The Iced Coffee Hour - EMERGENCY UPLOAD: Stock Market Investors Are Losing Everything - How To Profit! | Chris Camillo

Starting point is 00:00:00 Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you. Buick's employee pricing for you event is on now. Get a purchase credit of up to $3,168 on a 2026 Buick Envision. Surround yourself with signature Buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra-wide 30-inch diagonal screen. Don't miss Buick's employee pricing for you event. Visit buick.com for more details. Chris Camillo, how did you make $10 million in one day on a stock trade?

Starting point is 00:00:34 It should have been a $30 to $40 million day for me. This is the fastest growth for AWS in nearly five years. AI is really impacting almost every single industry. The figure that's being thrown around is like the $20,000 to $80 million. 80 trades over 17 years. And every one of them has a story. You only need to find one good trade every five to 10 years to be like a top 1% investor. The most important thing in hitting is waiting for the right pitch.

Starting point is 00:01:03 You only have to have an opinion on a few things. Over the course of a couple weeks, I have one of the biggest drawdowns of my investing career. I just happen to have the same major investment as Leopold. What are you paying attention to right now in the stock market? This is the biggest moment in the history of capital markets. I'm so sick of listening to these old guys that have so much conviction that this is going to happen. We just don't know. Trade is not over.

Starting point is 00:01:32 In many ways, it's just beginning. Chris Camillo, Wednesday morning, you texted into our group chat. Finding cash wasn't easy today, but added to my Bloom Energy and Amazon, knowing it could get a lot uglier before the market rationalizes, but been here before. Wednesday afternoon, a few hours later, you texted, I don't know of many people who are as immune to volatility than me. and there was a moment this morning where I legit almost threw up, then picked up more bloom energy in Amazon. Thursday afternoon, 24 hours later, you texted, this is so close to an eight-figure up day, unreal.

Starting point is 00:02:12 I'm curious, why did you almost throw up? When it rains, it pours, guys. It's just, I feel like this happens to every investor every time. It's like you have these bad days, these bad weeks, at the worst possible times in your life. It's like when you're on family vacation, spending way too much money, or when you need money for something else

Starting point is 00:02:36 and you're like already drawing down your account for something else in your life, I have a couple things going on right now that I needed to withdraw an insane amount of money for my account for. So like I already kind of watch my account dip because of something I need, right? Something I want to do.

Starting point is 00:02:56 right as that happened over the course of a couple weeks, I have one of the biggest drawdowns of my investing career, 40%. I've been worse. How do you lose 40%? That's a lot of money because the market only went down a little bit. That's what's so crazy. I mean, I got caught up. I just happened to have the same major investment as Leopold, right? Like, you know this.

Starting point is 00:03:22 I was very early on Bloom Energy. He was very early on Bloom Energy. Both of us compounded and levered into Bloom. We six-stacks, seven, eight-xed our money on Bloom, even without leverage. Like, Bloom is one of the biggest investments I've ever made. Bloom got cut by, I don't know, 45%. It went from, what, $300 a share to $165 over a short period of time? That was one of my largest positions right there.

Starting point is 00:03:52 What price did you buy into Bloom Energy? I bought Bloom Energy all around. I bought a few hundred shares at like $70, bought a few hundred at a hundred and something, bought a few hundred at $300 and something. So I was buying kind of like all around, but I ended up getting obliterated on Bloom. Fortunately, not that bad because I was selling some calls in the shares

Starting point is 00:04:13 and I was doing some tricky options that hurt me and helped me at the same time. Overall, I would say I probably lost on Bloom, but it's okay because I made it up elsewhere. here's the thing. So my account was slaughtered. And don't feel bad for me, because you guys know this. My account was hitting all-time highs. Like before this started, I was starting from a very good place, which is why I decided,

Starting point is 00:04:35 hey, I can afford to take out these huge chunks of money to do these other things that I want to do in my life, other investments, other projects, right? I didn't expect within the same week for my account to get crushed 40%. So it was kind of a big mental hit. I also knew without knowing what was happening to Leopold. I knew what he owned. Whether or not it was someone manipulating that to try to mess with him didn't really matter to me. I knew that he was getting margin called.

Starting point is 00:05:07 He had to be getting margin called. I assumed he owed something in the range of 10 plus billion very quickly. And I knew that was what was driving the down cycle in Bloom Energy and Nebriot. and a few of these other AI names in addition to sector news that was pushing it down, right? So because I knew about that forced downflow, I knew it was going to revert.

Starting point is 00:05:31 I just didn't have the timing, right? And so here's where you get into what I do. Everything's a probability game. I knew we were days away from having that trade reverse because at some point, his margin call would end. And Bloom did not deserve to be at 100.

Starting point is 00:05:50 $165 a share. Like it was outrageous. In fact, all of these names, they were, the entire sector move was completely ridiculous and fueled by not just his margin calls, but I knew all of Korea was getting margin called. Basically, every levered fund in South Korea was getting liquidated over the same time period because what are they invested in? Bloom Energy is one of the biggest names in South Korea, right? Basically, all the Leopold stuff is all the South Korea stuff. which is all the Chris Camillo stuff. So me, Leopold, and South Korea were all getting crushed at the same time. So what are you going to do?

Starting point is 00:06:29 Fortunately, I'm not managing an institutional fund. My account is more liquid. I have more control over it. And I wasn't four X Leopard like Leopold. That was like one X lebrd. So a lot of people are accusing you on Twitter of irresponsible risk taking that you shouldn't even be discussing publicly. What do you say to that? That's insane.

Starting point is 00:06:49 I have full control over the risk in my account. You guys know this. No one is more obsessive over every move that they make than me. So first of all, let's start here. We all have different investment objectives, right? My objectives are very different than yours. They're very different from other investors. The entirety of my brokerage account is a ultra high risk, ultra high ward account.

Starting point is 00:07:19 I'm trying to grow that account into a billion dollar account, right? That's not going to happen without concentration. It's not going to happen without leverage. And it's not going to happen without me making really bold bets when I have ultra-high conviction in a trade. I only get that conviction a few times a year. So when it happens, I have to go all in on that trade. It's all about probability. I know that every time I go in on a high conviction trade, there's things that I know I don't know,

Starting point is 00:07:52 and there's things that I don't know that I don't know, okay? I know that there's an infinite number of things that could happen that could zero me out on that trade, because they're usually levered, they're usually on margin, they're usually with options. I'm a big boy. I've been doing this for like close to 30 years, okay? So like I know what I'm doing. I know the risk. I know that if I make six of those trades in a row, that account is pretty close to.

Starting point is 00:08:15 of being gone, right? I get that. There is a theoretical in an ultra high risk, ultra high ward account. There is a theoretical there that that account can get wiped out. I know that. I'm willing to take that risk. Hasn't happened yet. Hasn't even gotten that close yet, right? 40% markdown. I basically had another 20% of the account at risk. And by the way, that Wednesday, I had a lot of options that expired on Wednesday. All got zeroed out. How much money was that? Seven figures of options that got zeroed out that day.

Starting point is 00:08:54 There was a 24-hour trade that got zeroed out. Again, I knew that we were close to the end. I knew that the liquidation had to end within a matter of hours to days. And I was willing to take that risk because even though I got wiped out on that Wednesday trade. If it would have turned that day, it would have been insane. It would have been like a 25 to 30x investment. We're talking about tens of millions. And that's the trade that I had been working all spring and summer. That is the highest conviction trade I've made in years. I was hoping it would play out before earnings. But if it didn't, earnings was my last shot.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And because of the things that happened running into Amazon earnings, I had an exceptionally high degree of confidence that it's not about Amazon nailing earnings. That was obvious. It's about how they would handle the earnings call. And these are things that other investors generally don't think about that I'm obsessive with. So walk us through the last month. At the peak, how much were you down? All right.

Starting point is 00:09:59 I'm not going to get super granular because people have started, and this makes me really nervous, especially with the Leopold stuff. Maybe I'm paranoid. Over the last couple of years, I feel like there's, one or more people with a lot more money than me that for whatever reason, they want to mess with me and my trades. And I've seen it. I've seen it with some of my trades that are easier to mess with when it comes to like mid caps, small caps. How do they do that? Well, as you guys know, like I run a very anti-Wall Street kind of content and I have for 20 years. I poke fun at the

Starting point is 00:10:37 institutions of Wall Street. Now, but some of those guys are my best friends. But I've been harping. on Wall Street for two decades, saying that it's the world's largest skimming operation. I believe it is. I don't think that people should have the world's money part in, you know, institutional accounts that basically skim money every year to not perform any better than you could perform being invested in a passive fund. And I think that's probably pissed more than a few people off. And the same way that I think Leopold probably pissed more than a few people off being a cocky

Starting point is 00:11:11 20 something year old that is managing what 40 billion dollars of capital and is now taking probably more media airspace than the citadels and the king griffons of the world he put himself he put a target on his back right i'm not saying like i have that big of a target on my back but it's something that's on my mind so i'm trying to stay a little less granular these days about my exact trades and exactly how i position them but it's eight figures i was down eight figures right or a little close to eight figures. What chance would you have been wrong? I would say there was probably a 20% chance of that trade not going well on Friday. So I was like, I was like 80% confident. And the 20% again are kind of things that I knew I didn't know and things that I didn't know that I didn't know.

Starting point is 00:11:59 I mean, we're in a situation with Trump and Iran. We don't know what's going to happen any night of the week. You know, Amazon, I was confident was going to beat their numbers. I mean, I was obsessed. You guys, I put so much work into this trade. It's obscene. Going right into that trade last week, I was still searching for every theoretical data point that I could find that would allow me to properly assess the degree to which they were likely to beat their AWS number. Now, you know, I think Amazon had predicted like a 22% beat. I think the whisper number was like 25% on the street and I was confident it was going to come somewhere north of 20%. So the only question in my mind was how are they going to handle the call?

Starting point is 00:12:44 Now, this is the nuance in the social or up trade here. If you look at how Google handled their call, and you look at how Microsoft handled their call, you have to look at Amazon management. Okay, and you have to look at Jassy. He's a smart guy. He sees what happened to Google. He sees what happened to Microsoft.

Starting point is 00:13:05 Microsoft flawlessly handled the CAPX question. right, they got in front of it and they were basically like, hey, we don't have any cap X risk, guys. If the demand doesn't fully materialize as we see it right in front of us, we can redirect it. And so I knew it was, to me, it was like a 99.9% chance that Jassy was going to handle it the same way in his own way by basically saying, hey, we know this is scaring you, 200 billion. We're actually going to increase the 220. But guys, not only do we see the demand, it's factual, it's happening. But if something catastrophic happens, the majority of the money that we have in CAPX projected the next year, we can take off the table because it's towards equipment

Starting point is 00:13:54 that we don't have to commit to until the very last piece of that data center, right? So I felt confident. Like there's no way that I was going to put that much work into Amazon this year. and even after what happened to me on Wednesday and the week before, because I've been losing money like every week, right? There's no way I was going to watch Amazon knock it out of the park and me not participate. I wasn't even nervous. That's just so crazy.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Like I was actually in my truck driving to Austin when earnings happened. And I wasn't even following it. Like I was just like I had a real sense of calm over me. I was like, hey, if I have to do this. and I think it's going to work out. I just didn't know how well it was going to work out. And so I'm suspecting you probably took your portfolio down to like the low seven figures, which is somewhat of, I mean, for you.

Starting point is 00:14:48 It wasn't that low. It wasn't that low. It was like it was still kind of in and around high seven figures, low eight figures. But you had previously lost close to eight figures in the portfolio. And now then you, for this Amazon trade, put a few million bucks. into Amazon call options and it was a heavy investment. And Bloom, Amazon and Bloom. Are you willing to say how much you put into those trades for the?

Starting point is 00:15:13 Yeah, it was, I don't know, like a couple million dollars of options. Expiring when? Friday, the next day, basically. Yeah. So, and on top of that, my account was fully levered. So I basically had to sell stock to make this happen. So I had to liquidate. I had to liquidate millions of dollars of equity.

Starting point is 00:15:34 that was less important to me in order to make that option straight. And so you ran it up about eight figures? Yeah, about 10 million in a day. And how did that feel? Like walk me through looking at your portfolio and seeing that it's up $10 million on a day. I will tell you this. Making money like that after you lost money feels better, much better than just making the money.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Right? Like there's something about seeing your account get crushed and then making a really bold move to make it all back plus some. Because I ended up doing better than what I lost. It was like a few million more than what I lost is what I made. It was the best feeling in the world because you know it was the hardest thing in the world to do and you force yourself to do it because it was the right thing to do. I would say from my sense, it would have been bad risk management for me not to do it. If you know how much work I put into the trade, you would think it's really bad risk management not to make that trade. So if you had millions of dollars in call options expiring in one week on this one bet that Amazon would have a good earnings call, what would have happened if the recovery on Amazon came two weeks later?

Starting point is 00:16:49 Now, most people think forming an LLC is just about filling out one form and calling it a day. But there's a lot more to it than that. And if you skip the rest, your LLC isn't really set up the way it needs to be. That is why we have partnered with Northwest registered agent. For $39 plus state fees, Northwest handles the state filing and make sure you have everything you actually need. Your operating agreement, membership certificates, and banking resolutions. Without this documents, you might be registered with the state, but you're not really

Starting point is 00:17:14 ready to operate because banks, vendors, and partners expect to see them. Plus, you get a free domain, website, email, and phone number when you file your LLC through Northwest, which means your business is ready to operate right away. And your home address never goes on the public record. Northwest uses their own address on your filing instead of yours. So if you want your LLC done right the first time, just go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash ICH to get started. It's Northwest Registeredagent.com slash ICH or click the link down below in the description to get your LLC filed.

Starting point is 00:17:44 Thank you, Northwest Registered Agent for sponsoring this episode. So if you had millions of dollars in call options expiring in one week on this one bet that Amazon would have a good earnings call, what would have happened if the recovery on Amazon came two weeks later? I have resources to continue that trade, just not as large, right? So the trade the next week would have been smaller and the payoff would have been smaller. And you would have just kept rolling that? I would have kept rolling it for a few more weeks. If I had confidence that there was a trigger event that week that gave me a meaningful probability of winning on the trade.

Starting point is 00:18:25 Okay, so like, I can't say this with confidence now. I'd have to like assess the trade at that moment in time. But the Amazon earnings call was a big event. Like it was a meaningful event, which is why I say there was an 80% chance of me hitting the trade. So what's the difference between what you're doing and gambling? Because when it comes to options, you could be right about the stock and just a little off on the timing. And that means you're wrong overall. I hate the gambling analogy because gambling means so.

Starting point is 00:18:55 many things to so many different people. Again, it all starts of what your objectives are and what your risk tolerance is. And on top of that, you have to understand that I do excessive amounts of probability analysis. So I essentially run through every theoretical scenario on that trade. That could happen that I'm aware of. I look through every scenario good and bad. And I make an assessment on how likely each scenario is to play out based on actual research. In this case, over 100 hours of deep research in Amazon. And you're playing probabilities. So I guess theoretically, everything in life is a gamble if you want to look at it like that. I mean, walking outside your door is a gamble because there's a theoretical possibility you could trip and die, right?

Starting point is 00:19:48 So that's why I hate the analogy. It's not like investing versus gambling. It's like, do you understand the risk you're taking and have you done the work? Or are you just willy-nilly throwing money out there that you don't know what the hell you're doing? This is what I do. This is my entire life, guys. So I live for this. And like I said, I think that was about an 80% chance that I would nail that trade.

Starting point is 00:20:16 20% chance I wouldn't. I'm going to take that every single time. And by the way, 80% chance of not doubling your money, 80% chance of like six-xing your money. I mean, that's insane. In fact, I knew when I placed that trade that I was going to be disappointed to myself for not making that trade larger. I knew that that trade should have been triple. It should have been a $30 to $40 million day for me. I knew that.

Starting point is 00:20:44 But with my account hemorrhaging, with all this stuff, happening in my life. I was just like, I just, I wasn't mentally prepared to make the trade. That was my fault. Like, I should have, it should have been a 30 to 40 million dollar day. Do you feel bad about not making 40 million dollars? I don't feel bad, but I do feel, I knew I was going to regret it. When I made the trade, I wasn't like, I'm going to regret making this trade because I might lose my money. It's like, I am going to regret not going bigger into this trade. So it's so funny that I was just telling Jack this. There's a stock I got for 20 bucks. I sold it at 55.

Starting point is 00:21:20 But had I waited, just an hour later, I could have sold it at like 68. And I was telling Jack, man, I lost out of all this money because I could have waited a little more. But at the end of the day, it's like you're just kind of picking reasons not to be happy. Also, it was like $1,000. So like there is a difference. No, it was $9,000 after tax. I don't even know what that means. It was more than a $10,000 profit for waiting like two hours.

Starting point is 00:21:44 Okay. You know, like honestly got, honestly got, this is what pisses for. me off so much about, and I'm not pissed off. By the way, I love all the commentary on X. Like, yeah, my account blew up this last week. I told you guys, I was eating dinner alone in Austin on Friday night at a really nice restaurant sitting in the corner at a table. And it took me like over two hours just to do all the replies to one single thread on X.

Starting point is 00:22:15 I love it. I live for that. Like, I have waited for decades to have a generation start investing, to have a generation caring this much about investing. I don't care if they're critiquing me. The bottom line is they care. This is literally the entirety of my life is to try to get every human on earth into the investor class. And it's actually starting to happen. So I invite it.

Starting point is 00:22:39 I invite the criticism. But I also want people to understand that the majority of investors right now, they're just paying attention to noise. They're all part of the herd. Right? Like that's not how you generate alpha, right? That's not how you knock it out of the park. You have to be an independent thinker.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Everything I see on X right now is noise. Like the easiest trade right now is just not to pay attention to the noise and just actually try to assess the ground truth in something, anything. If you can figure out the ground truth in anything and place a bad. bet on it, you're going to win. I want to show you this tweet that went pretty viral on X. This person retweeted, admittedly while pissing my pants as my account was hemorrhaging, those are the hardest trades you'll ever make, but could be the most rewarding. Please, people, don't get into a trade that makes you piss your pants. This is high-risk stuff,

Starting point is 00:23:37 belongs in the sports betting slash prediction market bucket. Entertaining, sure, and it worked for Chris. But you're far better off just buying and holding great companies using an amount of money that won't make you lose sleep at night or piss your pants. Don't tell people what their account objective is or what their level for risk is. In my account that has an objective to generate outsized returns by taking concentrated levered bets on high conviction trades, there are going to be moments where I have high conviction and I feel that the probability is high that I'm going to win, but there is some probability that I'm going to get wiped out on that trait.

Starting point is 00:24:21 And in those situations, I'm a human and I'm nervous, okay? And I'm going to get nauseous. I might throw up. I might piss my pants. Whatever, right? Like, that is the reality of someone that manages a high risk, high reward account that makes high concentration levered bets on high conviction calls. That's not everyone.

Starting point is 00:24:40 but it's me and it's not just me. There are a lot of people out there that choose to have a separate account or a portion of their account where they want to take levered, concentrated high-risk bets on things they believe in that they put the work in on, that they believe will end up with a good outcome, but know because they're smart enough to know that it's far from a guarantee. and it's okay to be nervous. It's okay to crap your pants for a second, okay, while you're waiting for that earnings report to come out.

Starting point is 00:25:15 Like, I don't see that as bad. But again, it's because of the type of account that I manage, okay? It's my objective. It's my risk tolerance. It's not yours. It's not that guys. But there are a lot of people that want to do that. And like, we're allowed to, and it's not a bad thing.

Starting point is 00:25:34 And when we turn tens of thousands of dollars into tens of millions of dollars into tens of millions of dollars in a high risk, high reward account because we put in the work hundreds and hundreds of hours on these trades. And I've been doing this for 18 years. If you don't agree with it, don't agree with it. I'm not asking you to do it. But there are a lot of people like Chris, I would like to start with a little bit of money and put in a lot of work and take risk with a designated account, not my kid's college education, not my retirement account, right? I want to do it the right way and I'm willing to take on that risk. And it's going to lead to some scary moments, dude.

Starting point is 00:26:13 Like, there's no way of getting around that. There's just not. It's like, we're human. Do you worry that a small subset or maybe actually a larger than small subset, they're not smart enough to make that nuanced decision of, hey, this is a high risk bucket? And they're just going to full port into like, what is Chris invest? Oh, he's buying this. All right.

Starting point is 00:26:34 Let's go all in. And they lose it. it. Yeah, I mean, there's like a million ridiculous things that a person could do in the world from actual gambling on sports, casinos, yoloing your money on option bets. There's a bunch of imbeciles that will tell you to do that, right? If you're one of those people, you're likely to find them and do it. Okay? And I hope you learn your lesson the hard way. It's not likely to be because they're, and, And if they do it because they're following me, I don't know what to tell you, man. You're going to, if it's not me, it's someone else, right? Like, but again, take even five minutes to do your research on me and understand who I am, why I do this, how I do it, how I frame risk, high risk, high reward in a designated account. Like, dude, I'm not going to apologize for it. Like, there are, for every one of me, there's like a million people that are doing the stupidest things in the world.

Starting point is 00:27:34 You just can't. We're adults, I mean, we're adult. If we lived our entire life worried about, you know, the degenerate gambler that's going to misinterpret something that they see out of context, then none of us should be on X talking about anything. None of us should ever talk about anything because someone might read one line out of context and do something crazy or stupid. And by the way, hopefully if they do that, they learn their lesson. They don't do it a hundred times over. You know, like I'm not their parent guys. Like I'm not going to stop sharing my life with the world. Like I share what I do for a reason. I don't make money off it. We all know that. I don't have, don't do anything. I don't have courses.

Starting point is 00:28:16 I don't even take sponsorships. I don't do anything. I literally share my thought patterns for the world to like poke holes in and then take his ideas, take the ideas, do their own homework, risk management. Like, do what they want with it. But like, I don't tell people to do with their accounts. And I don't want anyone tell me what to do at my account or what I should be writing on X. So what's something that you see on X that is objectively noise that a lot of people believe,

Starting point is 00:28:41 but you were able to find the ground truth about. And how did you find the ground truth? I think the best example of this is the CAPX story. Like, it's been driving me not all year. So this is wild to me that we're even having this conversation. Because at no other time in my life would you have companies coming out. and saying, we are so blown away by the demand that we are signing, contractually signing, multi-year demand for this product, that we are going to go out and leverage the entirety of

Starting point is 00:29:17 our balance sheet. And then on top of that, we're going to borrow debt because this is the biggest opportunity we've ever seen in the history of our company to compound returns on our money. over the next few years. And by the way, these aren't just random startups. These are like the biggest most well-run companies in the world by teams that have historically being highly conservative when it comes to CAP-X.

Starting point is 00:29:47 And they're telling you this. And then you have these numskills who work at sell-side banks and like rando retail investors freaking out because the company is reducing their cash flow. Like, that's not what these companies are supposed to be doing. Like, the entire purpose of capital markets is to invest your money into entities that can take your money and do something bigger and better with it, right? That's why we're investing in these companies, right? Because they have an edge.

Starting point is 00:30:25 They have access to resources and distribution and not. knowledge and and like that other companies don't have like they're they're basically leveraging their alpha right to compound returns for us so we want them to do this like it's called a growth company for a reason they basically borrow money at this rate and they make money at this rate i mean like this is how it's always been until this year like it's just wild to me so you're saying that these people that don't know a thing about their business, they're not in these meetings where they're signing multi-year contracts with essentially every one of their companies that they do business with, right?

Starting point is 00:31:13 Like, that we know that these random investors know more than Jassy knows about his own business? Like, I'm going to take that bet all day long. So it's like, but here's the problem. That negativity is what goes viral on X. It drives all the engagement, right? And then there's all these guys with newsletters and guys like Bury that are out there for engagement and selling money with newsletters. And they're just like, it's sickening to watch all these retail investors get pulled into that. Nothing that I did with Amazon was special.

Starting point is 00:31:44 Like, I did not see anything. None of my research resulted in me finding like a needle in the haystack that no one else could see with Amazon. It's all very obvious stuff. that's what's so crazy. It's like, it's not like I did something special here. It's just that I'm not getting caught up in the noise. It's just right in front of our face. Is there an anomaly that could potentially impact Amazon in a negative way?

Starting point is 00:32:10 Of course there is. But that would be the anomaly. People are acting like the anomaly is that what Amazon is saying is the truth. And by the way, like there is some degree of like concentration. with a lot of the compute demand coming from Anthropic, coming from OAI, right? People just are worried that they're not going to make good on their compute contracts.

Starting point is 00:32:41 So what? Like, in the event that OAI did blow up, which, again, if OAI and Anthropic blow up, there are so many things that could happen, right? First of all, the government can backstop them. And they will. They probably will. Like, how did we forget too big to fail?

Starting point is 00:32:58 That's what happened, by the way. 2008, you have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the government. Dude, are these kids? They would not let them fail. I think these retail kid investors are too young to really, to have, if you live through too big to fail, you really understand it, right? Like, it is highly likely. I mean, there's been nothing more important that I could remember in the last 25 years than AI right now.

Starting point is 00:33:24 to like sovereignty. Like you see what's happening with China? Do you really think that our government is going to let OAI, an anthropic fail? Not because we care about those two companies, but the avalanche that would happen after them, right? So what would happen? They would come and they would backstock, stop them,

Starting point is 00:33:43 and they would help negotiate a deal to transfer that to other entities that have the technical infrastructure and the best. balance sheets to take them over, right? And those new entities, however many are involved in that deal, would take over the compute contracts, right? It's just that simple. And I think everyone is also concerned. I mean, there's a lot of concerns.

Starting point is 00:34:12 And this is where the opportunity is, right? Because, like, no one understands AI in the financial world. The world of finance has become so short-sighted and, like, ADD, I don't think anyone does deep research anymore. Neopold does. I mean, there are a few people that do deep research. But most of the research I see getting printed is just copy and paste. It's very surface level or people are just going for engagement and clicks.

Starting point is 00:34:44 But if you do the research, it is, it's like so clear that it would be an anomaly for, for the value of compute to just go away quickly anytime in the near future while these contracts are meaningfully important for these hyperscalers. What did you learn this last month about investing and risk management? Six years ago, I was working for Graham for completely free and then we launched this podcast and I started making a little bit of money and I was investing every single dollar I earned. And that turned into me buying my first property in 2021 and my second property in 2025, which is exactly where we're filming right now.

Starting point is 00:35:24 But here's the part nobody tells you. The more you build, the messier it gets to manage, which is exactly why we've partnered with Monarch. For those are aware, Monarch is the personal finance app that tracks everything. We're talking accounts, investments, spending income, you name it. Without exaggeration, this is something that I've been doing myself manually for years, probably since I was like in my early 20s.

Starting point is 00:35:45 I'd be writing down on like a computer notepad, exactly what I was spending where the money was. but Monarch aggregates it all perfectly so I could see it all in one dashboard. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent. Monarch helps you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. They even have an investment view where you could see how your portfolio is doing compared to the S&P 500.

Starting point is 00:36:08 And it spots stuff that you would not think to look for with AI insights, like has your spending actually gone up or is it just inflation? Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code iced coffee at Monarch.com to get your money. first year of Monarch Core half off at $50.00. It's 50% off the first year at Monarch.com or click the link down below in the description with the code, iced coffee. Quick thanks to Ethos for sponsoring this episode.

Starting point is 00:36:34 For those unawares, I've been married for over a year now, and things have been great. But there's the added layer of responsibility when you're committed to someone. It's really forced me to think about uncomfortable stuff, like, what happens to her if something happens to me? It's not a fun question, but if someone depends on you, you should know the answer. And that's what today's sponsor ethos is for. Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. It's 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, and get same-day coverage with no medical

Starting point is 00:36:59 exam required. Just answer a few basic health questions. You could get up to $3 million in coverage, with some policies starting as low as $30 a month. If you're young and healthy, right now is when you lock in the best rates. Don't wait until that changes. Even if you have life insurance through your employer, it may not be enough to actually cover your family, and it almost certainly does not follow you.

Starting point is 00:37:19 if you leave the job. Ethos is 4.8 out of five stars on Trust Pilot with over 4,000 reviews, and you'll get your lowest rate through their network of trusted carriers. Getting started takes about 10 minutes. So take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash iced coffee. Again, that's ETHOS.com slash iced coffee. The link is also down below in the description. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. What did you learn this last month about investing and risk management? The thing I learned more than anything else, not just this month, but the entirety of this year, is that for the first time ever, there are single accounts and small groups of influential people, both on the retail side of Wall Street and on the institutional side of Wall Street, that can meaningfully manipulate the market over a short period of time. it's because we're so digitally connected, right, through X,

Starting point is 00:38:20 and there's so much of a herd mentality right now around the subject matter that is so confusing and so intimidating to people, meaning AI, whenever you have the driver of a market being something that people don't understand, there is an opportunity for people to manipulate the market by showing confidence one way or the other, even if they're faking it, right?

Starting point is 00:38:49 So if 99% of the market really doesn't understand AI on the day-to-day basis, and I believe that's the case, when someone comes out that has an institutional pedigree and says something, you're going to either think that they know what they're talking about or that they have information from somebody. And that's exactly what happened last week, Ken Griffin and Citadel because when Citadel came out and said that they thought that interest rates were going to go up, there was an assumption that they knew something. Okay. That type of power is insane to me. I don't know what we do about it, but the market is more easily manipulated today than ever before. Talking about that, do you think that that was done on purpose to margin call Leopold and take over his. fund. Yes, I think it was done as part of the trade. Obviously, part of the trade was just the market doing

Starting point is 00:39:54 what the market does. We had Kimmy come out. That was creating a lot of concern that Chinese open models were going to basically, you know, democratize compute. That was a false assumption, at least for the moment. So there were narratives that, were already putting him in a bad situation. Additionally, Leopold made some bad trade decisions. Leopold might ultimately be right with his thesis, meaning that AI and AGI is going to eat all software. So he had long bets on various AI and he had short bets on software. But he's a bit young and naive to fully assess how long it takes sometimes for things to play out because he just doesn't have that degree of experience. So he actually did make some mistakes with his thesis. And he opened

Starting point is 00:40:57 himself up to the possibility of being manipulated. So yes, absolutely. I think people piled on. I think it's more likely than not that Citadel saw the opportunity. They know exactly what's going to happen. They knew that they would be one of two or three people in the room when he was forced to liquidate. And, you know, they ended up making, I think, two to two and a half billion dollars last week on this trade. Citadel did. Quick two to two and a half billion dollars that made the month. It probably made the quarter for them off of one trade. This is what they do. This is a big boy game, right? And like, that's on Leopold. Like, you got to, you got to know that. Probably learned his lesson now. But I learned that in the short term, it's less about ground truth today than it

Starting point is 00:41:44 ever has been. Meaning, as an investor, if you're making short-term leverage bets, there are more things that you don't know than ever before. Because any number of influential people or influential groups can come out and manipulate the market on a day-to-day basis, even if what they're saying is incorrect, wrongly assumed, or just outright made up for manipulation. So why couldn't this happen to you? It could. And that's something that I need to assess with every trade that I make. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to make the trade.

Starting point is 00:42:22 I told you that I thought there was an 80% chance of that trade going right, not a 99% chance. I think that's a very fair assessment of the risk of that trade. I was like 99% sure that my work was correct on Amazon and they were going to knock it out of the park and they were going to say these certain things during the earnings call. That's exactly what happened. The other 19% that could go wrong are other things. Iran, Trump, some other thing happening over. overnight, some other rumor that gets started on Amazon? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:43:01 Like, I think honestly, guys, if this was like a couple years ago, it would have been like a 95% chance that I was going to get that trade right and a 5% chance I wouldn't. But because of these factors, I'm calling it 80-20. Yeah. Which I think is a fair assessment of the risk. Who should listen to you and what type of person would listen to you and wind up losing everything? Well, I think every investor should listen to me.

Starting point is 00:43:27 for my ideas. And then they should take those ideas and do their own research and try to pull holes in them and try to vet them, come up with their own thesis that might or might not have anything to do with my idea. And then assess their own level of risk tolerance and make the trade that's correct for them. Okay. One of the things that I do that I think I don't get enough credit for is I would. will always spend more time trying to understand the other side of my trades than I do my own thesis. So I've spent more time this year trying to understand why people are not excited about Amazon and why they might even be short hyper-scalers and Amazon than I have with my own thesis.

Starting point is 00:44:18 Because in order for you to gain real conviction on a trade, you have to understand the other side of the trade. because once you understand why people disagree with you, you can now make a proper assessment of whether you think they're right or wrong. But you got to hear them out. And that's really meaningful. So you should listen to me because I have, you know, I have really strong takes. I do a tremendous amount of work on my high conviction trades. There are very few people right now that will spend 50 to 100 hours researching a single trade.

Starting point is 00:44:51 And if you could find those people, I'm going to listen to every one of them that I know to do that. right? So like, I'm going to hear him out. That doesn't mean you should copy my trade. It doesn't even mean you should be influenced by. So what do you say to the people, though, that just see, oh, Chris bought this. Let me go and buy this too. Or let me buy call options on this. Actually insane. Because if you don't develop your own sense of conviction, then you're not going to be able to make the right decisions around that trade, especially when it goes wrong, right? Because if you actually have real conviction because you put in the actual work that you should be doing on these trades, then you're going to be aware of how to frame the trade. You're going to understand that there's a chance that trade one could go wrong, but you're going to have money and conviction to make that trade again the next week.

Starting point is 00:45:44 And that that's actually more often than not an opportunity because like, you know, what I've even saying for months, I hope Amazon goes down. I hope Amazon goes down. And it did. It went down. That just opens up an opportunity. Truthfully, I got really more killed by Bloom than anything else. Like, and other AI trades. It wasn't like Amazon that like killed me because guys, as Amazon went down, like, I'd just been piling in again the whole way up.

Starting point is 00:46:14 What's the number one trade you've ever done? Amazon, NVIDIA, Pallenteer, Robin Hood. a lot of the biggest trades I've made in terms of like actual returns, not just percentage, but actual dollar returns have mostly come in the last two years. Because you have more money now? Exactly. Yeah. And so the figure that's being thrown around is like the $20,000 to $80 million.

Starting point is 00:46:40 Is $80 million approximately what you've traded up from this $20,000? Yeah, it's approximately what I've generated in returns. Again, you pay taxes on those returns. As you guys know, I've invested in 160 private companies. So essentially every year for the past 17 years, I paid my taxes. I've then taken money out for living expenses. And then the majority that was left, I would invest in private companies, which again was the biggest mistake in my life because I should have just left all the money in that

Starting point is 00:47:13 public. Do you actually mean that? Because a few of your private company investments seem like they're doing incredibly well. No, in aggregate, they've returned like 10 or 12% in aggregate, as opposed to like the 60 to 70% I've been averaging in my public portfolio for 17 years. So, no, financially it would have been meaningfully better. I'd be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds of millions. I'd be like six or 700 million dollars now if I would have just kept the money in the brokerage account and never invested in a single private company. I wouldn't have met the interesting people I've met over the past 16 years.

Starting point is 00:47:48 years. So like, I don't regret doing it for that because I've met so many amazing people. I'm in so many deals. I've learned so much. And guys, you know this. I have at least one massively large private investment that could end up making me something close to that if it hits in the next few years. At what point is the risk just not worth it? Because Jack and I were talking last night, how much do you decide to put on each trade? Like, let's say there's a 20% chance you get 100x, but an 80% chance it goes to zero. How do you know how much to put in that or if that's a deal worth taking? Again, everyone has to answer that question for themselves because everyone has a different degree of risk tolerance based on what you need to live, okay, versus what your account objective is.

Starting point is 00:48:37 There are a lot of people that do not have an objective to make hundreds of millions or a billion dollars. They don't even know what they would do with it, right? I'm obviously doing it for noble causes. You guys know me. I have big philanthropic goals in my life. But most people would generate very little additional value beyond $10 or $20 or $30 million. So why would they put everything at risk to become destitute to make more money that they would probably not make them any more fulfilled in life or content with their life? So like everyone has to make their own decision.

Starting point is 00:49:09 But for me, I'll take that money long. Like if it's a high probability, I'll take it because. I have everything I want in life. I don't need anything more in life. I'm set for the rest of my life. And the money that is in my trading account is there to aggressively grow for something big that I'm trying to achieve in life. And that's what I do. So like, it has a very clear objective.

Starting point is 00:49:36 And I will never hit that objective if I am not concentrated and levered in my high conviction trades. And so I will continue to do that, knowing that there is a very tiny chance that I could make six or seven of these high conviction trades in a row that all go bad, and the account gets wiped out. But that's my risk tolerance. That's for me only and nobody else in this world. So that's the risk tolerance that makes sense for my account objective and no one else. and it's not my fault if some random person sees one line of text out of hundreds of hours of video content and literally thousands to tens of thousands of tweets and knows nothing about me and is like this random person just did this so I'm going to do it too like what sense does that make

Starting point is 00:50:29 that makes no sense and if you're going to get irritated at me like i cannot go over my entire account objective every time i say something on twitter that that wouldn't make sense. What would my tweets look like? I'd have to have like paragraphs and paragraphs of this is who I am. This is what I'm trying to do. I have these other accounts. I have restaurants that cash flow for me. My houses are paid off. Like, I can't do that. It's insane that people expect that. What is the rule that you follow to determine your risk tolerance floor? Like, what is the base amount of quality of life or maximum amount of risk that you are willing to take on? I have confidence I'm not going to make six high conviction trades wrong in a row. And I would have to make six in a row to lose all my money. So like just do the math on that, you know? Like I do it six in a row and I'm dead. So like I've never made more than like two bad calls in a row that were high conviction.

Starting point is 00:51:28 Could it happen? Could it kind of go to three? Like really big, really big high conviction calls. What about for the people who say that you can't consistently beat the market? It seems like you have consistently beat the market. There are a ton of people that consistently beat the market. Tons. They're in my community.

Starting point is 00:51:47 They've been doing it for 10 years. And they're just regular people. There are so many people out there that have generated 15 to 25% returns for 10 to 15 years. Do you think, though, that if you just have enough people, and let's just say everyone threw a dart on a board, with enough people, there would be a small subset of those people who just consistently get it right and maybe attribute that to skill rather than just a bit of luck too. Yeah, of course. So survivorship bias as a portion of those things. Not everything's black and white, right? It's not like everyone that has consistently beat the market over 10 years has done so because they have a great methodology and a system. And not everyone that's done that over 10 years has done it just purely because of survivorship bias. So I think we have to take a look at each individual and say, okay, what do you do? How do you beat the market? What I do is so transparent and simple. I simply try to uncover change in the world quicker than others and connect dots to companies that would benefit from that change. I try to find the ground truth and information asymmetry

Starting point is 00:53:04 when the world is confused about something because they're caught up in noise and misinformation and I actually did the homework to figure out what's true knowing that that will eventually surface and I make my bets. That's what I did with Amazon, right? So like what I do is not mysterious. I don't have like some black box mysterious trading system.

Starting point is 00:53:26 You know what I'm saying? Like it's just freaking makes sense. Like I don't know how else to say it. Like I don't know. how else to say it, guys. Like, you know my method. I've had like 70 trades, 80 trades over 17 years, and every one of them has a story. I invested in Amazon early on when I went to Reddit forums and technology forums and saw a lot of technologists talking about migrating to the cloud at their company. Well, tons of devs are migrating their company's data to the cloud. This AWS is going to be a big

Starting point is 00:54:01 deal. I'm going to invest in Amazon because of AWS, because I was essentially able to see cloud computing as it was emerging. Does that seem mystical to you or does that just make sense? Right? Like it's it's not it's not like that difficult to understand what I do. And I think that's the problem that most people have with it. They're like it's not that it is that easy, but it's also hard because you just you have to you can't do that and be on Twitter all day paying attention all the stupid noise you know like you have to if you want to do that you have to clear your mind you actually have to see what's real what are your overall thoughts then of leopold as an investor and what words would you have for him if you were sitting right here right now now really quick

Starting point is 00:54:48 here's that have noticed everybody has a business idea that they've been sitting on but what stops them isn't necessarily the idea itself. It's everything that comes afterwards. It's building a website, building out the store, creating the checkout page, and so on. Thankfully, though, our partner, Shopify handles it all pretty much for you. Everything that you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. That includes the moment your first customer is ready to pay, Shopify checkout helps more of them actually finish their purchase. Plus, when they come back, their details are already saved, so it's one click and done. I've personally set up several different Shopify stores, because before I was working with Graham, I tried drop shipping, and I actually made some sales,

Starting point is 00:55:27 me. Of all people, I was able to do it, which just shows that Shopify is the easiest way to start an online brand and actually see real sales coming in. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Mattel and Jim Shark, to everyday businesses just getting started. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash ICH, once again, that is Shopify.com slash ICH. Once again, that's Shopify.com slash ICH with the link down below in the description. What are your overall thoughts then of Leopold as an investor?

Starting point is 00:56:03 And what words would you have for him if you were sitting right here right now? I think Leopold is, has unique insight into the most important subject matter that we've ever seen in our lifetime when it comes to investing, meaning AI. Like if AI is the biggest thing that we've ever seen hit our global economy and financial markets, Leopold is directly at the nucleus of the ground truth of what's happening in that world. If you look at his background, you know, where he worked, what he was doing, he obviously has the ability to like assess what's real and connect dots. but he was also in the right places with the right people. I mean, we all know who his wife is, right? So, like, he is so in the mix of this world.

Starting point is 00:57:02 And he saw it early. And he's like, listen, this is real. I know it's real because I'm literally seeing it with my own eyes. And unlike everyone else that sees it and just like, let's time pass by. He's like, I see it and I'm going to trade on it. And so he does, you know, him and his team do these really great reports. You might have read them on what he sees. And it's nothing mystical.

Starting point is 00:57:28 It's like he's just explaining what's happening and who's going to benefit from it. Now, is it perfect? No. Like, is his, is his thesis perfect? No. Is his timing off? Probably. I think one of the best criticisms of Leopold is that he's a technologist and he's young.

Starting point is 00:57:47 but he doesn't have a whole lot of business acumen. So he doesn't really fully understand the moats and the realities of how slow sometimes, you know, technology moves through the business world. So even if you have a superior product, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a superior business. And it could take forever, right, for that to play out. So a lot of people are like, you know, we hate Microsoft and shouldn't use these Microsoft products, but there's a reason why Microsoft has that stickiness and has been able to generate the revenue they've generated forever, right? A lot of people are like Salesforce sucks. Everyone hates Salesforce, but they have this distribution

Starting point is 00:58:36 mode that unless you've been in the business world for a long time and have been deeply engaged of what it's like for systematic change transformation at a large incumbent business, you can't fully appreciate how important those things are. So he's just a young kid and it's like, we're going to AGI. we're going to eat every company in the world. Those companies are going out of business. Maybe Leopold. Maybe they will.

Starting point is 00:59:05 But it might take five to ten times longer than you think it's going to take. And it might take even longer for people to appreciate what you see. So like he doesn't have that wisdom either as a business person or as an investor. So I think that's where Leopold is weak. Have you ever spoken to him? No. But we have mutual friends. And the mutual friends we have in common have nothing but great things to say about him.

Starting point is 00:59:37 I mean, me and Leopold and a group of friends, we all had the same thesis on Bloom. And nobody believed in that thesis early on. Nobody believed in Bloom. Not institutional investors, not retail investors. We've all seen the same short reports come out on Bloom every six to nine months, right? Like no one did the homework on Bloom. He did it. I did it.

Starting point is 01:00:01 I have a very close friend. Gianchu, who's one of our mutuals, he did it. So like, I have a lot of respect for him. And I think he's going to be back bigger than ever at some point in the future. Are you worried with how much leverage there is in the markets? Like, we've seen what happened with Korea. We saw what happened with people taking on a lot of margin, these leveraged ETFs. Is that a concern to you?

Starting point is 01:00:24 And is that a concern that maybe that's going to cause? the market to skyrocket faster than it should, and then drop a lot faster than it should. Yeah, I don't love it. But it's an opportunity. At IKEA, we make things just for college life, like the Rosenmandel blackout curtains in gray. They say you can't put a price on sleep, but we did for the low low, low price of $49. Why are you in my room? Shh, go back to sleep. You have a peak. exam tomorrow. Shop back to school at IKEA. It's an opportunity on both sides of the trade, right? Because we have

Starting point is 01:01:08 this leverage, things tend to move quickly, quickly up, quickly down. Bloom Energy is a great example of that. A big reason why Bloom moved as quickly as it did was because of the leverage not just applied by Leopold, but applied by South Korea. It was like one of the most actively traded stocks in South Korea. The reason why it blew up as quickly as it did is because of that leverage. So as long as you understand that the leverage exist and you know where it exists in the market, you can adjust for it, but you do have to be careful. I think where it gets dangerous is the combination of leverage plus influence and manipulation. Again, but that's okay because we know this now. Right. So like, I'm not afraid of anything that I know exists.

Starting point is 01:01:56 I just have to account for it in my thesis. I have to account for it in my trade strategy. I have to account for it in my risk management. And I do. So there's no reason to be afraid of anything as long as we know it exists. Where things get scary is when things pop up that we didn't know existed until after they blow. What are you paying attention to right now in the stock market? I'm really paying attention more so than ever to the attention trade.

Starting point is 01:02:26 meaning like where people have their attention, even if the information's not truthful, I think those will probably be some of the biggest short-term trades the next couple of years. Give us an example of that that you're seeing today. I know that we are going to enter into another flood cycle on AI. I've already done some research with AI to try to assess what that's going to look like. What will the narratives be like that people use to try to crash the AI? sector in 30 to 90 days, right? We know it's coming. And so I think one of the biggest opportunities is to assess who is influential in this market. And what are those narratives and to what degree

Starting point is 01:03:15 are those narratives starting to accelerate and to be mentally prepared? I talk about this all this time. Having a prepared mind is extraordinarily important, meaning you have to get ahead of what might happen. So I run scenario analysis, right? This is scenario analysis. I'm talking to you guys about. One of my scenarios is that at some points, I'm still heavily invested and levered in the AI sector right now,

Starting point is 01:03:40 is that I want to try to get in front of the next FUD cycle. I want to do a better job than I did this time. I don't want to take as large of a drawdown than next time the FUD cycle hits. So, for example, I knew Kimmy was coming. Okay. I knew that Kimmy could be a threat, but I did not place enough emphasis on the acceleration of the Kimmy narrative as it was happening and the open source narrative. I need to take those things even more seriously next time around. So what am I doing? I'm looking for the next narrative that is going to be used by all the anti-AI guys and everyone that wants. wants to crash the market and all the people that are short, all these names, I'm trying to figure out who should I be following that was really influential this last flood cycle because they're

Starting point is 01:04:38 likely to be influential the next time. And I'm trying to like build some tools and I'm working with some different people to try to figure out how to measure the acceleration of that narrative. Because if it starts to accelerate quickly, then that is a signal. especially if we get into a levered state again, that we could see a massive correction in AI stocks. So what does that look like in terms of practical things that the average person can practice? Does that mean that they should have more dry powder set aside to be able to take an advantage of the next potential drawdown where the forces at B or the powers that B can, you know, manufacture some sort of drawdown? people can get involved with that. Does it mean like avoid some leverage at least for the near future? And this is obviously not financial advice. It's just like, how are you reflecting this

Starting point is 01:05:34 belief in your portfolio? Also, with that being said, I've always wanted to do this because I thought it would be cool for you guys. I got these, uh, Ray ban like, uh, meta glasses. And I was thinking how cool would be if they're super fogged up or whatever, or just dirty. If I like filmed and you guys could see what it's actually like to like sit at the table of the ice coffee hour. So I kind of like record on this. I actually don't look. terrible on you. Thanks. And they usually look terrible. I feel like the viewers would think it's kind of cool. Dude, I think they look reasonably good on you. Thanks. Am I wrong? They do. They do look good. Thanks. They're a little bit bulky. It's a little thick. Yeah. Those,

Starting point is 01:06:11 those glasses look great on you. It's like interesting, because I never seen anyone wear those glasses and like the interesting reflector things on the top of the frame. But I thought it'd be cool if you guys just kind of see what it's like to sit at the table of the ice coffee hour. Yeah. So how are you practicing this belief that you have? I think one of the biggest lies that investors tell themselves is that they're addicted to basically like making money. And I actually don't think that that's true. I think we're addicted to like more of the emotional hit of getting it right. Okay.

Starting point is 01:06:48 And those are two very different things. My worst investments are never made after I've lost my last. money, they're always made after a great well-researched investment because I'm sitting on a pile of cash, right? My confidence levels up, the dopamine is hitting, and I find myself chasing, like, that next emotional hit, as opposed to, like, being patient and waiting for the next great investment. So I've come up with this, like, hack, and I've been using it the last couple years, and it's something like, like, I really want to share this with other investors because they're like, what should you be doing differently? Don't lie to yourself. We're all chasing it, right? We're all

Starting point is 01:07:30 over investing. We're investing too often. We're convincing ourselves that we did the work when we didn't do the work. We're convincing ourselves that this investment is well researched when it's actually not. So when you have a low to medium conviction trade or you find yourself just wanting to do something, just do it with a much, much smaller amount of money. I noticed that you get like 90 to 95% of the emotional, like, the emotional benefit of making that trade, whether you're right or whether you're wrong, at like a minuscule amount of the financial risk.

Starting point is 01:08:15 And so, like, traders don't believe this, but it works. They don't think that if you make a tiny trade, they're going to get that dopamine hit. You still get the dopamine hit, most of it. And you're not doing something financially irresponsible. And like, I've been doing this now for like a couple years because I'll make a high conviction trade. I don't have the time to spend another hundred hours on another high conviction trade,

Starting point is 01:08:37 but I also don't like sitting on the sidelines. I start to get like anxious. Like I kind of do something. Like, I want that feeling again. And often I will have like, I will do some research, right? and I'll be semi-confident in a trade. I just have trained myself to go in really small. And I get to go through the entire experience, right?

Starting point is 01:09:00 What are the smallest positions that you take then? Very small. Like, I would say, like, 2 to 3% of what I would normally trade in a high-conviction trade. So, like, instead of, like, chasing the dopamine, it's like, okay, you're not fighting the dopamine. You're just basically, you're redirecting it. Okay? into something that's more financially responsible. And like, again, like, you wouldn't believe that it would work.

Starting point is 01:09:25 Like, I didn't believe that it worked. I've been doing it now for so long that I just recommend that something that everybody try because I'm seeing all these people all the time making trades. And I'm just like, there's no way that you did the homework on that. There's no way that you should be that confident in so many different things. Because, you know, like, I'll spend six months on a trade to get that confident, to where I'll do what I did on Amazon, or Bloom Energy, or Palantir, before it, or Nvidia, or Robin Hood. All of those trades were 50 to 100-hour research trades.

Starting point is 01:10:01 And you can't do those every month, obviously. But everyone wants to be part of the culture of this market. Like you're on X, everyone's talking about what they're doing. Like you want to participate. Earnings are coming out. You want to be part of that. You want to be part of the roller coaster excitement. If they hit earnings, you want to make money.

Starting point is 01:10:19 So just do it small. Do it really small. So this really isn't then for most people because we were talking about it yesterday, how much free time you have because you don't have a day job. But for a lot of people out there that do have certain things that they need to do on a recurring basis, like a job or like this or like that, they just don't simply have the time to pick out individual stocks. That's probably like 90 to 95% of the people. For those people, you would just recommend passive ETFs, you know, VU or just sort of like even a single ETA.

Starting point is 01:10:49 portfolio. You only need to find one good trade every five to 10 years to be like a top 1% investor over the course of your life. So like you don't need to be finding new stocks every month or every three months or every six months. But everyone has time to start observing the world and connecting dots to start to retrain your mind to see things early. The same way I saw AWS, the same way I saw like all these stories when I see shifts happening and change happening. like that's just living life you're not doing you're you're just literally reading social media but that assumes that you're good at buying

Starting point is 01:11:26 at the right time and then also selling at the right time and knowing when to get out because you could get a great stock on the way up and then just keep holding and it eventually goes back down and then sell it like for a loss I think you're over you're overthinking it yeah you could you could perfect the methodology it's all about information dissemination you invest when you know something that other people have

Starting point is 01:11:49 been seen and you exit the investment when the rest of the world sees what you saw, right? Like all the people that made all their money on Tesla back in the day, they simply got in a Tesla and drove one. They're like, this is a game changing moment for the world and they invested in Tesla. And then some number of years later, when the rest of the world was hyped on Tesla, they decided, well, I made all this money. Everyone kind of knows what I know now. So I'm going to sell, right?

Starting point is 01:12:12 It doesn't have to be an all or none decision. Like, I always say if you are unsure about something, buy half. sell half. Like that's the other rule that I live by. It's such a dumb rule, by the way. It's like, it's such a dumb rule. It's like, every time someone is confused, they call me. They're like, dude, I don't know, man. I'm just like, I'm at odds. Should I exit? I was like, dude, if you're at odds, just sell half of whatever you're planning on selling. And if it goes your way, be so happy that you pulled the trigger or sell half. If it doesn't go your way, be so happy that you didn't sell it all. You know what I'm saying? Like that that's, dude, it's psychology. This, this psychology part of

Starting point is 01:12:55 investing is so important and you have control over it. Dude, I've been doing that forever. It works. It actually works. Glass half full, right? Like, it's the greatest thing in the world. You don't have to overthink investing. You don't have to nail every trade. Just like live your life, when you see something that's pop in, that you connect the dots to a company, it's going to benefit from it. If the whole world's already talking about it, you probably have some edge there. So after this last big win then, are you still invested aggressively in nebious, Bloom, and Amazon? Mainly Bloom and Amazon, yes. I think the big picture here is that everyone has the wrong framing for this AI super cycle. People are trying to frame the size of this AI sector by how much money it could potentially

Starting point is 01:13:48 make companies or save companies, I think history will reveal that we will only know the value of AI once we understand what can be built once compute becomes fully abundant. Okay. So what I mean by that is our minds can't actually even assess the value of the AI sector today because until compute becomes truly abundant, we won't know what we can do with it as a civilization. Think about movies that rewrite themselves in real time based on your emotions,

Starting point is 01:14:33 personalized movies, okay? Think about video games that have no scripted content because they're being generated in real time. Think about having 24-7 scientific discoveries made with tens of millions of agents that are operating on the equivalent of trillions of dollars of compute today, right? We're extending life. I think what we'll ultimately find out is that AI will be looked at in the future as something

Starting point is 01:15:03 that looks much less like software and much more like the, you know, electricity, basically, like the founding of electricity. So if you think about that, when we discovered electricity, were we able to capably understand what the world would do with that? Just think about that. When we discovered electricity,

Starting point is 01:15:24 were we able to comprehend how that would change the world and what economies would be grown from that and industries and sectors? Absolutely not. So it's insane that we think we could actually frame the size of the AI world

Starting point is 01:15:39 based on the world today. We just don't have enough compute and enough capacity to even assess what we want to do with it yet. So we need to get out of the current frame and understand that there's a different framework that we're not ready for.

Starting point is 01:15:56 That will emerge over the next 10 to 15 years. And that's how I think about it. So if you think about it like that, whoever those leaders are, and they could change over time, I need to be heavily invested. I just have to be. So I saw this tweet that says,

Starting point is 01:16:13 here's how you retire in five years. Right now, the biggest play is AI infrastructure. Then from 2028 to 2030, it's the AI power grids. And then from 2030 onwards, it's physical AI and robotics. What are your thoughts on that? That could be true, but I have a bit of a different, non-competitive thesis on what I'm focused on. Obviously, in the last show, we talked a lot about the AI efficiency wave

Starting point is 01:16:40 and how the next big leg up in technology would be any company that, it's going to benefit from AI, right? Save money from AI or generate more revenue from AI because you essentially now can grow, you can grow as a company without having to spend infinitely to grow, right, if intelligence is free. I think the biggest opportunity going forward when it comes to monetizing AI are those companies that have distribution. So I just got you guys a coffee and iced coffee. Got you guys an ice coffee.

Starting point is 01:17:15 when you guys were setting up. I love that. And so when I went in my car, I spilled one from those cups, right? Why can we not make better coffee cups, right? And I was thinking infinite intelligence and AI is going to enable us to make way better plastic coffee cups that are way cheaper. I don't even know what that means right now, but it will. And you could say that for essentially every single product in the world. we're going to figure out how to make better products way cheaper because having access to

Starting point is 01:17:49 infinite intelligence is going to teach us how to do that. So who's going to benefit from that? Is it going to be a startup that develops the next best plastic coffee cup when we have infinite ubiquitous intelligence or will it be the company that already has massive distribution in coffee cups if every company is going to have access to that intelligence at the same time. I just want to say, I have no idea why they've not put gimbals in cars for cups, because that you have, you could have a coffee filled all the way to the brim and you make a turn and it just turns in such a way. I've seen it. I've seen, I have never seen that. I think in a Ferrari or a sports car or a Porsche, a little like just something. Okay, but do you don't remember

Starting point is 01:18:35 the infomercial cup from like 12 years ago that it would, it had that counterbalancing in the cup itself? That was essentially what you're talking about. In the, Why don't they put that in cars? Because no one even buys the cup anymore. I don't know. You might be overthinking it. Even though it makes sense, people don't care. I've spilled so much coffee because I fill it up to the top and I just take a turn too much and the thing just spills over.

Starting point is 01:18:56 But listen, think about what I just said. Yes. It's not going to be a new company. It's going to be because once intelligence becomes fully democratized and free, you don't have any inherent advantage by coming up with something. better, the company that has the distribution already is the company that's going to get that advantage because everyone will have access to the best coffee cup design simultaneously. So the company that already has the distribution of the coffee cups and has the manufacturing facility and has the logistics and has the deployment of billions of coffee cups is going to get to make

Starting point is 01:19:36 coffee cups cheaper and better, but mainly cheaper, right? And that company is going to become more profitable. And you could repeat that story for almost every single company in the world that has massive distribution and moats in their industry sector that do not rely on intelligence. That's why I'm so hyped on Amazon, because Amazon is a company that spent 25 years building a global logistics network, distribution around the world, invested tens and tens of billions of dollars doing that, right? But you just need to look at companies that can operate more efficiently once intelligence becomes infinite. And it's all about distribution.

Starting point is 01:20:22 Those that have distribution will win. So if I'm an investor right now and I'm thinking the next five years, the next eight years, who are going to be the big winners that no one's talking about today because maybe they're boring companies, I'm going to look at companies that have massive distribution modes because once the intelligence wave hits, they are going to win in so many ways, every way, right? They'll be making their products cheaper. In fact, I just saw, I just read an earnings report earlier today on a trade I got lucky on. It was booking.com.

Starting point is 01:20:55 Yes. And I was scanning the earnings report and I noticed something in there. And it is that the cost of their customer service at booking.com was meaningfully coming down due to the AI tools that they've been, developing and instituting across the organization. We hadn't seen that yet, guys. Like, we had not seen that hit regular end climate. This is what I was talking about, right? The AI efficiency wave.

Starting point is 01:21:24 This is just one little piece of information. If we start to see that wording starting to come out more and more in earnings reports, we're lowering our costs to this AI. Watch out. You were going to see AI blow up unlike we've ever seen it before. because that is the last leg that everyone's waiting for. Everyone that is anti-AI in terms of not believing in its value keeps raising the bar and raising the bar. At first it was like, hey, the hyperscalers are not seeing any returns on their investments.

Starting point is 01:21:57 Okay, well, they're seeing their returns, but they're only seeing returns because all these companies are spending so much money on compute with them. And they're not seeing any returns on their investment. And so eventually it's all going to unwind. As soon as we start to see all the world's companies saying, nope, we're operating at higher efficiency. We are now growing and we're able to make this step growing because we can grow more efficiently. Like we would have to spend this much money to enter this space, but now we're doing it for 10 cents on the dollar. And so we're taking that initiative and now we're generating more revenue, more profits. As soon as those reports start hitting the street, that is going to lead to, I think, the biggest mega cycle that we've ever seen in AI yet.

Starting point is 01:22:42 Because it's not about 20 companies, guys. It's about every, theoretically, every company in the S&P, right, for the most, not all of them. Yeah, like whichever ones. So last time we talked about companies that would benefit from efficiencies, and that still exist, and also from from revenue expansion due to being able to operate and grow more efficiently.

Starting point is 01:23:05 So now a use case that didn't make sense for them before now makes sense because the costs are lower so they can chase that use case. This time we're talking about the companies that benefit most are the ones that have moats and distribution.

Starting point is 01:23:18 So that's where I'm looking the next year. I'm trying to decipher who has the biggest distribution modes because intelligence is going to bring costs down massively. What do you think about the SpaceX IPO? Because that's now down, I believe, over 40% from its peak.

Starting point is 01:23:35 At what price do you buy SpaceX? If you look at everything I said about SpaceX, you can tell I was trying to like be really careful with my words because so many retail investors were so hyped on SpaceX. I wanted to kind of warn them. But like, I didn't want to like, I didn't want to like, I didn't want to be the guy to like poop on the party. Right. And SpaceX did so well when it IPOed. I was really happy for all these people that made money. But the truth is, as I said before, anyone with any amount of money, institutions or high net worth, has been pitched SpaceX a hundred times in the 12 to 18 months before that IPO.

Starting point is 01:24:16 So anyone with real money had the ability to invest in SpaceX at hundreds of billions of dollars. And virtually nothing has changed between them, then and now. So I think it's insane seeing SpaceX at a trillion. If you love it at a trillion and a half and you have money to invest, you should have been investing aggressively at three, four, five hundred billion. So like I just don't know, I don't understand. It makes zero sense. Could you say that about Tesla?

Starting point is 01:24:43 Because a lot of people said the same thing about Tesla that, oh, it's overvalued, it's this and that, but it's still somehow managed to. No. No, the numbers are totally different. I just risk reward on large numbers here. I mean, the numbers aren't there. The numbers are only there for SpaceX under like theoreticals that are years out, which is why I said, you know, if you want to invest in SpaceX and the story continues to get better and better, it's possible with a blue sky company like that, that people will continue to value it for what they might build 10 years from now. And if you want to be part of that game, then go ahead and be part of that.

Starting point is 01:25:21 It's not something I'm interested. For me, that's a highly speculative game based on something that might or might never materialize. When I look at SpaceX's actual business, I love it. And that's why I invested in it at $30 billion. Okay, I loved what they were doing with satellites. And I was like, this satellite business is going to be worth more than $30 billion. I see it at $1.6 trillion today, even after the move down. You said it was like $1.6 trillion.

Starting point is 01:25:51 Is that right? 1.6 today after being down 40%. I'm like, whatever people are seeing in SpaceX is something more than I'm able to see. So I only invest in companies when I see something that others don't. It's the opposite with SpaceX. With SpaceX, others see something in SpaceX that I don't, which is totally fine. It's just not right for me. So there's no world in which SpaceX becomes an investment in my portfolio unless something radically changes.

Starting point is 01:26:20 radically. Even if it does follow your thesis, which is they have distribution and they have a moat, would you agree with that? They have distribution. They have a moat. Absolutely. The only difference is that there's no practical use case for exactly that. Like that is assuming that we can't come up with an alternative solution that, you know, outside of space or like on Earth that can do what SpaceX is trying to do with AI. Is that like the main? People are valuing SpaceX based on the best of all best case scenarios, right? That's what I'm saying. So it's just a math number. Yeah, I don't, yeah, I just don't, you're a math problem. It's not even a math problem. It's just like the people that are invested in SpaceX are invested in it because they believe in these pie in the sky goals,

Starting point is 01:27:05 which is awesome. I hope they hit them. I just like, I not only, I don't believe in them, right? I haven't seen proof that I think we're highly likely to hit that. And even if we were, it wouldn't matter to me because it's already being valued, assuming that that happened. right? So I'm going to invest in something where I see something big that is likely to happen where the rest of the world doesn't see it. And I have conviction it will happen. So it's the poor opposite of how I invest. It also seems like right now some companies could report really good earnings and then immediately afterwards the stock still falls 10%. Expectations. Just expectations. So people have even higher expectations than good earnings. They want good earnings and something else.

Starting point is 01:27:48 Yeah. And by the way, it's short, short term expectations are different from long term expectations. I'm not super concerned with what happens month to month quarter to quarter in the AI sector. For me, this is like a multi-year trade, right? And as long as nothing happens, by the way, this is another thing that really upsets me about modern day investors. you'll notice one thing about me is like if I see something that goes against my thesis, I will immediately exit my trade and sometimes take the opposite side of that trade. So if something actually does happen right here with AI or compute that really messes with the economics, I will be out of that AI trade in an instant. So I'm constantly looking for that devil's advocate take and I'm actually very,

Starting point is 01:28:46 open to saying, well, what I thought was going to happen is not playing out, and I need to completely reverse the way I'm thinking about this sector. Investors don't think like that, guys. If you guys read X, I have never seen a time when people are so loyal to their stocks, so loyal to these companies. I just don't understand it. Like, I don't get it at all. The companies don't care about you. The stocks don't care about you. Why do you have a personal relationship with a stock. It drives me nuts because when you start to see evidence to the contrarian side of the person's thesis, they refuse to believe it and they're constantly trying to fight it. I don't fight it. I welcome it. Like, show me where I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I will thank you because you

Starting point is 01:29:36 just helped me reverse out of a trade where I was wrong. It's maybe the biggest issue facing investors take. Like, guys, this is so important to like nail through investors head. And stop it. Stop having a personal relationship. You're not dating your stock. You're not married to your stock. Just be objective and be willing to say that the information has changed. You learned something new.

Starting point is 01:29:58 The world has changed. There's something new that shifted. Something came out of China. I don't know. Like you've got to reevaluate everything. And even though if you've been talking about this stock as the greatest long ever for a year and a half, tomorrow you might need to come out and say, dude, things are different now. I just exited and I might even be shorting that stock.

Starting point is 01:30:18 Are you willing to do that? You have to ask yourself, are you actually willing to do that? Run that scenario in your head because I guarantee you most investors would like, they can't get the words out of their mouth. They wouldn't do it. What in your life has changed since this past month of trading? I'm having the best time in my life with other investors. I just am having so much fun, guys.

Starting point is 01:30:41 Even though it's been a roller coaster in the last few weeks were rough before this last week. dude, I feel, I've said this so many times, like the community keeps getting larger and larger. And people are learning. And like for every one person that has a negative comment, there's like 50 that are like, dude, this is the greatest ever. Like, that are having so much fun investing and researching and hot takes. And like, the bottom line is, if you're just investing, you're winning. You know what I'm saying? Like, we all know that, right?

Starting point is 01:31:13 Like you might beat the SMP or not beat the SMP. You might spend way too much time doing research to actually not outperform the SMP. It doesn't matter. Because if that's what actually gets you to get excited about and engage with the world of investing, the mere fact that now you're going to be throwing more of your money into investing instead of like buying stuff means you're winning. because what happens generally, there's no absolutes, right? But what happens generally when you have money in capital markets,

Starting point is 01:31:50 you make money. It's just factual. Like obviously, you can do stupid stuff. You can get levered out. People should be doing things responsibly. And we teach a lot of that, right? On my channel. You just got to get in the game of investing, dude.

Starting point is 01:32:05 And more people are investing today than ever. And by a lot. And it's growing by the day. And I freaking love it. I love it now that I have to take hours sometimes to go through comments on a single thread to just reply to people. I love that this world is getting that big and that I'm part of making this world bigger every day with my hot takes, whether you love them or hate them. What are some of the best ways that you get information asymmetry outside of what the average investor thinks is what they should be studying, like earnings reports or interviews? Like, is there a specific way that you get? get access to that information? You've got to go to the source. Like you got to forget about, forget about financial media earnings report.

Starting point is 01:32:47 I mean, that stuff's all fine to understand a baseline for what people generally know about the company and what generally people care about. But you have to figure out what the marginal driver of interest and or price action is going to be for a company. And it could be one thing. Like in the case of Amazon, it was, are they converting all this CAP-X into actual real returns? That was the one thing, right? So ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level?

Starting point is 01:33:24 This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Once you know what that one thing is from reading the investing report, and the earnings reports and media, you have to go away from finance to find the ground truth. So like what I mean by that is I've spent so much time in the last few months, actually like reading technology forums with all the people that are actually working at these companies.

Starting point is 01:34:01 What is a technology forum? Any, they're on Reddit. They're all over the place. So like there's tons of them. What you want, it's on X. There are people on X who are, are actually a developer at company XYZ. There's millions of them.

Starting point is 01:34:14 So instead of spending your time reading, you know, investors that have good and crappy takes on the same stuff that everyone else is reading and they're just recirculating opinions over and over again and fighting with each other, spend more time looking for tech. This is what Leopold does, right? He hangs out with these guys. This is his world, right? It doesn't have to be your world because they all live. on the internet, right? So if you're not hanging out with people that work at OAI and Anthropic and that work

Starting point is 01:34:46 at the end clients that are actually instituting AI into their workflow, they will be the first people to tell you if it's making or saving their company money or not. Okay? Before it ever hits the financial press, before it ever hits an earning statement, the guys who work at the companies and the women that work at the companies? No. And there's millions of them. They're all over the internet. Chatrooms on X, making videos on YouTube, right? Like, go to the source. If you want to figure out if AI is actually a productive technology that's generating positive ROI for all the world's companies that are now spending all their money on AI, because if that's true, the AI sector is going to explode higher. If it's not true, we got a problem. The only way to get that answer is to

Starting point is 01:35:43 go to the source. So that's where I spend my time. I don't spend my time listening to other investors' opinion on what Michael Burry said this morning. Like, that's not going to do me any good, guys. Like, I want to go to, so I basically read right now, because I'm really deep in the AI trade, obviously. I just spend a lot of time reading, sometimes obscure people that have virtually no followers, by the way. They don't have to be like influential. A guy who's at a company, like just name any company, like American Airlines. I don't know. American Airlines probably has hundreds to thousands of developers working on AI and stuff right now, right? Like, they're all over the internet. Some of them are talking about how well it is or isn't working.

Starting point is 01:36:30 And that exists for every company in the world right now. And we have to figure out as investors, over the next few months to couple years, is the AI trade real or not? Is it deserving or not? If you could answer that question, this is the biggest moment in the history of capital markets. If you can correctly answer that question and you know where to place your bets and you have risk capital that you're willing to make concentrated lever bets in an account to where you fully understand. that if you're wrong, you're going to get crushed. So again, understand the risk,

Starting point is 01:37:12 understand your objectives, but that opportunity is out there for anyone. And I just look at other investors and I laugh because I know what they're doing with their day. I can see it. I can, I can read what they're saying on X and I know how they're spending their day. They are not spending their day following the same people that I follow, like searching the same keywords and reading these tech forums. Like they're not doing that. No one's trying to get to ground truth right now. So my alpha is I am willing to do what it takes to get to ground truth. And then that will deliver the conviction that I need to place a levered, concentrated bet on who I think will benefit. If AI is going to make everything higher quality and more

Starting point is 01:37:53 abundant, what's the practical use case of building wealth right now as opposed to like spending it on the things that increase the quality of life? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week. Feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that as well as early access to everything else that we post along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join. Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. If AI is going to make everything higher quality and more abundant, what's the practical use case of building wealth right now as opposed to like spending it

Starting point is 01:38:32 on the things that increase the quality of life. You're making a wrong assumption that life as it exists is a fixed pie, right? So when you say that everything becomes more abundant and that everything becomes cheaper, right? That theoretically might be true for our world today, but new worlds will be created. What I mean by that is there will always, we will always, as humans, we will always, as humans, we will always come up with newer, greater things that we want to do, right? And those things will become prohibitally expensive and difficult, right? There are levels to life. And so even if life becomes better for everyone today in today's terms, there will be new things that we're going to discover

Starting point is 01:39:22 that we're going to want to do in 20 years, that if you happen to have more resources, more time, you'll be able to chase. So I don't know what they are, man. But like, At no point in history has that not happened. That is interesting that it would demand some sort of resource, but that's also to assume that that resource would be money because it could be something else. It could be influence. It could be time. Absolutely. It could be access.

Starting point is 01:39:45 And those things could be way more valuable to attain this new goal that we could have in the future. I've said this. So if intelligence becomes fully democratized and free, then the type of people and the type of scale, that become valuable in the future have nothing to do with conventional intelligence. That's why I'm so focused on content creation right now and working with other content creators, working with people, I think, have really rare human voices that are like special because entertainers become super valuable, right? Like people that are charismatic, people that can make you laugh.

Starting point is 01:40:27 These other things in life that aren't maybe directly connected. to this intelligence layer that's going to become devalued become way more interesting in the future. So, listen, we've seen this throughout history, right? Like, like, we kind of, like, go through cycles where certain types of people, like, there's certain times in history where people that are physically strong have an advantage, right? The last 50 years, it's people that were, you know, smart, right? Developers, coders, you know, the nerd class has bull. blown up the last 25 years during the age of technology and might still for a little while, right, as we enter this age of AI. I think once we're actually kind of deeper into this age of

Starting point is 01:41:14 AI, I think the creatives are going to flourish. And I say creative loosely because what creative doesn't necessarily mean just what we think of being creative today. Like creative can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but people that aren't valued as much in today's world might become unbelievably valued in tomorrow's world. Like charisma. All of it.

Starting point is 01:41:38 You know what's interesting is we were speaking to David Edelman on the podcast and he owns a percentage of the 76ers or he owns a percentage of a group that owns a few different sports teams

Starting point is 01:41:48 and the like of that. And he said that that was his reason for getting involved with sports is that he thinks that that's something that you can't necessarily

Starting point is 01:41:56 correct or improve with AI. And so it's sort of like this untouchable thing that's going to exist forever that everyone's going to want to enjoy it's an awesome example it's an awesome example i completely agree i completely agree and there are so many examples like that right so like what i would be doing if i was a young person right now like there's a lot of stuff you should be doing i we talk about this all the time right like learning AI tools so you can like be 10 workers

Starting point is 01:42:21 and one and just getting a job and making money but you know what you still can't right the next 10 years but you should also be thinking about what skill sets become valuable when intelligence becomes commoditized and you should be working on those skill sets because we all kind of have them but we don't we don't grow them because historically they haven't been that valuable like you might know a little guitar but you chose to spend your time doing school versus guitar because the guitar wasn't going to take you any place that would allow you to be successful in life where I think If everyone has access to lots of money and access to lots of intelligence and you're trying to get into certain groups or certain rooms or certain people, maybe the ability to be musically talented becomes more important in 10 years, 15 years, right?

Starting point is 01:43:14 That's just one example. Or sports, right? Or honestly, like, anything. Is there a part of art that is threatened by AI? Because I have heard a lot of like AI music and it's not half bad. And I think a lot of the, like, top performers on the charts right now are AI songs. Yeah, I thought a lot about it. And I just don't know how that all plays out.

Starting point is 01:43:40 And even charisma. It's like, eventually we could have these things planted in our brains that give us a charisma. And then all of the sudden, I mean, obviously, that could be five years past the democratization of intelligence, right? Is like, then the democratization of charisma. I think it's also important, guys, like, again, going back to the birth of electricity, it's naive to think that we could really kind of assess what the world's going to look like in 20 years when we're going through this big of a quantum leap and technology. So you shouldn't get too ahead of yourself. I kind of tell people, just focus on the next three to five years. if you start making predictions of what it's going to be like in 15 years,

Starting point is 01:44:28 you're going to be so wildly off. It's not even really worth your time because it's just going to change so much. The world's going to change so radically between now and then. By the way, this is why I feel it's really important to be liquid. This is why I love liquid capital markets. And I stopped investing in private markets years ago. So the second that AI started to like really emerge, I was like, I am pulling way.

Starting point is 01:44:54 back because it's an unknown. I don't know where the barriers to entry are. I don't know where the moats are anymore. I need to have access to my capital. So as the world changes quickly, I can reroute my capital to where it makes sense, which is very difficult to do with the E-liquine investment. Given probabilities, I see a lot of posts right now comparing today to 2001. And they're showing these charts side by side, showing that they believe we're going to see another uptick up and then just a brutal crash downwards. What are the chances of a market crash to this degree and what do you think the likelihood is of that happening?

Starting point is 01:45:33 I think it's unlikely, but it could definitely happen. I mean, we're going through a period of creative destructionism where the thing that's happening with AI is so big that we overinvest in it and we really don't know what the hell we're doing. So we're like investing in a lot of companies that are going to go bankrupt, right? And it's moving quicker than any technology we've ever seen before. So there could be a window. This is the thing I always talk about.

Starting point is 01:45:56 There could be a window where we make the big investments, but we don't see the fruits of those investments quick enough. That would be my biggest concern. I don't know. I don't know. It's possible. And any time the world starts to move this quickly, you have to be honest with yourself that we're becoming more fragile as a result of it. And if we're living in a more fragile world, it's going to become more volatile and anything could happen. So you have to be mentally prepared for that, which is why I think it's really important to have access to your capital, to be in public markets where you have a lot of liquidity.

Starting point is 01:46:39 And if you need to kind of make some moves, right, you can make them quickly. I, dude, but like, I think everyone that tries to correlate things to the past, that's ridiculous. I was around then and trading, okay? Like, this feels nothing like 2000. What did that feel like? Nothing like it. I hated it. I was working at a dot com and I thought every single person around me was a fraudster.

Starting point is 01:47:07 Every company was a fraud. It was disgusting. Hated it so much. Every company was just doing whatever they could to go. public and to float complete false business models that didn't make any sense, the internet was growing really slowly. So like there was this thing that could be really big. Everyone was chasing money.

Starting point is 01:47:36 They weren't chasing real change. Like they weren't like the internet was evolving too slow, but we over invested in it. And like, you know what I'm talking about how like it was almost like the opposite problem. We invested so much capital in this sector, but it was going to take way, way, way too long for that sector to play out. And so that was the issue back then. Now things are moving so quickly, right? It's almost like we don't even know how it's going to play out.

Starting point is 01:48:06 But then couldn't you argue that it's moving on too quickly? Maybe we haven't caught up to some of the ways that we're going to be able to take advantage of it in the future, even though it's going to happen. The issue with how quickly it's moving, is that it's creating a more fragile world and that we aren't spending the time to protect ourselves against the downside of it, right? The things we really don't want to talk about, right?

Starting point is 01:48:31 Someone creating a virus. Someone, you know, doing bad actors leveraging this technology for bad things. Our military becoming less defensible because billions of drones can be operated by third. world country, right? And all of a sudden, our old military isn't as effective against that technology. So it could create an issue for our economy. And then our capital market structure

Starting point is 01:49:01 falls apart because people feel like we don't have the stability to invest in capital markets because anything could happen at any moment in time. That's what worries me about a fast-moving technology. The fact that it's moving fast, though, I think prevents us from having a similar issue to 2000 because we're already starting to see the results, right? We're already starting to see that this technology is changing companies in a positive way. Like that one I just talked about and more. But like it's not the same. People always go back to try to make these.

Starting point is 01:49:34 The 2026 Chevrolet tracks is the stylish SUV for those on the move. And with the standard Chevy safety assist package, you have the backup to handle every turn with confidence. The 2026 tracks. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always 375 and get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more.

Starting point is 01:50:04 Guys, I'm telling you right now, like, AI is so, it's in another stratosphere compared to the internet that was created back in 9. 2009, 2000, when it started getting big. What do you think about Steve Isman, who recently went all cash? He's from the big short. And his argument was that he believes that AI is binary right now in the market. It either succeeds in the market climbs or it doesn't, and there's a big correction. He sees that over half the equities in a 60-40 portfolio, plus most new bond issuance,

Starting point is 01:50:37 is AI related, so no one's actually diversified. And he also says the latest Nvidia deal is so convoluted that you don't know if there's any real profitability outside of invidia. I'm going to answer that question, not just to Steve Iceman, but I'm going to answer it to Michael Burry. I'm going to answer it to every single person that has this strong, high conviction take on how this is going to play out. I don't think any of us know exactly how it's going to play out.

Starting point is 01:51:06 And I'm so sick of listening to these old guys that have so much conviction that this is going to happen or this is going to happen. We just don't know. And these guys are so afraid to admit that they don't know. I don't know. Okay. Like I have like I kind of feel like I know what's going to happen the next 30 to 60 days. And I know this is going to be really big. Okay. But I am spending time every day to assess how quickly it's moving and in what direction it's moving in and new risk factors. And the probabilities in my head are shifting every day. And single day and all the scenarios that I'm running in my head that are good and bad for the AI sector are changing every day. And I think it's really dangerous to follow one of these guys just because they had success at one point in the past to think that they are the guru and they can see the freaking future. Because history has proven that it's impossible to see how these big game changing things are going to play out that when we've never experienced anything that big before, right? If we were just experiencing another big development in software, right, or another like kind of just another step up in technology, I think it would be reasonable to say, hey, this is how it's likely to play out. But clearly AI is not that.

Starting point is 01:52:30 So I'm going to say that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. And then I'm not going to try to make pretend that I do either. Like the best approach right now is to realize that no one knows what the hell they're talking about when they're trying to. confidently say that this is going to happen. And by the way, if any of those scenarios happens to play out, that's survivorship buys. We've seen it a million times. You predict the market crashed 38 times and it eventually happens or whatever.

Starting point is 01:53:00 We cannot predict anomalies. Like, AI is the biggest anomaly. It's an unknown. It's a new frontier. We haven't having a clue. There are so many factors that are going to play in. to how what the roadmap looks like for AI and how it kind of merges into our economy

Starting point is 01:53:22 and our world and changes us over the next few years. I don't think Sam Altman knows. I don't think Elon knows. We can see a few months ahead of us, barely, barely. What do you think is going to happen the next 30 to 60 days? I think we're coming around to realizing the realness of AI in the next 36 days.

Starting point is 01:53:40 We've just come off of a cycle where everyone again, the last 30 to 60 days, days, we were in this FUD cycle. And we came up with every reason why AI was going to blow up. We're still, even the last couple weeks, we're like, oh, AI is going to blow up, Anthropics going to blow up because of open source. I think everyone's going to chill out a little bit the next 30 or 60 days. And I think we're going to realize that like, okay, nothing catastrophic is likely to happen here as quickly as we think it is. And hopefully people will take more measured takes on, you know, the AI cycle is at least somewhat more real than people believe.

Starting point is 01:54:22 Compute's not going away tomorrow. Like, like, you know, the Kimmy thing came out and it was like, okay, we don't need compute anymore. Like, we've gone through this guy so many times. Inference compute is barely changing it all, right, due to the open source models. We still need massive amounts of inference. And even if someone has a massive breakthrough on compute, where we only need a tenth of it,

Starting point is 01:54:48 we're going to come up with new use cases for compute, like instantly evolving entertainment that's personalized to you based on your emotions, right? Or like I said, the video games that just make themselves as we're going along. Like there's going to be a million things that we can do. Like let's solve cancer tomorrow. Like, as soon as compute gets cheaper, as humans, we're going to figure out a way to leverage it in new ways where we'll,

Starting point is 01:55:14 you know, it goes down by 10x, we'll figure out we'll need 20x more. I believe that's going to be the cycle. I don't know how quickly that cycle happens, but it's going to like ebb and flow, ebb and flow between open source, China, breakthroughs. Is AI still an economic model that we can count on? I think people are going to slowly start to,

Starting point is 01:55:36 to educate themselves. Like right now, no one knows anything. I think every few months, people are going to get a little bit smarter. on AI. And they have been, by the way, to some extent, right? If you look at the fears we had nine months ago, they were completely obscene. So I think people get smarter every couple months, but it doesn't mean that we still won't have these frightening moments when people freak out and they're like, I got to sell my AI stocks. One thing I'm curious about is that on Twitter, you've been going pretty viral. You've been spending a lot of time answering comments, responding to people. Some of it, and has been a little divisive. I'm wondering, do you think the additional social media exposure

Starting point is 01:56:20 is going to diminish or reduce your critical thinking putting on some of these traits? Like, do you worry that's going to take away from like your focus and shift it away from looking at these stocks to responding to comments? Yeah, to some extent,

Starting point is 01:56:37 I need to refocus, right? But I've been responding to comments. the last few days because I can't go through these cycle. When I spend 100 plus hours researching a company, I need a break. Right. So like, I'm taking time off right now. Like, I'm not doing heavy research right now. I had a big win.

Starting point is 01:56:58 I'm taking a break. You know, I'm not 20. I value balance in my life. And I really enjoy the community aspect of it. I actually authentically enjoy talking to other investors. It's one of my favorite things in the world. So even if I miss a couple trades because I'm distracted hanging out on Twitter and talking to other investors and coaching people through things and I'll get reengaged with my own community, that's what I need to get revved up for the next big high conviction trade where you don't hear from me for a month because literally I'm not sleeping and I'm up until 4 a.m. every night doing deep research and then I just announce what it is. And by the way, like, I'll always make the high commission trades.

Starting point is 01:57:44 And what I, what have I been saying about Amazon all year? I said, if Amazon is a thing that takes me down, so be it. Like, I have an 18-year track record. I have this reputation. I have this community. And it'd be really easy for me to just chill out and not take big risk that could implode my account. And like, that's how you'll remember me. But that's, I'm not, I don't care.

Starting point is 01:58:09 Like this isn't like football guys like I don't have to worry about my joints you know what I'm saying like yeah I can still do this and I'm going to still do this I'm just going to do it at a pace that makes sense for me and when I really believe in something I'm going to talk about it even if I fall flat on my face and by the way you saw what I did last week I put it out there everyone knew what I was doing right like if that trade didn't work out everyone was going to know that I blew up okay Everyone. That's not an easy thing to do. Speaking of that, what did you get wrong about sweet green? Well, first of all, the big sweet green moved down has to do with this stomach virus and lettuce. You're probably aware of that. Yeah. So like, if you're trading one piece of information, in the case of sweet green, I was trading the new rap. Then we had this cyclo virus. What is it called?

Starting point is 01:59:04 Like, you know the virus. It's called the Jack Selby virus. That quickly became the driver for not just sweet cream, but for Taco Bell. Sure. So listen, sweet cream, their entire business is lettuce and no one's eating lettuce for the last, what, five or six weeks. So I always talk about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Like, that wasn't on my radar. But even before that, I ate it sweet cream a few times, and I loved the wrong.

Starting point is 01:59:37 wrap, but then I went to Kava and I had, because I had never been to Kava actually. And Kava was, you know, doing really well, again, before this whole lettuce thing. Mm-hmm. And what I noticed at Kava, because I'm eating really, like, uh, clean right now. And I love sweet green because sweet green was clean. Like, you can tell, like, there was no sauces on that stuff. I went to Kava and I tried to order something really clean and I couldn't. Like the chicken, like the protein was like mixed with sauce and stuff, but it had a lot more taste than sweet green.

Starting point is 02:00:14 And then I started researching a lot of the comment analysis. And I realized that was a little bit of a theme. Kava is more position for the masses where sweet green is more position for the clean eating demo. Okay. And I think Kava is making for a really tough competitor against Sweet Green. So that's kind of like a little bit of a headwin for that company. But again, you got to remember something. I placed a very tiny bet on Sweet Green because I had only partially done my research, right?

Starting point is 02:00:46 Remember that? So I was like, this is speculative. I think there's a potential here for this to be a big hit for Sweet Green. But we'll just have to see how it plays out. Now, I ended up getting pulled into some other bigger trades. and all this stuff. And I've been telling people since then, I'm like, they asked, I'm like, I don't have time for sweet green guys.

Starting point is 02:01:06 Like, the trade was tiny. Like, I really don't care. Like, I have bigger trades I'm focused on. I think sweet green earnings like this week, people can ask me, I'm like, not only do I not have time for sweet green, but my little rap thesis has become irrelevant with this virus, completely irrelevant. So there's no reason for me to be even looking at sweet green because the only sweet green trade right now is to what extent will this virus destroy their sales more or less than the market thinks it will.

Starting point is 02:01:38 That's all that matters for sweet green. My thesis on the wrap has become irrelevant until this virus passes. Got it. Is there anything else you're buying outside of stocks right now? Like are you getting into collectibles, other alternative assets, anything else that you are bullish on? I don't invest in anything outside of public equities. And I don't, I don't think I will for a very long time. I have my cash flow businesses, but those are more for joy, right? The thing I care about right now, like I'm having fun is content, doing more content. I'm enjoying doing content myself. I'm opening up a podcast studio in Austin.

Starting point is 02:02:20 We'll be doing a show for someone else, not me there. and I'm having fun kind of applying a lot of the stuff I've been doing with investing in the last 20 years to the content game. So I think content creators are going to be the next big thing because of AI.

Starting point is 02:02:38 I know we talked about this. Like people need that sense of connection. They need that humanity. So like the humans that are most interesting that remind us how great we are as humans and how special we are that have a voice that truly is differentiated from what we're about to get with all the AI stuff that's coming.

Starting point is 02:02:58 Like, there might not be that many of them, but the ones that exist, I think, become, one, super valuable and two, super fun to be around. So, like, I'll spend the next few years of my life, spending more time with those people. And also trying to improve my own content, right? Because I think, like, there's never been a bigger moment for the world to come into the investor class. And, you know, they're not doing it because they study investors. in college. They're doing because I see a YouTube show or podcasts and they get excited and they open up a brokerage account and five years later it changes their life. So did I tell you this story?

Starting point is 02:03:34 That guy that I'm going to take you to see this project that I'm building out at Love Field. And my contractor's worker, one of his workers was crying and made me come up there because he found out I own the place and he was about to commit. But twice. Because his business partner basically took all this stuff. And after 20 some odd years, he lost his business and was destitute, basically lives on a farm. And he randomly saw one of my shows talking about how you can start from nothing and build up by just investing in things that you see. And it like made him think that he could do it.

Starting point is 02:04:14 And like he literally, I went up there and he started crying in front of me. He saved my life. I'm like, that's how important content is, right? Like, I'm just a financial YouTuber. I didn't think I had that impact on people, but people are deeply need connection with other humans right now. Because there's not a lot of it, as you guys know, these days. So this is just one way for those. And listen, I love being a content creator that I'm fortunate not to have to make money from my content.

Starting point is 02:04:45 So I could just focus on trying to be hyper authentic and intimate with the people that care to follow me and like that's really fun for me. Like I could just I could just focus on that. That's what I really think that in person communities over the next 10 years are going to do insanely well. Like I'm seeing all of these like masterminds now popping up in person that are just exploding in popularity like in person communities where people could sit face to face and meet each other. Because I think that's missing online. It is missing online. And then the online. And then the online becomes more impactful. You know what I'm saying?

Starting point is 02:05:25 Like if you have any in-person connection at all, all of a sudden the parasycial relationship online becomes that more authentic and real. So like I agree. I think it's a hybrid. Okay. Kind of like companies that, you know, sell their products,

Starting point is 02:05:43 the retailers, and then sell direct hybrid. You've got to do both. And it's not an easy thing to pull off, by the way, either. Because as soon as you go offline, It's coordination. It's a big commitment. Yeah, well, we have it with the index that you're in.

Starting point is 02:06:00 But it's not like, that's not like crazy scalable, though. It's, no, it's the least, we keep joking. It's the least scalable business we could do because it's kind of capped. We've got like 30 people in it. Yeah. You can't really scale beyond that. You know what's interesting is that pickleball groups are so lucrative. Like, if you can transform industrial space into,

Starting point is 02:06:22 pickleball courts and then there's like memberships involved. I have a friend that actually started or acquaintance that started one in Vegas and they are making absurd amounts of money. Talking about like a solo house of like. No, it's like it's like a gym that hosts events and people go or even my recreational soccer team. I'm on a rec soccer team in Vegas and these things are super popular. Pickleball specifically because it's like most ages can participate in it, But people are opening up pickleball places in Vegas, charging membership dues, doing some sort of event once a week, once every other week. And it is packed and they charge, like, I paid $100 for an hour and a half. I believe it because it.

Starting point is 02:07:05 And there's no overhead. It's a court. It's a pickleball court. You need a filter. The thing is, if you just meet like Randos, you need a filter to filter out who you're going to get along with without you having to do all like the work. And that, that is a good filter of the type of. a person who would do that, you'd probably get along with each other. Okay, like in Austin, the run clubs, heard say.

Starting point is 02:07:24 Yeah. Like the number of run clubs, you go down there and you, there's- That's hard to charge for you. Everywhere. Well, I'm not thinking of as a business. Again, I'm thinking of it. There is a thirst for in-person connection around any shared experience. It could be pickleball, it could be run clubs.

Starting point is 02:07:41 People are not drinking anymore. They're not going out late at night. It's wild, dude. Like, they're looking to do anything but go out. and drink. You know, it's interesting? I went to a park to like walk around with my friend. As we were walking, I saw a horde of people, probably 100, maybe 120 people all walking somewhere. I was like, what are these people doing here? And I walk up and they're all like on their phones and walking around. And then I go out to him like, what is this? And everyone's kind of like all

Starting point is 02:08:10 staying together in a small group. I thought it was some summer camp or something, but it was like old people, young people, people of a bunch of different backgrounds. And they're like, we're here because of Pokemon Go. And apparently that has turned into this thing where like literally hundreds of people will all meet up at one place because there's a legendary Pokemon that you can meet. And I think, and they all battle together. And like, it's like a group activity. But even that, like, I was blown away that had that that was such a big thing. So there are a lot of people playing cards at my restaurants now and games. Like, I've never seen this before. Like, I walk into my restaurants and there are tables of just like women, young girls, they're either playing

Starting point is 02:08:55 cards or some like board game or something. I'm like, they just bring it to a restaurant and start playing it, just cool, whatever. Like we're more of a neighborhood place. Um, I just think it's all becoming a thing. People are trying to, they want ways to connect. They want to, because they're not drinking guys. Like, people just used to go out and drink. Now they're just coming up with different things to do. I think over the next 10 years, that is going to be the future big business is going to be these in-person communities,

Starting point is 02:09:25 no phone, not anything digital, because I think so many people are missing that. I think it's not big business. I think it becomes like maybe the next small business. I don't think people need to make a ton of money. You know, it's just like, you just find something where you can cash flow,

Starting point is 02:09:43 anything where you can cash flow. Um, I, dude, everything is just shifting so hard. Like, I'm having these college conversations with my kids and it's absolutely killing me because you know how I feel about that. I'm like, dude. They want to go to college? They want to go to college, which is fine. You don't seem happy with it. No, no, no, no, it's fine. Wouldn't you rather just give them the money that would be intuition and say, here's an account. Let's grow, let's five X this. And we do it together. And we talk about, each trade we go through why you believe this trade is going to be the next thing. Show me your research on it and we'll trade together. No, I want them to go to, I'm cool with them going to college for a year. I would love for them to go travel and meet people and network and have real conversations with people around the world and develop a deep network as a 21, 22, 23 year old. and then take six months off and learn AI and then go back to those people.

Starting point is 02:10:45 Maybe they met 30 or 40 alumni at college because they're connecting with friends, with their friends' parents and with alumni at school. Then maybe they go to Europe and they meet people all over the place, right? And they come back with a network of like 50 to 70 adults that are business professionals, business owners. They self-trained themselves in AI. And then they go back to that network and they say, hey, I want to work for you for free for three months, for six months. And I want to work for you because I have trained myself on AI and I am one of the most proficient professionals in AI.

Starting point is 02:11:22 I can do the work of 10 people and I'm going to come in and help any area of your business because I'll be one of the most proficient AI guys at your company and I want to work for free. Meaning I don't have to pay for college education that year. So I'll pay for them to live and stuff. And they do that three or four times, at three or four different people at three or four different companies. Now they have a resume. They've had three or four different internships. They met way more people in the world, the professional world, because they've been working in a corporate environment. They have corporate friends now.

Starting point is 02:11:53 That's how you get your job, find your career, right? Like get in the real world quicker. I want to get them in the real world quicker. And by the way, like, I still respect going to college for a year. like going to football games, do a fraternity, do the stuff so you can relate. How about also going to Europe for six months and just like do that? It's all about people. Okay, the one of the, I think the biggest thing that is non-displaceable by AI is relationships.

Starting point is 02:12:24 Relationships count more than anything else in an AI age. I don't think anything is more S-tier in an AI world than relationships. So when I think about my kids and I think about college, all I'm thinking of, what path allows them to build the deepest relationships with the most interesting, most important people? And whatever that path is, is the path I want them to take because I'm confident they could learn what they want to learn with some AI tool in a temp the time that conventional college will teach it to them. So I really just want them focused on relationship building. That's it. Like that's my number one goal for my kids. Because that's AI is not going to do anything for you when it comes to relationships. Right.

Starting point is 02:13:13 Like that's valuable. Like it's the most AI resistant skill set in the world. I love the Husk videos. Have you seen it? Hey, I'm with Saul right now. What do I say to them? And chat GBT will walk them through the conversation of what to say it's all. Have you seen these videos? No.

Starting point is 02:13:30 They're hilarious. I'm going to show them to you. No. They're the best. I'm addicted to them. Wait, does it teach you how to like... No, no, it's a joke because of how bad it is. Oh.

Starting point is 02:13:39 You're saying that it's not able to replace these relationships. And when it walks you through what to say to another person, it's awful. But even it's not like the app, having a relationship where you build value, not business value, you make them laugh. Like you're a friend to them. Like you're just like there for them, right? Like you connect with each other. You've been through real stuff together. like that is so valuable, dude.

Starting point is 02:14:08 Like that is so valuable. Like, I don't know why people aren't talking about that right now. Like I even hear these like college experts on TikTok that like coach families on what you should be doing to get into college or like how valuable is college in AI age. I never hear them really going deep into like what should you be doing to identify pathways and skill sets to. build meaningful relationships with the right people, whether you're in college or out of college, because that actually matters more than anything else. For me, like almost every single thing in my life has come from a relationship that's been good. Like every business success, every opportunity, collecticon, like all the stuff. Like everything I've done. By the way, most of my biggest

Starting point is 02:14:56 trades the last 10 years, I'll say probably 60% have, were initiated, the idea came from someone in my network, someone who follows me, sending me a DM, sending me a text, someone in a comment on one of my videos. Now, that just starts off a process for me, right? But like someone starts it and I'm like, I write it down and then I put it on my list and I start doing work on it. Dude, if I didn't build all these parasocial relationships with people over the last eight years through YouTube and X, I would not, that person would not have ping me with that idea that

Starting point is 02:15:39 ultimately became a huge trade for me. And like, even a lot of the due diligence I do, it's like, people are like, hey, did you know this? And like, oh, shoot, you just poked a hole in my thesis, man. Thank you. Because like, that saved me $300,000. Right. So, or whatever it is. It's all relationship based. And like, no one's talking about that. But that's the thing. Like, that is the big thing. In an AI age, relationships. How do you build them? Where do you go to get them?

Starting point is 02:16:06 How do you, like, model your next steps with career, with, like, that should be a conversation. So that'll be the cliffhanger of this episode. If you want to see what happens to this, we'd love to have you back on in the future. It seems like every few months we hit something where we got to have you back on to talk about it. The Amazon trade's not over. I'll just be very clear about that. Yes. Amazon trade is not over.

Starting point is 02:16:32 In many ways, it's just beginning. So, yeah, you're going to hear a lot more about Amazon for me. Now, I'm not like hyper levered short term in Amazon right at this very moment, but Amazon is a trade that has a lot more ahead of it. It's just a matter of timing, right? I think everyone thinks you have to like 5x a trade or 8x a trade. these days because everyone's so greedy. No, if you have high conviction that a trade will 2x over a period of time and you're able to figure out when those jumps are likely to be, you can 5 to 8x that trade on a company that's just 2xes over the same multi-year period.

Starting point is 02:17:17 So I'm still going to focus a lot of my attention and research on Amazon. Cool. Sounds good. And by the way, for the members, we're going to have an extended cut where we're going to ask you about the favorite stocks overall in the market right now to get your quick take on it. So for all the channel members who want an additional episode, by the time you see it, that episode's now live. Your thoughts on... I just can't get excited about it. I want to be excited about it because I love the company. I love so much.

Starting point is 02:17:51 As much as I love it, I will turn my back on that company in a second if the narrative changes. What about Nvidia? Yeah. Man, I. So really appreciate it. And by the way, the channel members also get access to early episodes, the uncensored takes, all the uncut bits that we have to trim out for the main episode. So if you want to see that, feel for to join. Wait, can I promote your index?

Starting point is 02:18:18 Because there's something cool, it's going to happen. Okay. I don't know if you guys know about what these guys do at the end next week. A quarterly trip. Yeah. Right? I am, I think, hosting your trip in Q1 of 27. That's right in Austin.

Starting point is 02:18:35 And it's going to be epic. Okay. So like I'll just say we are going to visit a row. We're going to have an insider's visit with a robot company I'm affiliated with down there. And, dude, by the time that trip is here, we are going to see some crazy stuff in the robot world. You guys are going to have an insights. You're going to have like. they, we're going to get to see stuff that almost no one gets to see at that robot company.

Starting point is 02:19:01 So, um, that'll be a, that'll be a fun one. Well, if you're interested, the link is down below in the description. Chris, all of your information is also in the description. Highly recommend to follow your Twitter, by the way. Oh, you know what? Yeah. I got on Instagram two months ago for the first time. Like, I have a clips account there, dude.

Starting point is 02:19:18 It's going crazy. I've seen that actually. That's funny. Yeah, I wasn't sure if that was you or not. Daily Chris Camillo on Instagram and TikTok. Daily. Daily. It's two clips a day because who wants to listen to me talk for an hour?

Starting point is 02:19:30 But two clips a day, I'm somewhat digestible. They cut me down. They do a really good job, cut me down really quick so you can actually tolerate me. Sounds good. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks. Thank you guys so much for watching. Until next time.

Starting point is 02:19:44 There is a lot more to a good life than a higher income and more wealth. A good life is subjective, but there is lots of research on what does and does not tend to contribute to good lives for most people. You do manage around $8 billion worth of assets. What would you say is a widely accepted belief that's actually going to make you poor? Picking stocks, and I think that's probably on average detrimental. Who should buy individual stocks? I honestly don't think anybody. Leopold made the same mistake investors in South Korea made.

Starting point is 02:20:19 Too much leverage. I would probably stop checking my portfolio five times a different. I would stop dabbling in individual stocks and covered calls. The costs of trading options are exorbitant. Is it possible, though, that we can continue to see these 10 to 15% returns every single year? We are very close to recession, and I'm worried about something worse than a recession. So what's the downside of saving too much money? Uh, well.

The Iced Coffee Hour - EMERGENCY UPLOAD: Stock Market Investors Are Losing Everything - How To Profit! | Chris Camillo

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.