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The Calum Johnson Show · YouTube

The AI Misfit: How To Actually Get Rich Using A Strategy Anyone Can Learn

A 91-minute conversation with the retail investor who turned $20K into $70M+ by reading TikTok comments, and why AI just handed every outsider his job.

Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
Views
26.8K
951 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Beating Wall Street no longer requires intelligence or pedigree — it requires the attention span to notice behavioral change in the real world before institutions do, and AI now does the research connecting those signals to tradable companies in minutes.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • An employee who has hit a promotion ceiling and wants a serious wealth-building track that does not require quitting the job or starting a company.
  • A retail investor sick of index-fund advice who wants a repeatable methodology for picking individual stocks with conviction.
  • An everyday person curious about AI agents who needs a non-technical entry point and a concrete reason to start using them this weekend.
  • An early-stage founder looking for ideas in the gap between problems too small for VC and too big for one human to solve alone.
  • A skeptic who assumes the stock market is rigged in Wall Street's favor and wants to hear the counter-case argued by someone who worked behind the curtain.
SKIP IF…
  • You want options-trading mechanics, charts, or technical analysis — this is methodology and mindset, not setups.
  • You are looking for index-fund or dollar-cost-averaging advice. The whole thesis here is aggressive, conviction-based picking with risk capital.
  • You expect a balanced view on AI. The guest is openly bullish and argues AI will create more jobs, not fewer.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

The internet broke Wall Street's information hierarchy, which means an ordinary person scrolling TikTok can spot the next billion-dollar trend before Goldman does. Camillo's method, which he calls social arb, is to observe behavioral change in the real world or in online conversations, then connect that change to publicly traded companies that will be lifted or hurt before earnings prove it. The hard part used to be the research linking the signal to the stock; AI now does that in minutes through any chatbot, which is why he calls this the biggest opportunity of our lifetime. To play, you need a separately bucketed pool of risk capital — even hundreds of dollars works — funded by trade-offs in your spending, and you must trade it for years to build conviction before sizing up.

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Voices

Who's talking.

00:00hostCalum Johnson
02:41guestChris Camillo
Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 02:39

01 · Cold open: TikTok beats Goldman

Camillo's manifesto in 60 seconds — observe change, connect dots, AI is the next big one. Host pitches the subscribe ask before turning to the real intro.

02:39 – 07:14

02 · Why now is the easiest time to get rich

The internet broke the information hierarchy. Any ordinary person can observe millions of conversations in real time, and being non-pedigreed is now an advantage because you are not biased.

07:14 – 11:11

03 · Why the game is rigged in your favor

After five years selling conversational data to hedge funds, Camillo realized Wall Street has no inherent edge anymore — they buy lagging transactional data while retail can read leading conversational data for free.

11:11 – 14:32

04 · AI does the hardest part of investing (with Vanta ad)

AI now does the research step — connecting a behavioral signal to a publicly traded company that will benefit or be harmed — in minutes instead of days. Mid-segment Vanta sponsor read.

14:32 – 22:41

05 · The day the promotion died: leaving the corporate ladder

Camillo's defining moment. Six-figure sales role, denied a promotion, realized employees never control their destiny. Decided investing was the only path he controlled.

22:41 – 27:51

06 · The Snapple flip: the methodology was born at age 13

Garage-sale arbitrage, the 7-Eleven shelf change, $300 in put options tripled to $900. The original observational trade — then 15 years of forgetting it and losing money mimicking professionals.

27:51 – 36:09

07 · $20K to $2M: Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang's, and Barbie

Returning to the method in 2007. Dallas lunch lines made Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's into early wins. Mattel ahead of Barbie. The Tesla miss because he never sat inside one.

36:09 – 44:19

08 · The trade that cost a third of his net worth

First trade in his new hedge fund: an Elsa-doll toymaker on Frozen earnings. Nailed the call, got blindsided by a 10% shareholder dumping into the print. Lost it all in one hour.

44:19 – 50:35

09 · Bucketing risk capital: the money trick the 1% use

Why wealthy people compound and ordinary people don't: they segregate a pool of money they can afford to lose. Trade off small daily expenses; every dollar acts like $100 toward your future risk pool.

50:35 – 56:49

10 · How much do you need to start? Hundreds of dollars

Twenty thousand was too much for most. Start with whatever you have. The point of the first several years is building conviction with real money, since theory cannot replace the lesson of losing.

56:49 – 1:03:06

11 · The QSR / Tim Hortons disaster and the COVID comeback

Right before the pandemic, the Impossible Whopper and Popeyes sandwich trades got crushed by a Tim Hortons miss. Days later, translating Chinese doctor reports, he loaded up on puts and tripled the portfolio.

1:03:06 – 1:09:54

12 · Why AI will create more jobs, not fewer

The counter-thesis. Internet destroyed jobs and created more. AI will compound that. The new world will have industries we cannot picture today, and the bottleneck is creative humans who can put pieces together.

1:09:54 – 1:16:07

13 · The business anyone could build right now

Live napkin sketch: a $20 camera plus AI mounted over a restaurant prep station to verify DoorDash and Uber Eats orders. A real problem, a small team, a fast acquisition target.

1:16:07 – 1:22:49

14 · What is an AI agent, clearly explained

Agents as a digital workforce that carries out multi-step objectives on their own and only check in at real forks. Bill Perkins' story: voice-rebuilding his mom's Wix site end-to-end in 45 minutes on a phone.

1:22:49 – 1:26:16

15 · How to start with AI if you're not technical

Only one rule: open Claude or ChatGPT and ask it where to start. The model already knows you better than any course. Prompt it to ask whatever it needs to ask you.

1:26:16 – 1:31:06

16 · What's next: the next class of podcasters as athletes

Camillo's life pivot. Bring everyone into the investor class, fund pediatric and animal-welfare causes, and build the next generation of data-driven podcasters — assets he thinks will trade like pro athletes within a decade.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Any kid scrolling TikTok can find the next billion-dollar trend before Goldman does, because the information that actually matters now lives on the internet.
  • Camillo turned $20,000 into over $70 million over 18 years at roughly a 70% annualized return — a track record he says no other retail investor has publicly matched.
  • Wall Street's edge collapsed when the internet made conversational data free; their credit-card swipe data only tells them what you already bought, not what you will buy next.
  • Hedge funds pay millions for transactional datasets, but ordinary people get earlier signal by reading what consumers are saying they want to buy before they buy it.
  • The research step that used to take days or weeks — connecting a behavioral signal to a publicly traded company — now takes any chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT a few minutes.
  • Most people stay stuck because they do not realize they can have risk capital like wealthy people; they treat every dollar as living expense instead of bucketing some for aggressive bets.
  • Think of every dollar as $100: skip the $4 coffee and you are effectively saving $400 a day in lifetime opportunity, and that savings only counts if it goes into your risk-capital account.
  • You do not need $20,000 to start — hundreds of dollars is enough, because the real point of the first three to seven years is building conviction with real losses and real wins.
  • Camillo lost a third of his liquid net worth in a single hour on a Burger King / Popeyes / Tim Hortons trade, then made his biggest year ever shorting the market into COVID weeks later.
  • He spotted Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's as breakout investments simply because he worked next door to them in Dallas and watched the lunch lines every day.
  • He bought Mattel, not Warner, ahead of Barbie because Hollywood insiders dismissed the trailers while TikTok comments showed unprecedented hype — toy-category lift was the cleaner play.
  • He missed the entire Tesla trade for one reason: he never sat inside one in the early years, so he never felt the behavioral shift with his own body.
  • Camillo's counter-thesis on AI is that it will create more jobs and better jobs, because the intelligence layer becoming free unlocks millions of tiny businesses that were never financeable before.
  • A startup he sketched live: a $20 AI camera over a restaurant prep station that verifies DoorDash and Uber Eats orders are packed correctly and stamps them with a green light.
  • His friend Bill Perkins rebuilt an entire Wix website end-to-end in 45 minutes by voice on a phone, with agents reading the Wix manual themselves before coding the rebuild.
  • Camillo says he knows at least eight people who have already loaded his methodology into agentic AI systems that read TikTok comments and surface trade ideas autonomously.
  • The right job-interview pitch in 2026 is to walk in and prove you can do five to ten people's work because you are fluent with AI tools — anyone can hire on that signal.
  • He predicts dozens of independent podcasters will be valued like pro athletes within ten years, at hundreds of millions of dollars each, because audiences will crave the human and the real.
  • The next decade will mint millions of one-to-ten-person companies generating $300K to a few million in profit a year — companies that were impossible to staff before AI.
  • The fastest way for a non-technical person to learn agents is to open Claude or ChatGPT and prompt: ask me everything you need to know about me so we can do this together.
Takeaway

The outsider's edge is bigger than ever, and AI just handed you a research team.

WHAT TO LEARN

Behavioral observation has always been the alpha; what changed is that the internet broke Wall Street's information edge and AI just collapsed the research step from days to minutes.

02Why now is the easiest time to get rich
  • Treat consumer conversations on social platforms as leading indicators and treat credit-card data as a lagging one, because people talk about what they want before they buy it.
  • Build the habit of asking 'what's changing right now' and 'which public company gets lifted or hurt by that change' every time you notice a new trend in real life.
04AI does the hardest part of investing
  • Use a chatbot to run the research step: feed it the behavioral signal and ask which publicly traded companies materially benefit or get hurt, and whether the effect is needle-moving.
05The day the promotion died
  • Quit waiting for the next promotion to fund your goals; employees are structurally capped on speed of growth and you only get aggressive upside through ownership or investing.
09Bucketing risk capital
  • Open a separate risk-capital account funded by trade-offs in your spending, and accept that everything in it is money you can afford to lose entirely.
10How much do you need to start
  • Start with hundreds of dollars, not thousands, because the first three to seven years are about conviction-building through real wins and losses, not maximizing dollar returns.
  • Size up only after you have a track record where you can point to the wins you were not aggressive enough on, since that gap is what conviction unlocks next.
08The trade that cost a third of his net worth
  • Diversify across many small high-conviction bets rather than one career-defining trade, because a Tim Hortons blindside can erase a third of your net worth in an hour even when you nailed the thesis.
11QSR disaster and COVID comeback
  • Trade behavioral change while it is still early; the bigger and faster the change, the bigger the opportunity, which is why pandemics and AI booms are once-in-a-career setups.
12Why AI will create more jobs
  • Treat AI as a jobs-positive force in your career planning: any company will hire someone who can prove they bring five to ten people of output through tool fluency.
14What is an AI agent
  • Use agentic AI to compress multi-step work — research, coding, web rebuilds — by giving the model an objective and only stepping in at real decision forks.
15How to start with AI
  • Start an AI conversation by saying 'ask me everything you need to know about me so we can do this together' instead of trying to write the perfect prompt yourself.
13The business anyone could build right now
  • Hunt for businesses that were not financeable before AI: $300K-to-$3M-profit one-to-ten-person companies solving narrow logistical problems for legacy industries.
16Next chapter: media as the new athletic class
  • If you want creative leverage, plant your flag in new media now, because the next decade will mint a generation of independent podcasters with athlete-tier valuations.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Social arb
Camillo's name for trading the gap between when ordinary consumers notice a behavioral or cultural change and when Wall Street prices it in. A more polished label for observational investing.
Observational investing
Picking stocks by watching real-world consumer behavior — what people are eating, buying, talking about — and connecting it to publicly traded companies that will benefit or be harmed.
Risk capital
A separately bucketed pool of money that you can afford to lose entirely, used for aggressive investments outside your living expenses and retirement accounts. The pool wealthy investors use to take real shots.
Put options
A contract that pays out if a stock falls below a chosen price by a given date. Camillo used puts to short Snapple as a teenager when he noticed inventory disappearing at his local 7-Eleven.
Conversational data
What people are publicly saying online — comments, posts, replies — about products, brands, and habits. Camillo treats this as the leading indicator that transactional data lags.
Transactional data
Credit card and point-of-sale data that hedge funds buy to see what consumers have already purchased. Lagging by design, since the purchase already happened.
Agentic AI
AI systems where you give the model an objective and it spawns and coordinates sub-agents to carry out multi-step tasks autonomously, asking you only when it hits a real decision fork.
Information hierarchy
The pre-internet structure where Wall Street insiders had privileged access to consumer and corporate data. Camillo argues the internet has fully inverted it in the retail investor's favor.
Needle mover
An event large enough relative to a company's revenue to actually shift its earnings number. AI is now strong enough to estimate whether a trend a retail investor spotted qualifies.
Unknown Market Wizards
Jack Schwager's book series profiling top traders. Schwager dedicated a chapter to Camillo's methodology, which Camillo recommends as the deeper-dive resource.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

11:11productVanta ↗
17:00toolClaude ↗
17:00toolChatGPT ↗
30:20productCheesecake Factory (CAKE)
31:10productP.F. Chang's
34:10productMattel (MAT) ahead of Barbie
36:40productTesla (the trade he missed)
38:00productSnapple put options (the original trade at age 13)
59:40productQSR — Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Hortons
1:18:20channelBill Perkins (agentic AI demo on Wix)
1:22:30toolWix ↗
1:24:20bookUnknown Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
1:27:20bookCamillo's investing book (own methodology)
56:40linkNew Era newsletter ↗
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:00
“Any kid scrolling TikTok can find the next billion-dollar trend before Goldman does, and that's sick.”
Manifesto line, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
00:25
“I turned $20,000 into $2,000,000 in three years.”
Number-anchored credibility punch→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
00:38
“One of them lost a third of my liquid net worth in an hour.”
Loss-confession hook with stakes→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
01:00
“Agents are everything right now.”
Tight authoritative claim→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
03:07
“Winning in the market is no longer about outsmarting sophisticated investors. It's about having the attention span to notice the behavioral change happening in front of you.”
Thesis statement in one breath→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
10:00
“The internet has completely broken the information hierarchy.”
One-sentence framing that reframes Wall Street→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
11:30
“The game is rigged. It's just rigged in our favor now.”
Reversal of a tired phrase→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
16:10
“I'm obsessed with how AI is democratizing intelligence for the benefit of humanity.”
Counter-narrative, quotable→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
21:20
“Unless you own your own business, you are more or less capped on how quickly you can grow.”
Employee-pain pull-quote→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
27:40
“It's just about observing change in the world and connecting dots to companies. That's it.”
Methodology compressed to one line→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
46:20
“The only way you're going to make it big as an investor is to invest aggressively. You need a bucket of money you can do that with.”
Direct prescription→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
49:00
“Make your own coffee at home. Save $4 a day — but it's $400 a day. Think of every dollar as a hundred.”
Concrete numeric reframe→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
52:00
“All the money that goes in that account is other people's money — it was never really yours.”
Mental model people will repeat→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:03:55
“I think AI is going to create more jobs, not fewer — and the jobs will be better.”
Contrarian core claim→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:11:40
“In the age of AI, we can start companies for next to nothing because the intelligence layer is essentially free.”
Founder-thesis line→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:19:40
“He had agents rebuild the entire website end-to-end in forty-five minutes — by voice, on his phone.”
Mind-blown story moment→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:24:10
“You can't lose right now if you're inquisitive and resourceful. You will learn and you will figure it out.”
Permission-giving pull-quote→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:28:40
“We're in the first few years of new media. In ten years, hundreds of podcasters will be valued like athletes.”
Bold prediction with a number→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map

Where the conversation goes.

00:00 – 02:39denseManifesto + sub
02:39 – 11:11denseInformation hierarchy collapse
11:11 – 14:32steadyAI as the research co-pilot
14:32 – 27:51denseOrigin story: the corporate ceiling
27:51 – 36:09denseStock-picking case studies
36:09 – 56:49denseLosing trades and risk capital
56:49 – 1:03:06steadyCOVID and the biggest year
1:03:06 – 1:16:07denseWhy AI is jobs-positive
1:16:07 – 1:22:49denseAgents explained + Wix demo
1:22:49 – 1:31:06steadyNon-technical on-ramp + next chapter
The Script

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metaphoranalogystory
00:00Any kid scrolling TikTok can find the next billion dollar trend before Goldman does, and that's sick. It's just about observing change in the world and connecting dots to companies. That's it.
00:13Maybe AI is now the biggest and quickest change. If you're right and if you can do this two or three times, you can be rich now versus waiting thirty or forty years.
00:24I turned 20,000 to 2,000,000 in three years. What's the trade that you've made? You're like, that's the one that really went wrong.
00:33One of them lost a third of my liquid net worth in an hour. And I wanna talk about how to manage that process for regular people because that shouldn't scare you. How critical of a piece is AI agents?
00:45I would say agents are everything right now. I'm gonna tell you a story that melted my mind two weeks ago with AI agents.
00:53I was in
00:56Okay. So a lot of you will be watching and seeing this show for the first time. And so I wanted to ask for a quick favor, and that's to subscribe to the channel.
01:05And if you do, the promise that I'll make is we're gonna take everything that we do here to the next level. That means scale the guests, scale the storytelling, the production, every little detail of what makes this show great so that we bring you an even better experience.
01:23You hit that subscribe button, we make this show better for you. Let's get back to the show. In 2007, you make a decision to invest $20,000 into the market.
01:35And speaking to you today, that's turned into over $70,000,000. And so where I wanted to begin is that happens without you ever working on Wall Street, having an MBA or a special fancy degree or special connections.
01:55And so for the person that's listening at home who's not familiar with you or your story, what value do you hope that they would take from hearing about your experience and your story?
02:09I think trying to convince people that winning in the market is no longer about outsmarting sophisticated investors.
02:20It's really about just having the attention span to be able to ignore the noise long enough to notice the behavioral change that's just happening right in front of you.
02:36Because if you could do that, you have the biggest edge in the world when it comes to investing.
02:43And that's actually all you need to do. You need to be able to have focus and attention.
02:50It's not about being incredibly smart. It's not about being financially pedigreed.
02:56It's not about being, you know, this algorithmic technical whiz person, right?
03:03That can do things that other people can't. I think there's never been a time like now when you being just an ordinary person that is deeply engaged and attached to the real world has been the advantage, has been the alpha, right, in the market.
03:23So it's a great time to be just a regular person investing.
03:28Yeah. You know, you you speak to the opportunity, and you even said that there's never been a time like now to be an ordinary person that's just connected to what's happening.
03:37And so I'm curious for the for your comparison because the the time when you started investing, I'm thinking about 2007 right before the recession.
03:48Can you compare the opportunity that exist exists now versus what it was when you began?
03:57Like, would you say that it's actually a bigger opportunity today than back in 2007
04:02when you started? I I would say it's it's easier. You know, in general, I always like to say the crowd's undefeated.
04:10Right? It's about finding that story before the market does.
04:16And back in 2007, I don't know. Maybe we had Facebook.
04:22Right? But for the most part, I was observing the world in real life.
04:28So I was limited to my exposure to the things that were interconnecting with my life every day.
04:36The restaurants I went to, the stores that I walked by, the Internet wasn't really fully evolved to the extent that it is today. Now, all the world's communications have become digital.
04:50So any ordinary person has the ability to essentially observe millions of conversations happening in real time just by reading comments on TikTok videos. So it doesn't really matter where you live.
05:04It doesn't matter what socioeconomic class you're in. You can gain exposure to every human on earth and what they're talking about, what they care about, how they're spending their time, what they're planning to buy tomorrow or next week, how their behavior is changing, how their eating habits are changing.
05:26Those are all the things that you have to be able to surface to be a great investor. At least when you're investing the way that I invest.
05:36And now, the world is your oyster because you have access to all of that information and it's all free and it's all available at your fingertips. So you don't have to walk them all.
05:46Right? You could just literally just go on these social sites.
05:53And and if you know what to look for and if you know how to decipher those conversations and extract value out of them as an investor, which is something that I've learned how to do over the past, you know, eighteen years, then you could become one of the greatest investors in the world.
06:12And that's all there is to it. I know it sounds insane, but but it's just facts. Yeah.
06:18Yeah. You know what? Even listening to you, the way you speak, like the things that you speak about, You don't speak like a traditional investor.
06:29You don't speak like someone that I would expect to meet on Wall Street, um, or, you know, who's going on CNBC and it's like an analyst and breaking it down in the way that they do, like that traditional investor. And even just being familiar with your story, it feels quite personal to you, the fact that you're a bit of an outsider, that you do things differently, you're a bit of a misfit.
06:51Why is that the case? Like, why is it so personal for you?
06:58I have always been an underdog in every facet of my life.
07:04I mean, there are a lot of stories there. Right? I was always obsessed with trying to make it.
07:11I was one of those kids that was, you know, grinding side hustles before that was a cool thing to do in in my generation.
07:20Now, all the kids love doing that stuff, which is which I've which I love that that's become normalized.
07:27But there has been a massively unfair advantage that's existed for decades and it's something that I sense when I was really young that kind of blocked out most of the world from having access to what would be required to generate wealth in the market.
07:45There was an information hierarchy back in the seventies, eighties.
07:50I think it went into the nineties where only certain types of people and investors and hedge fund managers had access to information.
08:01Regular people didn't. But a bigger thing is that the Internet has completely broken the information hierarchy.
08:10Right? So now, the information that actually matters is just living on the Internet.
08:17Again, what people are doing, what they're buying, what they're saying, all the things that are connected to how the world is changing can be clearly seen by anyone with an Internet connection. Right?
08:30So basically, any kid scrolling TikTok can find the next billion dollar trend before Goldman does. And that's sick.
08:38Okay? The craziest part about that is that most people don't believe what I just said. Because we have decades of institutional unfairness that we just assume continue to go on.
08:54But it's not the case. And I so I actually had you know, I know this for a fact because, you know, I started a company ten ish years ago that basically institutionalized what I do, basically observational, conversational data analysis for hedge funds and Wall Street banks.
09:16So I actually spent five years working behind the curtain, seeing the best of the best on Wall Street.
09:24Right? You know, meeting with the guys that control the biggest funds in the world. And I was stunned when I realized that they no longer have any inherent advantage over us Because they are essentially focused on spending millions of dollars on transactional datasets, meaning credit card swipe data to see what we're buying at stores before earnings comes out.
09:48But again, people speak about what they're going to buy before they actually buy it. So we still hold the advantage as regular people that are willing to observe conversational data on the internet.
10:02So the craziest part about that is no one believes me. People still think the game is rigged in Wall Street's favor.
10:10And I keep saying over and over again, no, it is rigged. It's rigged in our favor now. But Wall Street doesn't want you to know that because they still want you to have to give them your money.
10:21Right? So that they can control it and that they can essentially skim a piece of your profits every year for themselves even though they have no inherent advantage investing in the markets than we do as regular people.
10:34Yeah. But they have to sell that story to keep the industry alive. So I'm just out here trying to convince people that you don't need them.
10:46And not only do you know not need them, but you are probably the world's best investor, especially if you're not if you don't have a finance background.
10:56If you don't have a technical background, you're at even more of an advantage because you're not biased. And, you know, the average person that's most deeply connected in the real world that has the the best ability to quickly decipher how the world is changing in real time because they're actually going out.
11:16They have people that they're speaking to. They're experiencing the world. They're on social media.
11:21They're watching cultural shifts. They're not like the conventionally smartest and most pedigreed people in the world.
11:31Right? It's really ironic. Like, those are the people that are actually have the advantage.
11:36They just won't believe it. Yeah. So if I can just get them to believe it, they
11:43can become the next big class of investors. Yeah. You know, as I as I listened to you speak, like, kind of I've never thought about this, but in many ways, we're in, like, the the age of the outsider, you know, like, the the person that didn't come from that traditional background.
11:59Um, I can't think of another time in human history where, like, the everyday person, the outsider, the retail investor, if you're talking about in, like, a investing standpoint, has such a level playing field with the insiders.
12:14And I I'm curious to get your perspective of does AI and when we think about millions and millions of people having access to, like, LLMs and, like, these agents and a chat GPT or a Claude, does that even further kind of that advantage of, the outside of the everyday person in your mind?
12:35Okay. So I know a lot of you listening to this conversation are early stage entrepreneurs. And so one of the most difficult things when you're starting a business in the beginning is getting your clients and your customers to trust you.
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13:46Thank you to Vanta for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show. Absolutely.
13:50I mean, I I I'm using AI AI as a really simple tool to simply help me with my research when I do find something. So, you know, I might find some behavioral change that's happening that I think might impact the way people are buying things, right, or how they're spending their time.
14:11And I share that information with, you know, could be chat GPT, it could be Claude. And I ask the AI to help me find companies that are publicly traded that sell products that could benefit or be harmed by this thing that I found reading comments on TikTok.
14:28And it used to take me hours to days, sometimes weeks to go through that research process of connecting the dots between the conversational data that I surfaced and the companies that would be benefit or be harmed by that shift in culture or consumer behavior.
14:50And now the AI does it for me in minutes. So it's it's actually insanely cool because that's the sometimes the hardest part of the process. And the AI is so good at doing it.
15:01So now as a regular person, you have the AI to help you kinda do some of the hard things. Right?
15:08Even if you want to assess, is this really a needle mover for this company? Could you help me understand if, you know, these kids that are buying this toy that's made by this publicly traded company.
15:23Can that actually move the needle for that company enough to where when the rest of the world comes to terms with what I just found this trend that they will trade this company up.
15:36And the AI will do the hard work to help you answer that question where just a few years ago, you might have needed the help of someone in finance to help you understand, you know, is this a needle mover for the company?
15:52Mhmm. That's pretty cool. Yeah.
15:54And I and I tell people it's not just finance. I'm obsessed with AI and how it's democratizing intelligence for the benefit of humanity. And I think people are just not paying enough attention to that.
16:05Yeah. You know, we're we're we're gonna get deeper into
16:08AI and the opportunities that you're seeing in that space both from, like, someone that wants to build a business, like, build their first successful business, or even someone that wants to get into investing. But before we do, because you you mentioned, like, one of the one of your frustrations almost is we live in this time where an outsider, like an everyday investor, can be incredibly, like, successful because of this access to information.
16:38And a lot of the times when you tell them that, they don't believe you. And I think the interesting thing is that today speaking with you, you're, like, one of the most successful investors.
16:50But if we rewind in your story, and this is actually something you said, like, a few years ago, you say, was just an ordinary guy with an ordinary job.
17:02I worked at a pretty big company at the time. I was making pretty good money, but never enough to support my life goals.
17:10I was always like, how do I get to where I want to be, and can I get there through having a job? And see, when when I heard you say that, it's such, like, a relatable thing for anyone that's working, anyone that's in employment but has those, like, bigger aspirations.
17:27And so I just wanted you to kinda take us behind the curtain. Like, let us be a fly on the wall.
17:33Take us back to that moment, that time in your life, and, like, what was going on in your thought process.
17:39I was working at a company in sales and business development, and I would be considered a really successful person making hundreds of thousands of dollars in my twenties.
17:51But it wasn't enough for me for what I wanted to do in life, for what I wanted to build. And I I had finally hit that point after being promoted over and over and over when I realized that the next promotion I think I got turned down for one big promotion.
18:08And that's when I realized that I no longer had control over my own destiny in corporate America. That I would have to maybe go look for a job at another company, maybe get lucky. And that I would always owe my destiny to someone else making a decision for me.
18:25And even though I was doing exceptionally well, that was something that was a reality for essentially every single professional in the world.
18:36Right? Like, unless you own your own business for the most part, you are more or less capped on how quickly you can grow or on your ability to control your own destiny when you're an employee.
18:50And that was like a really defining moment for me because I realized, like, what am I gonna do? Like, what am I actually going to do? Because if I leave this job and take another job someplace else, it might work out, but it might not.
19:03And so many of my friends have taken that path. They quit the job.
19:09They got a job someplace else. It didn't work out, and now they were in a worse place than they were before. And I realized then at that moment that I had to go back to my background in investing.
19:23And that would be the only path where I had control over building wealth for myself. Right?
19:29Like that was it. There was no other way. There was either that or starting a company, which is even more dangerous and risky.
19:37Right? And the reality is most people should not be going out as an entrepreneur and just starting a company because you're gonna fail Mhmm. Almost every time.
19:46So this is something that every person deals with. I don't know how many people have kind of gone through that chain of thinking and gotten to that point.
19:55I think most people don't understand how big of an opportunity simply learning how to invest is.
20:02So they get to the point where they realize that they're stuck in their job and then life just sucks. And they just stop.
20:09And they just it it's depressing. Yeah. Right?
20:12You you mentioned that feeling that that realization of, like,
20:16being stuck in your job, life just sucks. When you mentioned getting denied that promotion, was that the, like, pertinent emotion, the pertinent feeling that you felt at that time?
20:33Yeah. Yeah. It it it was a defining moment when for the first time in my career, I didn't get the promotion.
20:41And I was like, wait a second. I don't have control over my destiny. What am I gonna do?
20:47Like, no. I I don't know that I wanna go find another job because I might find myself in the same exact situation at another company. I don't know that I wanna go start my own company because I'd done that before.
20:58I I was smart enough to know that that is not easy and you more often than not are going to fail. But I still wanted to build wealth.
21:08I wanted to do things. I wanted to live in certain neighborhoods. I wanted, you know, I have, you know, I have altruistic philanthropic goals in life that I wanna do to help humanity.
21:18Like I I want to do big things in my life. And to do big things, I needed a lot of money.
21:25And because that money buys freedom, that money buys time, that money buys me the ability to do what I want to do with my life. And I realized that there was no way I was ever going to get that freedom by just staying in that job. Unless I got lucky again.
21:41Maybe eventually I would get the promotion. So it's kinda like rolling the dice, but I didn't wanna roll the dice in my life. I wanted to have more control over my destiny.
21:51And I had this journey when I was much younger. It actually started when I was a kid.
22:00Like a weird kid. Like I said, I was always an outsider, quirky kid.
22:07I would go to garage sales, you know, when I was like 12, 13, 14 years old. I get up before school. I take buses around the city.
22:15I try to identify the one garage sale or state sale in the entire city that was most likely to have a mispriced item that I could buy and make money off of flipping. And so, I'd show up at five in the morning and I just sit outside for two or three hours until that sale that had the thing that I thought might be mispriced opened up.
22:35And sometimes I'd buy the thing and then I would sell it to someone, you know, a dealer. It depended on what thing was like. And I made pretty decent money doing that.
22:45But it was doing that that I learned how to invest because I would always start each day at the same seven eleven getting a bottle of Snapple lemon flavored iced tea for the caffeine. And one day I walked in that seven eleven and they didn't have any because they had had gone from two refrigerators to half of one refrigerator because they had all these other competing iced teas.
23:10I was like, hey, what happened to my lemon flavored half Snapple iced teas? Like, we don't have as much inventory anymore because these other brands came in. I went home and talked to my older brother who's a stockbroker.
23:21I said, can I make money off of that? He said, well, can help you short Snapple. They have earnings in a few weeks through put options, which I didn't know what that was.
23:30I gave him $300, which is all the money I made off garage sales I had saved up during that moment in time. And in a few weeks, I tripled my money.
23:40I turned it to $900. It was the first time that Snapple had ever missed their earnings and they missed their earnings because they were inventory was building up in the channel because retailers like seven Eleven were starting to bring in other competing brands to Snapple after Snapple had this long run of being this huge brand.
23:58Other people were competing with them. So I saw something as a young teenager that anyone in the world could have seen Mhmm.
24:05Including people that work on Wall Street, but they were too consumed with sophisticated, you know, analyses and the noise of the world in the market to simply see something in real life and connect the dots to an investable opportunity.
24:19But I knew at that very moment that investing would is something that I'd be interested in. Yeah.
24:25So but but then I went off and I didn't make great investments after that because I thought there's no way that that was the way to invest. No way.
24:34Right? So I started to invest like everybody else. I read all the books.
24:38I was gonna be a sophisticated investor as a teenager. And then even in college, was investing a lot with options. But again, I was trying to mimic what all the professionals were doing.
24:50Right? I I wanted to be a real investor and I thought there's no way that thing I did when I was a young teenager at seven eleven would be a methodology of investing that I could exclusively do. Yeah.
25:02And so I lost a lot of money. And then I went to the real world and I got a job. And it went well for a long time until it didn't.
25:09And that's when I looked back at myself as a young teen. I said, what if I kind of that was the one investment that worked best for me.
25:18What if I kind of develop an entire methodology all around just trying to find things that are changing in the world and connecting the dots to companies that would be harmed or benefit from that change I was spotting.
25:34Whether it was a change in what people are buying, you know, what people are doing, what they're eating, how they're acting. And I called it at the time, like observational investing.
25:48Social arb is what it grew in to become, which is a more sophisticated way to say observational investing. Right? But it's just about observing change in the world and connecting dots to companies.
26:02That's it. Yeah. It's something that anybody could do.
26:05Yeah. A lot of people today, they listen to you. They hear your approach, your strategy, your story, and they dismiss it.
26:13They dismiss the opportunities that are available because it's like, oh, but I'm just an everyday person. Like, how would I ever beat people that have, you know, years of experience on Wall Street?
26:23Or how would I ever get return? I'm not meant to do this. I didn't get an MBA.
26:27It's like the these limiting beliefs can actually have, like, this very real block on, like, opportunity in our lives.
26:38And for a good portion of your story, like, that was your story as well.
26:43Yeah. There are a lot of skeptics out there when it comes to my story. And I used to get really defensive.
26:50You know, early on, I would get into a lot of fights of people trying to prove myself. And I don't anymore because I actually fully appreciate where they're coming from.
27:00It doesn't make sense. Listen, I didn't believe in myself. So why should others believe in my story?
27:05Like it's it seems insane. Like it's an eighteen year track record of 70% annualized returns, which to my knowledge has never been achieved by any retail investor.
27:16So I understand why people will be skeptical and when they learn how I do it, it just sounds way too simple. But then when we look back at all the biggest things, they're usually simple.
27:28Right? Like the biggest breakthroughs are usually pretty simple breakthroughs. Right?
27:32Yeah. I think we like to over complicate things and I think industries and people over complicate things to kind of, you know, create cloud of protection around themselves, their companies, their industries.
27:48When in reality, there's usually a pretty simple path to greatness in anything that we're doing.
27:56So I know. I it's okay to be skeptical on it.
27:59Mhmm. I get it.
28:01But if you really think hard about it, it intuitively just makes sense. Right?
28:07Like what actually drives earnings? What drives revenue?
28:12What drives cost? What drives success or failure for every company on earth?
28:18And it's ultimately the change that's happening in the world. It's the degree to which people are accelerating or decelerating their purchase patterns or their engagement or their interest in certain things.
28:36So if you could simply learn how to detect change quicker than other people and how to connect the dots quicker than other people, you have an inherent advantage in what companies are going to be the next big thing.
28:55Right? Or like if a company is going to surprise earnings on the upside or downside, there's always a narrative behind that. There's always a reason why a company beat earnings.
29:05There's a reason why they missed earnings. And you could usually go back in time to something that an ordinary person could have seen if they knew where to look to discover that shift that ultimately led to that company having a great or a bad quarter, at least when it's something big.
29:26Okay? And that's something that I do all the time. So when I when a company has a huge quarter and I did not invest in that company and they had a big earning surprise.
29:36I'm like, what drove that? And is it something that I could have discovered if I knew where to look?
29:43So I can try start to rewire my brain to capture that thing in the future. You know what? You you mentioned it's
29:51it's simple. In a way, I'd say it's almost like painfully simple. Because even though the the principles of how you do it are simple, you're putting in an extraordinary amount of work and attention to be always, like, cognizant of things that are happening and even, like, going back and looking over your misses.
30:09And so my question to you, because in 2007, you kind of return to your this methodology that you really came up with when you were a teenager, and you make this first investment, this $20,000 investment.
30:24Can you explain to people what that investment was and then how you even came to that decision at the time?
30:32Yeah. I mean, it it was simply looking back at that Snapple investment and trying to go all in on that methodology to say, I am going to start paying attention more and connecting dots.
30:49So my office that I worked at for nine years where I was working when I started this journey was right next door to a cheesecake cheesecake factory. And that cheesecake factory was in Dallas, Texas and there was a line out the door every single day for lunch and dinner.
31:09This is when Cheesecake Factory was really popping. Now if you're an institutional investor working in Manhattan at the time, you're probably not going to give as much credibility to a company like Cheesecake Factory as you should simply because your taste in food, right, is probably levels above where most of America was.
31:35And you just can't relate. And there was another we were across the street from North Park Mall in Dallas, and there was a company called Chang's that was there.
31:45And right as Cheesecake Factory was popping, so was Chang's. They also had similar lines. And, again, if you're an institutional investor or working in Manhattan, your Chang's isn't even real Chinese food.
31:59Right? But most of America has never experienced real Chinese food. And P.
32:04F. Chang's was a game changer as was Cheesecake Factory. Those were actually two of my biggest investments during those years because I saw it with my own eyes.
32:13I was exposed to it. And fortunately, I lived in Dallas and I didn't live in New York because I probably would have been just as biased if I lived in New York as the those institutional investors.
32:25But when you're able to see the change and really feel it, you believe it and you have conviction in it. I miss one of the biggest trades of the last forty years, which was Tesla because for some number of reasons, I just didn't get inside of a Tesla in the early days.
32:46I didn't experience it. Right? Like, if you were one of those people that were in a Tesla and got to actually drive one or be in one in its earliest years, there's a decent likelihood you would have went all in on Tesla as an investment because you saw this game changing thing happening with EVs at the time.
33:08And if you didn't, you probably were skeptical on the company for a whole host of reasons. So, I mean, that's what it was at the time.
33:18I was just I'm gonna get out there and really dive deep into this methodology. And I would I would walk the malls constantly. I would speak to people.
33:25At times, the only social network that was a thing was Facebook. So I was obsessive surfing Facebook for what people are talking about.
33:34Yeah. It's just connecting dots. It's observing the world and connecting dots.
33:39You know, I did it with you know, and by the way, it's applicable to anything. It's not just companies that make products. It could be, you know, movies, for example.
33:51Right? Mhmm. I was at a dinner and there was a Hollywood analyst who deeply in the film business who essentially said that Barbie would be the biggest bomb movie of the year.
34:05And he he told this to the entire table, like, sharing kinda inside Hollywood information. I didn't say anything.
34:14But after the dinner, I went up to him and I said, have you been reading any of the comments on the two trailers that the movie released? Because I've been studying Hollywood releases myself for ten years as an investor, and I've never seen anything like this.
34:29I've never seen so much buzz, so much excitement for a film coming out. And I think everything you said is dead wrong.
34:38And this is gonna be one of the biggest blockbusters. And we had a fight over the whole thing.
34:43Right? I said, well, we'll see. We'll see.
34:46And I I made a huge investment not in the company that was releasing the movie, but in Mattel who owned the rights to Barbie because I thought it would be a lift for that toy category obviously.
35:02And my goal was always to exit the trade the day the movie came out because I thought by then it would be clear that the hype was real and that the movie was exciting and that it was likely to be a success. That's exactly what happened.
35:14So in the weeks leading up to the movie, reviews came out, The hype was real. It was very obvious that this is gonna be a big blockbuster move movie. And people start to connect the dots back to Mattel Mhmm.
35:28Which I think went up 20% Yeah.
35:31Prerelease, and I exited the trade. So again, it's about being early.
35:36It's about seeing the world change and detecting these shifts early and then simply connecting dots.
35:42Yeah. What's the trade that you make you've made that when you look back on your career, you're like, that's the one that really went wrong.
35:52I've made a few really bad trades that went wrong to give you some context because I I'm a fairly ballsy investor.
36:00One of them lost a third of my liquid net worth in a in a in an hour. Mhmm. So it happens and I wanna talk about how to manage that process for regular people because that shouldn't scare you away from doing what I do.
36:17I I Do you remember Frozen? The movie Frozen?
36:21Yeah. Okay. My sister loves that.
36:23Okay. So there was an Elsa doll that was like the number one toy in the world that year.
36:29And it was pretty large and it spoke like it would talk like Elsa and it it was made I can't I think the name of the company I traded that that that made the doll, can't remember at the second at the second, but they were really small toy company that had been doing terrible for years. Just on the outs.
36:51And all of a sudden, they have the number one toy in the world with this Elsa doll. I was like, this is it.
36:56This is the big one. Right? And so I aggressively traded that company into the earnings report that should have announced a record lift in sales for the company unlike anything they had ever seen before.
37:11I was really excited about this trade. It was a huge one for me. So I invested in options, meaning that if the company did not go up in price on earnings, I'd lose all my money.
37:21But if they did go up, I wouldn't just make a little bit of money. I'd make a lot. Right?
37:25I would make five, ten, fifteen, twenty times my money. They reported the best earnings in the company's history.
37:34It was astonishing, even better than I had anticipated. And the stock was up, I think, 30% premarket before the market opened.
37:41And I was like, here we go. I'm great at what I do. Right?
37:45Like, this is gonna be a big day for me. The market opened and the stock immediately kinda it popped up for a quick second and then it almost it went down as quickly as it went up, and it just hovered at breakeven, and then it started going down.
38:01Yeah. It started going down a lot. By the end of that day, I wanna say the company was down 25%.
38:08It was the most unusual thing I had ever seen as an investor. I couldn't I didn't know what was going on.
38:15I felt that someone just had it out for me. Right? Like, someone someone had it out for me because, like, I nailed it.
38:23I nailed this trade, and yet I lost all my money. It was devastating.
38:28And so there is no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to investing or quite honestly life in general. So this is applicable to everything in life. Yeah.
38:36So what I try to inspire people to do is to bucket their money so that they can have risk capital in their life the same way that wealthy people do. If you want to try to build generational wealth for yourself outside of your job, if you want to eventually find a way to develop income and wealth that is not restricted by your profession and the company that you work for and getting a promotion, you must learn how to have risk capital in your life.
39:06Because the only way that you're going to make it big as an investor is to invest aggressively. You need a bucket of money you could do that with.
39:15Most people don't have that money. Every wealthy person does. Yeah.
39:18We all have risk capital. Most people don't. So how do you get risk capital?
39:22Yeah. I mean, you you have to start thinking about money differently. If you think about every dollar is a $100, all of a sudden you're gonna find so much money in your life through trade offs.
39:32I don't know. Maybe you get a haircut every five weeks instead of every four weeks. You just Maybe you make your own coffee at home.
39:38Save $4 a day, but it's like $400 a day. Would you save Would you make your own coffee to make $400 a day? Yes.
39:44Because you have to think of every dollar is a $100. So, when you start thinking like this, you can start saving money through trade offs.
39:52But every penny, every dollar that you save by making these trade offs, remember the purpose behind it was to get rich quick. So you have to take those savings and put them into an account that you're gonna take risk with.
40:04Right? And then you could start investing like wealthy people do.
40:09And that's a mind block that most people have. No one's ever taught that before
40:13ever. Yeah. You know, when you when you say risk capital, because I wanna make it clear for people, is this this is an set aside amount of money that in the worst case scenario that it does completely fall out like what you had with the, uh, toy company, that your, I guess, sustenance, your basic level of living is not threatened.
40:39So it's almost like it's an amount of money that you would be comfortable. Comfortable is a hard way to say it because you never wanna lose money. But you'd be as comfortable as you could be if it went to zero.
40:50That that's correct. So when I started that account with $20,000, I actually had $87,000 to my name.
40:57And so the $87,000 I had, I was comfortable saying, I'm gonna take $20,000 and I'm gonna try to make a life for myself by being an aggressive investor and investing like wealthy people do with that $20,000.
41:11Taking real risk, investing aggressively, and I was okay losing that $20,000. And that number is different for everyone.
41:18I think for most people, it's good to start with zero and just make trade offs. And so I I say all the money that goes in that account is other people's money.
41:26It's money that was really never yours. You only got it by clipping a coupon or saving you know, delaying a trip, doing making some trade off in your life. It was never really going to be your money.
41:39It's like bonus money that you that you earned to take risk in life to try to, like, jump ahead. And I think just knowing that you're on that journey, that you have the ability to maybe accelerate to where you wanna be in life financially is such an exciting thing.
42:01It's such a hopeful thing for people to have. Because most people just don't even have a 1% chance of that happening. If you open an account like this and you start contributing to it and you spend a little bit of time learning how to invest aggressively and you will find something.
42:17It I just don't know how long it's gonna take you to do that or how many mistakes you make along the way. Yeah. But the journey is worth it.
42:23Like, almost I would say almost everyone that I've seen start to do this over the past ten years. Almost everyone has become hyper successful and their accounts are now massively larger in size because of it.
42:38I mean, I get notes from people almost on the daily saying, I'm a UPS driver. I'm a dentist. I'm a desk.
42:45Just regular people. They're like, you don't even understand. My life has been turned upside down.
42:53We have this account with money that we thought we would never have and we've been doing this for six years or eight years. Like, thank you so much for like inspiring us that this is possible. And by the way, it's not like they're just learning from me.
43:06Once you're in the game, you learn from other people. And then they bring their own learnings into it. I say this is like the most fruitful hobby on earth.
43:17Know, people have all kinds of hobbies. You should add this one just for fun. Yeah.
43:21Because how how often do you have a hobby? It's just observing the world and like taking bets on things that can result in like life changing amounts of money. Yeah.
43:31You know what? I think I think this idea of the, like, having risk capital,
43:35uh, is important. And to your point, I think for most everyday people, for me listening, it's not something, uh, that people have.
43:45And so I think that this this question is important so that people can get started, which is you mentioned that the the 20,000 that you initially invested was your risk capital.
43:57If someone is listening and they're trying to know if there's a certain number that they have to get to first before they can start investing, what's a good number almost to to build your risk capital to in the beginning so that you can go in and actually make it worthwhile?
44:16Like, what's the is there a number that you would recommend people get to when they're starting out? So many people start with hundreds of dollars.
44:23I I don't think you need more than hundreds of dollars. I I really don't. You could start with zero.
44:31You don't need to start with 20,000. Right? And I think for most people, that's too much money.
44:36Remember, when I started, I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and I did have $87,000 in savings. So most you know, I don't know.
44:46A lot of people don't have $87,000 of savings. I just start with anything.
44:51It really doesn't matter because the one thing I will say is you will not gain confidence doing this for years.
45:01It takes years. So you have to start with a very small account and just do it. Actually do the trades because what's going to happen is you will make some mistakes, but you will actually get some big wins based on things that you saw.
45:18And the wins, you didn't go into them aggressively enough. You have to build the conviction that you can do this. And once you build that conviction, three years, four years, six, seven years down the road, then you'll be willing to put more money with higher leverage into these investments.
45:35So you just need to start immediately. Yeah. Because the only way to really learn is using real money.
45:42And also you're going to make mistakes. The only way to learn is to lose money. Like, you can you can like learn in theory.
45:50But once you start losing money, you're never gonna do that again. Yeah. So I I just I would say time is the most important piece here.
45:57No matter how old you are, just start now. Yeah. Because it's going to be a few years, which is good because remember, you're not gonna lose much money in the beginning because you're not gonna have much money to lose.
46:07But it will grow. And by the time your account gets big enough to making bigger trades, a bigger margin and leverage,
46:16you'll be smarter about how you do this. Yeah. You mentioned that you you learn through the loss of of capital.
46:24And I think about that experience that you have when you invest in this, like, toy manufacturer for the Frozen, like, Elsa dolls.
46:34And the emotion of on the day that their earnings come out, you see it.
46:41You see, like, the thing that you wanted to happen go in the way that you wanted. Like, it was going in the upward direction for it to then go the other way.
46:50And I think about the effect on Chris Camilo, the human being. In terms of your emotion, the effect on your your mind, can you take people through that day and, like, the the feeling?
47:07Like, what was the cost of that?
47:11It it was devastating. And and, you know, I left this part of the story out earlier, but I had just opened up my own hedge fund and that was my first trade in my hedge fund.
47:27So people have been asking me to open a hedge fund for years.
47:34I I never wanted to do it, but a family friend who had been tracking my investments for years wrote me a very long note that I mostly kinda didn't pay attention to.
47:53And then this family friend committed suicide. And I went back and I read the note and basically the note was he was an Ivy League grad.
48:06I think like a Stanford guy. Genius. And he he knew a lot of big money guys and he said, Chris, like, I know where your heart is.
48:17I had never seen someone that could do what you have done in markets before. If you could do this in markets on an institutional level, you will be a multi billionaire.
48:28And what you can do with that money in this world is unprecedented with your heart.
48:34And and I know you don't wanna do it, but you need to start a hedge fund. And I went on to start the hedge fund.
48:42So it took me like a year to raise the capital. And that was my first trade.
48:48Now, I had to close the hedge fund two months later for an unrelated reason because I had a software, My software company that was a social data intelligence company for hedge funds, they told me they would never buy my software if I had my own hedge fund because I they thought I'd front run my own software data in front of their trades.
49:05So, I had to close the fund. But anyway, that was my first trade.
49:11It was so embarrassing. Because like I had all these billionaire investors like some of the biggest guys in the state of Texas backed my hedge fund based on my track record.
49:23And this is my first trade zeroed out. It was just humiliating. And what was so frustrating was that I nailed the damn trade, man.
49:32It was like such an anomaly that I nailed the trade, but it was one investor who owned 10% of the stock unloaded their shares into the strength of the earnings report and and screwed me.
49:45So, I mean, it's it's devastating, but but you learn and and you gotta push through in life. Right?
49:51Like, remember, like, I've been an underdog my whole life.
49:57It sucks for a minute and I got through it. Just five, push through. Right?
50:02I made one other trade. It went it went pretty well and I closed the fund down because I was forced to because of my software company. So I had I had one more trade like that that was really even more devastating for me though.
50:15It was right before the pandemic. You know, I I invested in this company, QSR. They own Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons.
50:24It was right at the time of the Impossible Whopper and the Popeyes chicken sandwich that were both going nuts. I was really early on both of those and I realized that they were both gonna have the biggest earnings report in the company's history.
50:38Biggest moment in the entire history of Popeyes chicken. Biggest moment in the history of Burger King.
50:44Yet, you know, unfortunately, Tim Hortons was half of the company and they just happen to have a terrible earnings report or or their revenue missed.
50:54And I was not able to assess that on Tim Hortons and didn't really pay attention to it. So, hey, Popeyes and Burger King, biggest quarters ever.
51:03I'm not really concerned what's going on Tim Hortons as much. Well, the stock got crushed and I lost a third of my net worth that day because I was so confident in the trade.
51:15But that just showed me I I I gotta be better at what I do. Right? But, yeah.
51:20That I lost third of my that was the the worst trade of my entire career. I had never lost a third of my account on a single trade. Now, here, I I I will never forget it because I kind of like, I'm not a depressed person, but like I had a couple days of depression on that.
51:37I kinda stayed in my bed and kinda just slept, slept it off. Mhmm. I woke up like, I got out of bed from like two days later.
51:44It's like, I gotta move on. And I and it's like getting the confidence back to to put on big trades after that. Because, like, if I get another bad trade and lose another third, I'm in trouble.
51:55Mhmm. Well, I just happened to come across an opportunity that I thought was gonna be the biggest trade in my life, and I was at that moment where I had to make a decision, do I do this again or not?
52:05And it was the pandemic. It was COVID. And I was, you know, translating doctor reports out of China.
52:12And I was like, god, the whole world is gonna get taken down by this virus and no one seems to care about it. The stock market is going to crash once people realize what's going on. And I started buying massive amounts of puts on, you know, airline stocks and casinos.
52:30And the market wasn't moving. I started losing, I think, 10% of my portfolio every week. And I already lost a third of it a few months earlier.
52:37Right? So it was bad, man.
52:40It was really bad. I got down to a point after two or three weeks where I was down to, like, 50% of my liquid net worth was gone, evaporated. And then people finally realized what was going on with COVID and the stock market.
52:52And this I hate saying this. I profited off the fault, but it was gonna happen. Right?
52:56I had no control over the stock crash. It was the biggest trade of my life. So, like, my entire portfolio, I don't know, three x in a minute Mhmm.
53:07From that trade. And then I went on to do a number of other trades that year and the and the year of I think it was 2020 was the biggest year I've ever had in the market. Just an absolutely astonishing amount of money made from the amount of change that was happening in the world.
53:22Because remember, all of what I do is dependent on surfacing change early.
53:30The bigger the change, the bigger the opportunity. The faster the change happens, the bigger the opportunity because it means that other people won't see the change because it's happening so quickly.
53:41Well, the pandemic was the biggest and the quickest change to ever happen in our lifetime. The fact that all of a sudden, the entire world is now working from their homes and they're not eating out.
53:54They're not flying. Right? They're not gambling in Vegas anymore.
53:58What are they doing? They're ordering all their food to be delivered at home. They're ordering their products from Amazon.
54:03Shopify is blowing up because everyone's an e commerce site now. Everybody's riding bicycles. Everyone is working out at home on their Peloton.
54:13Everyone's spending time at their lake house. Everyone's buying boats and jet skis. So there was so much change happening.
54:21I mean, people are buying printers because everyone has to have a good printer at home because their kids are doing school from home now. Like everyone's buying the little cameras, right? On their on their computers because they're doing Zooms.
54:32Yeah. Right? Webcam.
54:33So it we had like twenty years of investments happen in nine months because everything was changing.
54:41You were either winning or you were losing as a company based on what side of that change you were on. And so there's never been a time in history to be a observational investor than that year of the pandemic.
54:55I basically didn't sleep. I was just making trades all day long based on things that I was seeing. Who's benefiting?
55:00Who's being harmed? Yeah. Know You what?
55:02I think I think it's important, and I'm I'm happy that you share the story
55:07is, uh, and the way that you shared it is just like the ups and downs in your story and in what you do, and how the the worst trade of your career very shortly happens, the the best trade of your career and that, like, roller coaster of it.
55:23And I think about, Chris, the time that we're in right now with AI where, again, it's like so many things are changing. And there was something that you said that I wanted to to bring up because when I look at media and I look at the world and I and I think about my friends that I speak with and jobs that they're working in, the level of anxiety and almost like doom that they feel around AI.
55:50And there was something that you said. You go, this is the new world.
55:55Whatever your new job is going to be, it's going to be using AI as a tool because whoever employs you in what whatever sector you go into, they're going to want to get five to 10 employees out of you.
56:10Can you talk about when you say this is a new world, what does that mean?
56:15And by the way, I I don't think I mentioned earlier my friend that commit suicide. He did it because he was dying of cancer. Right?
56:20And he thought that if someone who had the right mission in life had enough money and power that we can accelerate the cures to cancer, accelerate all the things that we need to accelerate for people in humanity that really do need help.
56:36And I think that ties into your question because everyone's so negative on AI right now for just numerous reasons. But I believe that this is potentially the most positive impactful thing we could ever have as a civilization because of how it will lift the people that are most in need in the world.
57:02But it is maybe, you know, when I talk about the pandemic being the biggest and quickest change, maybe AI is now the biggest and quickest change.
57:12So what does that mean? As an investor, we now are faced again with the biggest opportunity of our lives to trade this change.
57:23I I do think that almost everything about AI is positive for us as people with the exception of the worst case scenarios that could eliminate all of us.
57:38Okay. So like Yeah. I'll I'll just put that out there.
57:42If we can if we can stay away from the worst case scenario, I think everything is essentially a positive. And what I mean by that is I am one of the few people and I know this is controversial who think that AI is going to create more jobs, not less.
57:58And that the jobs that are created will be better jobs, not worse. So I think the entire AI revolution will ultimately result in more and better jobs for humans. It's it it it it it's a take that most people don't believe in.
58:15I never hear it. I I haven't heard it. Yeah.
58:19I mean, I've been thinking about it deeply for three years. I do think there will be moments when that feels like it's not true.
58:26There will be layoffs. There will definitely be sectors and people that will be discarded along that journey.
58:34And I am nervous about that. And I think it's our job to make sure that we take care of those people and we provide them with a bridge to the new world.
58:44And I mean, that's on us to execute. Nothing is perfect. If you look back at the Internet, right, when that was coming up, there were a lot of jobs that went away with the Internet.
58:56But way more jobs were created because of the Internet. So when I think about AI, yes, I think eventually one person could do the job of five, maybe even the job of 10, maybe even more.
59:13But what does that actually mean? If we can do the job of five unless you're saying that humans, one person could do the job of 10,000,000,000, it's it's it's actually a positive and not a negative for humans.
59:27Because what it means is that we can create more. We can build more. And and you have to get out of the framework of we're adding AI into our world today.
59:40We're adding AI into a world that is going to change to become a new world. Okay?
59:47And that new world is going to be have industries that we can't even envision today. It's going to have products and services.
59:55It's going to have things that humans want to do that we can't Even conceive today. And because of that, even if one human equals a 100 in that future world, we're going to want every one of those humans because we still need the one to do the 100 people of work with the help of robotics and AI and all the other stuff because we're creating things that we never thought were even possible.
1:00:20Mhmm. Right? So and but those jobs are going to become more creative.
1:00:25Right? Those jobs are going to become more interesting. Yeah.
1:00:28You know, it's it's very rare for me to hear. We have a lot of conversations in the in AI space. It's very rare for me to hear someone that actually paints a positive picture of what this new world can be.
1:00:40And so for me, like, this is an interesting conversation. I think it's gonna be valuable for people and the person listening at home. And so for that person, they want to to build something, be it a business or just like a successful career, kind of where you were at all those years ago where it was like, you know, you wanna build a life that has, like, high upside, and they want their skills to be deeply applicable and for them to be able to win in this new world.
1:01:08You know? I heard an interview where you were talking about OpenClaw and, like, some of the agents and the things that people are building.
1:01:18If someone wants to succeed in this new world that you just outlined, where should they be spending their time today when it comes to AI and using AI?
1:01:31Okay. So give me sixty seconds of your time because you're gonna want to hear this. So I've done over 200 episodes of this show.
1:01:38I've been doing it for four years. In the last six months, I started to notice a shift in the conversations. Things that the guests would talk about was different.
1:01:46The common message was that we had entered this new period of time where the rules to be successful and have a great business and a great life had fundamentally shifted and changed. And so I started to realize that we had entered a new era.
1:02:00And so a couple of weeks ago, we launched a secret newsletter called New Era that pulls together stories, supporting documents, step by step guides, even unseen footage from the show, and we send it to you in your inbox every single week.
1:02:16And so if you wanna be involved, just go to the link in the description, plug in your email, and you will get an issue of our new era newsletter every single Monday in your inbox.
1:02:27Thank me later. Let's get back to the show. I would say there's first of all, you have to use AI every day in your life.
1:02:34You have to force yourself to learn about these products, how they work, how to prompt them. You need to be following at least a few people that talk about AI on TikTok or Instagram every day.
1:02:47So you can keep up with it, but use it. I've always said like, you'll get a job if you know how to use AI because you'll walk into that interview at any company in the world. And if you could prove to that interviewer in five minutes that you're gonna bring five to 10 people worth of skills and bandwidth to that job, they're gonna hire you.
1:03:09They're gonna hire you. All you have to do is show that you can bring five to 10 people worth of work because you're really good at using tools.
1:03:19You're really good at using AI. And and, you know, I was, you know, I was out here in LA with my two partners in my restaurant group.
1:03:29You know, we have restaurants in Dallas. And I talk about the fact that there will be millions millions of new businesses created in the next decade with the help of AI and robotics.
1:03:42I'll just share one of you one of them with you. Like, we were complaining because we got a Yelp review. Not a Yelp review.
1:03:48We we got a DoorDash review saying that, you know, they got the wrong food in their delivery order from one of my restaurants and they gave us a one star.
1:03:58We're like, how does that even happen? Like, how do we miss an entire piece of an order? And I was like, this is ridiculous.
1:04:06Like By the way, one of every five orders I get from DoorDash or Uber Eats is wrong. Yeah.
1:04:12It's so annoying. It's bad for the restaurant. It's bad for DoorDash and Uber Eats.
1:04:16And it's bad for the customer at home and they probably end up ordering less because of it. Right? I was like, why can't someone just take a $20 camera, modify some AI, stick the camera right above the kitchen where we prep the the to go orders, give it access to the Uber Eats and DoorDash orders.
1:04:37The camera will utilize AI to assess if the order is being prepped properly based on what it knows the customer ordered and literally have a green light. So, yep, you did that one right.
1:04:48It's approved. Done. Someone can build that company right now themselves using, you know, tweaking AI and using some $20 camera.
1:05:01Package it, market it, take it to a restaurant, get it going. That company will hire people because there is logistics involved with dealing with fragmented restaurant owners, pack you know, giving this stuff out, selling it.
1:05:19That's one of the million companies that's going to get started. Sounds like a headache to me.
1:05:24I'm not gonna start it. But if someone else wants to start it, please do and call me. I'll be your first customer.
1:05:29Yeah. But I mean, I I I would imagine DoorDash or Uber Eats will buy you out pretty quickly because you you'll be a game changer for them.
1:05:36Can you imagine? Like, imagine if you're on the app. You're on the DoorDash app, and you can see a little icon by the restaurants that have AI validation that your order was prepped perfectly.
1:05:49Would you not be more likely to order from that restaurant? Well, then you know what happens? That those restaurants get more business.
1:05:56Now all the restaurants have to enact this new technology. So what I'm trying to get at is this is why I'm optimistic. Okay?
1:06:05No. AI is not gonna displace every human in the next five, ten years.
1:06:10It's just gonna make everything so much more efficient and productive that everything we think about enterprise, everything we think about companies and products and brands and services is going to radically change.
1:06:27It's gonna turn upside down. The same way the Internet did. Right?
1:06:30And all of a sudden, the amount of opportunity out there is just going to be massive.
1:06:37Because so many of these companies that I'm talking about would have been too expensive to start before.
1:06:45The risk was too high. Without the AI, that company I just told you about, the teams that you would have to hire, the money you'd have to raise to start that company, it would have been insane.
1:06:59It'd have been too risky. So that company probably would have never materialized. But in the age of AI, we can start companies for next to nothing because the intelligence layer is essentially free.
1:07:10Mhmm. So what you have to do is just put pieces together. Connect dots, find problems, put the pieces together, institute them, that still requires humans, and I believe is going to require humans pretty much forever.
1:07:25Okay? So to me, that's really exciting because now we could ascend because we have millions of problems that need to be solved.
1:07:35And entrepreneurs are really good at solving problems, but often coming up with the solution to a problem does not necessarily make a great business because the business model itself might not work.
1:07:50It might not be profitable. You might have to raise too much money. The business doesn't make enough money.
1:07:55But if the intelligence layer is free, we can now solve millions
1:08:00of problems and they could become hyper efficient businesses. Yeah. Right?
1:08:05I I I think this is important because what you just mentioned, the idea that you mentioned, um, around, like, if your if your order that you got from DoorDash was actually AI verified this was perfect.
1:08:18It reminds me very similar to what, like, StockX did in the sneaker resell market. Right? Is that we're gonna verify that these Jordans that you bought online are legitimate and real.
1:08:28Like, that's a potentially billion dollar opportunity.
1:08:31Now more Jordans are getting transacted online. Yeah. I mean, could you imagine how much larger the DoorDash business would be if every order was perfect?
1:08:40Mhmm. Like, was just but because everyone's making listen.
1:08:43My restaurant had to pay for that order. We got we I think we had a refund. We got $38 had to get sent back.
1:08:50So we just lost $38. That's not good. For us, it's definitely not good for the customer.
1:08:57All these costs eventually go back to the customer. Right? By the way, it's not good for DoorDash.
1:09:03It's just bad for everyone. Yeah. Right?
1:09:05So, like, we all win. That's what I'm trying to say. In almost every one of these situations, everybody wins.
1:09:12Companies win. Investors win. Customers win.
1:09:17We all win. If you look at AI and what it's going to do, at the end of the day, pretty much everybody wins in every single case.
1:09:26You you you mentioned that and, like, protecting those people, helping those people.
1:09:31And so one of the things in kind of like the step one that you mentioned is that people should be using AI every day. Can you kind of speak to the opportunity that exists right now in using AI agents?
1:09:46Kind of how far along that process we are. And then when we talk about people that wanna build things, build businesses, be ready for, like, this new world, this AI world that we're moving into, how critical of a piece is AI agents and learning how to use them in that process.
1:10:06I would say agents are everything right now. And all it really means when we talk about AI agents is rather than relying on you to continue to prompt every single thing that you want to do with the AI, you could simply lay out an objective.
1:10:25And the artificial intelligence will create agents, essentially AI people that will then start to carry out that task and interact with you across the range of that task.
1:10:39So it's not just on you anymore. You have an agent that's working on this task and an agent that's working on this task. And if they need help or if they want to inquire about a, you know, a fork in the road, they'll communicate back with you and say, hey, we kinda hit this fork in the road.
1:10:57We're kinda thinking we should go this way with it. What do you think? But you essentially have an AI workforce, like digital people working for you.
1:11:07And it's not on your shoulders anymore to kind of carry the prompting of the AI from a to z.
1:11:15It's doing the majority of the work for you. And it allows you to do multi step processes, like if you're building a business or if you're working on a really hard problem that doesn't have like a very easy start point and end point, agents can do everything.
1:11:32They can create organizations and businesses and run them for you. It they're essentially could do anything. I'm gonna tell you a story that melted my mind two weeks ago with AI agents because everyone's so skeptical about this.
1:11:48Like, I talk about what you can do with agents and there's an infinite number of people saying like, that's BS.
1:11:57It's not that easy. You can't do it. Yes, you can.
1:12:01Yes. You can. I was in Hawaii filming a YouTube, this crazy YouTube thing a few years a few weeks ago.
1:12:12One of the guys that was there with me was this energy trader out of Texas. His name is Bill Perkins. And he went down a really, really deep path with Agentic AI.
1:12:24And he set up a whole system. I think he has 12 agents that are doing stuff for him, basically, four hours a day. And we were watching these surfers during one of our breaks kind of on the edge of a cliff by the beach and he's telling me about all this stuff he built and he could essentially rebuild any website in the world in minutes.
1:12:45Right? He's like, any anything that you're writing that you want to be better like So he's like, give me a website. That's that that that's just really bad.
1:12:54You know, my mom is writes books and she has a website for all of her books. And she built the website herself on Wix.
1:13:03And so, my mom's website is really bad. And he basically put it through his system and it optimized the website for what it should be based on the objectives that she actually has. How she should be communicating on the website, what the layout should actually look like, what links should actually do, how the SEO should be optimized.
1:13:23And it just basically rebuilt what she should do. Now, normally, you would take all this and you would take it to a website firm and say, hey, can you enact this?
1:13:31He said, do want me to build that site now for her in the next forty five minutes? I was like, what? He said, yeah.
1:13:37I'll have my agents build it. Probably take about forty five minutes. And we'll just do it right here off my on his phone.
1:13:42On his phone. And so, he's speaking into his phone to his agents on a Mac mini at his house.
1:13:48Right? Back in Texas. And he's like, hey, I wanna do this thing for my buddy's mom.
1:13:54Here's her site. She writes these books. I already had the system run through and assess what the site should be to be optimized.
1:14:01There's a lot of work to be done. And I I'm gonna give He said, just give me your mom's login to Wix. Just give me her login.
1:14:07I got it for for him. Here's the login to her Wix. He says, want you to start by reading the entire Wix manual so you know how to do all the coding and that website platform and then just do it.
1:14:17And it wouldn't do it at first. It was like, oh, we can't hack into a site. Absolutely not.
1:14:21You know, that's not. And then he convinced her, no. I'm here with the guy, says mom.
1:14:24Like, you know, we convinced it to do the work. This is where, like, we're in a gray area still. Right?
1:14:29Like, nothing's clean. Nothing's clean yet. Yeah.
1:14:31Just because nothing's clean yet and because, you know, maybe nine out of 10 people that would try to do this maybe wouldn't be successful, doesn't mean it can't be done. And doesn't mean that 10 out of 10 people won't be able to easily do it in six months. Once it gets a little easier and we work out some of the kinks.
1:14:45So, in forty five minutes, that site has been completely rebuilt. Blew my mind.
1:14:52Blew my mind. Him having a few conversations back and forth using voice on his mobile phone. And it actually recoded the site, put it live, and this all happened in forty five minutes.
1:15:07Like, so don't tell me we can't do astonishing things right now. Like, I could not even believe it. And man, is that site good relative to what it was?
1:15:14Yeah. So, and then listen, but there's a billion examples. So, are there some things that we can't do with the Gentic AI right now?
1:15:21Yes. Are there a lot of things where if we try to do them, if the system sometimes breaks and it's a little bit onerous? Absolutely.
1:15:31But are there a lot of things we could do right now and it will never get worse than this. Yeah. Right?
1:15:36So like and it's changing every week. This is the biggest thing to ever happen. This is like actually so insane.
1:15:42The type of investments that I make with observational investments that we're talking about right now, my entire processes, I wrote a book about it. Jack Schwager wrote a chapter on it in Unknown Market Wizards, which I recommend everyone read if they wanna go deep on my methodology. There are people I know of at least eight of them that have basically put all of my content, all of my methodology into an agentic AI system and they have created versions of me that actually now go out and do this.
1:16:13They are reading TikTok comments. They're trying to detect shifts and changes in the world. And when they detect changes, they're now trying to validate that those changes are real and meaningful and what companies it would actually impact.
1:16:27And that they are then suggesting trades. Mhmm. That's happening right now.
1:16:33It's wild. I've actually seen it. Like I've seen some of these sites working.
1:16:38It's freaking me out, obviously. Fortunately, you know, like I I still believe I have an edge.
1:16:45I don't think these systems will become super proficient at this because the world is so large or so much to see. There's a lot of nuance interpretation. And ultimately, even if a system feeds you that information, how much conviction do you have in it to actually trade?
1:17:00I think we still have a number of years left when ordinary people can do what I do really successfully with or without an AI system. Yeah.
1:17:08Your friend your friend, was he using
1:17:12OpenClaw in order to execute that? I don't know. Bill per I asked him that.
1:17:16He uses a few different things. Bill Perkins, he's like, in addition to being an energy trader, he's like a weird genius, and he just really he's really resourceful and inquisitive.
1:17:28Mhmm. Right? And I say that one of the best talents to have right now is to be an inquisitive person who's resourceful.
1:17:39You can't lose right now because you will learn and you will figure it out. And you can like I said, I think there's millions of companies to start, like millions of them.
1:17:50They're all very small. Most are small.
1:17:53Most of these companies are probably going to generate hundreds of thousands to a few million in profit a year. But none of these companies were possible before AI because they were none of them would have been efficient enough to operate as a company. They would have been too cumbersome, require too much capital.
1:18:10They don't generate enough profits. The problems that we're solving with these new companies that are gonna start are too small to validate having a venture scalable company behind them.
1:18:20But in the age of AI, these are companies that anyone could start. So I think we're going to have millions of new CEOs working in one to 10 person companies
1:18:32the next decade. You know what? I because right in the beginning of this conversation, we we said that it's kind of a you said we're in the age of, like, the outsiders.
1:18:40You know? And I think even in, um, one of the when you talk about, like, uh, limiting beliefs and almost like mentality blockers, I think that for a lot of people, and I speak with them, and I see them in the the comments, and I meet them in real life, like the everyday person who's not technical, they don't have, you know, they're not they don't have a coding degree.
1:19:00They're not a software engineer. And they hear terms like agentic AI, and it just sounds so like it sounds like you have to have a certain level of expertise and, like, coding knowledge.
1:19:12And so if someone's listening to this conversation and they even internalize what you mentioned around, people that are, like, inquisitive and resourceful are gonna absolutely crush it in this age that we're going into.
1:19:25And they just wanna spend, like, a couple of hours this weekend just, you know, playing around with, like, an AI agent or trying to build one that could take one workflow, kinda create some more time for them in their life.
1:19:40Is there a recommendation or, like, a tool?
1:19:44Like, I'm curious even how you started. Like, what's the easiest way that someone can just start using this technology? There's only one way, and it's to open up any LLM you want
1:19:57and say, hi. This is what I wanna do. How do I start?
1:20:04What AI do I use? What are my first steps? Let the AI take you through that journey.
1:20:12It shouldn't be me. Right? Like, I think there are a number of content creators out there that talk about this stuff all day long.
1:20:19There's millions of videos on YouTube. But the truth is it's shifting so quickly.
1:20:24The videos that came out two months ago are no longer relevant. I would start with your with ChatGPT.
1:20:31Start with Claude and just say, want to learn about this stuff. I want to like, how do I get started with this agentic stuff? Like, where do I start?
1:20:39Just talk to it.
1:20:42That's the way you do it now. That's what's so crazy. Like, it will just tell you.
1:20:47And by the way, if you've been using it, it probably knows you better than I know you. So it will even know how to explain it to you in a way that I can't in this interview because every person is different.
1:21:01And I would ask it, see like, hey, I I want you to help. How do I learn? What's the best way for me with everything that you already know about me?
1:21:09You know my job, you know my skill set, you know what I do. Like, how do I start? You know my budget level.
1:21:14How do I start? Just And always start off these prompts by saying, ask me anything you need to ask me so that we can do this in the best way possible.
1:21:25I think I wanna learn agentic AI, but I don't even know what I should be asking you right now. So can you please ask me anything that you need to ask me so that we can get started on this journey together and I could learn how to do this. Because I think I might wanna start a business someday using these agents, these AI agents.
1:21:42But I don't know anything about them right now and I'm scared and I'm freaked out because I'm not a coder. I'm a plumber.
1:21:49Mhmm. You know what I'm saying? Like like, can you help me through this?
1:21:54Man, is it good at that? It's so good at that right now. Yeah.
1:21:58You know what, Chris? Before we get out of here, I'm I'm curious about what's next for you.
1:22:03And the reason that I asked that is I think about where you started. You know? I think about, like, the those first investments that you made.
1:22:13And I'm sure even for you at that time, it was hard to imagine that you would have achieved the things that you've done and the the rooms that you're in and, like, the impact and the people that you reach. And also the fact that you did it all while being a bit of a misfit, a bit of an outsider, the ultimate underdog. And so when you put everything within that perspective and within that story, I'm so curious if you have a what your thought is on what happens next.
1:22:39Yeah. I'm going through a major life pivot. That's for sure.
1:22:44I am finally at a point in my life where I've done all the things that I thought I would probably never be able to do. I have all the stuff. I have everything I wanted to achieve personally.
1:22:57I I feel like I have for myself. So, now I could do anything I want and I've been thinking about this for a couple years like what should it be? Right?
1:23:06Like, obviously, I'm I'm I'm laser focused on my foundation. I talk about a lot, you know, I wanna have a large foundation for, you know, people that need or most in need.
1:23:17In in the case of my foundation, it's pediatric causes, it's animal welfare, it's it's elder care, the people that are most reliant on others to help them.
1:23:27I wanna continue to spread the story of anyone and everyone should invest for themselves. You have to become part of the investor class.
1:23:35It's the only way we'll ever solve the wealth gap is by bridging every human on earth into the investor class. And right now, the only thing preventing that is an intimidation factor that has been established by institutional Wall Street over the past fifty or sixty years that I'm trying to break down, um, which is why I do stuff like this.
1:23:54I feel that humans are going to become, as I said, incredibly important in the age of AI, which again is a counter thesis to what everyone else thinks. I think humans will become more important than we've ever been. I think creative humans are gonna be amongst the most interesting kind of facets of this AI age because people while they will love and embrace robotics and automation, artificial intelligence for all the things it's going to do for our world.
1:24:24I think we will equally thirst for things that are real in humanity.
1:24:31Right? And so, I think content creators and podcasters are an undervalued asset class right now.
1:24:41I think in ten years, we will have many many hundreds of podcasters that will be valued like athletes are today. Hundreds of millions of dollars each.
1:24:50We've only we've seen a couple of these happen with like Call Her Daddy. Right? And and another recent one by OpenAI valued in the hundreds of millions.
1:24:59I think we're just getting started. And I think some of the most brilliant creative people are afraid to step into this space because they're intimidated by it.
1:25:12And I want to help kind of bridge that gap. So, you know, one of the things I'm working on is a a to help content creators in the space become podcasters in areas where I think we need more and better podcasters, where we need to use better data, better processes.
1:25:32I just think we're in the earliest age of new media. Mhmm. Like if you look at the history of media and how it's grown over the past eighty or ninety years, it's dead now.
1:25:43And we're in the first few years of new media. And yeah, we have millions of podcasters, but we're all just kinda doing stuff rogue. Learning on our own.
1:25:52No real like like we're not really sharing insights. I think there are very few people in the podcasting space that are using best in class data methodologies to kinda sculpt how they program their content.
1:26:10I just think we're barely scraping the surface. And I think when in history could you throw a few million dollars at something and potentially have a top 20 global media property because you do do it better than everyone else. Yeah.
1:26:23That could happen today in twelve months. Yeah. How wild is that?
1:26:27Yeah. Like, you couldn't start competing against ABC, NBC, CBS twenty five years ago.
1:26:32You couldn't start a competitor and be at their level in a year. You can do that now. Yeah.
1:26:38You can be that in in six to twelve months if you care enough, right, to to actually do it right.
1:26:46And so, like, I love creative people. I the one thing I found out about myself is the thing that I enjoy more than anything else in the world is being around awesome, fun, creative, ambitious people.
1:27:01And so, like, if I'm going to spend the next five to ten years of my life working on something new, I want that thing to be with the type of people that I love. Mhmm.
1:27:13Right? So I'm gonna do something that is in a sector where I get to be around these people that inspire me. Right?
1:27:20People that are fun, people that are interesting. So why wouldn't I pick that as the next sector? You know, it's funny is as much as I love the Collect icon business, people are shocked to hear that I don't collect Pokemon cards.
1:27:33I don't do any of that stuff. So I love the business element of what we built and created. It was not my world.
1:27:41And I spent five years in a world that wasn't a world that I enjoyed. So the next thing I do, I'm trying to pick a world that I enjoy.
1:27:52I enjoy this. I enjoy talking to guys like you. Right?
1:27:55Like I I enjoy other younger content creators are trying to make it. Right? And they need some help.
1:28:02So like, I'm I'm excited for what's to come because I think there's never been a better time for a single individual person that wants to do something big to to do it.
1:28:19Right? Like, you can do whatever you want.
1:28:23And it's not just me. Like, the number of entrepreneurs I have met over the past eighteen years as a v as event I'm invested in a 170 startups.
1:28:33Right? The number of entrepreneurs I have met who had the greatest ideas, they were so energetic.
1:28:40They were just like, maybe the problem they were trying to solve wasn't big enough for me to invest or more times than not, I'm like, I love this person, but I don't think they can raise enough capital. I don't think they could manage an IT team.
1:28:55I don't think they can do all the things that I know need to be done to make this business a success, so I didn't invest in them. I would say for every one entrepreneur founder that's like has the right thing and is the right person, there's probably a thousand that are equally exciting but just didn't make sense for the old world.
1:29:16All those people make sense in the new world of AI. Because now they don't need anyone. Now, that whole layer is gone.
1:29:24They could just they could the problem they wanna solve is big enough now in this new world. And they don't need an IT team.
1:29:31They don't need to go raise 10,000,000 in VC. I don't need they don't need to do any of that. They could just be excited about solving a problem, be resourceful, and solve it, and be a successful entrepreneur in the new world.
1:29:47And make, I don't know, 300,000 or 3,000,000 a year doing it. And maybe they have a couple of employees.
1:29:54Yeah. That that that's pretty cool and fun, I think. Exciting.
1:29:57It's exciting. There are millions there will be millions of those people. The new world is gonna look so dramatically different than what we're accustomed to.
1:30:07People just don't see it yet. We're not gonna have the type of companies we had before. Right?
1:30:12I think we're gonna have millions of these pods of people doing cool things. Right? Mhmm.
1:30:17It's a new paradigm.
1:30:19Chris Camilo, thank you so much, man. This was great. This was great.
1:30:23And you know what? It's actually, um, I was gonna say this to you after hearing, uh, your new thesis. Uh, it sounds like you and I have to have a conversation, um, because, yeah, I I feel the same way.
1:30:34I feel like we're in the early stages, and that's incredibly exciting when you're like you're saying, you're seeing podcasts going for hundreds of millions of dollars.
1:30:44You know? There'll be more.
1:30:46A lot more. Yeah. Yeah.
1:30:49Chris Camilo, thank you so much, man. Thank you. It's been fun.
1:30:52So if you enjoyed this conversation and you wanna hear even more stories like this, then just click here. And also my team is gonna put some more videos that you can watch here. Thank you.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Camillo opens with a claim that sounds like a brag and ends up reading like a manifesto: any teenager scrolling TikTok can spot the next billion-dollar trend before Goldman Sachs does, and AI just handed that teenager Goldman's research department on top.

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

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