How to get rich with stocks (without math, charts or models)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f713e57a6958e529

really only need one great trade to be a top one percent investor. The most inherently ground truth thing of investing, the most important thing, the thing that matters more than anything else.
Is
I don't look at evaluation, I don't look at PE. All I look about is there is new information. I've been reading TikTok comments. That's where I get most of my alpha from. Yeah, Buffett or Munger and who were like reading the Moody's manual. Cover to cover, just company financials. And you're like, I scroll the TikTok comments. That year I made like thirty million in one year and it was
You will try to beat the market, you'll trade with leverage, you're moving in and out of positions, you're not a buy and hold forever kind of guy. Just before the pandemic, I had made the worst trade of my life. I lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade. Okay, so let's break it down.
This is where the biggest mistake I ever made was.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day song on a bowl that's a little bit more. You break all the rules of investing.
You know all what I normally hear is
Should just index
Don't try to beat the market.
Don't take any leverage.
You know, and so but you do the exact opposite, right? You will try to beat the market, you'll trade with leverage, you're moving in and out of positions, you're not a buy and hold forever kind of guy.
According to the internet, you've done pretty well.
So um I've seen some different numbers that have been float around. Can you set the record straight? What is the actual story?
Yeah, I I I started with twenty thousand in two thousand and seven to try this new methodology.
Which is the way I was investing
when I was way, way younger, that worked for me. I c I call it social arbesting today.
But what it essentially is is observational investing. You're s you're looking for any change that's happening in the world, whether it's
You know.
change in consumer behavior.
uh change in culture, change in technology, change in the weather.
Politics.
Anything that has the potential
to be meaningfully impactful to one or more publicly traded companies in either a positive or negative way.
So if you can surface that change early.
And connect the dots back to a company that would benefit or be harmed by that change.
That's
Essentially the entire methodology. Uh it doesn't
really incorporate much fundamental analysis.
It definitely doesn't incorporate any technical analyses.
In in in its purest form.
You really don't even need to know what the stock is trading at when you open up a position or what it's trading at when you exit.
So like ideally you'd be completely blind to stock price.
Completely blind to
Everything.
other than the extent to which other investors were aware of that one thing
that you surfaced that you feel
would ultimately be impactful to that company and
You know, you enter your position.
at the point of information asymmetry, right? When w when you know that thing and
Very few others do.
And you exit the position at the point of information parity when other investors start
to learn about that thing that you uncovered first. And it's uh it sounds so simple and it really is.
But there are nuances to it.
And like everything else to do it.

Takes time and uh
And and a little effort and some
Regimented.
processes that you have to go through like
Is the information that you found.
Actually meaningful.
Uh is it a needle mover?
For that sector or for that company?
You know, is the information you found really off radar?
Uh or do institutional and retail investors o are they're already accounting for it.
And are there any other things that are happening?
at that moment of time or within the window of that trade.
that are equal to more important.
Than that.
piece of information that you're trading. Right.
So th there there is a process there. Of course. Yeah. So and and
I wanna go through a bunch of examples of it.
Idea.
Of
Observational investing.
of arbitraging information.
Without being
You know, a guy who grew up
On you know, you weren't working on Wall Street.
You didn't have an MBA.
You didn't have the what what would be like, you know, some twenty year
twenty years of experience doing this.
The story is
You take
Twenty grand.
You start doing this type of investing and you run it up, it's just it's it works pretty well for you. It's successful. I don't know the exact numbers, but
I've seen something like you know sixty million, seventy million, eighty million.
is how you've grown that portfolio starting at twenty thousand. Is that right, by the way,'cause I mean that sounds
In some sense too good to be true.
Yeah, it it it certainly is.
It does sound too good to be true. It it is accurate. It's
I don't know the exact number, seventy or eighty million dollars of returns from the twenty K
Um, but I've been audited over the past seventeen years.
I'll be re audited at the end of this year and I'll
Falls somewhere around seventy five percent.
Annualized returns total portfolio over the seventeen or
I think it might be eighteen year period now. Since
Two thousand.
And seven.
Hey, let's take a quick break because the team at HubSpot has put together something pretty cool.
You know, in this episode Chris is talking about the way he knows how to make money, identifying these trends, scouting the tick tock comments, making these big
leverage bets.
That's great for him. It is amazing. Some people will like that.
I personally don't know how to make money that way. I wouldn't do it. But I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how build a money making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that.
And turn it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money.
Now.
This is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth. Things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started.
And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode.
Okay, so let's break it down. So you uh you said I started doing this as a kid.
You go I I fell I went to the type of investing I was doing as a kid. I I re I I had read your book, uh, Laughing at Wall Street.
And you talk about like basically kind of like
G starting with like you know, garage sailing.
And uh very simple stuff when you were a kid, noticing things, talking to your brother, talking to your dad.
Hey, could this mean this?
And um and taking, you know, getting learning lessons with very small bankroll, you know, a hundred bucks uh type of deal. So can you just take us like
Early days.
What was the w where did you kinda have this sort of aha moment that
This style of investing can work.
Yeah, uh you know, I I was an entrepreneurial kid. Uh I was really interested in making money before that was a cool thing to do. You know, the the new generation now all these
All these kids are traitors. They're trading crypto I mean it's all it's like every kid now
is like I was back in the, you know, eighties.
And by the way, that makes sense now because
If you're a kid, you're on YouTube, you're on TikTok, you'll you'll see things.
But h why why did you have that itch? What what made you want to to to get on that hustle? What who did you see?
I don't I don't know what made me
so laser focus on grinding at age twelve. But but I will I but the way that I was going about it was not
Investing. It was uh
Arbitrage and garage sale and estate sale merchandise, I would take
you know, buses around the city on Thursday and Friday mornings and Saturday mornings.
before I could drive. Sometimes I'd take three or four buses before school to
the one estate sale that I had seen in the paper the night before
that based on my analyses I thought was most likely to have mispriced.
merchandise and and the thesis there
is that most of these estate sales at the time
were run by older women.
who really had a great knack for pricing silver and pricing other
you know, types of things that they knew about and cared about, but they were really, really bad.
at identifying value in mail oriented uh items like whether it was
Old trains, old watches.
It any anything that tended to be made. So you can't just go look up every item quickly and know the know the current like live market price for it.
Yeah, it's pre eBay, exactly.
So I I would show up at
five thirty, six in the morning and the goal is if you pick the right sale and you're first in line.
And you know exactly what you're looking for.
Uh
You know, you get a good shot at buying something that is mispriced. And I I would I did that for years.
Um, I just happen to go to the same seven eleven every morning and get a bottle of Snaple.
A lemon flavored iced tea, which was like the hot company at the time. It was the hot drink at the time. Snapple used to be huge.
Yeah. And one morning I went to the seven eleven and they had like one quarter of the door space dedicated to Snapple. They had brought in
a couple other brands of iced tea. I don't even recall what it was. Maybe it was Arizona Ice T and a couple of others.
The clerk told me that that's the way it was going to be from that point forward.
Uh due to this new competition coming in.
And sure enough, I talked to my older brother, I shared
the observation with him. He was a stockbroker.
Oh I asked it Can I make money off of this? This has gotta be bad for Snaple, right? I mean it's such a hot company, sure enough.
Uh
A few weeks later they had announced earnings. He taught me how to short Snapple with put options. I did it through his account. I was too young to have a brokerage account. I think I gave him three hundred dollars, which was most of the money I
Had
At the time from garage selling.
And he triple the money in the course of about a month.
because Snaple for the first time in its history had reported
you know, bad earnings due to inventory building up, uh due to retailers like seven eleven giving them less
door space. So it was just something that I had noticed as a kid.
And you have to ask yourself, like, that's crazy because, you know, professionals on Wall Street, they could have easily have seen the same thing that I saw.
But they were so distracted by so many other things, macro economics, noise, government, their jobs.
uh just herd mentality
that they didn't see something very simple that was right in front of their face. So now if I did that as a you know young teenager
That really means something. Now, of course, I didn't realize what I did at the time.
How special it was because
you would never believe that you as a kid are better than
you know, all Wall Street. So I I got really into stocks and investing after that.
But I did it in the conventional sense. I read
All the books. And I mean all the books. Technical, trading, fundamental.
And I just tried
every type of investing method.
And of course.
Basically nothing worked.
So uh I was just like everybody else. Uh but
Later on in my life when I was in my twenties and I had a job and
I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to make or I felt that I needed to make.
to have the life that I wanted.
I got back into investing and that was
really most aggressively in two thousand seven. And I said, You know, why don't I try this kind of observational approach?
That I did a little bit of as a kid.
And
I I re recalled that one approach and at the time it was similar. What I did as a kid was
reflective of what Peter Lynch was doing.
Uh though Peter Lynch
you know, utilize observational investing as just part of his methodology. He also did a lot of fundamental analysis.
Well let's break it down.
Major schools of thought around investing, right?
Um
Number one, passive investing.
You know, don't try to beat the market, just be in the index or
Even worse, mutual fund.
And um, you know, you go as the Americ goes. All right, that's one school of thought. Then there's oh, I I think I could do better.
Than indexing.
And there's technical analysis.
Which is
You know, some cross between I don't know horoscopes.
And you know, fantasy football or something. And so there's a lot of people who believe that they can re see patterns and
And and and
You know, signs and math in the charts and that the the charts will tell you, the technical analysis will tell you.
uh where the m where the price is going.
And so there's a lot of people who try to do that. I've never met anyone smart who's good at that, but uh it's possible that that is a thing. There are some people.
So there's there's technical training.
There's fundamental analysis to sort of buff it.
style of investing where you're trying to understand the intrinsic value.
of the business, you're trying to understand the, you know, the durability and the quantity of the cash flows, and you're trying to use that to try to understand what the business is worth.
relative to what the market's pricing it.
Lot of people try to do that. That's sort of seen as like kind of gold standard. What you do is this other school of thought. So you know, here comes
Door number three.
And door number three, you kind of described it a second ago, but I would
My short summary of that is
You're looking for significant
Behavioral change.
So the way that either consumers or businesses ha are changing in some way, whether that's
Covid is gonna make it where people are not traveling.
Or it's um teenagers are now doing this thing.
You gave this example of
Women.
Who were uh changing their bra preference from wired push up bras
And Victoria's Secret is on top? So you started noticing
A lot of people talking about the word bralets and now they're wearing
Bra and here you know, there's two guys talking about bras. There's now women are wearing bras without a wire.
Uh or a no bra movement and hey, that's probably gonna affect
The number one Braw player, Victoria Secret, who's not even carrying bralets at the time. So you're looking for
Сам Бейр Чен.
Somewhere.
Oh, let's say
Any change.
It could be a hailstorm.
Okay, that impacts a
Positively impacts a publicly traded roofing company. It could be in anything that's happening
In the world.
that is change oriented.
That is
not well well uh d discovered or known by by the investing. Correct. So not sort of consensus, not
quote unquote price then.
And so let's go through a couple of examples. So what are your favorite examples of
these that you found in your life. Take me through a couple of your greatest hits.
I mean there's like there's maybe north of eighty.
Uh eighty to ninety I know over the past eighteen years. Uh
You know, there have been a handful that didn't work out. We could talk about those too, but for the most part
Almost every one of them is worked out. I know that's really hard to believe. I know it's like exceptionally difficult to believe. Uh the the one I just mentioned that popped in my head.
uh is actually one of my my favorites. I I would track
Every spring
I would simply go and track uh the number of people that were searching
for the words uh roof damage or roof repair.
It's a it's a free data source. Anyone could, you know, leverage Google Trends. And what's fascinating about this is when there is a hailstorm.
people will immediately
uh start Googling roof repair the day after that hailstorm hits. Now
the at the time, uh, there's a publicly traded company called Beacon Roofing, and then one of the largest roofing companies in North America.
And if the hail season was particularly
Damaging.
uh that would meaningfully impact their bottom line as a roofing company. So what's fascinating about that is that the Wall Street generally
would utilize insurance sector reports that would report
on the damage from the hail season as a data point.
to analyze beacon roofing, you know
Prior to earnings.
But those reports take a very long time. They're really delayed. They're delayed by like, I don't know, five, six weeks uh after that that the actual hailstorms happen.
So I had discovered this real time data source that would tell me in real time uh the volume of people searching for roof repair because even if you knew there was a terrible hailstorm and you see it on the news.
If that hailstorm just happened to be over a super populated area as opposed to two miles down the road that isn't populated, that's what makes the difference. And the only nobody really knows how many people are impacted by hail, how many roofs are, uh, until it get reflected in the insurance reports or a great
measure of that that's maybe slightly less precise, but
uh way more real time is the the volume of people that are searching for roof repair. Now what's so great about a platform like Google Trends is you have, you know, fifteen years of historical data. So you can look at every single spring and you could see
where the peaks are in the search volumes. So
There was one
Hail season in particular.
uh that the peaks were nearly triple
Anything I had ever seen before years past. So I I went in on a very large, uh very levered
call long position on beacon roofing.
And yeah, I mean that would be considered like a greatest hit.
My my understanding is
You the same thing you did in the garage sales where you said
Look, most of these garage and estate sales were run by
Older women.
They knew the price of jewelry really well. You're not gonna get uh too much of a deal there.
But they may not know what their kind of husband or their son's baseball card collection is worth. Specifically this one nineteen ninety six tops rookie card, Kobe Bryant, you know, whatever. So you you find the value there.
My understanding is you you applied the same principle to Wall Street. You said well most of the guys who were on Wall Street
Got people who work in finance are guys.
White guys.
live in New York, who are of a certain age, and then you started saying
Well, instead of I'll use the Garage Cell principle again.
If they know a lot about certain types of things, where are their blind spots? Is that right? Is that how you how you thought about it?
So th that's how you identify like the lowest hanging fruit or the highest probability of finding
the most opportunity, especially early on, I would say
The vast majority of my big wins
Or around
You know,
changes in consumer behavior and culture.
that were primarily female oriented or youth oriented or to some demographic that wasn't older white northeastern you know uh you know geographically located uh in investors. So
You know, it it it could be something like I talk a lot about the
Uh the moment that Jeffree Starr, who's a beauty influencer
uh you know made a single video about this drugstore
Cosmetics.
product made by Elf Cosmetics that was just as good as uh
sixty dollar
product. It was called the Elf Primer.
Putty.
That that was an old trade now, but that was back when Elf was trading at like seven dollars a share, uh before it blew up to a hundred and seventy dollars a share, right? Uh but but just
B seeing a single YouTube video.
And then realizing that wow, it has ten million views and this is a company that nobody cares about.
And all of a sudden the most influential
you know, uh content creator in the world for beauty is saying that it's just as good as

I I went down to I think it was CVS or actually I think it was Walgreens by my apartment. And just stood there all day and and and watched moms coming in with their kids uh and buying out all the elf
products because all of a sudden instantaneously
This drugstore brand that was just like at a price point of like eight bucks.
For any piece of makeup, right?
became a cool brand because this one individual said it was. And and and so that was a game changing moment that I witness
via watching a YouTube video and I actually called one of the
Analyst on Wall Street.
Who is covering
Elf cosmetics, because m part of my methodology is not just to discover things early, but you have to assess to the degree to which other investors might already be aware of that information.
In order to gain conviction
uh that you that you truly found some information asymmetry in the market. So I called this analyst and I said, you know, what do you what do you think about the Jeffree Star?
Uh video on on elf. Uh
You know, has that impacted
The way that you're analyzing elf discorder.
And the analyst said.
Who's Jeffrey Starr?
And and and that at that moment.
I knew everything I needed to know about that trade, right? And and listen, it makes sense. These guys are not watching
You know, y YouTube videos of beauty influencers, right? Uh but that's all that I do. I I spend I
People don't believe me, but I spend
On average, three to four hours.
A night, late night.
Uh basically reading through these days last six, seven years, uh
Uh TikTok comments, right? So like that's where I get most of my alpha from recently is
People'cause
'Cause that's just happens to be the place
uh where people express themselves most freely uh across the
a largest number of topics. And that'll get you laughed out of the room.
It with with you know, quote unquote serious investors, right? Like you know, you have
Yeah, Buffett or Munger and these guys
Who are like reading the Moody's manual.
You know, cover to cover, just company financials. And that's where they're looking for
An opportunity. And you're like, I scroll the TikTok comments. And that's why I'm compounding
Seventy five percent a year.
For twenty so here's what you have to determine as an investor because
We we we can't all be you know w warm up it, right? So like
Like who do you want to compete with? I always say it's really
not important for you to be smart.
But it's
important for you to figure out how to be smart in a totally different way than others. So do you want to go and compete?
with the top mathematicians in the world as a as a technical trader.
Do you want to compete with just droves and droves of
you know, Wharton and Harvard f grads who are doing financial analysis, can you do that analysis a little bit better than them? Yeah, maybe maybe you can. Maybe you're that type of a person.
But let's be honest, uh, most of us, I'll I'll even say ninety nine percent of us.
Probably don't
Fit.
into one of those two camps.
So how could the rest of us get an edge on Wall Street? How could the ninety nine percent
Figure out a way to outperform
others in the market. Like what could we do that others aren't doing? And you have to think differently. So you have to look for edge
uh in a place where your competition and your competition being conventional
institutional and retail investors.
Are not willing.
To go.
And you know, the one thing about institutional Wall Street is
The like uh
correlated data. They they like certainty.
They like proof in in in historic correlations. So
The data that I am trading is conversational data.
Because Wall Street
primarily uses transactional data. So they'll use credit card receipts that they spend millions of dollars for. And then they synthesize all this transaction data uh so that they can
Kind of figure out.
What's happening at that company before earnings. So a lot of times when we see stocks move a week or two before earnings.
And we're like, who's doing that? Like how do they know? Right? Like it it's transactional data. Wall Street's been use utilizing it for 15 years.
More so today than they ever have.
So like how do we gain an edge?
on a hedge fund that's spending millions to tens of millions of dollars and has fleets of people
analyzing credit card receipts.
Well, what do you do before you buy something? Uh you talk about buying it. Uh so you there's
A billion people out there that are talking about their interest and what they want and what they did and what they plan to do tomorrow, every single day. Uh, if they see a video about a particular, you know, piece of apparel.
Uh you'll have
thirty thousand women commenting
whether they plan to also buy that piece of apparel that they just saw the video on, right? And and so what you could actually measure
The depth
Of interest.
In
An infinite number of things.
Even before
That's provable through sales.
Right. And and so
Yeah.
I in my opinion, it's a superior
Oh
way to to discover alpha a change in the world.
Although it's
Imperfect.
Because you have to do a lot of
your own interpretation of what you're reading.
And what that actually means because it's spec.
And and and it's a lot of times the speech is nuanced and
uh the way that we speak about things is constantly evolving. So
You know, if you're just a regular person that spends a lot of time
In the real world
Uh
and on social media
Uh
Believe it or not.
You're probably well qualified.

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There's a great story. I don't know if you know the story of uh
The trending tab on Twitter is actually kind of it's it's a interesting story. So that
The gu I met the guy who who did it. He's running a company. His name is Abder.
So my friend Abder was basically
uh at the time had a you know a group of
Basically data nerds, machine learning.
And data nerds and they were trying to figure out they're trying to do something very meaningful for the world. They're like
We would love to be able to do sentiment analysis. So try to figure out how people feel about things. So do they feel positive about something or negative about something.
And um so he's like, Oh, Twitter is this huge source of text traffic. So let me just try to use Twitter.
To understand sentiment about things.
And he was trying to do it. It wasn't really working very well.
And one day he's uh on a train and he's working on something and he just sees that like
His
program he's writing is not spitting out sentiment analysis about things.
But it's just spitting out like city names.
And he's like, Why are there like these city names or these uh sorry, country names? Why are these country names just popping up out of the the
Why is it being surfaced as signal?
And what he realized was that the Olympics was going on at the and they were basically like, you know, the the opening parade was happening.
And each country that was you know being shown was getting mentioned a lot.
And what he realized was that like oh
If I just paid attention to the delta, so like if nobody's ever talking about
You know, whatever. Zimbabwe. And suddenly
It's not that a lot of people are talking about it, but way more than usual are talking about it.
That's gotta mean something. And so he created
A standalone product that was basically just tell you
What are people talking about in a abnormal way on Twitter?
And then Twitter ended up buying that and making it the trending product, which was actually like really, really important for Twitter to succeed because they were able to differentiate from Facebook and others.
by being about like real time, what's going on in the world. How do you figure out what's interesting and new and fresh that's going on in the world? Well, you needed something like that that was reading all the social signals.
It sounds like you were kind of manually doing a similar thing when you're like, Oh
I noticed a lot of people are I've I've heard you talk about the example of slime.
The slime trend is getting really big. Well, how do you make slime?
Right. If everyone's doing sli if all the kids are doing slime, well how do you make slime? You need Elmer's glue.
And then you go and you figure out that wow, people haven't really priced in that
Elmers Elmers is about to have like, you know, a huge quarter or a huge huge earnings call.
So m me and my business partner, we actually created a platform called TickerTags in the mid-20 teens with Twitter.
Uh, and we had access to the Twitter Decahose, which is a ten percent randomized sample of every tweet in real time.
And we hand curated um
about one point five million word combinations that represented
how people were speaking about every product brand
basically anything that was connected to any publicly traded company or meaningful to any publicly traded company in any way.
we had organized into a taxonomy.
So every company had like, you know, three hundred to a thousand
combinations of words.
Like what would be an example? What what do you mean by that? So like if I'm Nike, what what do I care about? So okay, so you just mentioned slime, so which is one of my big trades, n newel brands makes Elmer's glue, right? So Elmer's glue would be a tag.
For new brands.
uh DIY slime, which is a product that
Uh
utilizes uh white Elmer's glue, uh when you're kids to playing with slime, that would be a tag.
Because to the extent that DIY slime
gets more popular, uh that's something that someone who's invested in new brands might want to know. So we were actually monitoring in real time
The frequency of mentions of those one point five million words.
and and benchmarking them against historical norms, including seasonality. And so since it was organized in a taxonomy,
uh when there was any type of anomaly in speech patterns happening across Twitter.
that were impacting a subject matter that we had curated to be
impactful, potentially impactful to a publicly traded company
our system would flag that. So that that's a platform that uh we developed and sold to hedge funds and sell side banks.
And so what that was was basically me taking my methodology of what I had done manually
And institutionalizing it.
uh for wall street
Напряжет опиниться.
On Twitter.
about everything that they were doing in life, uh, the way that people currently no longer do on Twitter, but do on
you know, pla in places like TikTok. Now, you know, Twitter is mostly news oriented or finance or tech oriented, right? Uh political oriented.
But people are not generally talking about the movie that they watch last night on Twitter. Right. They're doing that on other platforms. But but we sold that company uh to Jeffery's bank uh years later.
Was that like a successful company, you know, n it obviously, you know.
It's not that it was unsuccessful. But I guess
You know,
It's all relative. So for example, you know, you're selling the data hedge funds, are they
really receptive to this? Do they believe what you believe where they're willing to pay and
That's the coolest part of the story. Uh I spent years
Flying to New York.
nearly weekly uh training the top sell side banks and the the the I would say
Yeah, probably
five or six of the top ten hedge funds in the world on how to interpret
This observational conversational data.
And how to ch attempt to correlate it.
And they just had very little interest they they had interest in the results.
But they couldn't figure out
how to build teams around it because hedge funds generally have
individuals that are like meth.
Right, that that that were that they were hiring from the West Coast.
To develop.
Yeah, algorithms.
for for for trading like quant traders.
And then they have very traditional fundamental
Analysts.
who are basically finance heads that would you know would crunch numbers and
kind of do fundamental analysis.
They didn't really have
you know, twenty something year old.
females on staff who were really savvy interpreting, you know, conversational data coming you know, coming coming off it and and and like, yes, this is a trend. This is not a trend. Uh this is meaningful. It's not meaningful. So it was a whole
You know Wall Street
They they do things kind of in the same way that they've always
done things, right? And it's really difficult.
For them to stick their neck out and say, hey.
Іно ви болі.
This thing matters when there's no historical correlation between the speech of that subject matter and the stock price or the earnings of that company. Because like I said, speech patterns evolve and that thing that they're talking about.
could be a new thing that was never meaningful before at that company. Sure. So
That is unfortunate for
Wall Street, but it's fortunate for retail investors, right? Because we we now know
Uh, I guess I'm telling you right now.
that this is still a data set that they're scared of. This is still a methodology
that they have a hard time wrapping their head around because they can't really document.
the degree to which i it it's it's meaningful for a thesis. If if you were to have someone come out and say, Hey, I I I I've been reading TikTok comments
And I I believe I I believe that this new show at the sphere in Vegas, uh Wizard of Oz.
People are super hyped on it. And I like read a hundred and eighty comments of people flying in from Europe next month to see it. And I think this just might be the like
the one thing that Spear has done right and it's gonna be a game changing moment for the company finding product market fit.
Sounds oddly specific. Is that actually a trade trade you're you're in right now, or no?
Yeah, it was one yeah, so so so that was so Sphere, uh the Wizard of Oz uh sphere was actually one of my largest uh wins of two thousand and twenty five. And it
Came from reading comments.
uh of Wizard of Oz the first forty eight hours that it was out and essentially making it m a monstrously big leverage. Up a hundred and fourteen percent this year.
Well it was a levered options trade, so it was a lot more than that.
A lot of what I do when I have high conviction around uh a particular thesis that has a s especially when they have a very defined window of time.
when I believe others w will start to acknowledge
that that that ground truth in the case of SPER it was people counting seat.
uh sales of seats. So you're actually able to go in
And see how many seats are available for a show that's a week and a half or two weeks out. And that's exactly what happened. So over the course of a few weeks,
uh other and it was cool because it was like retail analysts. It wasn't even like Wall Street, but the other people that were trading Spear
We're like, hey, like we're seeing a there's a lot of see we've never seen seats sell out like this before.
For a show.
So what I had
interpreted from early
User c early reviews.
Ultimately
came out in seat sales that other retail investors started trading and then Wall Street eventually picked up on it when the company came out and said that they're adding new shows, right? Because they're selling out all their shows. They're increasing their
pr you know, profit guidance and yeah, you would the stock has, you know, more than doubled here over the last

Uh exclusively almost because of Wizard of Oz.
Do you remember
Wait, so the show's called My First Million. Do you remember when you made your first million and
You know, what what got you there and how did it feel?
Yeah, I I I I one hundred percent do. I was uh working at a company called E Rewards in Dallas, Texas.
Uh w with one of my best friends, uh Patrick.
It was like
Not
far past when I started this in two thousand and seven with the twenty thousand dollars.
that I had grown to a few hundred thousand dollars and I said, This is just absolutely crazy.
I said I think I'm going to
I think I'm gonna hit a million dollars here, like within the next
I don't know, next year or so. And it was a few months later I hit a million dollars and I'll never forget walking into his cubicle and saying, I did it. I cannot believe my account.
just hit a million dollars, it absolutely melted my mind.
Uh have that happened. And you know, I wrote my book.
I don't know.
two years, three years later laughing at Wall Street because
There was this tracking service called Co Vestor at the time, and Covestor was like the first portfolio tracking service. I think they had forty thousand accounts in it, including mine.
And it would monitor
you know, how well you're doing month to month total portfolio and it would rank you publicly
And it there was a while uh
a moment in time when I was the number one ranked investor on Co Vester.
Oh, which is just absolutely. And it was during that three year period.
And uh
That's when I I I think I was on a few different business shows like Fox Business talking about it. And then I got a book deal to write that book.
Laughing at Wall Street.
And when I wrote Laughing at Wall Street, it was twenty thousand to two million dollars. It was a hundred times your money in three years.
And at the time, there was a small piece of me.
That thought.
You know.
Is am I just like part of the long tail?
statistical
Anomaly.
Right.
You flip a coin, flip a coin a hundred times, somebody if you d get enough people to do it, somebody will land on heads.
You know, ninety times and they'll you'll think they're they're a genius.
Or a hundred percent. I doubted myself more and then I had a really defined methodology and I knew
The narrative behind every one of my trades.
It it was very sensible, right? Like it wasn't like this mystery where I came up with some random formula and it was just trading stocks on its own and maybe a the formula just happened to get lucky.
I felt strongly that the nature of observational investing about simply uncovering
some piece of meaningful information that others weren't aware of intuitively just makes sense, right? Like it's not like this mystical thing that you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Of course it makes sense.
You're just uncovering important information a little bit quicker than other people, and you're connecting dots a little bit quicker than other people. So in my head, I knew the methodology.
At its core.
was really valuable.
But I still didn't believe that three years was enough. So in my head, I was like, if I can get to five years and keep this track record up, that would be insane. I got to five and I was like, Okay.
Let's see if I can push it to ten. And then I got to ten years.
And now here I am, I'm a eight.
Like I said, I think I'm going on eighteen years of average seventy
you know, mid seventies of total portfolio
Returns.
And I truly believe I can hit twenty. So like twenty is now the new number in my head. I wanna go for twenty years and all I have to do at this point is not mess it up, right? But but at the same time, it's very hard generating
You know
returns that are that high
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So let me ask you a couple of mechanical questions.
Do you
Take profits every year? Do you reinvest everything? Wha w what are you actually doing?
With sort of annual.
Yeah, ca'cause you know, you compound at that rate for a long enough time. The number's actually much bigger.
Than seventy million that you would have. Yeah, it's almost a billion dollars. So it it so what's in
This is where the biggest mistake I ever made was, uh, that I'm now resolving for the most part.
So
Just about I've been half of my life is trading public equities through, you know, observational investing, social or conversational data, everything we're talking about.
the other half of my life is been an entrepreneur.
And
You know, I've had some success as an entrepreneur, and like a lot of entrepreneurs that have success, you start investing in other entrepreneurs. So I've been an early stage venture investor for 20 years. I'm actually invested in a hundred and sixty.
Early stage companies.
And
my performance investing in early stage companies is
pretty much average. Uh it I you know, I'm on sync with
just about any other average V C. I I wanna say maybe ten, eleven
Twelve percent.
Annualized returns.
So
I have pulled out
Almost
All of my games.
Every single year.
For the past.
Eighteen years.
and have taken that money and invested it in the private market.
And that has been really unfortunate.
for obvious reasons. It's unfortunate because the opportunity cost of my capital
is so high, but I never even believed in myself that much on the bubbling side that I could continue to do that. So I was never like, Oh well, I'm just gonna keep
Doing seventy some odd percent average returns.
That never really seemed
Feasible.
It o I I I felt like I needed to make my home runs.
In the early stage V C world.
And I finally came to terms a few years ago with the fact that that was a really bad decision. And it's taken me about four years to pull myself out of early stage because when you're in when you're an early stage investor and that big of an early stage investor.
I mean, I was taking hundreds of meetings with founders annually, and it takes a long time to unwind yourself.
From that ecosystem.
Hm.
Yeah.
So
I don't know who it was. Maybe Peter Lynch he had like a
Don't don't cut your flowers to water your weeds.
Right. Like he basically he talk about with with stock individual stocks, right? Don't sell your winners to diversify back into like losers.
But uh you know, in a way what you were doing was that at a at a overall level
If you were performing a seventy percent in one asset one strategy and ten or eleven percent in the other, but you were taking the profits out, you know, that's a
That's a water that's a water your weeds sort of scenario.
Yeah, and and and by the way, not I I love Peter Lynch uh maybe more than any other investor, but you know, I I don't believe in any preset rule of investing like that. Like my methodology
is very clean. You know, I I I
You you invest when you discover something that other people haven't discovered yet that will be meaningful.
Yeah.
And you exit as soon as other people have figure that out. And that's it. That that's literally the only thing. And and if that stock goes up a hundred X.
or two hundred X, you don't sell it because it's up two hundred X. Uh you know, you you sell it when other people find out the information that you're trading. So
One of my most controversial trades a a
over a year ago was you know Palantir and
I I went all in
Unbelievably levered and pounded here at thirty dollars a share.
And I was very public about it. You know, I have a YouTube channel, Dumb Money Live and
We did a multitude of episodes on Palantir and this really strong thesis.
That we felt there was this kind of twelve month window where the whole world was going to discover.
these things about Palantir that were really misunderstood.
And I had never gotten so much heat, a lot of it from Palantir investors going
You're an idiot. We've been in this thing since six bucks. You're gonna do this at thirty dollars a share? Like, what are you talking about? I'm like
Well, I I'm not trading the information you were trading at six dollars. Seven I'm trading.
Well, because pe'cause people didn't even understand what they did.
Right. They didn't understand the the where they would actually sit in the stratosphere of the AI wave that was coming.
Uh as a beneficiary of it.
And
Palantir was just starting to scrape.
the surface uh of this new product that they had with clients.
And
Mm.
There was it was unstoppable, right? Like like w there was just going we knew there would be this twelve month window.
When
Everything that Palantir had been working on for years.
They finally had the case studies done.
with their first set of clients, and now they were just gonna start to steamroll and and add add to clients. So so they were just scratching the surface of their TAM.
And the market didn't
Realize that.
So what was interesting about Palantir is that they were so overvalued at the time.
based on fundamentals that people were like, there's no way you could be going in levered on Palantir at thirty dollars a share.
With its valuation already so out of whack.
And
My response to that was the valuation is irrelevant to me. I don't I don't look at valuation. I don't look at PE. I don't look at anything like that.
Um, all I look about is
There is new information that's about to come online for Palantir.
The
Will
bring in a whole new group of investors. And once people see this information, th however they're valuing Palantir today based on the information that exists, this is new information that will be
settled into the stock price. And that that's exactly what happened. And Palantir went from you know thirty to a hundred and sixty, right? Or whatever it went to. So hundred and eighty, hundred and ninety.
You say, uh, you know, I went really big into this or I made a huge bet on this.
What is that? And you're taking leverage, which could cut both ways, right? Obviously leverage will increase your gains, but it'll
Quickly.
Your portfolio if if done incorrectly.
How much are you actually let's say you have
You to I think you said something like seventy million dollar portfolio.
Let's say you have seventy million dollars.
And you get a lot of conviction about something.
What are you actually
betting at a high conviction bet at this stage.
Oh is it?
Are you putting
One percent, ten percent, thirty percent? Like what are you putting out there? And then you're levering up, and then how do you manage that risk of
That going south.
Yeah, and by the way, just to be transparent, it's seventy million ish of returns, right? Of of of gains over that time. And you know, those gains were taken and put in into other things like private companies, right? So I'm not managing
That's not my
public. So seventy let's say that's gains, you gotta pay taxes, a lot of your stuff sounds like it might be short term because it's not holding for long time.
And then you're you're reinvesting that into your uh addiction in startups. And so that's that there's a lot of it's going that way. But but percentage wise, percentage wise, um, when you have a uh high what I call just a high conviction idea.
Uh, I'm usually investing between five and ten percent of my entire uh liquid portfolio.
uh into that idea via options. So if you're wrong
You just lose five to ten percent of the portfolio. And a in a good example of where I did that and was
you know, wrong. Like I think
Two or three, maybe.
three weeks in a row, maybe four weeks in a row, and I lost like thirty, forty percent of my portfolio.
was during uh Covid, during the pandemic, when I was kinda tracking the virus coming out of China. I was
You know, using Google Translate on a lot of uh medical reports coming out of China to assess uh how big of a deal that virus was and it
became very clear to me that it w
was going to be a global pandemic. And you know, global pandemics only do one thing to financial markets, right? So I I was essentially taking I think ten percent of my portfolio and putting it into puts in the S P
uh casino stocks, Vegas casino stocks and airlines.
uh every week and the market wasn't moving down. Like the the market just wasn't accepting
Uh
COVID for what it was.
And I got to a point where I was like thirty to forty percent of my portfolio was gone.
And I did it again the week after and that
week after was the first week the market cracked and it went down two percent.
And then the next week is where it it really hit. And that that was one of the biggest trades

And
Uh
over the court, I think that year was of like a three hundred and seventy percent annualized return total portfolio. Some something like that.
And it was partially because
I had shorted the pandemic early on, even though it was a little too early and paid off. And then two days after it bottomed, I had a selection of I think fourteen or fifteen companies.
uh that should have never gone down at all. They should have only gone up as soon as we realized there was going to be a global pandemic and and everybody would be stuck living in their house for you know working in their house for a year. So, you know, companies ranging from
Ulid Packard, where everybody would want to go buy printers for their house to Peloton because you can't go to the gym. You gotta work out at your house now. Shopify because you know you're shopping online, Amazon obviously.
uh you know, campers world because one of the things you can do, you can still go camping, uh boat stocks. You know, I bought a company out of Canada that nobody even had ever traded before that owned Schwin bicycles because, you know, Schwinn
How to run of the biggest bicycle sales in the history of the company. I think that that company went up eight X, eight or nine X.
over the course of nine months. Uh so
You know, I had these fourteen, fifteen companies, so I was like, these companies should be doubling right now. And instead they were all down like
thirty, forty, fifty percent just because
Ever the whole market traded down. So I always knew that I was gonna go levered long in these fifteen companies, but I didn't want to do it until the market became less erratic and irrational.
So once the markets finally started
to you know normalize
And come back up. I took all the gains.
From shorting.
the travel stocks and the market at large.
And just put them into levered positions in these fifteen companies, which is obviously the trade of a lifetime. So
So that was a that was huge year. I I I don't know, by the way, I I don't
Watch enough of your content to know.
How much you talk, like do like d uh do you disclose like how much you make on these things? Do you say like I gotta
Ten million active portfolio. Wait, what what do you actually say? I don't know. I don't know what you're doing. I think that year I made thirty million uh
In the market.
So that was like thirty million in one year and it it was it was
A wild ride. Didn't it I think the most interesting
part of that narrative.
Was just before the pandemic I had made the worst trade of my life.
And it was
Actually
A trade that was psychologically damaging to me. Like I lost a third.
of my portfolio on a single trade just months before the pandemic started.
And
The the probably the thing I'm most proud of myself of
Is I was so down and out.
About that trade.
that I still found a way when I when I
You know.
had come out with all that conviction on COVID.
to actually still go all in on my thesis on COVID, even though my account was so brutally damaged at the point that if I got another one wrong.
I mean so it was like
I could have gotten that wouldn't
really had wiped me out. And I mean not wiped me out, but it it would have been
An unbelievable
But
Unbelievable damaging implosion for me to have two monster trades in a row go wrong. The one that went wrong months earlier.
was a company, uh QSR. They own Burger King Popeye's and Tim Hortons and
I was so convicted.
The
the company would have the best earnings quarter.
In its entire history because
Two of the three companies they owned.
both had anomalies on the positive side. Burger King had the impossible Whopper.
uh which was unlike anything the company had ever done before, uh in terms of sales traction and Popeyes.
Had the uh crispy chicken sandwich.
Which is during the the the the this is the chicken wars, if you remember. Chief, yeah. Y yeah, a a at the time and that chick uh that crispy chicken sandwich that Bopeyes had
It it would literally sell out in like two hours, uh every day. Uh it Popeyes, no one had ever talked about Popeyes ever in the history of the company. Uh until this crispy chicken sandwich. And I was monitoring both those trends and
I was like they're they're both going to report the best quarter in the history of their quarters at Burger King and Popeye's.
And then you have this third piece.
Which was unfortunately the biggest piece of the company, Tim Horton's
And Tim Hortons is just
You know.
They're they're Canadian
coffee and donut shop, okay? And
The company had
basically been around forever.
It had not been doing
Awesome, but it was kind of flatlining.
They would have to have had a really bad quarter.
To screw up my trade.
And
It was just happened to be a really difficult company.
For me
To to extract information on
through the methods that I use because it was Canadian
And people just didn't talk about it that much, right? There was nothing happening there. So it's like I saw zero reason why they should have this anomaly of a bad quarter.
Which is exactly what happened. They just happened to have like randomly one of the worst quarters ever, which statistically the chance of that happening were so low.
And it crushed my trade. I I lost
all of my money on that trade. And it was like a third, a full third of my portfolio. And w the wildest piece about that.
And this is where there's a lot of self reflection.
So I take it
A lot of pride in in going in deep and doing really intense comprehensive due diligence.
Where sometimes if I if I have a high conviction trade
I will put s you know sixty plus hours of due diligence into the trade where I like to joke that I'll uncover every piece of contextualized information on the company globally through every social media.
anyone who's speaking about any of their products. Uh I will visit I will sometimes travel if they they're a retailer and visit stores and talk to store owners and clerks.
But
Because there were three things I was having to deal with Burger King Popeye's and then Tim Hortons.
I just assume Tim Horton's how bad is it gonna be? Well, they had the Tim Hortons annual meeting a few weeks before earnings in Florida that I didn't realize they had this meeting.
But
If I did realize that and I had done my homework, I would have been at that
in Orlando for that annual meeting. Not'cause I would have got gotten in, but I would've hung out at the bar.
And I would've talked to all the franchisee owners because from what I understand there was a revolt.
at that at that meeting by franchisee owners because the company was doing so many things wrong. Their sales were just getting slaughtered due to recent decisions that
corporate was pushing
On the franchisee owners.
And it would they were very public about it at that meeting.
It was
Really harsh.
And if I was just in
In the building.
Right at the bar. I would have been well aware of that. So going back.
Uh I learned that you know
You really have to be comprehensive in your research if you're gonna take a levered bet.
on a thesis that you have and
You you can't you can't be lazy.
What are the bets you're looking at now?
'Cause a lot of these examples are from the ha past seventeen years.
Where are you now?
On the AI side, you know, two of my favorite AI picks.
You know, right now one is Bloom Energy. You know, the energy trade is a big one.
Uh and it's one that's really, really, really misunderstood, I think, by most investors.
So Bloom Energy is a company uh that
just has a really different approach to powering
data centers, right? They're not using
Big gas turbines.
Uh, you know, they have a technology that they've worked on for, you know, twenty years.
that is actual, you know, DC
uh technology where instead of combusting
Gas is actually a chemical change that creates the energy.
And they have a really quick
Uh timeline.
uh to energy for a data center. So if you have a data center and you could actually get energy through Bloom and get your data center up and running six to twelve months quicker.
uh than getting on a wait list.
for gas turbines and going through all the various approvals.
That's that's a really big deal. And that's why Bloom Energy has, I think, dropped like five or six X, right, over the past eight or nine months as people are starting to realize this.
But there's still a lot of
controversy around the company.
So
Again.
It it's somewhat unproven. They only have a couple big hyperscaler deals, you know, one's with Oracle.
Uh, I think there'll be others that will be announced in the near future.
But it's a new technology.
So people are still somewhat skeptical of it. And then you have
you know, news events that that happened like this last week where now we're building data centers, you know, in in space, right?
You know, now the
You know, SpaceX's
Preparing to IPO all of a sudden we have this narrative pop out of nowhere where oh didn't everybody realize that
We're just gonna be doing, you know, compute data centers in space now. Like that's all that's like right on the horizon. Like
Couple of years, two, three years, yeah, we're just doing data centers in space. Like
Th th this is the noise in the market right now.
Right. So like oh we're doing data centers in space and do we don't even need any down here. Like oh well if you're powering those with solar
You know,
Why would we want to value an energy company?
you know, here in the US, uh, if you're just gonna do'em in space with solar. So
The market is so A D D
Yeah.
It's changing week to week, month to month, based on whatever the hype story is.
that will, you know, either positively or negatively impact companies in the space.
But for me I I think uh I think Bloom energy is definitely
one of my favorite AI plays right now.
Because
they will be the company that will enable data centers to get up and running.
I think meaningfully
Quicker.
uh over the next three to five years. And I think that's a company that's just going to see its earnings double.
basically year over year for the next three to four years.
Uh and I think there's still very much
misunderstood. They're actually going to be the topic of my next
Uh Dumb Money Live episode. I'm gonna go in deep uh on on Bloom Energy. We we spent like a couple months uh doing some doing deep analysis on the Do you publish all your
Like.
Do you publish your portfolio somewhere? Do you publish your trade somewhere?
Um
We don't I won't ever publish trades. I I sometimes speak about trades on a really high level
The last thing we ever want is other investors trying to mirror our trades because
That's not just not what we do, right? We don't think it's a healthy behavior
Uh
I always tell investors to steal my ideas and run with them. So take the idea.
Uh, then poke holes in the idea. Do all of your own research, right uh
And then come back to me and tell me where I was wrong. Uh, but ultimately then go off and make your own trade based on your own
you know, risk reward because we all have different degrees of risk tolerance and
We should all have a different take.
On an idea.
So I love sharing ideas. I don't
Really sure.
trades.
I mean, I'll be honest with you because um this is not my world of expertise. I'm a founder first.
And my investing is very um
Sort of simple.
Uh, you know, I basically own a couple of s you know, I own some indexes and I own stocks that I understand. I've owned them for a long time, you know, tech companies basically, because I've grew up in the
tech industries ever since college. And then I my investing outside of that is
Private angel investing, again, tech.
And lastly would be, you know, my own private equity where it's
businesses that like individual businesses that I can own and and I can affect with with things that I know how to do operationally or
Promotionally with this podcast.
And so you're interesting to me because
On one hand, I I think well, first of all, you're interesting because the story is great.
Like I turned twenty thousand dollars into, you know, I've made seventy million in gains or something like that. That's an incredible story.
I think it's interesting because your
approach, like just the way you describe observational investing, actually lines up with a what a lot of the great investors do and say, which is that they don't
um sort of spreadsheet themselves is that they try to understand
Like
Surface out the signal from the noise. What is the actual important thing I need to know about this company?
That I can believe.
before it is obvious, true, and proven. And you know, the market uh sort of response to certainty. And if you can
Handle uncertainty.
Um you could do quite well.
At the same time, uh you know, sometimes you say things like you know
Ninety nine percent of the other ninety nine percent of us can go do this and we have sort of the I th I've heard you say, you know, uh
The game is rigged. Wall Street is rigged, but it's rigged in our favor and um
Yeah, that part I think seems untrue. Like if
If what you've done.
is true. It's in many ways because you have a a a very unique skill set and upbringing and background. No. That's the that's it I'll just sort of explain that'cause I think it's important. I think I the last thing I would want is
People to listen to this and be like, Oh, okay, cool. I can just go and
Trade levered up.
off of observations and I too will turn twenty thousand dollars into seventy million dollars. There's a reason that's not common
That's not a common result. There's a reason you get a book deal, there's a reason people will follow you because it's not a common result everybody everybody does.
And I think one of the reasons it's uncommon
It's not because it can't work. That's not what I mean.
A lot of it is interpretability, right? So interpret interpreting the signals, trying to figure out what is actually important. Is it already priced in? What does this mean? Who does it who benefits from that? The second order effects of that.
That's not like
You know, something incredibly uh, you know, simple that the that uh everybody is gonna do. So there's a big difference between
Anybody can? Yes.
Everybody can.
Is different.
And so like yeah I I view it very similar to to startups where
You know, an entrepreneur can come on here and they'll say, Look, it's not rocket science. I'm not any smarter than you guys. I just did this, this, this, and this.
And it's true that any that was in the capacity for anybody to do, but definitely everybody won't. And uh and definitely everybody should not try because they don't have, you know, either the nature, the disposition, the the risk tolerance to be able to go do it. So I just think you're interesting because you're this sort of like
Puzzle. Normally if I hear a story like this, it's too good to be true.
It violates a lot of the sort of like
fundamental wisdom that people have about investing, where you want to buy gr you know
buy a share in a great company and hold it for a long time. You know things that I have sort of accepted from
you know, a a certain school of thought around this. So I think you're very interesting because you violate some of those and I think that
But
works and it works for you and I think it's very cool, but I hesitate.
I hesitate because I think that this is not something that a lot of people ca could or should do.
So so I couldn't disagree more. Um I did I agree with some of what you're saying in terms of yes, I mean over a long period of time.
You know, doing you know
generating almost a hundred million dollars from a you know
twenty thousand dollars or yeah that
It's that's not easy to do, obviously.
But
I will say this. I think I think the biggest issue
Is simply bucketing money and having uh risk capital. So I think that the the number one issue preventing someone from doing this.
Is
Thinking that they have this
One bucket of capital.
for their life savings for their future.
kids college for their retirement, and they think about that money all as one. And this is something that's a little foreign. The concept of being a regular person and observing something and saying connecting the dots and saying, you know what?
I'm gonna put a levered bed on
that because I just found you know, I just discovered this.
You're not going to do that unless you have your money properly bucketed. And the one thing I teach people is you have to have risk capital. I don't care if it's fifty dollars.
Or fift million dollars. You don't you shouldn't be waiting until you're part of the
You know.
Ультравелф клас.
to to to to think that you have risk capital to take risk with. You need to have risk capital starting with day one. So everybody should have a big money account. I talk about this in Laughing Wall Street. Everyone should have a big money account.
And the big money account.
Is the account
that that yes you get wealthy quickly.
And you do that by taking big swings on things that you really believe in and
The only way that you're going to psychologically
Do that.
is if you fund that big account with money that is not
being stolen.
from other areas of your life. So I I call it
You know
there's this whole concept of like frugality or trade offs where okay, maybe you mow your own lawn, maybe you make your own coffee.
Maybe you clip coupons. Like people
don't want to clip coupons to save a dollar. But if you think about every dollar in your life as
Uh uh
as potentially being a hundred dollars, a hundred X, which is
a hundred percent feasible over a long period of time if you invest aggressively with leverage.
And get a few wins.
Then you'll clip a dollar coupon.
Because that dollar coupon is clipping a hundred dollar coupon. Okay, you're gonna make your own coffee because instead of saving five dollars, you're saving five hundred dollars a day.
Right, so all of a sudden you discover
All of this money, newfound money in your life by making little trade-offs in things all over your life. The difference is every time you make one of those trade offs.
And you save five dollars.
For making your own coffee.
You take that five dollars and you put it into your
Uh
The rest of the little bucket.
Yeah.
Bucket, right? By the way, this is not financial advice, right? It's just like this is how I did. I'm just saying, like
I hope I'm inspiring people'cause I re
Just understand something. I graduated in the bottom twenty five percent.
Of my high school class.
Um
Bottom
tw today, the way college is, I could not even had I would not have gotten into any university in the United States, okay? Pretty much today in two thousand twenty five with m with my grades.
This is why I love doing the podcast.
'Cause you can get people who make their money in all different ways. We just had
John Morgan, who's like the guy on the billboards.
Personal injury law.
And he's a guy, you know, he's biggest personal injury lawyer in the world, two billion dollars a year.
And then he started uh he started his career working at Disney World as Pluto, like he would be in the costume.
And then he started because of that formative experience, he took the money from the law firm and started building little like attractions like a
Fair and and and places you go and buy tickets like the
The museum of crime and history, things like that. And he's made a killing doing that. So you have that guy comes on and tells about how you make money that way, the other guy says how you do it this way. So what I love about the podcast is
I get to hear these people who come on with
completely different blueprints and playbooks that they one hundred percent believe in.
And
I get to listen and I get to decide. I get to decide for myself. Does that sound like something that's interesting or would suit me? And I hope the listener does the same because I don't agree with a lot of what you said, but I found it all very interesting. And you know, there's some things you said, if like I'll I'll be I'll be totally honest. If you saw if you have like a paid course somewhere.
I would be like, I can't run this episode because I feel like this guy is selling this dream to people that hey, yeah, you just gotta.
Just go go get in the TikTok comments, find an observation, lever up, baby, make a trade. One trade will change your life. And it's like that is a scary principle.
I think that is a heretical idea to a lot of people. It's by interesting to me to hear it to talk about it.
Why is it why is it important to you that
People really
That the average person who's listening
They believe this and they go take action on this'cause you know, like I said
It's not that you're running a fund, right? So you're not soliciting investors.
You're not selling a course saying, I'll teach you how to do this. Trust me, it works.
You're not doing any of those things, which is usually why people really
kinda pound the table and say, You could do this. Just believe, just go for it.
My my overriding purpose is to
inspire every human on earth to enter the investing class, right?
because I think it's the only way we'll ever solve the wealth gap.
So like there's no way to solve the income gap.
The income gap is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve.
The wealth gap is a problem that's solvable.
uh by bridging more humans into the investor class. And so everything that I do on X, everything that I do on YouTube, every podcast that I do.
has a single mission to
Inspire
other people to start investing on their own and
Mm.
By all means, if that means just throwing money in the S P in an ETF, awesome.
But
There's no reason to stop there, right? Like I I I I know I know that
People love the concept of
Actually hope.
And having an opportunity to do something truly great in their life,'cause so many people when it comes to income are stuck.
Their job is not going anywhere. Okay. Like and by the way
I am not a proponent of people quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs and taking all this massive personal risk to start businesses.
Um I think there are very few people that are capable of doing that.
And I think that this roadmap is m way more achievable for people.
Start making trade offs.
Come up with a big money account, do it through making tradeoffs in your life in frugality, learn how to use leverage, learn how to take big risk with other people's money, because I call them other people's money because it all comes through tradeoffs.
Um, in things that you believe in because you can do this. And by the way, there is nothing cooler.
than when you're just a regular person and you
You just
make a grand slam in the market, right? And you
you thirty X your money, all of a sudden you have financial independence in life. So
I don't know many things that are more important because it just it helps solve so many other issues. And so many humans are just depressed because they look at their life and they're like, This is my job, these are my expenses, this is inflation.
Holy crap, I'm screwed. I will never be.
the person I want to be for me or my family and I want to inspire people that it doesn't have to be that way. And you also don't need to be taking big risks with your retirement money or any of that stuff. That's why I'm like, I'm very clear if you're gonna do this.
Do it with
Money that's bucketed.
Right.
For ri for risk.
Інодинча.
About
Investing.
Um
The same methodology of being able to identify change in the world and tailwinds.
um and trends should apply to career
It should
also, you know, like it should apply to entrepreneurs as well. Cause like I'm an entrepreneur, like I'm about to start another business.
Uh and that business is directly tied.
to the analysis.
that I'm doing
discovering change in the world, right? So like you know
We're about to embark on this
Journey of
Of abundance. And that's not gonna be like
we just hit the age of abundance in five years and we're not working. Like no, the age of abundance is gonna like slowly happen. It's already happening. It's gonna it's gonna like happen over the course of
decades and it's just th it's just lots of tailwinds and trends. It's like people will be working
A little less. People will have a little more free time. People will have more flexibility to dive into the things that they care about, right? Uh wealth signaling will, I think, become even bigger in the future than it is today. I think there's just so many changes that are massive that are happening in the world.
That if you're an entrepreneur trying to figure out like where do I spend my time, or if you're
Just
Someone that is figuring out where's your next career path or where
If you're a young person, where's my crib? Like you need to be doing more analysis.
on where the opportunity is because
These are some of the biggest decisions of your life. It's not just about trading a stock. Especially in Silicon Valley, you see this all the time. People will take a job.
And it's like you realize you're investing all of your life force, your your you know, your creative energy.
And you're getting these stock options, but you never thought about this like an investor. Like you're just happy you got the job versus
You should be looking at the job market the way an investor looks at these companies. And even if you're not investing capital, you're investing your time, right? So
You know.
Totally there.
It is
related to the jet industry, private jet industry.
Which I believe will be one of numerous beneficiaries of
us kind of entering into this age of abundance with people having, you know, more i in fact, I'll I'll just quickly state that if you want a glimpse into the future, you need to simply look back into our past from the pandemic because that one year of the pandemic
When we actually had
In abnormal amount of time as humans. We had never experienced anything like that.
throughout our lifetime.
When we had excess time to actually do what we wanted to do, and we also just happened to have excess money because of this wild stimulus that happened during the pandemic. So if you want an example of what the age of abundance is gonna look like in terms of the winners and the losers.
Just look.
Back to that one period of time.
What did we do when we had more time and more money?
We dug into our hobbies.
We dug into our interest.
Um we
You know, w we we we we kind of
did things that now that we're back to this world, right? Like we do a little bit less of
But if we truly
Get
You know
The industry of intelligence
And automation and robotics.
To help us do
the vast majority of work, uh the repetitive work at least that we do today.
I think the entire world has an opportunity to become more creative.
uh spend more time
With their families, with their friends, doing things that are meaningful.
Uh travel certainly, I think i is something that we can all count on in the future as becoming
a larger industry, not a smaller industry. I am ultra long on the private
Jet.
sector even though myself uh I carry too much guilt to fly private.

So like I you'll never see me on a private jet. But
Uh I I I I'm very bullish on the sector.
Chris, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you.
And uh
People can go find you, you got your show Dumb Money Live.
It's on YouTube. That's where I watch it at least when I when I tune in.
Um
So thanks for coming on.
And by the way, the only place I am personally is X. So at Chris Camillo at X, but dumb money dot TV has all the socials. So
Thanks for having me on. I I appreciate it.
Very cool.
That's it.
That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world a no way
be what I want to
I'm putting my all in it like my day's all on a road, less travel, never looking back. All right, everyone, if you're listening to MFM, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist, and it's hosted by Donald Kelly.
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