AI transcript
0:00:06 you really only need one great trade to be a top one percent investor the most inherently ground
0:00:13 true thing of investing the most important thing the thing that matters more than anything else is
0:00:18 i don’t look at valuation i don’t look at p all i look about is there is new information i’ve been
0:00:23 reading tiktok comments that’s where i get most of my alpha from you have buffett or munger and
0:00:28 who are like reading the moody’s manual cover to cover just company financials and you’re like
0:00:34 i scroll the tiktok comments that year i made like 30 million in one year and it was a wild ride you
0:00:39 will try to beat the market you’ll trade with leverage you’re moving in and out of positions
0:00:44 you’re not a buy and hold forever kind of guy just before the pandemic i had made the worst trade of my
0:00:52 life i lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade okay so let’s break it down this is where
0:01:07 the biggest mistake ever you break all the rules of investing you know all what i normally hear is
0:01:14 you should just index don’t try to beat the market don’t take any leverage you know and so but you do
0:01:20 the exact opposite right you will try to beat the market you’ll trade with leverage you’re moving in
0:01:24 in and out of positions you’re not a buy and hold forever kind of guy according to the internet you’ve
0:01:28 done pretty well so um i’ve seen some different numbers that have floated around can you set the
0:01:38 record straight what is the actual story yeah i i started with 20 000 in 2007 to try this new methodology
0:01:46 which is the way i was investing when i was way way younger that worked for me i call it social arb
0:01:52 investing today but what it essentially is is observational investing you’re you’re looking for
0:01:59 any change that’s happening in the world whether it’s you know change in consumer behavior uh change
0:02:07 change in culture change in technology change in the weather politics anything that has the potential
0:02:14 to be meaningfully impactful to one or more publicly traded companies in either a positive or negative way
0:02:21 so if you can surface that change early and connect the dots back to a company that would benefit or be
0:02:30 harmed by that change that’s essentially the entire methodology uh it doesn’t really incorporate much
0:02:38 fundamental analysis it definitely doesn’t incorporate any technical analyses in its purest form
0:02:46 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
0:02:55 so like ideally you’d be completely blind to stock price completely blind to everything other than the
0:03:04 extent to which other investors were aware of that one thing that you surface that you feel would
0:03:12 ultimately be impactful to that company and you know you enter your position at the point of information
0:03:20 asymmetry right when when you know that thing and very few others do and you exit the position at the
0:03:26 point of information parity when other investors start to learn about that thing that you uncovered first
0:03:33 and it’s it sounds so simple and it really is but there are nuances to it and like everything else to do it
0:03:39 to be great at it it takes time and a and a little effort and some regimented
0:03:46 processes that you have to go through like is the information that you found actually meaningful
0:03:52 uh is it a needle mover for that sector or for that company you know is the information you found
0:04:01 really off radar uh or do institutional and retail investors or are they already accounting for it and are there
0:04:06 any other things that are happening at that moment of time or within the window of that trade
0:04:15 that are equal to more important than that piece of information that you’re trading right right so
0:04:21 there is a process there of course yes and and i want to go through a bunch of examples of it so you
0:04:30 take this idea of observational investing of arbitraging information without being you know a guy who grew
0:04:36 up on you know you weren’t working on wall street you didn’t have an mba you didn’t have the what would be
0:04:44 like you know some 20 year 20 years of experience doing this the story is you take 20 grand you start
0:04:48 doing this type of investing and you run it up it’s just it works pretty well for you it’s successful i
0:04:54 don’t know the exact numbers but i’ve seen something like 60 million 70 million 80 million is how you’ve
0:04:59 grown that portfolio starting at 20 000 is that right by the way because i mean that sounds in some sense too
0:05:07 too good to be true yeah it it certainly is it does sound too good to be true it is accurate it’s
0:05:11 i don’t know the exact number 70 or 80 million dollars of returns from the 20k
0:05:20 but i’ve been audited over the past 17 years i’ll be re-audited at the end of this year and i’ll fall
0:05:28 somewhere around 75 percent annualized returns total portfolio over the 17 or i think it might be 18
0:05:36 year period now since 2007. hey let’s take a quick break because the team at hubspot has put together
0:05:40 something pretty cool you know in this episode chris is talking about the way he knows how to make money
0:05:46 identifying these trends scouting the tiktok comments making these big leveraged bets that’s great
0:05:50 for him it is amazing some people will like that i personally don’t know how to make money that way i
0:05:54 wouldn’t do it but i’ve talked before about the way that i know how to make money about how to build a
0:05:58 money-making skill about how to leverage your time and energy and the team at hubspot actually went
0:06:04 through the video where i explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my
0:06:08 four rules of how to make money now this is not you know get rich quick advice it’s just core
0:06:12 principles foundational principles about building wealth things that i wish i knew when i was you know just
0:06:16 getting started and so if you want to download it it’s in the description below it’s totally
0:06:20 free you can go get it thanks to the folks at hubspot for doing the research making this document
0:06:25 and making it available to all you guys all right back to this episode okay so let’s break it down
0:06:30 so you uh you said i started doing this as a kid you guys i felt i went to the type of investing i was
0:06:36 doing as a kid i i had read your book uh laughing at wall street and you talk about like basically kind
0:06:42 of like starting with like you know garage sailing and uh yeah very simple stuff when you were kids
0:06:48 noticing things talking to your brother talking to your dad hey could this mean this and um and taking
0:06:52 you know getting learning lessons with very small bankroll you know 100 bucks uh type of deal so could
0:06:58 you just take us like early days what was the what where did you kind of have this sort of aha moment that
0:07:07 this style of investing can work yeah you know i was an entrepreneurial kid uh i was really interested
0:07:14 in making money before that was a cool thing to do you know the new generation now all these all these
0:07:22 kids are traders they’re trading crypto i mean it’s all it’s like every kid now is like i was back in the
0:07:27 you know 80s and by the way that makes sense now because if you’re a kid you’re on youtube you’re
0:07:33 on tiktok you’ll you’ll see things but why why did you have that itch what made you want to to get on
0:07:41 that hustle what who did you see i don’t i don’t know what made me so laser focus on grinding at age 12
0:07:49 13 but but i will but the way that i was going about it was not investing it was uh arbitrage and
0:07:55 garage sale and estate sale merchandise i would take you know buses around the city on thursday
0:08:01 and friday mornings and saturday mornings before i could drive sometimes i’d take three or four buses
0:08:09 before school to the one estate sale that i had seen in the paper the night before that based on my
0:08:17 analyses i thought was most likely to have mispriced merchandise and and the thesis there is that most of
0:08:27 these estate sales at the time were run by older women who really had a great knack for pricing silver
0:08:33 and pricing other you know types of things that they knew about and cared about but they were really
0:08:43 really bad at identifying value in male oriented uh items like whether it was old trains old watches
0:08:50 any anything that this is pre ebay right so you can’t just go look up every item quickly and know
0:08:59 the know the current like live market price for it yeah it’s pre ebay exactly so i i would show up at
0:09:06 5 36 in the morning and the goal is if you pick the right sale and you’re first in line and you know
0:09:11 know exactly what you’re looking for uh you know you got a good shot at buying something that is
0:09:18 mispriced and i i would i did that for years um i just happened to go to the same 7-eleven every
0:09:25 morning and get a bottle of snapple a lemon flavored iced tea which was like the hot company at the time
0:09:32 it was the hot drink at the time yeah snapple used to be huge yeah and one morning i went to the 7-eleven
0:09:40 and they had like one quarter of the door space dedicated to snapple they had brought in
0:09:44 a couple other brands of iced tea i don’t even recall what it was maybe it was arizona iced tea
0:09:50 and a couple others the clerk told me that that’s the way it was going to be from that point forward
0:09:56 due to this new competition coming in and sure enough i talked to my older brother i shared
0:10:04 the observation with him he was a stock broker uh i asked him can i make money off of this this has
0:10:10 got to be bad for snapple right i mean it’s such a hot company sure enough uh a few weeks later they had
0:10:16 announced earnings he taught me how to short snapple with put options i did it through his account i was
0:10:22 too young to have a brokerage account i think i gave him three hundred dollars which was most of the
0:10:31 money i had at the time from garage sailing and he tripled the money in the course of about a month
0:10:38 because snapple for the first time in its history had reported you know bad earnings due to inventory
0:10:44 building up uh due to retailers like 7-eleven giving them less door space so it was just something that
0:10:51 i had noticed as a kid and you have to ask yourself like that’s crazy because you know professionals on
0:10:58 wall street they could have easily have seen the same thing that i saw but they were so distracted by so
0:11:07 many other things macroeconomics noise government their jobs uh just herd mentality that they didn’t see
0:11:13 simple that was right in front of their face so now if i did that as a you know young teenager
0:11:19 that really means something now of course i didn’t realize what i did at the time how special it was
0:11:26 because you would never believe that you as a kid are better than you know all wall street so i i got
0:11:33 really into stocks and investing after that but i did it in the conventional sense i read all the books
0:11:40 books and i mean all the books technical trading fundamental and i just tried every type of
0:11:49 investing method and of course basically nothing worked so uh i was just like everybody else uh but
0:11:55 later on in my life when i was in my 20s and i had a job and i wasn’t making as much money as i wanted to
0:12:02 make or i felt that i needed to make to have the life that i wanted i got back into investing and that was
0:12:09 really most aggressively in 2007 and i said you know why don’t i try this kind of observational approach
0:12:17 that i did a little bit of as a kid and i i recalled that one approach and at the time it was similar
0:12:27 what i did as a kid was reflective of what peter lynch was doing uh though peter lynch you know utilized
0:12:34 observational investing as just part of his methodology he also did a lot of fundamental analysis
0:12:40 well let’s break it down so there’s major schools of thought around investing right um number one
0:12:48 passive investing you know don’t try to beat the market just be in the index or even worse mutual fund
0:12:54 and um you know you go as the american economy goes all right that’s one school of thought then there’s
0:13:01 oh i i think i could do better than indexing and there’s technical analysis which is you know some
0:13:07 cross between i don’t know horoscopes and you know fantasy football or something and so there’s a lot of
0:13:14 people who believe that they can see patterns and and and and you know signs and math in the charts and
0:13:19 that the charts will tell you the technical analysis will tell you uh where the where the price is going
0:13:23 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
0:13:27 uh it’s possible that that is a thing there are some people there are some people will do that really
0:13:34 so okay so there’s there’s technical training there’s fundamental analysis the sort of buffet style
0:13:39 of investing where you’re trying to understand the intrinsic value of the business trying to understand the
0:13:43 you know the durability and the quantity of the cash flows and you’re trying to use that to
0:13:47 just try to understand what the business is worth relative to what the market’s pricing a lot of
0:13:50 people try to do that that’s sort of seeing this like kind of gold standard what you do is this
0:13:57 other school of thought so you know here comes door number three and door number three you kind of
0:14:03 described it a second ago but i would my short summary of that is you’re looking for significant
0:14:10 behavioral change so the way that either consumers or businesses are changing in some way whether that’s
0:14:16 covid is going to make it where people are not traveling or it’s um teenagers are now doing this
0:14:24 thing you gave this example of women who were uh changing their bra preference from wired push-up bras
0:14:29 and victoria’s secret is on top to you started noticing a lot of people talking about the word
0:14:34 bralettes and now they’re wearing bra and you know there’s two guys talking about bras there’s
0:14:39 now women are wearing bras without a wire uh or a no bra movement and hey that’s probably going to
0:14:43 affect the number one bra player victoria’s secret who’s not even carrying bralettes at the time so
0:14:51 you’re looking for some behavioral change somewhere let’s not let’s not um restrict it to behavioral
0:15:01 change let’s say any change it could be a hail storm okay that impacts a positively impacts a publicly traded
0:15:09 roofing company it could be in anything that’s happening in the world that is change oriented
0:15:17 that is not well well uh discovered or known by the investing correct so not sort of consensus not
0:15:23 quote-unquote priced in and so let’s go through a couple of examples so what are your favorite examples of
0:15:29 these that you found in your life take me through a couple of your greatest hits yeah i mean there’s like
0:15:38 there’s maybe north of 80 uh 80 to 90 i know over the past 18 years uh you know there have been a
0:15:43 handful that didn’t work out we could talk about those too but for the most part almost every one of
0:15:47 them has worked out i know that’s really hard to believe i know it’s like exceptionally difficult to
0:15:54 believe uh the one i just mentioned that popped in my head uh is actually one of my favorites i i would
0:16:04 track every spring i would simply go and track uh the number of people that were searching for
0:16:10 the words of roof damage or roof repair it’s it’s a free data source anyone could you know leverage google
0:16:17 trends and what’s fascinating about this is when there is a hail storm people will immediately uh start
0:16:23 googling roof repair the day after that hail storm hits now the at the time uh there was a publicly
0:16:28 traded company called beacon roofing and the one of the largest roofing companies in north america
0:16:36 and if the hail season was particularly damaging uh that would meaningfully impact their bottom line
0:16:45 as a roofing company so what’s fascinating about that is that the wall street generally would utilize insurance
0:16:54 sector reports that would report on the damage from the hail season as a data point to analyze beacon
0:16:59 roofing you know prior to earnings but those reports take a very long time they’re really
0:17:05 delayed they’re delayed by like i don’t know five six weeks uh after that the actual hail storms happen
0:17:13 so i had discovered this real-time data source that would tell me in real time uh the volume of people
0:17:18 searching for roof repair because even if you knew there was a terrible hail storm and you see it on the
0:17:25 news if that hail storm just happened to be over a super populated area as opposed to two miles down the
0:17:31 road that isn’t populated that’s what makes the difference and the only nobody really knows how many people are
0:17:37 are impacted by hail how many roofs are uh until they get reflected in the insurance reports or
0:17:44 a great measure of that that’s maybe slightly less precise but a way more real time is that the
0:17:50 volume of people that are searching for roof repair now what’s so great about a platform like google trends
0:17:58 is you have you know 15 years of historical data so you can look at every single spring and you could see
0:18:07 where the peaks are in the search volumes so there was one hail season in particular uh that the peaks
0:18:17 were nearly triple anything i had ever seen before in years past so i i went in on a very large uh very
0:18:24 levered call long position on beacon roofing and yeah i mean that would be considered like a greatest
0:18:31 hit my understanding is you the same thing you did in the garage sales where you said look most of these
0:18:38 garage and estate sales were run by older women they knew the price of jewelry really well you’re not
0:18:43 going to get uh too much of a deal there but they may not know what their kind of husband or their son’s
0:18:50 baseball card collection is worth specifically this one 1996 tops rookie card kobe bryant you know
0:18:54 whatever so you you find the value there my understanding is you you applied the same principle
0:18:58 to wall street you said well most of the guys who are on wall street you got people who work in finance
0:19:06 are guys white guys live in new york who are of a certain age and then you started saying well instead
0:19:11 of i’ll use the garage sale principle again if they know a lot about certain types of things where are
0:19:17 their blind spots is that right is that how you how you thought about it so that that’s how you identify
0:19:24 like the lowest hanging fruit or the highest probability of finding the most opportunity
0:19:36 especially early on i would say the vast majority of my big wins were around you know changes in consumer
0:19:45 behavior and culture that were primarily female oriented or youth oriented or to some demographic that
0:19:53 wasn’t older white northeastern you know uh you know geographically located uh in investors so you
0:20:00 know it it could be something like i talk a lot about the uh the moment that jeffrey star who was a beauty
0:20:06 influencer uh you know made a single video uh you know made a single video about this drug store
0:20:16 cosmetics product made by elf cosmetics that was just as good as a 60 product it was called the elf primer
0:20:22 putty got out that was an old trade now but that was back when elf was trading at like seven dollars a share
0:20:31 uh before it blew up to 170 a share right uh but but just be seeing a you single youtube video and then
0:20:37 realizing that wow it has 10 million views and this is a company that nobody cares about and all of a sudden
0:20:44 the most influential you know uh content creator in the world for beauty is saying that it’s just as good
0:20:50 as one of the best products in the world i i went down to i think it was cvs or actually i think it was
0:20:57 walgreens by my apartment and just stood there all day and and and watched moms coming in with their
0:21:05 kids uh and buying out all the elf products because all of a sudden instantaneously this drugstore brand
0:21:11 that was just like at a price point of like eight bucks for any piece of makeup right became a cool
0:21:18 brand because this one individual said it was and and so that was a game-changing moment that i witnessed
0:21:26 via watching a youtube video and i actually called one of the analysts on wall street who is covering
0:21:33 elf cosmetics because part of my methodology is not just to discover things early but you have to
0:21:40 assess to the degree to which other investors might already be aware of that information in order to
0:21:48 gain conviction uh that you that you truly found some information asymmetry in the market so i called
0:21:58 this analyst i said you know what do you what do you think about the jeffree star uh video on on elf uh you
0:22:05 know has that impacted the way that you’re analyzing elf this quarter and the analyst said who’s jeffree
0:22:13 star and and and at that moment i knew everything i needed to know about that trade right and and listen it
0:22:21 makes sense these guys are not watching you know youtube videos of beauty influencers right uh but that’s all
0:22:29 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
0:22:37 night uh basically reading through these days last six seven years uh uh tick tock comments right so like
0:22:44 that’s where i get most of my alpha from recently is people because because that’s just happens to be
0:22:54 the place uh where people express themselves most freely uh across the uh largest number of topics
0:22:58 and that’ll get you laughed out of the room it with with you know quote unquote serious investors
0:23:03 right like you know you have you have buffett or munger and these guys who are like reading the moody’s
0:23:09 manual you know cover to cover just company financials and that’s where they’re looking for
0:23:16 an opportunity and you’re like i scroll the tiktok comments and that’s why i’m compounding 75 a year
0:23:25 well okay so here’s what you have to determine as an investor because we can’t all be you know warm
0:23:31 about that right so like like who do you want to compete with i always say it’s really not important
0:23:37 for you to be smart but it’s important for you to figure out how to be smart in a totally different
0:23:45 way than others so do you want to go and compete with the top mathematicians in the world as a as a
0:23:53 technical trader do you want to compete with just droves and droves of you know wharton and harvard
0:24:00 grads who are doing financial analysis can you do that analysis a little bit better than them yeah maybe
0:24:07 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 99
0:24:17 99 of us probably don’t fit into one of those two camps so how could the rest of us get an edge on wall
0:24:25 street how could the 99 figure out a way to outperform others in the market like what could we do that
0:24:32 others aren’t doing and you have to think differently so you have to look for edge uh in a place where your
0:24:38 your competition and your competition being conventional institutional and retail investors
0:24:46 are not willing to go and you know the one thing about institutional wall street is they like uh
0:24:58 correlated data they they like certainty they like proof in in in historic correlations so the data that i am
0:25:07 trading is conversational data because wall street primarily uses transactional data so they’ll use
0:25:12 credit card receipts that they spend millions of dollars for and then they synthesize all this
0:25:20 transaction data uh so that they can kind of figure out what’s happening at that company before earnings so
0:25:27 a lot of times when we see stocks move a week or two before earnings and we’re like who’s doing that like
0:25:33 how do they know right like it’s transactional data wall street’s been using utilizing it for 15 years
0:25:40 more so today than they ever have so like how do we gain an edge on a hedge fund that’s spending millions
0:25:45 thousands of tens of tens of millions of dollars and has fleets of people analyzing credit card receipts
0:25:53 well what do you do before you buy something uh you talk about buying it uh so you there’s
0:26:01 a billion people out there that are talking about their interest and what they want and what they did and what
0:26:10 they plan to do tomorrow every single day uh if they see a video about a particular you know piece of
0:26:18 apparel uh you’ll have 30 000 women commenting whether they plan to also buy that piece of apparel that they
0:26:28 just saw video on right and and so what you could actually measure the depth of interest in an infinite
0:26:40 number of things even before that’s provable through sales right and and so it in my opinion it’s a superior
0:26:51 uh way to to discover alpha a change in the world although it’s imperfect because you have to do a lot of
0:26:59 your own interpretation of what you’re reading and what that actually means because it’s speech and and
0:27:07 and it’s a lot of times the speech is nuanced and uh the way that we speak about things is constantly evolving
0:27:17 so you know if you’re just a regular person that spends a lot of time in the real world uh and and on
0:27:25 social media uh believe it or not you’re probably well qualified to make that assessment
0:27:30 today’s episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use 20 of their
0:27:36 data that’s like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages point is you miss a lot
0:27:39 and unless you’re using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you
0:27:43 need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that
0:27:48 unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you want
0:27:54 to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot.com there’s a great story i
0:27:58 don’t know if you know the story of uh the trending tab on twitter is actually kind of it’s an interesting
0:28:04 story so that i met the guy who who did it is uh he’s running a company his name is abder so my friend
0:28:11 abder was basically uh at the time had a you know a group of basically data nerds machine learning
0:28:15 and data nerds and they were trying to figure out they’re trying to do something very meaningful for
0:28:19 the world they’re like we would love to be able to do sentiment analysis so try to figure out how
0:28:23 people feel about things so do they feel positive about something or negative about something and um
0:28:28 so he’s like oh twitter is this huge source of text traffic so let me just try to use twitter
0:28:34 to understand sentiment about things and he was trying to do it it wasn’t really working very well
0:28:40 and one day he’s uh on a train and he’s working on something and he just sees that like his program
0:28:44 he’s writing is not spitting out sentiment analysis about things but it’s just spitting out like city
0:28:50 names and he’s like why are there like these city names or the country names why are these country
0:28:56 names just popping up out of the the why is it being surfaced as signal and what he realized was that the
0:29:02 olympics was going on and they were basically like you know the the opening parade was happening and
0:29:08 each country that was you know being shown was getting mentioned a lot and what he realized was
0:29:13 that like oh if i just paid attention to the delta so like if nobody’s ever talking about
0:29:19 you know whatever zimbabwe and suddenly it’s not that a lot of people are talking about it but way more
0:29:25 than usual are talking about it that’s got to mean something and so he created a standalone product
0:29:31 that was basically just tell you what are people talking about in a abnormal way on twitter and then
0:29:35 twitter ended up buying that and making it the trending product which was actually like really really
0:29:40 important for twitter to succeed because they were able to differentiate from facebook and others
0:29:44 by being about like real time what’s going on in the world how do you figure out what’s interesting
0:29:48 and new and fresh that’s going on in the world well you needed something like that that
0:29:52 that was reading all the social signals it sounds like you were kind of manually doing a similar thing
0:29:58 when you’re like oh i noticed a lot of people are i’ve heard you talk about the example of slime
0:30:02 hey the slime trend is getting really big well how do you make slime right if everyone’s doing
0:30:06 if all the kids are doing slime well how do you make slime you need elmer’s glue and then you go and
0:30:11 you figure out that wow people haven’t really priced in that elmer’s glue elmer’s is about to have
0:30:16 like you know a huge quarter or a huge huge earnings call so me and my business partner we
0:30:24 actually created a platform called ticker tags in the mid-2000 teens with twitter uh and we had access
0:30:31 to the twitter deca hose which is a 10 randomized sample of every tweet in real time and we hand curated
0:30:42 about 1.5 million word combinations that represented how people were speaking about every product brand
0:30:48 basically anything that was connected to any publicly traded company or meaningful to any publicly traded
0:30:57 company in any way we had organized into a taxonomy so every company had like you know 300 to a thousand
0:31:02 combinations of words like what would be an example what do you mean by that so like if i’m nike what do i
0:31:09 care so okay so you just mentioned slime so which is one of my big trades newel brands makes elmer’s glue
0:31:17 all right so elmer’s glue would be a tag for newel brands uh diy slime which is a product that uh
0:31:25 utilizes white elmer’s glue uh when you’re kids to playing with slime that would be a tag because to the
0:31:32 extent that diy slime gets more popular uh that’s something that someone who’s invested in newel brands
0:31:39 might want to know so we were actually monitoring in real time the frequency of mentions of those 1.5
0:31:46 million words and benchmarking them against historical norms including seasonality and so since it was
0:31:53 organized in a taxonomy uh when there was any type of anomaly and speech patterns happening across twitter
0:32:01 that were impacting a subject matter that we had curated to be impactful potentially impactful to a
0:32:08 publicly traded company our system would flag that so that that’s a platform that we developed and sold to
0:32:15 hedge funds and sell side banks and so what that was was basically me taking my methodology of what i had
0:32:24 done manually and institutionalizing it uh for wall street and at the time people expressed their
0:32:31 opinions on twitter about everything that they were doing in life uh the way that people currently no
0:32:38 longer do on twitter but do on you know play in places like tick tock now you know twitter is mostly news
0:32:45 oriented or finance or tech oriented right uh political oriented but people are not generally
0:32:49 talking about the movie that they watched last night on twitter right they’re doing that on another
0:32:57 platform but but we sold that company uh to jeffrey’s bank uh years later was that like a successful
0:33:02 company you know obviously you know it’s not that it was unsuccessful but i guess you know it’s all
0:33:07 relative so for example you know you’re selling the data hedge funds are they really receptive to this
0:33:12 do they believe what you believe were they’re willing to pay and that’s the coolest part of the story
0:33:22 uh i spent years flying to new york nearly weekly uh training the top sell-side banks and the the i would
0:33:29 say you know probably five or six of the top 10 hedge funds in the world on how to interpret this
0:33:37 observational conversational conversational data and how to attempt to correlate it and they just had very
0:33:44 little interest they had interest in the results but they couldn’t figure out how to build teams around
0:33:51 it because hedge funds generally have individuals that are like mathematicians right that that were
0:33:58 that they were hiring from the west coast to develop you know algorithms for for trading like quant traders
0:34:05 and then they have very traditional fundamental analysts who are basically finance heads that would you
0:34:13 know would crunch numbers and kind of do fundamental analysis they didn’t really have you know 20 something
0:34:21 year old females on staff who were really savvy interpreting you know conversational data
0:34:29 you know coming coming off it and and like yes this is a trend this is not a trend uh this is meaningful
0:34:35 it’s not meaningful so it was a whole you know wall street they do things kind of in the same way that
0:34:42 they’ve always done things right and it’s really difficult for them to stick their neck out and say
0:34:50 hey you know we believe this thing matters when there’s no historical correlation between the speech
0:34:56 pattern of that subject matter and the stock price or the earnings of that company because like i said speech
0:35:04 patterns evolve and that thing that they’re talking about could be a new thing that was never meaningful
0:35:14 before at that company sure so that is unfortunate for wall street but it’s fortunate for retail investors
0:35:25 right because we we now know uh i guess i’m telling you right now that this is still a data set
0:35:33 that they’re scared of this is still a methodology that they have a hard time wrapping their head around because
0:35:40 they can’t really document the degree to which it’s it’s meaningful for a thesis if you were to have
0:35:49 someone come out and say hey i i i’ve been reading tiktok comments and i i believe i believe that this new
0:35:56 show at the sphere in vegas uh wizard of oz people are super hyped on it and i like read 180 comments of
0:36:02 comments of people flying in from europe next month to see it and i think this just might be the like
0:36:07 the one thing that spear has done right and it’s going to be a game-changing moment for the company
0:36:13 finding product market fit sounds oddly specific is that actually a trade trade you’re you’re in right now
0:36:20 now or no it was yeah so so so that was so sphere uh the wizard of oz uh sphere was actually one of my
0:36:31 largest uh wins of 2025 and it came from reading comments uh of wizard of oz the first 48 hours that
0:36:39 it was out and essentially making a monstrously big levered up 114 this year well it was a levered
0:36:45 options trade so it was a lot more than that a lot of what i do when i have high conviction around uh
0:36:53 a particular thesis that has a especially when they have a very defined window of time when i believe
0:37:01 others will will start to acknowledge that that that ground truth in the case of sphere it was people
0:37:08 counting seats uh sales of seats so you’re actually able to go in and see how many seats are available
0:37:14 for a show that’s a week and a half or two weeks out and that’s exactly what happened so over the course
0:37:20 of a few weeks uh other and it was cool because it was like retail analysts it wasn’t even like
0:37:26 wall street but the other people that were trading spear were like hey like we’re seeing a there’s a
0:37:34 lot of seat we’ve never seen seats sell out like this before for a show so what i had interpreted
0:37:44 from early user early reviews ultimately came out in seat sales that other retail investors started
0:37:49 trading and then wall street eventually picked up on it when the company came out and said that
0:37:54 they’re adding new shows right because they’re selling out all their shows they’re increasing
0:38:00 their you know profit guidance and yeah you would the stock is you know more than doubled here over
0:38:07 the last few months uh exclusively almost because of wizard of oz do you remember when so the show’s
0:38:11 called my first million do you remember when you made your first million and you know what what got
0:38:18 you there and how did it feel yeah i i i 100 percent do i was uh working at a company called e-rewards in
0:38:27 dallas texas uh with one of my best friends uh patrick it was like not far past when i started this in 2007
0:38:33 with the twenty thousand dollars that i had grown to a few hundred thousand dollars and i said this is just
0:38:40 absolutely crazy i said i think i’m going to i think i’m going to hit a million dollars here like within
0:38:45 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
0:38:51 never forget walking into his cubicle and saying i did it i cannot believe my account just hit a million
0:39:00 it absolutely melted my mind uh that happened and you know i wrote my book i don’t know two years
0:39:06 three years later laughing at wall street because there was this tracking service called covestor at
0:39:13 the time and covestor was like the first portfolio tracking service i think they had 40 000 accounts
0:39:19 in it including mine and it would monitor you know how well you’re doing month to month total portfolio
0:39:26 and it would rank you publicly and there was a while uh a moment in time when i was the number
0:39:32 one ranked investor on covestor uh which is just absolutely wild and it was during that three-year
0:39:40 period and that’s when i i think i was on a few different business shows like fox business talking
0:39:46 about it and then i got a book deal to write that book laughing at wall street and when i wrote laughing
0:39:50 at wall street it was twenty thousand to two million dollars it was a hundred times your money in three
0:39:59 years and at the time there was a small piece of me that thought you know is am i just like part of the
0:40:07 long tail statistical anomaly right you flip a coin flip a coin a hundred times somebody if you get enough
0:40:11 people to do it somebody will land on heads you know 90 times and they’ll you’ll think they’re they’re
0:40:18 a genius or no a hundred percent i doubted myself more and now i had a really defined methodology and
0:40:26 i knew the narrative behind every one of my trades it was very sensible right like it wasn’t like this
0:40:32 mystery where i came up with some random formula and it was just trading stocks on its own and maybe
0:40:40 the formula just happened to get lucky i felt strongly that the nature of observational investing
0:40:47 about simply uncovering some piece of meaningful information that others weren’t aware of intuitively
0:40:52 just makes sense right like it’s not like this mystical thing that you’re like well that doesn’t make
0:40:58 any sense of course it makes sense you’re just uncovering important information a little bit quicker
0:41:02 than other people and you’re connecting dots a little bit quicker than other people so in my
0:41:11 head i knew the methodology at its core was really valuable but i still didn’t believe that three years
0:41:15 was enough so in my head i was like if i can get to five years and keep this track record up that would
0:41:22 be insane i got to five and i was like okay let’s see if i can push it to 10 and then i got to 10 years
0:41:30 and now here i am i’m at eight like i said i think i’m going on 18 years of average 70 you know mid 70s uh
0:41:39 total portfolio returns and i truly believe i can hit 20. so like 20 is now the new number in my head i
0:41:46 want to go for 20 years and all i have to do at this point is not mess it up right but but at the same time
0:41:53 it’s very hard generating you know returns that are that high hey quick message here because you
0:41:58 know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works no friction well i’ve used mercury
0:42:02 for years now let me tell you it just works and that’s why i use it for not one not two but eight
0:42:08 of my companies from credit cards to invoices i have everything in one place there’s no janky dashboard
0:42:13 i’m never told please please visit a local bank branch none of that tomfoolery and a few months
0:42:18 ago i landed a big client the first thing i did i sent them a clean branded invoice boom deal close
0:42:22 cash in the door that’s the kind of banking experience i want and that’s why i use mercury
0:42:27 so if you’re running a startup and you want banking that feels like it’s built in this century well go
0:42:32 to mercury.com and get started in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the
0:42:36 services are provided through choice financial group column a and evolve bank and trust members fdic
0:42:42 so let me ask you a couple of mechanical questions do you take profits every year do you reinvest
0:42:48 everything what are you actually doing with that sort of annual yeah because you know you compounded that
0:42:52 rate for a long enough time the number is actually much bigger than 70 million that you yeah it’s almost
0:43:00 a billion dollars so it so what’s in this is where the biggest mistake i ever made was uh that i’m now
0:43:07 now resolving for the most part so just about i’ve been half of my life is trading public equities
0:43:12 through you know observational investing social or conversational data everything we’re talking about
0:43:21 the other half of my life has been an entrepreneur and you know i’ve had some success as an entrepreneur
0:43:26 and like a lot of entrepreneurs that have success you start investing in other entrepreneurs so i’ve
0:43:34 been an early stage venture investor for 20 years i’m actually invested in 160 early stage companies
0:43:45 and my performance investing in early stage companies is pretty much average uh you know i’m on sync with
0:43:51 just about just about any other average vc i i want to say maybe 10 11 12 percent annualized returns
0:44:03 so i have pulled out almost all of my gains every single year for the past 18 years and have taken that money
0:44:11 and invested it in the private market and that has been really unfortunate for obvious reasons it’s unfortunate
0:44:20 because the opportunity cost of my capital is so high but i never even believed in myself that much on the
0:44:26 public side that i could continue to do that so i was never like oh well i’m just going to keep
0:44:35 doing 70 some odd percent average returns that never really seemed feasible it i i felt like i needed to
0:44:43 make my home runs in the early stage vc world and i finally came to terms a few years ago with the fact
0:44:50 that that was a really bad decision and it’s taken me about four years to pull myself out of early stage
0:44:54 because when you’re in when you’re an early stage investor and that big of an early stage investor
0:45:00 i mean i was taking hundreds of meetings with founders annually and it takes a long time to unwind yourself
0:45:09 from that ecosystem yeah so i don’t know who was maybe peter lynch he had like a don’t don’t cut your
0:45:14 flowers to water your weeds all right like you basically he talked about with with stock individual
0:45:19 stocks right don’t sell your winners to diversify back into like losers but you know in a way what you
0:45:27 were doing was at a at an overall level if you were performing at 70 in one asset one strategy and 10 or
0:45:31 11 percent and the other but you were taking the profits out you know that’s a that’s a water that’s
0:45:39 a water your weeds sort of scenario yeah and and by the way nothing i love peter lynch maybe more than
0:45:47 any other investor but you know i i don’t believe in any preset rule of investing like that like my methodology
0:45:54 is very clean you know i i you invest when you discover something that other people haven’t
0:45:59 discovered yet that will be meaningful to a trade and you exit as soon as other people have figured that
0:46:04 out and that’s it that that’s literally the only thing and and if that stock goes up 100x
0:46:12 or 200x you don’t sell it because it’s up 200x uh you know you you sell it when other people find out
0:46:19 the information that you’re trading so one of my most controversial trades uh over a year ago was you
0:46:30 know palantir and i i went all in unbelievably levered in palantir at 30 a share and i was very public about
0:46:37 it you know i have a youtube channel dumb money live and we did a multitude of episodes on palantir and this
0:46:44 really strong thesis that we felt there was this kind of 12 month window where the whole world was going to
0:46:53 discover these things about palantir that were really misunderstood and i had never gotten so much heat a lot of it
0:46:59 from palantir investors going you’re an idiot we’ve been in this thing since six bucks you’re gonna do this
0:47:07 at 30 a share like what are you talking about i’m like well i i’m not trading the information you are trading at six dollars
0:47:11 so i’m trading something sort of two-line reason you were so bullish on palantir at that stage well
0:47:18 because p because people didn’t even understand what they did right they didn’t understand the the where
0:47:26 they would actually sit in the stratosphere of the ai wave that was coming uh as a beneficiary of it
0:47:35 and palantir was just starting to scrape the surface of this new product that they had with clients and
0:47:42 there was it was unstoppable right like like there was just going we knew there would be this 12 month
0:47:50 window when everything that palantir had been working on for years they finally had the case studies done
0:47:57 with their first set of clients and now they were just going to start to steamroll and and add add to
0:48:05 clients so so they were just scratching the surface of their tam and the market didn’t realize that so what was
0:48:11 interesting about palantir is that they were so overvalued at the time based on fundamentals that
0:48:18 people were like there’s no way you could be going in levered on palantir at 30 a share with its valuation
0:48:26 already so out of whack and my response to that was the valuation is irrelevant to me i know i don’t look at
0:48:33 valuation i don’t look at pe i don’t look at anything like that um all i look about is there is new
0:48:43 information that’s about to come online for palantir that will bring in a whole new group of investors and
0:48:49 once people see this information however they’re valuing palantir today based on the information that
0:48:56 exists this is new information that will be settled into the stock price and that’s exactly what happened and
0:49:03 palantir went from you know 30 to 160 right or whatever it went to 180 question you say uh you
0:49:09 know i went really big into this i made a huge bet on this what is that and you’re taking leverage which
0:49:14 could cut both ways right so obviously leverage will increase your gains but it’ll quickly sink your
0:49:20 your portfolio if done incorrectly how much are you actually let’s say you have you i think you said
0:49:25 something like 70 million dollar portfolio let’s say you have 70 million dollars and you get a lot
0:49:32 of conviction about something what are you actually betting at a high conviction bet at this stage
0:49:37 or is it are you putting one percent ten percent thirty percent like what are you putting out there
0:49:43 and then you’re levering up and then how do you manage that risk of that going south yeah and by
0:49:49 the way just to be transparent it’s 70 million ish of returns right of of gains over that time and
0:49:54 you know those gains were taken and put into other things like private companies right so i’m not
0:50:00 managing that’s not my public so 70 let’s say that’s gains you got to pay taxes a lot of your stuff sounds
0:50:07 like it might be short term because it’s almost exclusively and then you’re reinvesting that into
0:50:12 your uh addiction and startups and so that’s that there’s a lot of it’s going that way but but
0:50:21 percentage wise percentage wise um when you have a uh hike what i call just a high conviction idea uh
0:50:30 i’m usually investing between five and ten percent of my entire liquid portfolio uh into that idea via
0:50:38 options so if you’re wrong you just lose five to ten percent of the portfolio and in a good example of
0:50:45 where i did that and was you know wrong like i think two or three maybe three weeks in a row maybe four
0:50:52 weeks in a row and i lost like 30 40 of my portfolio was during uh covid during the pandemic when i was
0:51:00 kind of tracking the virus coming out of china i was you know using google translate on a lot of uh
0:51:07 medical reports coming out of china to assess uh how big of a deal that virus was and it became very
0:51:13 clear to me that it was going to be a global pandemic and you know global pandemics only do
0:51:21 one thing to financial markets right so i i was essentially taking i think ten percent of my portfolio
0:51:30 and putting it into puts in the s and p uh casino stocks vegas casino stocks and airlines uh every
0:51:36 week and the market wasn’t moving down like the market just wasn’t accepting uh covid for what it was
0:51:43 and i got to a point where i was like 30 to 40 percent of my portfolio was gone and i did it again the
0:51:50 week after and that week after was the first week the market cracked and it went down two percent and then the
0:51:57 next week is where it really hit and that that was one of the biggest trades of my life and uh
0:52:05 over the court i think that year was like a 370 percent annualized return total portfolio so something
0:52:13 like that and it was partially because i had shorted the pandemic early on even though it was a little too
0:52:20 early it paid off and then two days after it bottomed i had a selection of i think 14 or 15 companies
0:52:25 uh that should have never gone down at all they should have only gone up as soon as we realized
0:52:30 there was going to be a global pandemic and and everybody would be stuck living in their house for
0:52:34 you know working in their house for a year so you know companies ranging from
0:52:40 euland packard where everybody would want to go buy printers for their house to peloton because you
0:52:46 can’t go to the gym you got to work out at your house now uh shopify because you know you’re shopping
0:52:52 online amazon obviously uh you know campers world because one of the things you can do you can still go
0:52:59 camping uh boat stocks you know i bought a company out of canada that nobody even had ever traded before
0:53:04 that owned schwinn bicycles because you know schwinn had a run of the biggest bicycle sales in the history
0:53:12 of the company i think that company went up 8x 8 or 9x over the course of nine months uh so you know
0:53:17 i had these 14 15 companies so it’s like these companies should be doubling right now and instead
0:53:25 they were all down like 30 40 50 percent just because the whole market traded down so i always knew that
0:53:29 i was going to go levered long in these 15 companies but i didn’t want to do it until the
0:53:36 market became less erratic and irrational so once the markets finally started to you know normalize
0:53:44 and come back up i took all the gains from shorting the travel stocks and the market at large
0:53:49 and just put them into levered positions in these 15 companies which is obviously the trade of a lifetime so
0:53:56 so that was a dollar amount was that the biggest dollar gains you’ve ever had i i don’t know by the
0:54:02 way i i don’t watch enough of your content to know how much you talk like do you like do you disclose
0:54:07 like how much you make on these things do you say like i got a 10 million active portfolio what do you
0:54:12 actually say i don’t know i don’t know what we’re very open and transparent i think that year i made 30
0:54:20 30 million uh in the market so that was like 30 million in one year and it was it was a wild ride
0:54:27 didn’t it i think the most interesting part of that narrative was just before the pandemic i had made
0:54:36 the worst trade of my life and it was actually a trade that was psychologically damaging to me like
0:54:45 i lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade just months before the pandemic started and
0:54:54 probably the thing i’m most proud of myself of is i was so down and out about that trade that i still
0:55:02 found a way when i when i you know had come out with all that conviction on covid to actually still go all
0:55:09 in on my thesis on copen even though my account was so brutally damaged at the point that if i got
0:55:17 another one wrong i mean so it was like i could have gotten that would really have wiped me out and i
0:55:25 mean not wiped me out but it would have been an unbelievable unbelievable damaging implosion for me
0:55:32 to have two monster trades in a row go wrong the one that went wrong months earlier was a company
0:55:42 uh qsr they owned burger king popeyes and tim hortons and i was so convicted that the company would have
0:55:50 the best earnings quarter in its entire history because two of the three companies they owned both
0:55:58 had anomalies on the positive side burger king had the impossible whopper uh which was unlike anything the
0:56:05 company had ever done before uh in terms of sales traction and popeyes had the uh crispy chicken
0:56:13 sandwich which is during the this is the chicken wars if you remember yeah yeah at the time and that
0:56:21 chicky crispy chicken sandwich that popeyes had it would literally sell out in like two hours every day
0:56:27 uh popeyes no one had ever talked about popeyes ever in the history of the company uh until this crispy
0:56:35 chicken sandwich and i was monitoring both those trends and i was like they’re both going to report the
0:56:41 best quarter in the history of their quarters at burger king and popeyes and then you have this third
0:56:47 piece which was unfortunately the biggest piece of the company tim hortons and tim hortons is just
0:56:56 just you know they’re they’re a canadian coffee and donut shop okay and the company had basically been
0:57:04 around forever it had not been doing awesome but it was kind of flatlining they would have to have had
0:57:14 a really bad quarter to screw up my trade and it was just happened to be a really difficult company for me
0:57:22 to extract information on through the methods that i used because it was canadian and people just didn’t
0:57:28 talk about it that much right there was nothing happening there so it’s like i saw zero reason why
0:57:34 they should have this anomaly of a bad quarter which is exactly what happened they just happened to have
0:57:41 like randomly one of the worst quarters ever which statistically the chance of that happening were solo
0:57:48 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
0:57:55 my portfolio and the wildest piece about that and this is where there’s a lot of self-reflection
0:58:02 because i take a lot of pride in in going in deep and doing really intense comprehensive due diligence
0:58:08 where sometimes if i have a high conviction trade i will put you know 60 plus hours of due diligence
0:58:14 into the trade where i like to joke that i’ll uncover every piece of contextualized information
0:58:19 on the company globally through every social media anyone who’s speaking about any of their products
0:58:25 uh i will visit i will sometimes travel if they they’re a retailer and visit stores and talk to store
0:58:32 owners and clerks but because there were three things i was having to deal with burger king
0:58:38 popeyes and then tim hortons i just assumed tim hortons how bad is it going to be well they had
0:58:44 the tim hortons annual meeting a few weeks before earnings in florida that i didn’t realize they had
0:58:52 this meeting but if i did realize that and i had done my homework i would have been at that in orlando
0:58:56 for that annual meeting not because i would have gotten in but i would have hung out at the bar
0:59:02 and i would have talked to all the franchisee owners because from what i understand there was a revolt
0:59:09 at that at that meeting by franchisee owners because the company was doing so many things wrong their
0:59:16 sales were just getting slaughtered due to recent decisions that corporate was pushing on the franchisee
0:59:24 owners and it would they were very public about it at that meeting it was really harsh and if i was just
0:59:31 in in the building right at the bar i would have been well aware of that so going back uh i learned that
0:59:37 you know you really have to be comprehensive in your research if you’re going to take a levered bet
0:59:44 on a thesis that you have and you can’t you can’t be lazy what are the bets you’re looking at now because
0:59:52 a lot of these examples are from the past 17 years where are you now on the ai side you know two of my
1:00:00 favorite ai picks you know right now one is bloom energy you know the energy trade is a big one uh and
1:00:08 it’s one that’s really really really misunderstood i think by most investors so bloom energy is a
1:00:15 company uh that just has a really different approach to powering data centers right they’re not using
1:00:25 big gas turbines uh you know they have a technology that they’ve worked on for you know 20 years that is
1:00:33 actual you know dc uh technology where instead of combusting gas it’s actually a chemical change that
1:00:42 creates the energy and they have a really quick uh timeline uh to energy for a data center so if you
1:00:48 have a data center and you could actually get energy through bloom and get your data center up and running
1:00:55 six to twelve months quicker uh than getting on a wait list for gas turbines and going through all the
1:01:00 various approvals that’s that’s a really big deal and that’s why bloom energy has i think they’re up
1:01:05 like five or six x right over the past eight or nine months as people are starting to realize this
1:01:15 but there’s still a lot of controversy around the company so again it’s somewhat unproven they only have
1:01:21 a couple big hyperscaler deals you know ones with oracle uh i think there will be others that will
1:01:29 be announced in the near future but it’s a new technology so people are still somewhat skeptical of
1:01:34 it and then you have you know news events that that happened like this last week where now we’re building
1:01:42 data centers you know in in space right you know now that you know spacex is preparing to ipo all of a
1:01:48 sudden we have this narrative pop out of nowhere where oh didn’t everybody realize that we’re just
1:01:52 going to be doing you know compute data centers in space now like that’s oh that’s like right on the
1:01:57 horizon like a couple years two three years yeah we’re just doing data centers in space like
1:02:04 this is the noise in the market right now right so like oh we’re doing data centers in space and
1:02:09 do we don’t even need any down here like oh well if you’re powering those with solar
1:02:16 you know why would we want to value an energy company you know here in the us uh if you’re just
1:02:24 going to do them in space with solar so the market is so add that it’s changing week to week month to
1:02:31 month based on whatever the hype story is that will you know either positively or negatively impact
1:02:40 companies in the space but for me i i think uh i think bloom energy is definitely one of my favorite ai
1:02:47 plays right now because they will be the company that will enable data centers to get up and running
1:02:54 i think meaningfully quicker uh over the next three to five years and i think that’s a company that’s just
1:03:00 going to see its earnings double basically year over year for the next three to four years uh and i
1:03:06 think they’re still very much misunderstood they’re actually going to be the topic of my next uh dumb
1:03:12 money live episode i’m gonna go in deep uh on bloom energy we spent like a couple months uh doing some
1:03:18 doing deep analysis do you publish all your like do you publish your portfolio somewhere do you publish your
1:03:25 trade somewhere um we don’t i won’t ever publish trades i i sometimes speak about trades on a really
1:03:31 high level the last thing we ever want is other investors trying to mirror our trades because
1:03:38 that’s not just not what we do right we don’t think it’s a healthy behavior uh i always tell investors to
1:03:45 steal my ideas and run with them so take the idea uh then poke holes in the idea do all of your own
1:03:52 research right uh and then come back to me and tell me where i was wrong uh but ultimately then go off
1:03:58 and make your own trade based on your own you know risk reward because we all have different degrees of
1:04:08 risk tolerance and we should all have a different take on an idea so i love sharing ideas i don’t really
1:04:14 share trades i mean i’ll be honest with you because um this is not my world of expertise i’m a founder
1:04:23 first and my investing is very um sort of simple uh you know i basically own a couple of you know
1:04:27 i own some indexes and i own stocks that i understand i’ve owned them for a long time you
1:04:32 know tech companies basically because i grew up in the tech industries ever since college and then i my
1:04:37 investing outside of that is private angel investing again tech and lastly would be you know my own private
1:04:43 equity where it’s businesses that like individual businesses that i can own and i can affect with
1:04:48 with things that i know how to do operationally or promotionally with this podcast and so you’re
1:04:54 interesting to me because on one hand i i think well first of all you’re interesting because the story is
1:04:59 great like i turned twenty thousand dollars into you know i’ve made 70 million in gains or something
1:05:06 like that’s an incredible story i think it’s interesting because your approach like just the
1:05:11 way you describe observational investing actually lines up with a lot of the great investors do and
1:05:16 say which is that they don’t um sort of spreadsheet themselves that they try to understand like surface
1:05:20 out the signal from the noise what is the actual important thing i need to know about this company
1:05:26 that i can believe before it is obvious true and proven and you know the market uh sort of response
1:05:32 to certainty and if you can handle uncertainty um you could do quite well at the same time uh you
1:05:38 know sometimes you say things like you know 99 of the other 99 of us can go do this and we have
1:05:43 sort of this i think i’ve heard you say you know uh the game is rigged wall street is rigged but it’s
1:05:49 rigged in our favor and um you know that part i think seems untrue like if if what you’ve done
1:05:55 is true it’s in many ways because you have a a very unique skill set and upbringing and background
1:06:00 no no that’s that’s it i let me let me just sort of explain that because i think it’s important i
1:06:06 think i the last thing i would want is people to listen to this and be like oh okay cool i can just
1:06:12 go and trade levered up off of observations and i too will turn twenty thousand dollars to 70 million
1:06:15 dollars there’s a reason that’s not common that’s not a common result there’s a reason you get a book
1:06:18 deal there’s a reason people will follow you because it’s not a common result everybody could
1:06:23 everybody does and i think one of the reasons it’s uncommon is not because it can’t work that’s
1:06:28 not what i mean a lot of it is interpretability right so interpret interpreting the signals trying
1:06:32 to figure out what is actually important is it already priced in what does this mean who does it who
1:06:38 benefits from that the second order effects of that that’s not like you know something incredibly uh
1:06:43 you know simple that that uh everybody is going to do so there’s a big difference between anybody can
1:06:50 yes everybody can is different and so like i view it very similar to to startups where you know an
1:06:53 entrepreneur can come on here and they’ll say look it’s not rocket science i’m not any smarter than
1:06:59 you guys i just did this this this this and it’s true that any that was in the capacity for anybody to
1:07:04 do but definitely everybody won’t and uh and definitely everybody should not try because they don’t have
1:07:08 you know either the nature of the disposition the the risk tolerance to be able to go do it so i just think
1:07:13 you’re interested because you’re this sort of like puzzle normally if i hear a story like this it’s
1:07:18 too good to be true it violates a lot of this sort of like fundamental wisdom that people have about
1:07:22 investing where you want to buy you know buy a share in a great company and hold it for a long time you
1:07:27 know things that i have sort of accepted from you know a certain school of thought around this so i think
1:07:32 you’re very interesting because you violate some of those and i think that that works and it works for
1:07:36 you and i think it’s very cool but i hesitate i hesitate because i think that this is not
1:07:43 something that a lot of people could or should do so so i couldn’t disagree more um i did i agree with
1:07:50 some of what you’re saying in terms of yes i mean over a long period of time you know doing you know
1:07:57 generating almost a hundred million dollars from a you know twenty thousand dollars or yeah that it’s
1:08:05 that’s not easy to do obviously but i will say this i think i think the biggest issue
1:08:13 is simply bucketing money and having a risk capital so i think the the number one issue preventing someone
1:08:20 from doing this is thinking that they have this one bucket of capital for their life savings for their
1:08:28 future kids college for their retirement and they think about that money all as one and this is something
1:08:33 the concept of a little foreign the concept of being a regular person and observing something and saying
1:08:42 connecting the dots and saying you know what i’m gonna put a levered bet on that because i just found
1:08:48 you know i just discovered this you’re not going to do that unless you have your money properly bucketed and
1:08:55 the one thing i teach people is you have to have risk capital i don’t care if it’s fifty dollars or fifty million dollars
1:09:02 you don’t you shouldn’t be waiting until you’re part of the you know ultra wealth class to to to to think
1:09:07 that you have risk capital to take risk with you need to have risk capital starting with day one so
1:09:12 everybody should have a big money account i talked about this in laughing at wall street everyone should
1:09:18 have a big money account and the big money account is the account that that yes you get wealthy quickly
1:09:25 with and you do that by taking big swings on things that you really believe in and the only way that
1:09:34 you’re going to psychologically do that is if you fund that big account with money that is not being stolen
1:09:42 from other areas of your life so i i call it you know there’s this whole concept of like frugality
1:09:50 or trade-offs where okay maybe you mow your own lawn maybe you make your own coffee maybe you clip coupons
1:09:55 like people don’t want to clip coupons to save a dollar but if you think about every dollar in your
1:10:02 life as it as potentially being a hundred dollars 100x which is a hundred percent feasible over a long
1:10:10 period of time if you invest aggressively with leverage and get a few wins then you’ll clip a dollar coupon
1:10:14 because that dollar coupon is clipping a hundred dollar coupon okay you’re going to make your own
1:10:20 coffee because instead of saving five dollars you’re saving five hundred dollars a day right so all of
1:10:28 sudden you discover all of this money newfound money in your life by making little trade-offs in things
1:10:35 all over your life the difference is every time you make one of those trade-offs and you save five dollars
1:10:42 for making your own coffee you take that five dollars and you put it into your uh your risk
1:10:47 bucket yeah account bucket right by the way this is not financial advice right it’s just like this is
1:10:55 how i did i’m just saying like i hope i’m inspiring people because i just understand something i graduated in
1:11:05 the bottom 25 of my high school class the bottom 20 today the way college is i could not even had i would
1:11:12 not have gotten into any university in the united states okay pretty much today in 2025 with with my
1:11:17 grades this is why i love doing the podcast because you can get people who make their money in all different
1:11:24 ways we just had john morgan who’s like the guy on the billboards personal injury law and he’s a guy you
1:11:29 know he’s the biggest personal injury lawyer in the world two billion dollars a year and then he
1:11:36 started uh he started his career working at disney world as pluto like he would be in the costume and
1:11:40 then he started because of that formative experience he took the money from the law firm and started
1:11:46 building little like attractions like uh fairs and and places you go and buy tickets like the the museum of
1:11:50 crime and history things like that and he’s made a killing doing that so you have that guy comes on
1:11:54 tells about how you make money that way another guy says how you do it this way so what i love about
1:12:00 the podcast is i get to hear these people who come on with completely different blueprints and playbooks
1:12:07 that they 100 believe in and i get to listen and i get to decide i get to decide for myself does that
1:12:10 sound like something that’s interesting or would suit me and i hope the listener does the same because
1:12:15 i don’t agree with a lot of what you said but i found it all very interesting and you know there’s
1:12:19 some things you said if like i’ll be i’ll be totally honest if you saw if you have like a
1:12:24 paid course somewhere i would be like i can’t run this episode because i feel like this guy is selling
1:12:30 this dream to people that hey yeah you just gotta just go go get in the tiktok comments find an
1:12:36 observation lever up baby make a trade one trade will change your life and it’s like that is a scary
1:12:42 principle i think that is a heretical idea to a lot of people it’s by why it’s very interesting to me to
1:12:47 hear it to talk about it why is it why is it important to you that people really that the
1:12:51 average person who’s listening they believe this and they go take action on this because you know like i
1:12:56 said it’s not that you’re running a fund right so you’re not soliciting investors you’re not selling
1:13:00 a course saying i’ll teach you how to do this trust me it works you’re not doing any of those things which
1:13:05 is usually why people really kind of pound the table and say you could do this just believe just go for
1:13:13 it my my overriding purpose is to inspire every human on earth to enter the investing class right
1:13:18 because i think it’s the only way we’ll ever solve the wealth gap so like there’s no way to solve the
1:13:24 income gap the income gap is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve the wealth gap is a
1:13:31 problem that’s solvable uh by bridging more humans into the investor class and so everything that i do on
1:13:41 x everything that i do on youtube every podcast that i do has a single mission to inspire other people to
1:13:47 start investing on their own and by all means if that means just throwing money in the s p and an etf
1:13:53 awesome but there’s no reason to stop there right like i i i know i know that
1:14:02 people love the concept of actually hope and having an opportunity to do something truly great in their
1:14:09 life because so many people when it comes to income are stuck their job is not going anywhere okay like
1:14:15 and by the way i am not a proponent of people quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs and taking all
1:14:21 this massive personal risk to start businesses um i think there are very few people that are capable of doing
1:14:30 that and i think that this road map is way more achievable for people start making trade-offs come
1:14:35 up with a big money account do it through making trade-offs in your life and frugality learn how to
1:14:42 use leverage learn how to take big risk with other people’s money because i call it other people’s money
1:14:49 because it’s all comes to trade-offs um in things that you believe in because you can do this and by the
1:14:56 the way there is nothing cooler than when you’re just a regular person and you you just make a grand
1:15:03 slam in the market right and you you 30x your money all of a sudden you have financial independence in life
1:15:09 so i don’t know many things that are more important because it just it helps solve so many other issues
1:15:16 and so many humans are just depressed because they look at their life and they’re like this is my job
1:15:23 these are my expenses this is inflation holy crap i’m screwed i will never be the person i want to be
1:15:30 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
1:15:34 need to be taking big risks with your retirement money or any of that stuff that’s why i’m like i’m very
1:15:43 i’m very clear if you’re gonna do this do it with money that’s bucketed right for for risk you know this
1:15:56 isn’t just about investing um the same methodology of being able to identify change in the world and tailwinds um and
1:16:05 trends should apply to career it should also you know like it should apply to entrepreneurs as well
1:16:11 right because like i’m an entrepreneur like i’m about to start another business uh and that business is
1:16:21 directly tied to the analysis that i’m doing discovering change in the world right so like you know we’re about
1:16:29 to embark on this journey of of abundance and it’s not going to be like we just hit the age of abundance in
1:16:35 five years and we’re not working like no the age of abundance is going to like slowly happen it’s already
1:16:42 happening it’s gonna it’s gonna like happen over the course of decades and it’s just it’s just lots of tailwinds and
1:16:48 trends it’s like people will be working a little less people will have a little more free time people will have more
1:16:55 flexibility to dive into the things that they care about right uh wealth signaling will i think become
1:17:02 even bigger in the future than it is today i there’s just so many changes that are massive that are
1:17:07 happening in the world that if you’re an entrepreneur trying to figure out like where do i spend my time or
1:17:13 if you’re just someone that is figuring out where’s your next career path or where if you’re a young person
1:17:20 where’s my career path like you need to be doing more analysis on where the opportunity is because
1:17:27 these are some of the biggest decisions of your life it’s not just about trading a stock especially
1:17:31 in silicon valley you see this all time people will take a job and it’s like you realize you’re investing
1:17:36 all of your life force you’re you know you’re creative energy and you’re getting these stock options
1:17:41 but you never thought about this like an investor like you’re just happy you got the job versus
1:17:44 you should be looking at the job market the way an investor looks at these companies and even if
1:17:49 you’re not investing capital you’re investing your time right so that applies you know totally there
1:17:58 you said you’re launching a new business what is it it is related to the jet industry private jet industry
1:18:07 which i believe will be one of numerous beneficiaries of us kind of entering into this age of abundance
1:18:12 with people having you know more in fact i’ll just quickly state that if you want a glimpse into the
1:18:20 future you need to simply look back into our past from the pandemic because that one year of the pandemic
1:18:27 when we actually had an abnormal amount of time as humans we had never experienced anything like that
1:18:34 throughout our lifetime when we had excess time to actually do what we wanted to do and we also just
1:18:41 happened to have excess money because of this wild stimulus that happened during the pandemic so if you
1:18:47 want an example of what the age of abundance is going to look like in terms of the winners and the losers
1:18:54 just look back to that one period of time what did we do when we had more time and more money
1:19:05 we dug into our hobbies we dug into our interest um we you know we we kind of did things that now that
1:19:12 we’re back to this world right like we do a little bit less of but if we truly get you know the industry
1:19:22 of intelligence and automation and robotics to help us do the vast majority of work uh the repetitive work
1:19:30 at least that we do today i think the entire world has an opportunity to become more creative uh spend more
1:19:38 time with their families with their friends doing things that are meaningful uh travel certainly i think it is
1:19:44 something that we can all count on in the future as becoming a larger industry not a smaller industry
1:19:52 i am ultra long on the private jet sector even though myself uh i carry too much guilt to fly private
1:20:00 so like you’ll never see me on a private jet but uh i i i’m very bullish on the sector that’s amazing
1:20:06 chris thanks for coming on man i appreciate you and uh people can go find you you got show dumb money
1:20:11 live it’s on youtube that’s where i watch it at least when i when i tune in um so thanks for coming
1:20:19 on and by the way the only place i am personally is x so at chris camillo at x but dumb money dot tv
1:20:25 has all the socials so thanks for having me on i i appreciate it very cool well that’s it that’s the pod
1:20:41 all right everyone if you’re listening to mfm you probably want to make more money well i want to tell
1:20:45 you about a podcast you might want to check out it’s called the sales evangelist and it’s hosted by
1:20:50 donald kelly each week donald interviews the world’s best sales experts who share their strategies to
1:20:56 succeed in sales they share actionable insights and stories that will encourage challenge and motivate
1:21:00 you to hustle your way to the top if you’re someone looking to raise your income level check
1:21:04 out the sales evangelist you can find it wherever you get your podcasts
0:00:13 true thing of investing the most important thing the thing that matters more than anything else is
0:00:18 i don’t look at valuation i don’t look at p all i look about is there is new information i’ve been
0:00:23 reading tiktok comments that’s where i get most of my alpha from you have buffett or munger and
0:00:28 who are like reading the moody’s manual cover to cover just company financials and you’re like
0:00:34 i scroll the tiktok comments that year i made like 30 million in one year and it was a wild ride you
0:00:39 will try to beat the market you’ll trade with leverage you’re moving in and out of positions
0:00:44 you’re not a buy and hold forever kind of guy just before the pandemic i had made the worst trade of my
0:00:52 life i lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade okay so let’s break it down this is where
0:01:07 the biggest mistake ever you break all the rules of investing you know all what i normally hear is
0:01:14 you should just index don’t try to beat the market don’t take any leverage you know and so but you do
0:01:20 the exact opposite right you will try to beat the market you’ll trade with leverage you’re moving in
0:01:24 in and out of positions you’re not a buy and hold forever kind of guy according to the internet you’ve
0:01:28 done pretty well so um i’ve seen some different numbers that have floated around can you set the
0:01:38 record straight what is the actual story yeah i i started with 20 000 in 2007 to try this new methodology
0:01:46 which is the way i was investing when i was way way younger that worked for me i call it social arb
0:01:52 investing today but what it essentially is is observational investing you’re you’re looking for
0:01:59 any change that’s happening in the world whether it’s you know change in consumer behavior uh change
0:02:07 change in culture change in technology change in the weather politics anything that has the potential
0:02:14 to be meaningfully impactful to one or more publicly traded companies in either a positive or negative way
0:02:21 so if you can surface that change early and connect the dots back to a company that would benefit or be
0:02:30 harmed by that change that’s essentially the entire methodology uh it doesn’t really incorporate much
0:02:38 fundamental analysis it definitely doesn’t incorporate any technical analyses in its purest form
0:02:46 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
0:02:55 so like ideally you’d be completely blind to stock price completely blind to everything other than the
0:03:04 extent to which other investors were aware of that one thing that you surface that you feel would
0:03:12 ultimately be impactful to that company and you know you enter your position at the point of information
0:03:20 asymmetry right when when you know that thing and very few others do and you exit the position at the
0:03:26 point of information parity when other investors start to learn about that thing that you uncovered first
0:03:33 and it’s it sounds so simple and it really is but there are nuances to it and like everything else to do it
0:03:39 to be great at it it takes time and a and a little effort and some regimented
0:03:46 processes that you have to go through like is the information that you found actually meaningful
0:03:52 uh is it a needle mover for that sector or for that company you know is the information you found
0:04:01 really off radar uh or do institutional and retail investors or are they already accounting for it and are there
0:04:06 any other things that are happening at that moment of time or within the window of that trade
0:04:15 that are equal to more important than that piece of information that you’re trading right right so
0:04:21 there is a process there of course yes and and i want to go through a bunch of examples of it so you
0:04:30 take this idea of observational investing of arbitraging information without being you know a guy who grew
0:04:36 up on you know you weren’t working on wall street you didn’t have an mba you didn’t have the what would be
0:04:44 like you know some 20 year 20 years of experience doing this the story is you take 20 grand you start
0:04:48 doing this type of investing and you run it up it’s just it works pretty well for you it’s successful i
0:04:54 don’t know the exact numbers but i’ve seen something like 60 million 70 million 80 million is how you’ve
0:04:59 grown that portfolio starting at 20 000 is that right by the way because i mean that sounds in some sense too
0:05:07 too good to be true yeah it it certainly is it does sound too good to be true it is accurate it’s
0:05:11 i don’t know the exact number 70 or 80 million dollars of returns from the 20k
0:05:20 but i’ve been audited over the past 17 years i’ll be re-audited at the end of this year and i’ll fall
0:05:28 somewhere around 75 percent annualized returns total portfolio over the 17 or i think it might be 18
0:05:36 year period now since 2007. hey let’s take a quick break because the team at hubspot has put together
0:05:40 something pretty cool you know in this episode chris is talking about the way he knows how to make money
0:05:46 identifying these trends scouting the tiktok comments making these big leveraged bets that’s great
0:05:50 for him it is amazing some people will like that i personally don’t know how to make money that way i
0:05:54 wouldn’t do it but i’ve talked before about the way that i know how to make money about how to build a
0:05:58 money-making skill about how to leverage your time and energy and the team at hubspot actually went
0:06:04 through the video where i explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my
0:06:08 four rules of how to make money now this is not you know get rich quick advice it’s just core
0:06:12 principles foundational principles about building wealth things that i wish i knew when i was you know just
0:06:16 getting started and so if you want to download it it’s in the description below it’s totally
0:06:20 free you can go get it thanks to the folks at hubspot for doing the research making this document
0:06:25 and making it available to all you guys all right back to this episode okay so let’s break it down
0:06:30 so you uh you said i started doing this as a kid you guys i felt i went to the type of investing i was
0:06:36 doing as a kid i i had read your book uh laughing at wall street and you talk about like basically kind
0:06:42 of like starting with like you know garage sailing and uh yeah very simple stuff when you were kids
0:06:48 noticing things talking to your brother talking to your dad hey could this mean this and um and taking
0:06:52 you know getting learning lessons with very small bankroll you know 100 bucks uh type of deal so could
0:06:58 you just take us like early days what was the what where did you kind of have this sort of aha moment that
0:07:07 this style of investing can work yeah you know i was an entrepreneurial kid uh i was really interested
0:07:14 in making money before that was a cool thing to do you know the new generation now all these all these
0:07:22 kids are traders they’re trading crypto i mean it’s all it’s like every kid now is like i was back in the
0:07:27 you know 80s and by the way that makes sense now because if you’re a kid you’re on youtube you’re
0:07:33 on tiktok you’ll you’ll see things but why why did you have that itch what made you want to to get on
0:07:41 that hustle what who did you see i don’t i don’t know what made me so laser focus on grinding at age 12
0:07:49 13 but but i will but the way that i was going about it was not investing it was uh arbitrage and
0:07:55 garage sale and estate sale merchandise i would take you know buses around the city on thursday
0:08:01 and friday mornings and saturday mornings before i could drive sometimes i’d take three or four buses
0:08:09 before school to the one estate sale that i had seen in the paper the night before that based on my
0:08:17 analyses i thought was most likely to have mispriced merchandise and and the thesis there is that most of
0:08:27 these estate sales at the time were run by older women who really had a great knack for pricing silver
0:08:33 and pricing other you know types of things that they knew about and cared about but they were really
0:08:43 really bad at identifying value in male oriented uh items like whether it was old trains old watches
0:08:50 any anything that this is pre ebay right so you can’t just go look up every item quickly and know
0:08:59 the know the current like live market price for it yeah it’s pre ebay exactly so i i would show up at
0:09:06 5 36 in the morning and the goal is if you pick the right sale and you’re first in line and you know
0:09:11 know exactly what you’re looking for uh you know you got a good shot at buying something that is
0:09:18 mispriced and i i would i did that for years um i just happened to go to the same 7-eleven every
0:09:25 morning and get a bottle of snapple a lemon flavored iced tea which was like the hot company at the time
0:09:32 it was the hot drink at the time yeah snapple used to be huge yeah and one morning i went to the 7-eleven
0:09:40 and they had like one quarter of the door space dedicated to snapple they had brought in
0:09:44 a couple other brands of iced tea i don’t even recall what it was maybe it was arizona iced tea
0:09:50 and a couple others the clerk told me that that’s the way it was going to be from that point forward
0:09:56 due to this new competition coming in and sure enough i talked to my older brother i shared
0:10:04 the observation with him he was a stock broker uh i asked him can i make money off of this this has
0:10:10 got to be bad for snapple right i mean it’s such a hot company sure enough uh a few weeks later they had
0:10:16 announced earnings he taught me how to short snapple with put options i did it through his account i was
0:10:22 too young to have a brokerage account i think i gave him three hundred dollars which was most of the
0:10:31 money i had at the time from garage sailing and he tripled the money in the course of about a month
0:10:38 because snapple for the first time in its history had reported you know bad earnings due to inventory
0:10:44 building up uh due to retailers like 7-eleven giving them less door space so it was just something that
0:10:51 i had noticed as a kid and you have to ask yourself like that’s crazy because you know professionals on
0:10:58 wall street they could have easily have seen the same thing that i saw but they were so distracted by so
0:11:07 many other things macroeconomics noise government their jobs uh just herd mentality that they didn’t see
0:11:13 simple that was right in front of their face so now if i did that as a you know young teenager
0:11:19 that really means something now of course i didn’t realize what i did at the time how special it was
0:11:26 because you would never believe that you as a kid are better than you know all wall street so i i got
0:11:33 really into stocks and investing after that but i did it in the conventional sense i read all the books
0:11:40 books and i mean all the books technical trading fundamental and i just tried every type of
0:11:49 investing method and of course basically nothing worked so uh i was just like everybody else uh but
0:11:55 later on in my life when i was in my 20s and i had a job and i wasn’t making as much money as i wanted to
0:12:02 make or i felt that i needed to make to have the life that i wanted i got back into investing and that was
0:12:09 really most aggressively in 2007 and i said you know why don’t i try this kind of observational approach
0:12:17 that i did a little bit of as a kid and i i recalled that one approach and at the time it was similar
0:12:27 what i did as a kid was reflective of what peter lynch was doing uh though peter lynch you know utilized
0:12:34 observational investing as just part of his methodology he also did a lot of fundamental analysis
0:12:40 well let’s break it down so there’s major schools of thought around investing right um number one
0:12:48 passive investing you know don’t try to beat the market just be in the index or even worse mutual fund
0:12:54 and um you know you go as the american economy goes all right that’s one school of thought then there’s
0:13:01 oh i i think i could do better than indexing and there’s technical analysis which is you know some
0:13:07 cross between i don’t know horoscopes and you know fantasy football or something and so there’s a lot of
0:13:14 people who believe that they can see patterns and and and and you know signs and math in the charts and
0:13:19 that the charts will tell you the technical analysis will tell you uh where the where the price is going
0:13:23 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
0:13:27 uh it’s possible that that is a thing there are some people there are some people will do that really
0:13:34 so okay so there’s there’s technical training there’s fundamental analysis the sort of buffet style
0:13:39 of investing where you’re trying to understand the intrinsic value of the business trying to understand the
0:13:43 you know the durability and the quantity of the cash flows and you’re trying to use that to
0:13:47 just try to understand what the business is worth relative to what the market’s pricing a lot of
0:13:50 people try to do that that’s sort of seeing this like kind of gold standard what you do is this
0:13:57 other school of thought so you know here comes door number three and door number three you kind of
0:14:03 described it a second ago but i would my short summary of that is you’re looking for significant
0:14:10 behavioral change so the way that either consumers or businesses are changing in some way whether that’s
0:14:16 covid is going to make it where people are not traveling or it’s um teenagers are now doing this
0:14:24 thing you gave this example of women who were uh changing their bra preference from wired push-up bras
0:14:29 and victoria’s secret is on top to you started noticing a lot of people talking about the word
0:14:34 bralettes and now they’re wearing bra and you know there’s two guys talking about bras there’s
0:14:39 now women are wearing bras without a wire uh or a no bra movement and hey that’s probably going to
0:14:43 affect the number one bra player victoria’s secret who’s not even carrying bralettes at the time so
0:14:51 you’re looking for some behavioral change somewhere let’s not let’s not um restrict it to behavioral
0:15:01 change let’s say any change it could be a hail storm okay that impacts a positively impacts a publicly traded
0:15:09 roofing company it could be in anything that’s happening in the world that is change oriented
0:15:17 that is not well well uh discovered or known by the investing correct so not sort of consensus not
0:15:23 quote-unquote priced in and so let’s go through a couple of examples so what are your favorite examples of
0:15:29 these that you found in your life take me through a couple of your greatest hits yeah i mean there’s like
0:15:38 there’s maybe north of 80 uh 80 to 90 i know over the past 18 years uh you know there have been a
0:15:43 handful that didn’t work out we could talk about those too but for the most part almost every one of
0:15:47 them has worked out i know that’s really hard to believe i know it’s like exceptionally difficult to
0:15:54 believe uh the one i just mentioned that popped in my head uh is actually one of my favorites i i would
0:16:04 track every spring i would simply go and track uh the number of people that were searching for
0:16:10 the words of roof damage or roof repair it’s it’s a free data source anyone could you know leverage google
0:16:17 trends and what’s fascinating about this is when there is a hail storm people will immediately uh start
0:16:23 googling roof repair the day after that hail storm hits now the at the time uh there was a publicly
0:16:28 traded company called beacon roofing and the one of the largest roofing companies in north america
0:16:36 and if the hail season was particularly damaging uh that would meaningfully impact their bottom line
0:16:45 as a roofing company so what’s fascinating about that is that the wall street generally would utilize insurance
0:16:54 sector reports that would report on the damage from the hail season as a data point to analyze beacon
0:16:59 roofing you know prior to earnings but those reports take a very long time they’re really
0:17:05 delayed they’re delayed by like i don’t know five six weeks uh after that the actual hail storms happen
0:17:13 so i had discovered this real-time data source that would tell me in real time uh the volume of people
0:17:18 searching for roof repair because even if you knew there was a terrible hail storm and you see it on the
0:17:25 news if that hail storm just happened to be over a super populated area as opposed to two miles down the
0:17:31 road that isn’t populated that’s what makes the difference and the only nobody really knows how many people are
0:17:37 are impacted by hail how many roofs are uh until they get reflected in the insurance reports or
0:17:44 a great measure of that that’s maybe slightly less precise but a way more real time is that the
0:17:50 volume of people that are searching for roof repair now what’s so great about a platform like google trends
0:17:58 is you have you know 15 years of historical data so you can look at every single spring and you could see
0:18:07 where the peaks are in the search volumes so there was one hail season in particular uh that the peaks
0:18:17 were nearly triple anything i had ever seen before in years past so i i went in on a very large uh very
0:18:24 levered call long position on beacon roofing and yeah i mean that would be considered like a greatest
0:18:31 hit my understanding is you the same thing you did in the garage sales where you said look most of these
0:18:38 garage and estate sales were run by older women they knew the price of jewelry really well you’re not
0:18:43 going to get uh too much of a deal there but they may not know what their kind of husband or their son’s
0:18:50 baseball card collection is worth specifically this one 1996 tops rookie card kobe bryant you know
0:18:54 whatever so you you find the value there my understanding is you you applied the same principle
0:18:58 to wall street you said well most of the guys who are on wall street you got people who work in finance
0:19:06 are guys white guys live in new york who are of a certain age and then you started saying well instead
0:19:11 of i’ll use the garage sale principle again if they know a lot about certain types of things where are
0:19:17 their blind spots is that right is that how you how you thought about it so that that’s how you identify
0:19:24 like the lowest hanging fruit or the highest probability of finding the most opportunity
0:19:36 especially early on i would say the vast majority of my big wins were around you know changes in consumer
0:19:45 behavior and culture that were primarily female oriented or youth oriented or to some demographic that
0:19:53 wasn’t older white northeastern you know uh you know geographically located uh in investors so you
0:20:00 know it it could be something like i talk a lot about the uh the moment that jeffrey star who was a beauty
0:20:06 influencer uh you know made a single video uh you know made a single video about this drug store
0:20:16 cosmetics product made by elf cosmetics that was just as good as a 60 product it was called the elf primer
0:20:22 putty got out that was an old trade now but that was back when elf was trading at like seven dollars a share
0:20:31 uh before it blew up to 170 a share right uh but but just be seeing a you single youtube video and then
0:20:37 realizing that wow it has 10 million views and this is a company that nobody cares about and all of a sudden
0:20:44 the most influential you know uh content creator in the world for beauty is saying that it’s just as good
0:20:50 as one of the best products in the world i i went down to i think it was cvs or actually i think it was
0:20:57 walgreens by my apartment and just stood there all day and and and watched moms coming in with their
0:21:05 kids uh and buying out all the elf products because all of a sudden instantaneously this drugstore brand
0:21:11 that was just like at a price point of like eight bucks for any piece of makeup right became a cool
0:21:18 brand because this one individual said it was and and so that was a game-changing moment that i witnessed
0:21:26 via watching a youtube video and i actually called one of the analysts on wall street who is covering
0:21:33 elf cosmetics because part of my methodology is not just to discover things early but you have to
0:21:40 assess to the degree to which other investors might already be aware of that information in order to
0:21:48 gain conviction uh that you that you truly found some information asymmetry in the market so i called
0:21:58 this analyst i said you know what do you what do you think about the jeffree star uh video on on elf uh you
0:22:05 know has that impacted the way that you’re analyzing elf this quarter and the analyst said who’s jeffree
0:22:13 star and and and at that moment i knew everything i needed to know about that trade right and and listen it
0:22:21 makes sense these guys are not watching you know youtube videos of beauty influencers right uh but that’s all
0:22:29 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
0:22:37 night uh basically reading through these days last six seven years uh uh tick tock comments right so like
0:22:44 that’s where i get most of my alpha from recently is people because because that’s just happens to be
0:22:54 the place uh where people express themselves most freely uh across the uh largest number of topics
0:22:58 and that’ll get you laughed out of the room it with with you know quote unquote serious investors
0:23:03 right like you know you have you have buffett or munger and these guys who are like reading the moody’s
0:23:09 manual you know cover to cover just company financials and that’s where they’re looking for
0:23:16 an opportunity and you’re like i scroll the tiktok comments and that’s why i’m compounding 75 a year
0:23:25 well okay so here’s what you have to determine as an investor because we can’t all be you know warm
0:23:31 about that right so like like who do you want to compete with i always say it’s really not important
0:23:37 for you to be smart but it’s important for you to figure out how to be smart in a totally different
0:23:45 way than others so do you want to go and compete with the top mathematicians in the world as a as a
0:23:53 technical trader do you want to compete with just droves and droves of you know wharton and harvard
0:24:00 grads who are doing financial analysis can you do that analysis a little bit better than them yeah maybe
0:24:07 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 99
0:24:17 99 of us probably don’t fit into one of those two camps so how could the rest of us get an edge on wall
0:24:25 street how could the 99 figure out a way to outperform others in the market like what could we do that
0:24:32 others aren’t doing and you have to think differently so you have to look for edge uh in a place where your
0:24:38 your competition and your competition being conventional institutional and retail investors
0:24:46 are not willing to go and you know the one thing about institutional wall street is they like uh
0:24:58 correlated data they they like certainty they like proof in in in historic correlations so the data that i am
0:25:07 trading is conversational data because wall street primarily uses transactional data so they’ll use
0:25:12 credit card receipts that they spend millions of dollars for and then they synthesize all this
0:25:20 transaction data uh so that they can kind of figure out what’s happening at that company before earnings so
0:25:27 a lot of times when we see stocks move a week or two before earnings and we’re like who’s doing that like
0:25:33 how do they know right like it’s transactional data wall street’s been using utilizing it for 15 years
0:25:40 more so today than they ever have so like how do we gain an edge on a hedge fund that’s spending millions
0:25:45 thousands of tens of tens of millions of dollars and has fleets of people analyzing credit card receipts
0:25:53 well what do you do before you buy something uh you talk about buying it uh so you there’s
0:26:01 a billion people out there that are talking about their interest and what they want and what they did and what
0:26:10 they plan to do tomorrow every single day uh if they see a video about a particular you know piece of
0:26:18 apparel uh you’ll have 30 000 women commenting whether they plan to also buy that piece of apparel that they
0:26:28 just saw video on right and and so what you could actually measure the depth of interest in an infinite
0:26:40 number of things even before that’s provable through sales right and and so it in my opinion it’s a superior
0:26:51 uh way to to discover alpha a change in the world although it’s imperfect because you have to do a lot of
0:26:59 your own interpretation of what you’re reading and what that actually means because it’s speech and and
0:27:07 and it’s a lot of times the speech is nuanced and uh the way that we speak about things is constantly evolving
0:27:17 so you know if you’re just a regular person that spends a lot of time in the real world uh and and on
0:27:25 social media uh believe it or not you’re probably well qualified to make that assessment
0:27:30 today’s episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use 20 of their
0:27:36 data that’s like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages point is you miss a lot
0:27:39 and unless you’re using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you
0:27:43 need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that
0:27:48 unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you want
0:27:54 to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot.com there’s a great story i
0:27:58 don’t know if you know the story of uh the trending tab on twitter is actually kind of it’s an interesting
0:28:04 story so that i met the guy who who did it is uh he’s running a company his name is abder so my friend
0:28:11 abder was basically uh at the time had a you know a group of basically data nerds machine learning
0:28:15 and data nerds and they were trying to figure out they’re trying to do something very meaningful for
0:28:19 the world they’re like we would love to be able to do sentiment analysis so try to figure out how
0:28:23 people feel about things so do they feel positive about something or negative about something and um
0:28:28 so he’s like oh twitter is this huge source of text traffic so let me just try to use twitter
0:28:34 to understand sentiment about things and he was trying to do it it wasn’t really working very well
0:28:40 and one day he’s uh on a train and he’s working on something and he just sees that like his program
0:28:44 he’s writing is not spitting out sentiment analysis about things but it’s just spitting out like city
0:28:50 names and he’s like why are there like these city names or the country names why are these country
0:28:56 names just popping up out of the the why is it being surfaced as signal and what he realized was that the
0:29:02 olympics was going on and they were basically like you know the the opening parade was happening and
0:29:08 each country that was you know being shown was getting mentioned a lot and what he realized was
0:29:13 that like oh if i just paid attention to the delta so like if nobody’s ever talking about
0:29:19 you know whatever zimbabwe and suddenly it’s not that a lot of people are talking about it but way more
0:29:25 than usual are talking about it that’s got to mean something and so he created a standalone product
0:29:31 that was basically just tell you what are people talking about in a abnormal way on twitter and then
0:29:35 twitter ended up buying that and making it the trending product which was actually like really really
0:29:40 important for twitter to succeed because they were able to differentiate from facebook and others
0:29:44 by being about like real time what’s going on in the world how do you figure out what’s interesting
0:29:48 and new and fresh that’s going on in the world well you needed something like that that
0:29:52 that was reading all the social signals it sounds like you were kind of manually doing a similar thing
0:29:58 when you’re like oh i noticed a lot of people are i’ve heard you talk about the example of slime
0:30:02 hey the slime trend is getting really big well how do you make slime right if everyone’s doing
0:30:06 if all the kids are doing slime well how do you make slime you need elmer’s glue and then you go and
0:30:11 you figure out that wow people haven’t really priced in that elmer’s glue elmer’s is about to have
0:30:16 like you know a huge quarter or a huge huge earnings call so me and my business partner we
0:30:24 actually created a platform called ticker tags in the mid-2000 teens with twitter uh and we had access
0:30:31 to the twitter deca hose which is a 10 randomized sample of every tweet in real time and we hand curated
0:30:42 about 1.5 million word combinations that represented how people were speaking about every product brand
0:30:48 basically anything that was connected to any publicly traded company or meaningful to any publicly traded
0:30:57 company in any way we had organized into a taxonomy so every company had like you know 300 to a thousand
0:31:02 combinations of words like what would be an example what do you mean by that so like if i’m nike what do i
0:31:09 care so okay so you just mentioned slime so which is one of my big trades newel brands makes elmer’s glue
0:31:17 all right so elmer’s glue would be a tag for newel brands uh diy slime which is a product that uh
0:31:25 utilizes white elmer’s glue uh when you’re kids to playing with slime that would be a tag because to the
0:31:32 extent that diy slime gets more popular uh that’s something that someone who’s invested in newel brands
0:31:39 might want to know so we were actually monitoring in real time the frequency of mentions of those 1.5
0:31:46 million words and benchmarking them against historical norms including seasonality and so since it was
0:31:53 organized in a taxonomy uh when there was any type of anomaly and speech patterns happening across twitter
0:32:01 that were impacting a subject matter that we had curated to be impactful potentially impactful to a
0:32:08 publicly traded company our system would flag that so that that’s a platform that we developed and sold to
0:32:15 hedge funds and sell side banks and so what that was was basically me taking my methodology of what i had
0:32:24 done manually and institutionalizing it uh for wall street and at the time people expressed their
0:32:31 opinions on twitter about everything that they were doing in life uh the way that people currently no
0:32:38 longer do on twitter but do on you know play in places like tick tock now you know twitter is mostly news
0:32:45 oriented or finance or tech oriented right uh political oriented but people are not generally
0:32:49 talking about the movie that they watched last night on twitter right they’re doing that on another
0:32:57 platform but but we sold that company uh to jeffrey’s bank uh years later was that like a successful
0:33:02 company you know obviously you know it’s not that it was unsuccessful but i guess you know it’s all
0:33:07 relative so for example you know you’re selling the data hedge funds are they really receptive to this
0:33:12 do they believe what you believe were they’re willing to pay and that’s the coolest part of the story
0:33:22 uh i spent years flying to new york nearly weekly uh training the top sell-side banks and the the i would
0:33:29 say you know probably five or six of the top 10 hedge funds in the world on how to interpret this
0:33:37 observational conversational conversational data and how to attempt to correlate it and they just had very
0:33:44 little interest they had interest in the results but they couldn’t figure out how to build teams around
0:33:51 it because hedge funds generally have individuals that are like mathematicians right that that were
0:33:58 that they were hiring from the west coast to develop you know algorithms for for trading like quant traders
0:34:05 and then they have very traditional fundamental analysts who are basically finance heads that would you
0:34:13 know would crunch numbers and kind of do fundamental analysis they didn’t really have you know 20 something
0:34:21 year old females on staff who were really savvy interpreting you know conversational data
0:34:29 you know coming coming off it and and like yes this is a trend this is not a trend uh this is meaningful
0:34:35 it’s not meaningful so it was a whole you know wall street they do things kind of in the same way that
0:34:42 they’ve always done things right and it’s really difficult for them to stick their neck out and say
0:34:50 hey you know we believe this thing matters when there’s no historical correlation between the speech
0:34:56 pattern of that subject matter and the stock price or the earnings of that company because like i said speech
0:35:04 patterns evolve and that thing that they’re talking about could be a new thing that was never meaningful
0:35:14 before at that company sure so that is unfortunate for wall street but it’s fortunate for retail investors
0:35:25 right because we we now know uh i guess i’m telling you right now that this is still a data set
0:35:33 that they’re scared of this is still a methodology that they have a hard time wrapping their head around because
0:35:40 they can’t really document the degree to which it’s it’s meaningful for a thesis if you were to have
0:35:49 someone come out and say hey i i i’ve been reading tiktok comments and i i believe i believe that this new
0:35:56 show at the sphere in vegas uh wizard of oz people are super hyped on it and i like read 180 comments of
0:36:02 comments of people flying in from europe next month to see it and i think this just might be the like
0:36:07 the one thing that spear has done right and it’s going to be a game-changing moment for the company
0:36:13 finding product market fit sounds oddly specific is that actually a trade trade you’re you’re in right now
0:36:20 now or no it was yeah so so so that was so sphere uh the wizard of oz uh sphere was actually one of my
0:36:31 largest uh wins of 2025 and it came from reading comments uh of wizard of oz the first 48 hours that
0:36:39 it was out and essentially making a monstrously big levered up 114 this year well it was a levered
0:36:45 options trade so it was a lot more than that a lot of what i do when i have high conviction around uh
0:36:53 a particular thesis that has a especially when they have a very defined window of time when i believe
0:37:01 others will will start to acknowledge that that that ground truth in the case of sphere it was people
0:37:08 counting seats uh sales of seats so you’re actually able to go in and see how many seats are available
0:37:14 for a show that’s a week and a half or two weeks out and that’s exactly what happened so over the course
0:37:20 of a few weeks uh other and it was cool because it was like retail analysts it wasn’t even like
0:37:26 wall street but the other people that were trading spear were like hey like we’re seeing a there’s a
0:37:34 lot of seat we’ve never seen seats sell out like this before for a show so what i had interpreted
0:37:44 from early user early reviews ultimately came out in seat sales that other retail investors started
0:37:49 trading and then wall street eventually picked up on it when the company came out and said that
0:37:54 they’re adding new shows right because they’re selling out all their shows they’re increasing
0:38:00 their you know profit guidance and yeah you would the stock is you know more than doubled here over
0:38:07 the last few months uh exclusively almost because of wizard of oz do you remember when so the show’s
0:38:11 called my first million do you remember when you made your first million and you know what what got
0:38:18 you there and how did it feel yeah i i i 100 percent do i was uh working at a company called e-rewards in
0:38:27 dallas texas uh with one of my best friends uh patrick it was like not far past when i started this in 2007
0:38:33 with the twenty thousand dollars that i had grown to a few hundred thousand dollars and i said this is just
0:38:40 absolutely crazy i said i think i’m going to i think i’m going to hit a million dollars here like within
0:38:45 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
0:38:51 never forget walking into his cubicle and saying i did it i cannot believe my account just hit a million
0:39:00 it absolutely melted my mind uh that happened and you know i wrote my book i don’t know two years
0:39:06 three years later laughing at wall street because there was this tracking service called covestor at
0:39:13 the time and covestor was like the first portfolio tracking service i think they had 40 000 accounts
0:39:19 in it including mine and it would monitor you know how well you’re doing month to month total portfolio
0:39:26 and it would rank you publicly and there was a while uh a moment in time when i was the number
0:39:32 one ranked investor on covestor uh which is just absolutely wild and it was during that three-year
0:39:40 period and that’s when i i think i was on a few different business shows like fox business talking
0:39:46 about it and then i got a book deal to write that book laughing at wall street and when i wrote laughing
0:39:50 at wall street it was twenty thousand to two million dollars it was a hundred times your money in three
0:39:59 years and at the time there was a small piece of me that thought you know is am i just like part of the
0:40:07 long tail statistical anomaly right you flip a coin flip a coin a hundred times somebody if you get enough
0:40:11 people to do it somebody will land on heads you know 90 times and they’ll you’ll think they’re they’re
0:40:18 a genius or no a hundred percent i doubted myself more and now i had a really defined methodology and
0:40:26 i knew the narrative behind every one of my trades it was very sensible right like it wasn’t like this
0:40:32 mystery where i came up with some random formula and it was just trading stocks on its own and maybe
0:40:40 the formula just happened to get lucky i felt strongly that the nature of observational investing
0:40:47 about simply uncovering some piece of meaningful information that others weren’t aware of intuitively
0:40:52 just makes sense right like it’s not like this mystical thing that you’re like well that doesn’t make
0:40:58 any sense of course it makes sense you’re just uncovering important information a little bit quicker
0:41:02 than other people and you’re connecting dots a little bit quicker than other people so in my
0:41:11 head i knew the methodology at its core was really valuable but i still didn’t believe that three years
0:41:15 was enough so in my head i was like if i can get to five years and keep this track record up that would
0:41:22 be insane i got to five and i was like okay let’s see if i can push it to 10 and then i got to 10 years
0:41:30 and now here i am i’m at eight like i said i think i’m going on 18 years of average 70 you know mid 70s uh
0:41:39 total portfolio returns and i truly believe i can hit 20. so like 20 is now the new number in my head i
0:41:46 want to go for 20 years and all i have to do at this point is not mess it up right but but at the same time
0:41:53 it’s very hard generating you know returns that are that high hey quick message here because you
0:41:58 know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works no friction well i’ve used mercury
0:42:02 for years now let me tell you it just works and that’s why i use it for not one not two but eight
0:42:08 of my companies from credit cards to invoices i have everything in one place there’s no janky dashboard
0:42:13 i’m never told please please visit a local bank branch none of that tomfoolery and a few months
0:42:18 ago i landed a big client the first thing i did i sent them a clean branded invoice boom deal close
0:42:22 cash in the door that’s the kind of banking experience i want and that’s why i use mercury
0:42:27 so if you’re running a startup and you want banking that feels like it’s built in this century well go
0:42:32 to mercury.com and get started in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the
0:42:36 services are provided through choice financial group column a and evolve bank and trust members fdic
0:42:42 so let me ask you a couple of mechanical questions do you take profits every year do you reinvest
0:42:48 everything what are you actually doing with that sort of annual yeah because you know you compounded that
0:42:52 rate for a long enough time the number is actually much bigger than 70 million that you yeah it’s almost
0:43:00 a billion dollars so it so what’s in this is where the biggest mistake i ever made was uh that i’m now
0:43:07 now resolving for the most part so just about i’ve been half of my life is trading public equities
0:43:12 through you know observational investing social or conversational data everything we’re talking about
0:43:21 the other half of my life has been an entrepreneur and you know i’ve had some success as an entrepreneur
0:43:26 and like a lot of entrepreneurs that have success you start investing in other entrepreneurs so i’ve
0:43:34 been an early stage venture investor for 20 years i’m actually invested in 160 early stage companies
0:43:45 and my performance investing in early stage companies is pretty much average uh you know i’m on sync with
0:43:51 just about just about any other average vc i i want to say maybe 10 11 12 percent annualized returns
0:44:03 so i have pulled out almost all of my gains every single year for the past 18 years and have taken that money
0:44:11 and invested it in the private market and that has been really unfortunate for obvious reasons it’s unfortunate
0:44:20 because the opportunity cost of my capital is so high but i never even believed in myself that much on the
0:44:26 public side that i could continue to do that so i was never like oh well i’m just going to keep
0:44:35 doing 70 some odd percent average returns that never really seemed feasible it i i felt like i needed to
0:44:43 make my home runs in the early stage vc world and i finally came to terms a few years ago with the fact
0:44:50 that that was a really bad decision and it’s taken me about four years to pull myself out of early stage
0:44:54 because when you’re in when you’re an early stage investor and that big of an early stage investor
0:45:00 i mean i was taking hundreds of meetings with founders annually and it takes a long time to unwind yourself
0:45:09 from that ecosystem yeah so i don’t know who was maybe peter lynch he had like a don’t don’t cut your
0:45:14 flowers to water your weeds all right like you basically he talked about with with stock individual
0:45:19 stocks right don’t sell your winners to diversify back into like losers but you know in a way what you
0:45:27 were doing was at a at an overall level if you were performing at 70 in one asset one strategy and 10 or
0:45:31 11 percent and the other but you were taking the profits out you know that’s a that’s a water that’s
0:45:39 a water your weeds sort of scenario yeah and and by the way nothing i love peter lynch maybe more than
0:45:47 any other investor but you know i i don’t believe in any preset rule of investing like that like my methodology
0:45:54 is very clean you know i i you invest when you discover something that other people haven’t
0:45:59 discovered yet that will be meaningful to a trade and you exit as soon as other people have figured that
0:46:04 out and that’s it that that’s literally the only thing and and if that stock goes up 100x
0:46:12 or 200x you don’t sell it because it’s up 200x uh you know you you sell it when other people find out
0:46:19 the information that you’re trading so one of my most controversial trades uh over a year ago was you
0:46:30 know palantir and i i went all in unbelievably levered in palantir at 30 a share and i was very public about
0:46:37 it you know i have a youtube channel dumb money live and we did a multitude of episodes on palantir and this
0:46:44 really strong thesis that we felt there was this kind of 12 month window where the whole world was going to
0:46:53 discover these things about palantir that were really misunderstood and i had never gotten so much heat a lot of it
0:46:59 from palantir investors going you’re an idiot we’ve been in this thing since six bucks you’re gonna do this
0:47:07 at 30 a share like what are you talking about i’m like well i i’m not trading the information you are trading at six dollars
0:47:11 so i’m trading something sort of two-line reason you were so bullish on palantir at that stage well
0:47:18 because p because people didn’t even understand what they did right they didn’t understand the the where
0:47:26 they would actually sit in the stratosphere of the ai wave that was coming uh as a beneficiary of it
0:47:35 and palantir was just starting to scrape the surface of this new product that they had with clients and
0:47:42 there was it was unstoppable right like like there was just going we knew there would be this 12 month
0:47:50 window when everything that palantir had been working on for years they finally had the case studies done
0:47:57 with their first set of clients and now they were just going to start to steamroll and and add add to
0:48:05 clients so so they were just scratching the surface of their tam and the market didn’t realize that so what was
0:48:11 interesting about palantir is that they were so overvalued at the time based on fundamentals that
0:48:18 people were like there’s no way you could be going in levered on palantir at 30 a share with its valuation
0:48:26 already so out of whack and my response to that was the valuation is irrelevant to me i know i don’t look at
0:48:33 valuation i don’t look at pe i don’t look at anything like that um all i look about is there is new
0:48:43 information that’s about to come online for palantir that will bring in a whole new group of investors and
0:48:49 once people see this information however they’re valuing palantir today based on the information that
0:48:56 exists this is new information that will be settled into the stock price and that’s exactly what happened and
0:49:03 palantir went from you know 30 to 160 right or whatever it went to 180 question you say uh you
0:49:09 know i went really big into this i made a huge bet on this what is that and you’re taking leverage which
0:49:14 could cut both ways right so obviously leverage will increase your gains but it’ll quickly sink your
0:49:20 your portfolio if done incorrectly how much are you actually let’s say you have you i think you said
0:49:25 something like 70 million dollar portfolio let’s say you have 70 million dollars and you get a lot
0:49:32 of conviction about something what are you actually betting at a high conviction bet at this stage
0:49:37 or is it are you putting one percent ten percent thirty percent like what are you putting out there
0:49:43 and then you’re levering up and then how do you manage that risk of that going south yeah and by
0:49:49 the way just to be transparent it’s 70 million ish of returns right of of gains over that time and
0:49:54 you know those gains were taken and put into other things like private companies right so i’m not
0:50:00 managing that’s not my public so 70 let’s say that’s gains you got to pay taxes a lot of your stuff sounds
0:50:07 like it might be short term because it’s almost exclusively and then you’re reinvesting that into
0:50:12 your uh addiction and startups and so that’s that there’s a lot of it’s going that way but but
0:50:21 percentage wise percentage wise um when you have a uh hike what i call just a high conviction idea uh
0:50:30 i’m usually investing between five and ten percent of my entire liquid portfolio uh into that idea via
0:50:38 options so if you’re wrong you just lose five to ten percent of the portfolio and in a good example of
0:50:45 where i did that and was you know wrong like i think two or three maybe three weeks in a row maybe four
0:50:52 weeks in a row and i lost like 30 40 of my portfolio was during uh covid during the pandemic when i was
0:51:00 kind of tracking the virus coming out of china i was you know using google translate on a lot of uh
0:51:07 medical reports coming out of china to assess uh how big of a deal that virus was and it became very
0:51:13 clear to me that it was going to be a global pandemic and you know global pandemics only do
0:51:21 one thing to financial markets right so i i was essentially taking i think ten percent of my portfolio
0:51:30 and putting it into puts in the s and p uh casino stocks vegas casino stocks and airlines uh every
0:51:36 week and the market wasn’t moving down like the market just wasn’t accepting uh covid for what it was
0:51:43 and i got to a point where i was like 30 to 40 percent of my portfolio was gone and i did it again the
0:51:50 week after and that week after was the first week the market cracked and it went down two percent and then the
0:51:57 next week is where it really hit and that that was one of the biggest trades of my life and uh
0:52:05 over the court i think that year was like a 370 percent annualized return total portfolio so something
0:52:13 like that and it was partially because i had shorted the pandemic early on even though it was a little too
0:52:20 early it paid off and then two days after it bottomed i had a selection of i think 14 or 15 companies
0:52:25 uh that should have never gone down at all they should have only gone up as soon as we realized
0:52:30 there was going to be a global pandemic and and everybody would be stuck living in their house for
0:52:34 you know working in their house for a year so you know companies ranging from
0:52:40 euland packard where everybody would want to go buy printers for their house to peloton because you
0:52:46 can’t go to the gym you got to work out at your house now uh shopify because you know you’re shopping
0:52:52 online amazon obviously uh you know campers world because one of the things you can do you can still go
0:52:59 camping uh boat stocks you know i bought a company out of canada that nobody even had ever traded before
0:53:04 that owned schwinn bicycles because you know schwinn had a run of the biggest bicycle sales in the history
0:53:12 of the company i think that company went up 8x 8 or 9x over the course of nine months uh so you know
0:53:17 i had these 14 15 companies so it’s like these companies should be doubling right now and instead
0:53:25 they were all down like 30 40 50 percent just because the whole market traded down so i always knew that
0:53:29 i was going to go levered long in these 15 companies but i didn’t want to do it until the
0:53:36 market became less erratic and irrational so once the markets finally started to you know normalize
0:53:44 and come back up i took all the gains from shorting the travel stocks and the market at large
0:53:49 and just put them into levered positions in these 15 companies which is obviously the trade of a lifetime so
0:53:56 so that was a dollar amount was that the biggest dollar gains you’ve ever had i i don’t know by the
0:54:02 way i i don’t watch enough of your content to know how much you talk like do you like do you disclose
0:54:07 like how much you make on these things do you say like i got a 10 million active portfolio what do you
0:54:12 actually say i don’t know i don’t know what we’re very open and transparent i think that year i made 30
0:54:20 30 million uh in the market so that was like 30 million in one year and it was it was a wild ride
0:54:27 didn’t it i think the most interesting part of that narrative was just before the pandemic i had made
0:54:36 the worst trade of my life and it was actually a trade that was psychologically damaging to me like
0:54:45 i lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade just months before the pandemic started and
0:54:54 probably the thing i’m most proud of myself of is i was so down and out about that trade that i still
0:55:02 found a way when i when i you know had come out with all that conviction on covid to actually still go all
0:55:09 in on my thesis on copen even though my account was so brutally damaged at the point that if i got
0:55:17 another one wrong i mean so it was like i could have gotten that would really have wiped me out and i
0:55:25 mean not wiped me out but it would have been an unbelievable unbelievable damaging implosion for me
0:55:32 to have two monster trades in a row go wrong the one that went wrong months earlier was a company
0:55:42 uh qsr they owned burger king popeyes and tim hortons and i was so convicted that the company would have
0:55:50 the best earnings quarter in its entire history because two of the three companies they owned both
0:55:58 had anomalies on the positive side burger king had the impossible whopper uh which was unlike anything the
0:56:05 company had ever done before uh in terms of sales traction and popeyes had the uh crispy chicken
0:56:13 sandwich which is during the this is the chicken wars if you remember yeah yeah at the time and that
0:56:21 chicky crispy chicken sandwich that popeyes had it would literally sell out in like two hours every day
0:56:27 uh popeyes no one had ever talked about popeyes ever in the history of the company uh until this crispy
0:56:35 chicken sandwich and i was monitoring both those trends and i was like they’re both going to report the
0:56:41 best quarter in the history of their quarters at burger king and popeyes and then you have this third
0:56:47 piece which was unfortunately the biggest piece of the company tim hortons and tim hortons is just
0:56:56 just you know they’re they’re a canadian coffee and donut shop okay and the company had basically been
0:57:04 around forever it had not been doing awesome but it was kind of flatlining they would have to have had
0:57:14 a really bad quarter to screw up my trade and it was just happened to be a really difficult company for me
0:57:22 to extract information on through the methods that i used because it was canadian and people just didn’t
0:57:28 talk about it that much right there was nothing happening there so it’s like i saw zero reason why
0:57:34 they should have this anomaly of a bad quarter which is exactly what happened they just happened to have
0:57:41 like randomly one of the worst quarters ever which statistically the chance of that happening were solo
0:57:48 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
0:57:55 my portfolio and the wildest piece about that and this is where there’s a lot of self-reflection
0:58:02 because i take a lot of pride in in going in deep and doing really intense comprehensive due diligence
0:58:08 where sometimes if i have a high conviction trade i will put you know 60 plus hours of due diligence
0:58:14 into the trade where i like to joke that i’ll uncover every piece of contextualized information
0:58:19 on the company globally through every social media anyone who’s speaking about any of their products
0:58:25 uh i will visit i will sometimes travel if they they’re a retailer and visit stores and talk to store
0:58:32 owners and clerks but because there were three things i was having to deal with burger king
0:58:38 popeyes and then tim hortons i just assumed tim hortons how bad is it going to be well they had
0:58:44 the tim hortons annual meeting a few weeks before earnings in florida that i didn’t realize they had
0:58:52 this meeting but if i did realize that and i had done my homework i would have been at that in orlando
0:58:56 for that annual meeting not because i would have gotten in but i would have hung out at the bar
0:59:02 and i would have talked to all the franchisee owners because from what i understand there was a revolt
0:59:09 at that at that meeting by franchisee owners because the company was doing so many things wrong their
0:59:16 sales were just getting slaughtered due to recent decisions that corporate was pushing on the franchisee
0:59:24 owners and it would they were very public about it at that meeting it was really harsh and if i was just
0:59:31 in in the building right at the bar i would have been well aware of that so going back uh i learned that
0:59:37 you know you really have to be comprehensive in your research if you’re going to take a levered bet
0:59:44 on a thesis that you have and you can’t you can’t be lazy what are the bets you’re looking at now because
0:59:52 a lot of these examples are from the past 17 years where are you now on the ai side you know two of my
1:00:00 favorite ai picks you know right now one is bloom energy you know the energy trade is a big one uh and
1:00:08 it’s one that’s really really really misunderstood i think by most investors so bloom energy is a
1:00:15 company uh that just has a really different approach to powering data centers right they’re not using
1:00:25 big gas turbines uh you know they have a technology that they’ve worked on for you know 20 years that is
1:00:33 actual you know dc uh technology where instead of combusting gas it’s actually a chemical change that
1:00:42 creates the energy and they have a really quick uh timeline uh to energy for a data center so if you
1:00:48 have a data center and you could actually get energy through bloom and get your data center up and running
1:00:55 six to twelve months quicker uh than getting on a wait list for gas turbines and going through all the
1:01:00 various approvals that’s that’s a really big deal and that’s why bloom energy has i think they’re up
1:01:05 like five or six x right over the past eight or nine months as people are starting to realize this
1:01:15 but there’s still a lot of controversy around the company so again it’s somewhat unproven they only have
1:01:21 a couple big hyperscaler deals you know ones with oracle uh i think there will be others that will
1:01:29 be announced in the near future but it’s a new technology so people are still somewhat skeptical of
1:01:34 it and then you have you know news events that that happened like this last week where now we’re building
1:01:42 data centers you know in in space right you know now that you know spacex is preparing to ipo all of a
1:01:48 sudden we have this narrative pop out of nowhere where oh didn’t everybody realize that we’re just
1:01:52 going to be doing you know compute data centers in space now like that’s oh that’s like right on the
1:01:57 horizon like a couple years two three years yeah we’re just doing data centers in space like
1:02:04 this is the noise in the market right now right so like oh we’re doing data centers in space and
1:02:09 do we don’t even need any down here like oh well if you’re powering those with solar
1:02:16 you know why would we want to value an energy company you know here in the us uh if you’re just
1:02:24 going to do them in space with solar so the market is so add that it’s changing week to week month to
1:02:31 month based on whatever the hype story is that will you know either positively or negatively impact
1:02:40 companies in the space but for me i i think uh i think bloom energy is definitely one of my favorite ai
1:02:47 plays right now because they will be the company that will enable data centers to get up and running
1:02:54 i think meaningfully quicker uh over the next three to five years and i think that’s a company that’s just
1:03:00 going to see its earnings double basically year over year for the next three to four years uh and i
1:03:06 think they’re still very much misunderstood they’re actually going to be the topic of my next uh dumb
1:03:12 money live episode i’m gonna go in deep uh on bloom energy we spent like a couple months uh doing some
1:03:18 doing deep analysis do you publish all your like do you publish your portfolio somewhere do you publish your
1:03:25 trade somewhere um we don’t i won’t ever publish trades i i sometimes speak about trades on a really
1:03:31 high level the last thing we ever want is other investors trying to mirror our trades because
1:03:38 that’s not just not what we do right we don’t think it’s a healthy behavior uh i always tell investors to
1:03:45 steal my ideas and run with them so take the idea uh then poke holes in the idea do all of your own
1:03:52 research right uh and then come back to me and tell me where i was wrong uh but ultimately then go off
1:03:58 and make your own trade based on your own you know risk reward because we all have different degrees of
1:04:08 risk tolerance and we should all have a different take on an idea so i love sharing ideas i don’t really
1:04:14 share trades i mean i’ll be honest with you because um this is not my world of expertise i’m a founder
1:04:23 first and my investing is very um sort of simple uh you know i basically own a couple of you know
1:04:27 i own some indexes and i own stocks that i understand i’ve owned them for a long time you
1:04:32 know tech companies basically because i grew up in the tech industries ever since college and then i my
1:04:37 investing outside of that is private angel investing again tech and lastly would be you know my own private
1:04:43 equity where it’s businesses that like individual businesses that i can own and i can affect with
1:04:48 with things that i know how to do operationally or promotionally with this podcast and so you’re
1:04:54 interesting to me because on one hand i i think well first of all you’re interesting because the story is
1:04:59 great like i turned twenty thousand dollars into you know i’ve made 70 million in gains or something
1:05:06 like that’s an incredible story i think it’s interesting because your approach like just the
1:05:11 way you describe observational investing actually lines up with a lot of the great investors do and
1:05:16 say which is that they don’t um sort of spreadsheet themselves that they try to understand like surface
1:05:20 out the signal from the noise what is the actual important thing i need to know about this company
1:05:26 that i can believe before it is obvious true and proven and you know the market uh sort of response
1:05:32 to certainty and if you can handle uncertainty um you could do quite well at the same time uh you
1:05:38 know sometimes you say things like you know 99 of the other 99 of us can go do this and we have
1:05:43 sort of this i think i’ve heard you say you know uh the game is rigged wall street is rigged but it’s
1:05:49 rigged in our favor and um you know that part i think seems untrue like if if what you’ve done
1:05:55 is true it’s in many ways because you have a a very unique skill set and upbringing and background
1:06:00 no no that’s that’s it i let me let me just sort of explain that because i think it’s important i
1:06:06 think i the last thing i would want is people to listen to this and be like oh okay cool i can just
1:06:12 go and trade levered up off of observations and i too will turn twenty thousand dollars to 70 million
1:06:15 dollars there’s a reason that’s not common that’s not a common result there’s a reason you get a book
1:06:18 deal there’s a reason people will follow you because it’s not a common result everybody could
1:06:23 everybody does and i think one of the reasons it’s uncommon is not because it can’t work that’s
1:06:28 not what i mean a lot of it is interpretability right so interpret interpreting the signals trying
1:06:32 to figure out what is actually important is it already priced in what does this mean who does it who
1:06:38 benefits from that the second order effects of that that’s not like you know something incredibly uh
1:06:43 you know simple that that uh everybody is going to do so there’s a big difference between anybody can
1:06:50 yes everybody can is different and so like i view it very similar to to startups where you know an
1:06:53 entrepreneur can come on here and they’ll say look it’s not rocket science i’m not any smarter than
1:06:59 you guys i just did this this this this and it’s true that any that was in the capacity for anybody to
1:07:04 do but definitely everybody won’t and uh and definitely everybody should not try because they don’t have
1:07:08 you know either the nature of the disposition the the risk tolerance to be able to go do it so i just think
1:07:13 you’re interested because you’re this sort of like puzzle normally if i hear a story like this it’s
1:07:18 too good to be true it violates a lot of this sort of like fundamental wisdom that people have about
1:07:22 investing where you want to buy you know buy a share in a great company and hold it for a long time you
1:07:27 know things that i have sort of accepted from you know a certain school of thought around this so i think
1:07:32 you’re very interesting because you violate some of those and i think that that works and it works for
1:07:36 you and i think it’s very cool but i hesitate i hesitate because i think that this is not
1:07:43 something that a lot of people could or should do so so i couldn’t disagree more um i did i agree with
1:07:50 some of what you’re saying in terms of yes i mean over a long period of time you know doing you know
1:07:57 generating almost a hundred million dollars from a you know twenty thousand dollars or yeah that it’s
1:08:05 that’s not easy to do obviously but i will say this i think i think the biggest issue
1:08:13 is simply bucketing money and having a risk capital so i think the the number one issue preventing someone
1:08:20 from doing this is thinking that they have this one bucket of capital for their life savings for their
1:08:28 future kids college for their retirement and they think about that money all as one and this is something
1:08:33 the concept of a little foreign the concept of being a regular person and observing something and saying
1:08:42 connecting the dots and saying you know what i’m gonna put a levered bet on that because i just found
1:08:48 you know i just discovered this you’re not going to do that unless you have your money properly bucketed and
1:08:55 the one thing i teach people is you have to have risk capital i don’t care if it’s fifty dollars or fifty million dollars
1:09:02 you don’t you shouldn’t be waiting until you’re part of the you know ultra wealth class to to to to think
1:09:07 that you have risk capital to take risk with you need to have risk capital starting with day one so
1:09:12 everybody should have a big money account i talked about this in laughing at wall street everyone should
1:09:18 have a big money account and the big money account is the account that that yes you get wealthy quickly
1:09:25 with and you do that by taking big swings on things that you really believe in and the only way that
1:09:34 you’re going to psychologically do that is if you fund that big account with money that is not being stolen
1:09:42 from other areas of your life so i i call it you know there’s this whole concept of like frugality
1:09:50 or trade-offs where okay maybe you mow your own lawn maybe you make your own coffee maybe you clip coupons
1:09:55 like people don’t want to clip coupons to save a dollar but if you think about every dollar in your
1:10:02 life as it as potentially being a hundred dollars 100x which is a hundred percent feasible over a long
1:10:10 period of time if you invest aggressively with leverage and get a few wins then you’ll clip a dollar coupon
1:10:14 because that dollar coupon is clipping a hundred dollar coupon okay you’re going to make your own
1:10:20 coffee because instead of saving five dollars you’re saving five hundred dollars a day right so all of
1:10:28 sudden you discover all of this money newfound money in your life by making little trade-offs in things
1:10:35 all over your life the difference is every time you make one of those trade-offs and you save five dollars
1:10:42 for making your own coffee you take that five dollars and you put it into your uh your risk
1:10:47 bucket yeah account bucket right by the way this is not financial advice right it’s just like this is
1:10:55 how i did i’m just saying like i hope i’m inspiring people because i just understand something i graduated in
1:11:05 the bottom 25 of my high school class the bottom 20 today the way college is i could not even had i would
1:11:12 not have gotten into any university in the united states okay pretty much today in 2025 with with my
1:11:17 grades this is why i love doing the podcast because you can get people who make their money in all different
1:11:24 ways we just had john morgan who’s like the guy on the billboards personal injury law and he’s a guy you
1:11:29 know he’s the biggest personal injury lawyer in the world two billion dollars a year and then he
1:11:36 started uh he started his career working at disney world as pluto like he would be in the costume and
1:11:40 then he started because of that formative experience he took the money from the law firm and started
1:11:46 building little like attractions like uh fairs and and places you go and buy tickets like the the museum of
1:11:50 crime and history things like that and he’s made a killing doing that so you have that guy comes on
1:11:54 tells about how you make money that way another guy says how you do it this way so what i love about
1:12:00 the podcast is i get to hear these people who come on with completely different blueprints and playbooks
1:12:07 that they 100 believe in and i get to listen and i get to decide i get to decide for myself does that
1:12:10 sound like something that’s interesting or would suit me and i hope the listener does the same because
1:12:15 i don’t agree with a lot of what you said but i found it all very interesting and you know there’s
1:12:19 some things you said if like i’ll be i’ll be totally honest if you saw if you have like a
1:12:24 paid course somewhere i would be like i can’t run this episode because i feel like this guy is selling
1:12:30 this dream to people that hey yeah you just gotta just go go get in the tiktok comments find an
1:12:36 observation lever up baby make a trade one trade will change your life and it’s like that is a scary
1:12:42 principle i think that is a heretical idea to a lot of people it’s by why it’s very interesting to me to
1:12:47 hear it to talk about it why is it why is it important to you that people really that the
1:12:51 average person who’s listening they believe this and they go take action on this because you know like i
1:12:56 said it’s not that you’re running a fund right so you’re not soliciting investors you’re not selling
1:13:00 a course saying i’ll teach you how to do this trust me it works you’re not doing any of those things which
1:13:05 is usually why people really kind of pound the table and say you could do this just believe just go for
1:13:13 it my my overriding purpose is to inspire every human on earth to enter the investing class right
1:13:18 because i think it’s the only way we’ll ever solve the wealth gap so like there’s no way to solve the
1:13:24 income gap the income gap is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve the wealth gap is a
1:13:31 problem that’s solvable uh by bridging more humans into the investor class and so everything that i do on
1:13:41 x everything that i do on youtube every podcast that i do has a single mission to inspire other people to
1:13:47 start investing on their own and by all means if that means just throwing money in the s p and an etf
1:13:53 awesome but there’s no reason to stop there right like i i i know i know that
1:14:02 people love the concept of actually hope and having an opportunity to do something truly great in their
1:14:09 life because so many people when it comes to income are stuck their job is not going anywhere okay like
1:14:15 and by the way i am not a proponent of people quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs and taking all
1:14:21 this massive personal risk to start businesses um i think there are very few people that are capable of doing
1:14:30 that and i think that this road map is way more achievable for people start making trade-offs come
1:14:35 up with a big money account do it through making trade-offs in your life and frugality learn how to
1:14:42 use leverage learn how to take big risk with other people’s money because i call it other people’s money
1:14:49 because it’s all comes to trade-offs um in things that you believe in because you can do this and by the
1:14:56 the way there is nothing cooler than when you’re just a regular person and you you just make a grand
1:15:03 slam in the market right and you you 30x your money all of a sudden you have financial independence in life
1:15:09 so i don’t know many things that are more important because it just it helps solve so many other issues
1:15:16 and so many humans are just depressed because they look at their life and they’re like this is my job
1:15:23 these are my expenses this is inflation holy crap i’m screwed i will never be the person i want to be
1:15:30 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
1:15:34 need to be taking big risks with your retirement money or any of that stuff that’s why i’m like i’m very
1:15:43 i’m very clear if you’re gonna do this do it with money that’s bucketed right for for risk you know this
1:15:56 isn’t just about investing um the same methodology of being able to identify change in the world and tailwinds um and
1:16:05 trends should apply to career it should also you know like it should apply to entrepreneurs as well
1:16:11 right because like i’m an entrepreneur like i’m about to start another business uh and that business is
1:16:21 directly tied to the analysis that i’m doing discovering change in the world right so like you know we’re about
1:16:29 to embark on this journey of of abundance and it’s not going to be like we just hit the age of abundance in
1:16:35 five years and we’re not working like no the age of abundance is going to like slowly happen it’s already
1:16:42 happening it’s gonna it’s gonna like happen over the course of decades and it’s just it’s just lots of tailwinds and
1:16:48 trends it’s like people will be working a little less people will have a little more free time people will have more
1:16:55 flexibility to dive into the things that they care about right uh wealth signaling will i think become
1:17:02 even bigger in the future than it is today i there’s just so many changes that are massive that are
1:17:07 happening in the world that if you’re an entrepreneur trying to figure out like where do i spend my time or
1:17:13 if you’re just someone that is figuring out where’s your next career path or where if you’re a young person
1:17:20 where’s my career path like you need to be doing more analysis on where the opportunity is because
1:17:27 these are some of the biggest decisions of your life it’s not just about trading a stock especially
1:17:31 in silicon valley you see this all time people will take a job and it’s like you realize you’re investing
1:17:36 all of your life force you’re you know you’re creative energy and you’re getting these stock options
1:17:41 but you never thought about this like an investor like you’re just happy you got the job versus
1:17:44 you should be looking at the job market the way an investor looks at these companies and even if
1:17:49 you’re not investing capital you’re investing your time right so that applies you know totally there
1:17:58 you said you’re launching a new business what is it it is related to the jet industry private jet industry
1:18:07 which i believe will be one of numerous beneficiaries of us kind of entering into this age of abundance
1:18:12 with people having you know more in fact i’ll just quickly state that if you want a glimpse into the
1:18:20 future you need to simply look back into our past from the pandemic because that one year of the pandemic
1:18:27 when we actually had an abnormal amount of time as humans we had never experienced anything like that
1:18:34 throughout our lifetime when we had excess time to actually do what we wanted to do and we also just
1:18:41 happened to have excess money because of this wild stimulus that happened during the pandemic so if you
1:18:47 want an example of what the age of abundance is going to look like in terms of the winners and the losers
1:18:54 just look back to that one period of time what did we do when we had more time and more money
1:19:05 we dug into our hobbies we dug into our interest um we you know we we kind of did things that now that
1:19:12 we’re back to this world right like we do a little bit less of but if we truly get you know the industry
1:19:22 of intelligence and automation and robotics to help us do the vast majority of work uh the repetitive work
1:19:30 at least that we do today i think the entire world has an opportunity to become more creative uh spend more
1:19:38 time with their families with their friends doing things that are meaningful uh travel certainly i think it is
1:19:44 something that we can all count on in the future as becoming a larger industry not a smaller industry
1:19:52 i am ultra long on the private jet sector even though myself uh i carry too much guilt to fly private
1:20:00 so like you’ll never see me on a private jet but uh i i i’m very bullish on the sector that’s amazing
1:20:06 chris thanks for coming on man i appreciate you and uh people can go find you you got show dumb money
1:20:11 live it’s on youtube that’s where i watch it at least when i when i tune in um so thanks for coming
1:20:19 on and by the way the only place i am personally is x so at chris camillo at x but dumb money dot tv
1:20:25 has all the socials so thanks for having me on i i appreciate it very cool well that’s it that’s the pod
1:20:41 all right everyone if you’re listening to mfm you probably want to make more money well i want to tell
1:20:45 you about a podcast you might want to check out it’s called the sales evangelist and it’s hosted by
1:20:50 donald kelly each week donald interviews the world’s best sales experts who share their strategies to
1:20:56 succeed in sales they share actionable insights and stories that will encourage challenge and motivate
1:21:00 you to hustle your way to the top if you’re someone looking to raise your income level check
1:21:04 out the sales evangelist you can find it wherever you get your podcasts
*Get Shaan’s 4 money rules that took him from broke to $25M by 30:* https://clickhubspot.com/wrg
Episode 777: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Chris Camillo ( https://x.com/ChrisCamillo ) about how he turned $20K into $60M using social arbitrage investing.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(1:00) Turning $20K to $60M
(5:30) Garage sale arbitrage
(12:36) Observational investing
(14:33) Bet: Beacon Roof
(19:03) Bet: E.l.f
(22:04) Trending on Twitter
(29:00) Ticker Tags
(31:55) Bet: Sphere in Las Vegas
(36:48) Chris’s first million
(40:34) My biggest mistake
(43:42) Bet: Palantir
(46:58) Drawing down 40% of my net worth
(51:49) $30M in one year
(57:39) 2026 picks: Bloom Energy, Palantir, NVIDIA
(1:02:06) Should regular people do this?
(1:13:45) Bet: Private airfaire
—
Links:
• Ticker Tags – https://ticker-tags.com/
• Dumb Money Live – https://www.youtube.com/@DumbMoneyLive
• Unknown Market Wizards – https://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-traders-youve-never/dp/0857198696
• Bloom – https://www.bloomenergy.com/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
• Shaan’s weekly email – https://www.shaanpuri.com
• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents.
• Mercury – Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies!
Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano //
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