The Iced Coffee Hour - Money Expert: A $37 Trillion Market Reset Is Coming - Do This Now! | Chris Camillo
Episode Date: November 16, 2025NetSuite: Download the Demystifying AI Guide for FREE at https://netsuite.com/iced Grammarly: Unleash your potential with AI that works at https://superhuman.com/podcast Shopify: Sign up for a $1 pe...r month trial period at https://shopify.com/ich ZocDoc: Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/ICED and download the Zocdoc App for FREE Follow Chris Camillo: @DumbMoneyLive Follow Chris on Twitter: https://x.com/ChrisCamillo Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 00:52 – Chris’s Market Predictions 08:31 – Why Michael Burry Closed His Fund 10:29 – How AI Changes Everything 18:45 – Winners & Losers in the AI Race 25:59 – Chris’s Worst Stock Pick 30:55 – Why Robinhood Might Be Undervalued 39:51 – How AI Impacts Jobs 49:36 – Why We Can’t Lose the AI Race to China 54:27 – Why Circular Financing Works 1:03:01 – Staying Informed on AI 1:09:15 – Why Housing Is Still Expensive 1:13:08 – Turning $20K Into $60M 1:17:40 – Why OpenAI Must Go Public 1:24:21 – How AI Could Fix Housing 1:31:16 – A New Way to Tax Billionaires 1:38:19 – How Tariffs Will Hit the Market 1:46:58 – Is ChatGPT the Best AI? 1:55:44 – Preparing for an AI Market Crash 2:10:39 – Running a $10M Restaurant Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: tmatsradio@gmail.com For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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This is the biggest thing that we will likely ever see in our life.
The first documented case of an AI orchestrated cyber attack.
AI has learned to bypass commands when asked to shut itself down.
There's so much doom around this concept of AI,
and it just drives me absolutely bonkers.
This is too big to fail.
I feel like those are famous last word.
It's too big to fail.
But it was last time, and look how it got.
saved.
You probably saw the Michael Burry stuff, right?
People are freaking out about the AI infrastructure being over leverage.
This is going to be, I think, the biggest thing to ever happen to you, that.
Chris, thank you so much for coming back on the ice coffee hour.
Really appreciate it.
What we found amazing is that the last few times you've been on the podcast, you've been
100% correct.
We had you on, and you talked about buying into the SP 500.
You predicted the best time to buy, and since then it's been up 35%.
You predicted the best time to buy Robin Hood, and since then it's been up over 200%.
You predicted it was the best time to buy energy stocks before they went up.
Since then, those are up 1 to 200%.
And you predicted AI and robotics over the last year and have also been correct.
It also seems like every time we film with you, the market's going down, you give us some insights.
And then we look back six months later and we're like, oh my gosh, he was completely correct.
It's a lot of pressure for you.
So what's going on today?
Yes, same exact thing, just different, slightly different storyline each time, right?
So we have this boom bust sentiment cycle around AI, I think primarily because people just don't really understand AI.
Like it's just big, huge, scary thing.
And so many people are talking about it being a bubble, right?
And for investors, the market's gone up quite a bit.
So it doesn't take a lot to shake it.
Remember back during DeepSeek, you know, Deep Seek was going to completely bust up the entire AI economics model, right?
AI was over because of Deep Seek.
I think we lost something like a trillion dollars of value because of a misunderstanding of how models work.
Deep Seek ended up being a reasoning model.
And shortly after, people realize that reasoning models take like 100 to a thousand X the amount of inference to actually use.
So, you know, even if you are able to come up with a model cheaper, the amount of compute necessary to actually utilize that model is massively more than anything we've ever seen, you know, up to that date.
So, you know, the market just didn't understand it.
And I think I see more of that happening today than ever before in my entire life investing,
where investors are just not willing to go deep and gain conviction, like, actually do the hard work it takes to get conviction so that when things like this happen, they don't get freaked out.
But do you think anything could be different this time?
Because the market was at an all-time high.
And then on the Fear and Greed Index, it hit extreme fear for the first time ever.
Yeah, you have two vastly different scenarios.
Like when we had you on initially, and that was the first like tariff scare, I asked,
what should the average person do?
And you said, get a second job, do everything you can to buy risk assets.
You also said this is the dream scenario for every investor.
And again, you couldn't have been more correct.
This time, however, the market's hit an all-time high at the same time that the Fear and
Greed Index hit extreme fear.
And you have these two convergences that just we don't.
don't see the market doing well at the same time that people are very pessimistic.
Yeah, I mean, like, nobody can predict what the market's going to do over a short period of
time, and that's not what we're really focused on, right? Like, when I made that comment,
it was like, I feel that people should be doing that for the next few years, you know, not just
the next few weeks. So, like I said, they would have been pretty well off, though, if they did it
for the next few weeks. Yeah, I mean, you just have to keep doing it. Like, guys, this is the biggest
thing that we will likely ever see in our life. Period. End of story, right? Like,
there's so much doom around this concept of AI, and it just drives me absolutely bonkers.
Let's just talk about what people are freaking out about right now. Like, like, right now,
you probably saw the Michael Burry stuff, right? So, like, right now people are freaking out about
the AI infrastructure companies being over-leverage and overbuilding. And,
not doing proper accounting because the chips they're saying are going to last and be and be valuable for five or six years when in reality people like Michael Burry are saying they're only going to be valuable for two or three years right so he's saying once the world realizes that the economic models are going to fall apart they're overspending on things that won't generate enough value to generate a return for their cost and that this will be similar to the mortgage crisis right that and that and that
He's like seating that in everyone's heads.
So I'll say this, even if he's right, it doesn't matter.
So even if this one cycle that we're in right now is maybe overspending on compute that isn't
going to last as long as the companies say it's going to last in terms of being valuable
and generating income, that doesn't matter to me because that's just this one little mini cycle
in the AI story.
That's not changing the much more important larger story.
which is we just, we're inventing intelligence.
And over the next 20 to 40 years,
we are going to make all of industry
meaningfully more productive,
meaningfully more efficient.
And when that happens, everyone wins.
When that happens, all companies become more profitable, right?
I don't want to use the word, no, right?
Like industry generally becomes more profitable.
We're able to climb out of this kind of,
kind of cycle of scarcity that we've been living in for so long, where more people will be able
to get more things that will start to accelerate. And if that happens, you have to be invested in
productive assets. Period. Like, end of story. Like, like, if you have conviction in what I just said,
these bumps along the road, whether it's deep seek or whether it's AGI is going to take 15 years
as opposed to two years, or, you know, this current generation of chips won't be.
be as productive as people think they're going to be. That stuff really doesn't matter.
Okay, so you say that we're not able to predict the short term and we can predict the long
term, but at the same time, you're also posting screenshots of your trading account on Schwab of
like call options and stuff that isn't super far out in expiration date. For those that don't know,
a call option is basically you're predicting a price will go above a different price by a certain
date. And that is kind of like predicting the short term. So how do you know,
when to like try to predict the short term with your call options or is that kind of you just see that
as a gamble because I see you making millions of dollars. Well they don't always work. This is a cycle
that repeats itself over and over again. Like I said, it happened with Deepseek. It happened with
AGI maybe being further away than we thought it was. Now it's the compute. It's always going to be
something else, but the cycles don't last that long. And I'm making bets that over the course of the next
few months, that it will be a rinse and repeat, and these companies will recover because
the risk reward of not being invested in these companies is just, it's asymmetric, right?
So could there be some downside?
Yes, absolutely.
But missing out on the upside of the biggest technological cycle that we've ever seen
in the history of the world, right?
It, like, that's an asymmetric risk.
And I firmly believe that both institutional and retail investors will ultimately decide that they have to be part of that.
And these stocks will recover.
So what happened to Michael Burry closing down his fund?
Why did you do that?
Well, listen, you know, Michael Burry seems to have conviction that we're in a bubble that things have gotten overinflated.
And maybe he's partially right.
you know, maybe he's partially right.
But he's a weird guy, first of all.
Let's just like take a step back.
Remember, he obsessed over the mortgage bubble for years and years,
and he was really early.
I think the difference between his historic call on the mortgage collapse and now
is that the mortgage industry was somewhat insular.
Like, he found a problem that once exposed,
theoretically there is no way to get out of it.
Whereas with this AI super cycle that we're in
and we're still in the very early innings,
I'm not even sure we started the first inning.
That's how early we are.
There are so many factors and it's so large
that I think he's in over his skis with this one.
Even if he's right about one piece of it,
this is very different from the mortgage sector, right?
Like this is the entire world innovating in a way
that we've never seen it innovate before.
Part of it reminds me of Isaac Newton, his investing.
Did you see this chart?
It was early in on something and sold it for a really big profit.
And his buddies got in a little higher than him.
And it went up even more.
And he says, I'm not touching that.
That's too high.
It keeps going up.
And he says, no, I'm not doing that.
It keeps going up even more.
He says, you know what, maybe I'm wrong.
And maybe I should be investing.
And then he buys.
And it goes up even more.
And he's like, oh, wow, yeah, I'm glad I didn't miss out.
And then the whole thing collapses.
And it shows he sells at the bottom.
Like, he lost his whole fortune doing this.
I think the core issue is people overthink things.
Right.
So, like, we all have these phones in front of us.
I think I've talked to you guys about this in the past.
You know, one of my biggest investments ever was on Apple, early days iPhone.
When this phone came out, there were a million things to kind of talk the phone down, right?
to say Apple is getting overinflated.
When you experience an iPhone for the first time,
when I've held an iPhone one in my hand,
I was like, this is maybe bigger than anything
that's ever happened in my life.
And this might will likely end up creating
the biggest company we've ever seen.
So it's like, that's all you need to know.
Game over.
Like, you don't need to worry about all the little things.
Did he do this thing right?
Is the connection good?
Did he get a good deal with AT&T?
That stuff is like nothing compared
to the overreaching story
that this is the most transatlantic story.
that this is the most transformative piece of technology
that has ever been invented in my lifetime
and would completely restructure the way that we live our lives.
And that the chokehold that Apple would have on all of us, right?
It was just, it's hard to wrap your head around that
and the financial opportunity for that company.
So I think about AI right now and what's happening,
it's so much larger than this moment.
Like, no, nothing.
worries me. No blip in the system worries me. No market correction worries me. They're all
opportunities to me. Every single dip, every single market bump is just an opportunity for me.
When I checked my portfolio this morning, today is, what is today? Thursday. Today's Thursday, it was a
horrible day in the market. You guys can go back and probably see it since we're posting this in a
couple of days. And I saw my portfolio down a bunch. I'm like freaking out a little bit. I'm like,
oh, okay, how am I going to make this up? Okay, I got to make sure the podcast is good for this
Sunday, got to make the money back. Then you walk in and you were saying, oh, yeah, this morning,
like, you know, I bought, I bought a little bit this morning too. And you bought some Bloom Energy,
Graham asked like, oh, how much did you buy? And you're like, a million bucks.
And then I'm thinking, okay, that's got to be, okay, margin. Is that like, no, just a million bucks.
But it's on margin, yes. So you pay for it on margin, but it's not leveraged Bloom Energy. It's not
options. I bought options too, but yeah, I bought a million in equity. So.
So let's talk about this morning.
When you open up your portfolio for the first time, how much were you down today?
A few million dollars.
And what was the internal dialogue?
So if you have people watching right now where their portfolio is going up or it's going down,
what do you tell yourself when you wake up and you see you're down a few million dollars?
Why?
That's all I care about is the why.
I don't care that the market went down.
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off-road challenge. Learn more at landrover.ca. I care about why it went down. If there's new
information, if there's something that I didn't know about yesterday that I need to learn about
today that is a meaningful risk to my assets, then I want to know about that. And I'll trade on that.
And so I immediately try to figure out what's going on.
It's the Michael Burry stuff.
You know, to some extent, it was soft bank yesterday selling all their Nvidia, although
they're just selling it because they have no cash and they need to make a $22 billion
investment in OAI before the end of the year.
So that didn't concern me.
There's a few other little things, specifically on Bloom Energy.
I contacted my Bloom Energy analyst, who's one of my best friends.
and I said, hey, I don't see anything on Blum Energy, do you?
I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything.
He's like, no, I don't either.
So I just bought more.
Again, if your thesis doesn't change and the market takes a downturn, that's an opportunity, right?
Like, as long as your thesis doesn't change, as long as the underlying information doesn't meaningfully change, it's just an opportunity.
But at what point do you get concerned?
Let's just say everything drops by 50%.
For no real reason.
It just drops.
Couldn't consumer sentiment be a reason in itself that the market's going down and that
become self-fulfilling and then more people start selling and more people start selling and more.
I mean, it doesn't concern me.
It probably excites me more than anything else if that happens.
If the reason for it happening is what you just laid out, which is sentiment and fear, that
excites me. If the reason is because we found something out that totally disrupts the thesis that I've
been working on for three and a half years about AI, that's a problem. That's something I want to know about.
So guys, I've been through this. I was a kid, but I lived through the 87 crash. My family was in, you know, the
finance sector. I was living in New York at the time. Like, I've been through it in 2000, I've been through,
in 2008. I mean, this is to be expected. It's actually so weird if we don't have days like today.
If we don't have days like today, that's what concerns me. I'm like, wait a second.
Is like the information that I know, does everybody already, have they already accepted that?
Meaning there's no meaningful degree of arbitrage, information arbitrage between me and the
rest of the world, right? I like it when people are coming out what concerns and
fear and, you know, the polar opposite kind of thesis as mine, as long as I believe mine is
stronger.
But that assumes that the market is somewhat logical.
The market can be very irrational and very emotional.
So where does that plan?
How long could the market be trading on emotions for before eventually logic comes in?
Logic will always win.
Historically, the market trades off of emotions for very short periods of times.
days, weeks, maybe months, look at every market crash. Look at the recoveries on every market crash
pretty much during our lifetime. It's very quick. So whenever it's a fear-based drop or just
confusion, the market generally recovers very quickly. How do some of these companies justify
their valuations when they're trading at crazy PE ratios that we haven't seen in a super
long time? Sure, you could say the company is good, but it seems like there's a lot of emotions
in there driving that price up, and it's sustaining it, too.
Yeah, I mean, so company by company is different.
Right now I'm talking about the AI story.
Could you make a case that Palantir is overvalued?
Absolutely.
You can definitely make a case.
Listen, I exited almost all my Palantir, you know, over the course of this summer.
On a case-by-case basis, you can make, yeah, they could be overvalued.
But the stocks that I'm invested in, I don't think are overvalued.
So I'm not concerned, right?
Like, you know what I'm focused on.
I'm focused on companies like Amazon.
I'm focused on companies like Bloom Energy that I think are beautifully positioned to be one of the primary power suppliers for data centers around the world and compute over the next five to eight years.
I'm not super concerned with the companies I'm invested in.
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in the description. Again, that is netsuite.com slash iced. Who do you think are going to be the biggest
winners and losers in the AI race? Well, it's early, and we don't fully know that yet. So I think
one of the big issues is as investors, we're always trying to answer all the questions.
We're always trying to figure out everything all the time at the same time. And that's just,
we're just not capable of doing that. To be a great investor, you just have to figure out one or two
things. So if you can find one or two companies that you have conviction in, that's all that really
matters. You know, for most of the last year, the companies I had conviction in were companies like
Robin Hood, Palantir, and InVIDIA, right? So as you know, I had levered positions in Invidia
every week for like 14 weeks in a row during the recovery after the tariffs. You know, going forward,
I still have conviction in Invidia. I absolutely now have less conviction in Palantir because the
world knows what I knew about Palantir a year ago. The world now finally knows what I knew about Robin Hood a year ago, right? I do think Robin Hood still has legs to continue to surprise people the next two to five years. So I'm still in Robin Hood. But when we think about this kind of next phase of the cycle, there are 60 or 70 AI companies. And I don't have opinions on most of them. Okay. Like there's no way.
for me to get strong conviction around dozens and dozens of companies.
I feel really good about Amazon.
I feel really good about Bloom Energy.
I still feel really good about InVidia.
You know, why do I feel good about Amazon long term?
It's really simple.
Regardless of who the big winners are in the early stages of AI,
who's ultimately one of the biggest winners, right?
Ultimately.
It's hard to make a case that Amazon isn't one of the,
of the biggest winners long term from this massive cycle of intelligence and automation and robotics.
They spent 20 years building out an obscene amount of infrastructure around the world,
making investments that no other company would ever even consider making. That didn't make any
sense because you're making these investments in a very low margin business. Because everything
that Amazon does on the consumer side, basically the world's,
largest retailer of stuff to humans is extremely low margin. Why is it low margin? Because it takes
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of expensive humans to basically move these products from one
place to another. The systems are extremely expensive, right? And so now that we've developed this
intelligence and, you know, the other half of my world is like this concept of us having an
infinite labor machine over the next few decades, once embodied AI comes to fruition, which is robots,
which is inevitable, it's just, we can debate the timelines, but it's inevitable. Amazon's the biggest
winner. Yeah. So like, I don't care what happens in the next few weeks to a few months with Amazon.
If it drops, I'll just buy more. Yeah, Amazon's been incredible. I went to Home Depot the other night
to find an extension cord. I wanted to find a 15-foot extension court outdoors. And I went to Home Depot,
and I looked at the prices, and then went to Amazon.
And then I realized I could buy the same thing at Amazon for half the price,
and it would arrive the next morning between like 6 and 8 o'clock,
a.m. That's insane.
So I just went and bought it on Amazon instead.
The other thing that's interesting with Amazon is there are movies that you could watch,
and there are shows that you could watch on Amazon,
which are incredible, like Beast Games was through Amazon.
And so them getting in that media side, too,
I think is incredible. Not a lot of people think about that. It's fun, but it's not what I really care
about. What I really care about is the infrastructure play that Amazon has invested in over the last
couple decades, that once they're able to properly, you know, kind of tweak the efficiencies in that
infrastructure with automation and robotics, which is inevitable, I think Amazon is going to be
unstoppable, meaning like, I don't think you'll be able to compete with Amazon in terms of your ability
to get a product from here to there. What about the growth possibility, though? Amazon is already
such a massive company that if they doubled, they would be the largest company. And if they
doubled, like, it would be hard, I feel like, to make a substantial return on Amazon. Not when you use
leverage, right? So if you're using leverage. So if they go up 10,000.
You have like weekly calls on it, then you can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it doesn't have to be weekly calls, right?
I mean, it could be monthly calls.
It could be just investing on leverage.
Like, that's what I do.
So I take big swings when I have high conviction in a thesis.
So I'm curious, what does your portfolio then look like right now?
You had Dave, the other host of Dumb Money Live, say that your portfolio is just insanity.
And I'm curious, you know, like, what are the main stocks that you're super bullish on and the swings that you see?
Listen, I'm going to stay super bullish on Robin Hood for a long time.
I don't see that position changing anytime soon.
I'm still bullish on Nvidia, but I'm not levered like I used to be.
That was insane.
What I was doing with Nvidia a few months ago was actually...
What were you doing?
Actually kept me up at night.
I mean, I had 10...
percent of my portfolio invested in weekly in video options every single week,
sometimes 15 percent of my entire liquid network and options that if it just moves a dollar
or the wrong direction in the next few days, it disappears.
But I had pretty good conviction that every week it was going to move in the right direction.
And except for like maybe one of those weeks, maybe two, I hit it every week.
How is that not gambling?
gambling. It's not gambol. It's the opposite of gambling. Every single one of those trades was based on a thesis that was deeply researched, right? So it was the, hey, I see who's flying over to the UAE next week. I know they have these meetings. I know exactly what those meetings are going to be about. Like, it's not hard to like anticipate what the news flow is going to be once they arrive in the UAE, once they have those conversations, once they talk about the data centers, once the news starts.
to put together the pieces about who's going to be the biggest beneficiary. Oh my gosh, now we have
this thing called Sovereign AI and all the stuff that Jensen was talking about is actually becoming real.
I mean, every week there was a different story. So I wasn't just randomly throwing my money in Invidia calls that
week. I had a thesis related to a very specific piece of information that I felt was going to get
dispersed right that week. And for the most part, it did and it worked. So the way that you kind of
balance out your finances is very interesting. You have your trading account that you try to build up
to a certain amount, like low eight figures, and then from that point, you take a chunk out at the
end of the year, put it in the foundation. And so what would happen then if your primary trading account
you were wrong on some of these things? Like, how would you build that back up? Like, do you,
because I don't think you necessarily have like an active source of income. I do have active sources.
I remember I have a few restaurants. A true, yeah. Volatile.
source of income. But you were you were you were lamenting recently I think on X about how hard it is to be successful in the restaurant. It's the hardest. It's the worst. We are successful, but we're an anomaly. I do have another business as you guys know collect a con, which is the largest, you know, Pokemon trade show in the world. And that's actually an obscene cash flowing business. And I love it. So no, I do have income. But for the most part, you're right. Like I generate as much as I can from my trading account. And then I take.
a big chunk of it and put in my foundation every year. And I have gotten a little, listen,
Dave has known me since I was 13, right? And he's seen me go through these cycles. And I've gotten
in some very squirly situations in the past where he's had to lend me money. So,
he's had to lend you money. Oh, yeah, yeah. How did that conversation go about?
I mean, we were younger and it wasn't a lot of money. But yeah, I mean, I just a few hundred thousand
dollars last week. I, listen, I don't know if I told you guys this before, but, you know, when
post-college, you know, I had taken cash advances off of every single credit card that I had, like five or six credit cards, cash advances.
I used those cash advances to buy options in one stock that went bad and I went broke.
I lost every dollar to my name and I was in debt.
How old were you?
Early 20s.
And how did you get out of that?
How much debt did you have it?
I didn't get out of it.
It was horrible.
I was, I was, had no money.
I was living in L.A.
My apartment costs $525 a month.
My car was broke down.
I was selling cars at the time, literally selling cars at Santa Monica BMW, I believe, at the time.
And I was just completely broke.
And then, unfortunately, I didn't have health insurance, and I got sick.
I got something called Graves disease, which is a thyroid disorder.
And I had to move home to Texas.
My parents took care of me
And once I got better,
I just started building my way
But it took a few years
Took a few years
Yeah, it took a few years
From one bad stock?
Yeah.
How much was it?
How much debt did you take it?
It was
It was the most incredibly bad stock
To ever be invested in.
It was a stock that ended up having
Some kind of fraud
And they delisted it
While I had my options
So they didn't delist it, excuse me
They froze the stock
while they were investigating
the whole thing, the SEC, and because the stock was frozen while I was holding my options,
my options just expired worthless.
What did you learn then from that experience?
Risk management is important.
Yeah, it is important.
I was a kid.
I always tell people, like, that's when you want to make mistakes.
The only way you will ever learn these lessons is losing real money.
So I encourage everyone when they're young just to actually do stuff, to invest with their own money.
Because if you do blow up your account, you are going to learn that lesson.
You want to learn that lesson when you're really young and you're investing thousands of dollars and not millions of dollars.
And you don't have a family, right?
And you're like, like, that's when you want to do it.
But yeah, I was in debt for many years.
My credit ruined.
You know, when I met my wife, I was deep in debt, had no money.
Like, it was, it was bad.
But you come out of it.
But how did you have the faith to then,
go back into the market and do it again.
What else are you going to do, right?
Like I learned my lesson, but like my lesson was I had too much concentration.
And I didn't really at the time, I wasn't investing properly.
I wasn't investing the right way.
I was investing because I knew a guy that knew a guy that said, hey, this is a sure thing.
First of all, as we know, there is no such thing as a sure thing.
But more important than that is you have to do your own homework.
And that's what I, that's what, now you know.
why I preach. I don't just say that to say that. Like I say it because I really mean it. When people
try to like copy my trades or people ask me for my exact trades, I generally don't release them anymore
because I truthfully do not want to instill that type of behavior. Steal my ideas, but do your own
research and actually make your own decisions because these are really important decisions. You
don't want like I don't want to blow up your account, right? Like that's on you, not on me. So I'll share an
idea with you, but you got to go to know more. I got to say when we met Vlad from Robin Hood
completely changed my opinion of the company. Like, I was a fan of Robinode and I had been for a long
time, but meeting Vlad and seeing him face to face and seeing his excitement about the company
and how passionate he is about- He was open to ideas, which I thought is the most important thing.
You need to be able to pivot and hear out other people and listen to the right ideas and ignore the
bad ones. And we were like, Graham was feeding him some excellent ideas. And he was
like totally interested. He's like, yeah, like we're we kind of working towards that.
Yeah. But it made me really think that Robin Hood, I think, has what it takes to compete with the
big people like Schwab, which I think a lot of people tend to compare them to in terms of account
balance size and number of accounts and average account, you know, things like this.
Seeing Vlad and even going to Hood Summit in Las Vegas, we got invited, incredible. And you meet the people
there that like you know you see Tesla super fans where they're like all Elon high I met those people but for
Robinhood like a totally different segment to the market where people are so excited about Vlad and
Robin Hood and I think he's one of the few people were after meeting him I was convinced on the company
and we've met other people uh big investors were immediately after meeting them like all right
listen I lost all faith I will say Michael Saylor was pretty convincing too yes Michael Saylor
was the only other one that when Bitcoin was $48,000,
when we filmed with him afterwards,
I'm like, you know what, Jack?
What he says makes a lot of sense.
No comment on Michael Seller,
but I will say this, that was the best interview
Blod has ever done.
I watched that and he's come a long way.
He used to be terrible at giving interviews.
Oh, he was excellent, yeah.
Yeah, that was great.
Listen, the Robin Hood's my number one position.
It became my number one position this last year.
It grew into becoming my number one position.
It clips Amazon.
And my thesis has always been really simple.
We have a hundred-ish trillion dollars that will get transferred over the next 30, 35 years to the younger generation through inheritance and other means.
And a big chunk of that money is going to Robin Hood.
And beyond that, I have a second thesis on Robin Hood, which is Vlad manages that company like a startup.
There are very few companies in the world of that.
size where the founder, CEO is, quite honestly, has the balls to still manage it like a
startup and to take big risk and to break through walls and to ask for forgiveness as opposed to
asking for permission.
And Elon is one of those guys.
He gets credit for being one of those guys.
Vlad does not get credit for also being one of those guys.
So anytime I see a company like that, what the capability of dominating.
a sector and literally like like like killing a sector and stealing all the business, you match
that with a CEO like that.
Like it's game over.
Here's the other thing is that he agreed to come on our podcast, which a lot of people don't
do.
And I think I think it's dumb not to come on a podcast, especially like a finance podcast.
And we reach out to a lot of people and we either get a lot of knows or just never hear back
from people that should be doing podcasts.
and we would, I think we'd be doing them a favor by doing a podcast.
And Vlad was excited about doing it.
And walking into his office, it's not like a corporate, you know, headquarter.
It didn't look, it looked like a house.
It also was surprisingly not extravagant.
No.
I was expecting we were going to walk into some sort of like crazy huge headquarters,
the classic Google thing with the slides and, you know, free food everywhere, buffets and this and that.
It really looked like they were running relatively lean for how productive their company.
is, which I also think is a positive indicator. And this is going to be another big one. They're
two and a half percent crypto match right now. They just brought it back. I don't know if it's,
if it's targeted, but they had a two percent match when Bitcoin was at 120. Then they increased
it, which I thought was really clever, to two and a half percent, but Bitcoin is now a hundred thousand
dollars. So technically, it's not costing them that much more, but it looks on paper that you're
getting two and a half percent on a lower amount though, but it looks like two and a half percent
for whatever you bring in the platform. They're going to bring in a lot of money to Robin Hood.
The thing that Vlad and Robin Hood does is they play the long game. They are playing the long game.
They are in this for the next 20 to 30 years to be the biggest financial company on earth.
I have absolute confidence that they will be unless something really crazy happens.
Listen, I opened up a Robin Hood account. Well, I've had an account for,
long time but I put meaningful money into my Rodman account for the first time this year,
which was shocking because like I'm just, that's not something I ever thought I would do.
I'm old school, but it was because of the match.
Yeah.
It was it was the extra little thing that said, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and do this
because it was that extra incentive that got me to pull the trigger.
And listen, once you're in that ecosystem, they do a really good job.
By the way, I love, I mean, the fact that you can, you know, prediction markets on your brokerage.
Oh, man.
Don't get me startled on that.
It's huge, though, because you got to realize it's not about even how big of a market that can be.
It's about the fact that you can do everything through one app, right?
That prediction market is great and it's awful because now every sports game I watch or go to, I'm, I don't want to say I'm.
betting, I am placing a hedged position on Robin Hood in a real time.
That's what they want you. It's not, it's not gambling. How are you? It's like you're hedging
a position. It's gambling ground. It's definitely gambling. That is by that. That is not
a hedge. It's speculation. There we go. I'm speculating on Robin Hood. But what's funny is that I
could watch, like, I went to a hockey game the other day. And I'm watching the hockey game at the same
time as I'm watching my Robin Hood account because I bet on the Las Vegas Golden Knights. And
when one team scores, like you see the odds change within like two seconds.
It's already priced in.
How much did you bet?
$100 and I lost it all.
But you had fun.
I had a great time.
And I also bet on the, this was bad.
I put money on Cuomo in New York because I thought it would be a closer race.
And he was priced when I bought in at like seven cents.
And I knew he was probably going to lose.
But I thought that was underpriced.
done it should be more of like he should be a 15 to 20 cent bet and that lost I just tell the matured
that that that was that's a fair thesis that you know that's my favorite type of investing is when
you see an asymmetric risk reward um investors like the way our brains work we're not really
capable of computing that and those opportunities are out there all the time it's like okay yeah
it probably won't happen but there's likely a two X better chance of it happening than how
what's priced currently. So you have to take that even if you're likely to lose. You have to
yeah it to size it appropriately. But you do it enough and you will win. But here's the one thing
that I think is worth looking out for with Robin Hood is that their fees on the prediction
markets are so massive. It almost makes it not worth it to go through Robin Hood. But the thing is
it's it's so easy. Like it saves me from having to drive down to Red Rock and place a bet when I
could just do it on my phone in like two seconds. But but the spread between.
the bid and the ask and the Robinhood fee you pay adds up to like 10 to 15 percent a buy
and then 10 to 15 percent a sell if you sell it before it matures.
Okay, so I think they're looking at the long tail of customers who want to engage in that
type of prediction market as opposed to the professional gambler, right, that really cares that
much. For people like me, I don't care. Like if I want to bet on the game,
I don't care if I can get a 5% better margin going to MGM, which I can't even do in Texas anyway, right?
But even if I could, like you said, it's just easy and they make it easy and fun.
I can go on there and place a bet like 5x quicker than I could on a gambling app.
It's just easier.
And I think a lot of people don't want to have a gambling app.
They don't want to have money inside of a gambling app.
That's just not part of who they are.
And I think Robin Hood is going to end up with millions and millions of people,
casually betting on sports, casually betting on various things, and I think that's buying for them.
So in terms of the AI infrastructure that's going in right now, what do you think the impact
is going to be on jobs? Because I've heard a saying that says that AI is not going to create more
jobs. It's simply going to redistribute them to fewer people. Yeah, this is a topic that I love
that I think most people get wrong. I think this will be massively possible.
long term for jobs just massively. Just just just play out the scenario. Okay. Like in in in what world do we end up
reducing the amount of scarcity and increasing productivity globally that doesn't ultimately
benefit humans in a whole number of ways, including more opportunity and better jobs and just
better life. Will there be hiccups in the short run? Yes. Can we actually define what jobs look like
in 25 years? Absolutely not. But I want you to envision a world where AI continues to accelerate
over the next 20 years. You will have a world where we're going to have millions. If Elon is correct,
billions of robots, what they look like, who knows. But there will be billions and billions of robots
all around the world. There will be new industries being formed because we now have this intelligence
that makes everything so unbelievably easy and cheap and productive to deliver value or to start new
things, right? Essentially, any human on earth can create entertainment on the fly, whatever's in your
head. You're able to actually express without having the skill set of being able to actually
produce music yourself, right? You have a helper there. You don't have to be able to produce a TV show or
go raise funding to produce a TV show.
Envision that world and just imagine how much demand we will have for humans.
How many more products will we have?
How many more machines will we have that need to be serviced and delivered and
taken care of and sold?
A world with more things requires more work from humans.
Right?
So like, I am 100% convinced in this.
Like, this is not even debatable to me.
What a job is in 25 years might look very different from what a job is today, but there will be more and better jobs as a result of AI and robotics in 20 to 30 years.
Now, again, between now and then, well, we have hiccups.
Yeah.
The issue is we can't foresee how that problem gets solved if AI moves too quickly and disrupts too many.
job positions, but we will fix that problem. So like humans, we, we don't fix big problems
until the pain of not fixing that problem becomes bigger than the pain of taking action.
Okay. So right now, the pain of like, let's just say it was increasing taxes. That's a huge pain.
Like, we're not going to increase taxes unless we absolutely have to for something, right?
If we have 50 million people that are jobless in eight years because of AI, do you not think we're going to resolve that?
Of course, we're going to resolve that.
Because if we don't resolve that, the pain of not resolving that will end up be people overthrowing our government and coming with, you know, picks and shovels to actually kill us.
Okay.
So that problem will get solved when it needs to get solved.
But don't you think that the government would then just step in and subsidize life if you had this massive, unemployed workforce that should be working, then that's kind of what we've seen in the past is like the government steps in like they've done with education and now, you know, housing is becoming less affordable. So now they've, you know, they're thinking about introducing 50 year mortgages.
Okay. So the answer is maybe yes, it will get solved. Will the government solve it? Maybe someone will solve it.
because the alternative is so catastrophic
that we would never allow that to happen.
And by the way, not to mention the fact
if AI becomes that great to displace tens
and tens of millions of workers,
probably going to be pretty great
at helping us solve those problems too.
I have always thought, I mean,
not to get too into politics,
I always stay out of politics.
You know, I have some of my very closest friends
on the furthest right as you can get,
and some of my very closest friends,
are literally as far left as you can get and everything in between.
And I've just been this guy in the middle my whole life.
I kind of call myself like a radical centrist because it's like I just like to solve problems.
So much of this is about misunderstanding and miscommunication and sentiment and feelings
and people just not coming up with solutions because we have all these obstacles to coming up with solutions.
AI doesn't have that. I think AI is going to actually play a really big role in helping us solve all of these huge
problems that we have today when it comes to how do we spend money as a government? Because that's what
most people on the right have an issue with. I don't think billionaires or millionaires would have
any issue paying more taxes if they had confidence that the money was being spent appropriately to help
humanity. I really don't and to help their neighbors. Because that benefits them, right? Because those people are
their friends, their family. We all want the same thing. Most of us want the same outcome, right?
We just don't know how, we argue over how to get there. So I think AI is going to do a really good
job helping not just companies become, because everyone's talking about companies becoming more
productive and efficient. Like, it's going to help governments in a really big way and no one's
talking about that. And once AI gets into government, which it will, and actually helps government
figure out how to be more productive with our money,
I think we're going to see such massive efficiencies there
and what we can actually do with our tax dollars to help people.
It's one of the things I'm actually most excited about,
about this AI revolution.
So, yes, we'll have hiccups.
It will not be a long-term problem.
And I don't know exactly what the solution will be
or how it will play out.
I just know we'll figure out how to like, like,
like even out the bumps along the way. But ultimately, we will have better and more jobs for humans
as a result of this. There's just like no doubt in my mind. Like I would bet everything I have on that.
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China is racing towards AI superiority. Okay. And that more than anything else ensures that the U.S.
government is going to support and if needed backstop our AI ambitions.
Okay.
Nothing in the world motivates a country to backstop something and to support it more than
its competing enemy that is pushing forward on that frontier.
So that's something that I think people don't fully appreciate.
So when we're talking about AI and all these big investments, like, we don't have a choice.
Our government doesn't have a choice.
Like even if there is some degree of unknowns or like, hey, we're not exactly sure how this is going to play out, the government is not going to allow the U.S. to fall meaningfully behind China in this AI race.
So whatever needs to happen, whether the government incentives on AI data centers or energy, whatever needs.
to happen, the government is required to ensure that happens because this is the new arms race.
Think about it.
If China becomes the country that's able to produce products, 5x cheaper than us, right, they have intelligence on future warfare and weapons, right?
And on vaccines, like, you can't let China have AGI.
You can't let China get super intelligence, like, meaningfully before you have it.
That's a national security risk.
So there is an inferred backstop here on the sector, which is the government.
Now, the CEOs are not going to talk about it because.
Sam Altman kind of alluded to it.
And it created quite a stir.
But it's there, guys.
It's there.
We all know it's there.
They all know it's there.
Sam knows it's there.
like all the big tech
CEOs, they all know it's there.
Jensen knows it's there.
This is too big
to fail.
I feel like those are famous last
word. It's too big to fail.
But it was last time
and look how it got saved.
Okay?
This, this
now I say too big to fail as a sector.
Companies obviously,
companies can obviously fail, right?
But when you look at the infrastructure
sitting behind it, the infrastructure really is too big to fail.
This infrastructure might be the most important thing that our country works on the next 20 years.
And we need to ensure that we are in lockstep, if not ahead of China, every step of the way.
You can love it or hate it, but that's just the way it is.
And that adds to my confidence level.
Because there will be moments that will be really rough along the way.
There will be moments when, like today, like complete freak.
out moments, maybe way, way worse than today, the government's going to be there. You think they're
going to let our AI superpowers just completely fall apart and let China move forward with AGI and
superintelligence and have access to all the next generation weapons and warfare. But doesn't that then
mean that it's really going to be the taxpayer who ends up funding AI? Possible. And do you think this is
the reason why they're investing so much right now?
because they know we can't go belly up because the government wouldn't let us.
So we may as well take riskier bets right now.
There are a lot of reasons to take those big bets because, again, it's an asymmetrical risk
reward.
If AI does what everyone believes it will.
And again, it's not about us reaching AGI in like two years.
It could be 10 years, 15.
It doesn't really matter.
We've already seen enough.
We know where it's headed.
You can't not be part of that.
It's just so so obvious.
It's like saying you're not going to be part of the internet when it came
know. Like, you know, like, listen, it didn't cost that much to be web oriented as a company when that
happened. This just happens to cost more, but you can't just not be part of it. Even look at what
Apple's doing right now, right? Behind the scenes, you know that like Apple's trying to figure out a way
to leverage Google, to leverage all the stuff they're doing. You know, Apple has a lot of data
for Google. I think this is what you're going to see really soon. Apple is going to lean on Google's
models for all their AI the next few years.
And I think they're going to get a great deal for that because Apple has so much crucial
data for Google to share back.
I think that's going to be the deal that plays out.
But even Apple, who's behind on AI, they will catch up.
Does it worry you about the circular financing nature?
No.
Not at all.
It's what has to happen.
The circular financing is a huge problem.
if this doesn't work out.
So explain the circular financing to...
So basically, if you're in Vidia and you're essentially financing your customers to buy your own chips, essentially, there's a lot of different ways that it's happening right now.
If your customers go belly up, you're taking the head, too, right?
So that's where we get into trouble.
Circular financing could be not such a bad thing if everything moves in the right direction.
If this whole thing falls apart and we're not able to monetize artificial intelligence at the corporate level, at the consumer level, if there's no monetization that eventually comes in over the next five to call it eight, nine, ten years, that's a problem.
And that, yeah, so think of the circular financing as leverage.
It's just invidia and Jensen have a strong thesis and they have a lot of conviction the same way I do.
and they're willing to place a little bit of leverage on it.
The way that they're doing that is they're taking their cash,
and rather than just giving their cash back to shareholders,
they're spending their cash to allow their customers
to do bigger and better things with their chips.
That's it.
It's not that scary.
I know it sounds scary because it can.
It's leverage.
It just looks scary.
Okay.
So think about leverage.
When things go wrong, they go really wrong.
But when things go right, they go really right.
And so everyone's making a bet that they've seen enough, they know enough, they know directionally where we are headed, even if there are bumps in the road, that it makes sense to apply leverage.
And that's where the circular financing comes in.
And I don't blame them from doing it.
Like, I like it.
What's so amazing to me is like you've seen like what, nanobanana.
Like, like you've seen some of this stuff, right?
What's a nano banana?
Like a Photoshop.
Google.
And the new one's coming out, like literally any day now.
you've seen what Open AI has done, right?
With their social network, right?
Have you been on there yet?
With the Sora.
Sora?
Yeah.
All the Jake Paul memes are hilarious.
But guys, this is like not even 1.0.
Like, they literally just showed us the future.
Like, how do you see that?
How do you see that?
See what this AI is capable of doing today?
Okay, but I see that.
The first thing in my mind is every actor,
every movie, every production company
is going to be obsolete in 20 years.
Like they were talking about doing a big movie studio
here in Las Vegas and bringing it in from Hollywood
and they wanted all these subsidies.
And that got temporarily shut down.
And at first it was like, oh, that's dumb.
That would think of all the jobs it would bring here.
And then I'm thinking, you know what?
In 20 years from now,
it's going to be a dude on his computer
sitting on a couch who could create
the next Michael Bay movie in 20 minutes
for $10.
All these movie production
companies, you're going to be wiped out. Like, why get a real actor when you could get the perfect
AI? And when you think about it, when you're watching something, it's just pixels on a screen. And when you
think if the pixel coloration is perfect and the way they're laid out on the screen is perfect,
it's going to be identical. And you could create anything that you want to. Like, why wouldn't that
wipe out entire industries? And then what you're left with is all these people who have trained their
entire lives for one specific thing. And that gets wiped out. What do they do when they're 50? And they don't
have savings and they have to learn something all over again when they're entering retirement
and they don't know what to do. Okay, so let's let's let's let's frame that in a way that
I know you'll appreciate. Okay. We used to have a media world where all of the media,
all of the marketing and all the advertising got pushed through agencies and then got pushed
through old media. And so if you wanted to advertise something, that's the flow of the
money only went one way. And you had newspapers and you had TV networks and cable networks. You
had radio stations. And they essentially controlled all of those media dollars. Now we democratize
the world of media globally through social networks. And now we have millions, tens of millions
of content creators around the world in every little niche. Those content creators are delivering
messages on behalf of companies around the world. Right. So,
a big part of that media world has already been disrupted and has already been torn apart, right?
It's not what it used to be newspapers.
They barely even exist.
Radio barely even exist anymore.
Wait to see what's about to happen to the rest of that world, like TV and Hollywood,
all of it, right?
But look at what we created.
Do you not think that what we created to replace that is meaningfully bigger, more efficient,
and look at the way the dollars are flowing?
they're still flowing to people.
You have a real job, Graham.
You are a creator.
Your job matters.
Just because you don't work at the newspaper that went out of business 15 years ago
doesn't mean that's any less valid of a job.
At the time, we just didn't have the foresight to understand what that job was going to look like in the future.
So in the same way, I agree, I think Hollywood will change.
I don't know if it will completely go away or how.
long that will take, but I think what this is going to create is going to be meaningfully larger
than the system that exists today. And what's going to happen to the people who don't adopt it?
Well, get left behind or just aren't as ambitious to pursue these things. I mean, I think you can say
that about any other innovation. If you don't change what the times, you won't benefit, right? So,
if you didn't adopt computers or if you didn't adopt the internet, right, when it came out,
your company was likely going out of business.
So yeah, you have to adopt it.
That's what I tell every kid.
I constantly get asked by other parents, like, what should I be telling my kids?
What jobs should they can go into?
I don't know about jobs, but like just start using AI every day.
Like start spending it.
Like learn all the tools.
Like start doing, because this is not going away.
And this is not a bad thing.
It's generally a good thing.
If it doesn't kill us and it might kill us, I don't know about that.
There is a doomsday scenario that's like very real, very legitimate.
and definitely something to be concerned about as we start to not only democratize the ability
to make entertainment, but to democratize the ability to make weapons, to democratize the ability
to do damage in the world.
That does concern me.
This doesn't concern me at all.
So what is the doomsday scenario for AI?
The doomsday scenario for AI is democratizing violence, like democratizing the ability to do
bad things because the same way that we can now do amazing things so quickly, so
cheaply, and anybody in the world has access to the information to do those things,
you could use these tools to do terrible things to, I don't know, create viruses that we
can't even imagine, to create weapons that we can't even imagine.
I mean, to just do damage through hacking and various things.
Like, you've seen some of the deep fakes.
The deep fakes alone are exceptionally dangerous right now that are out there.
Like there was an investor who's very well known who kind of exposed a deep fake of Elon Musk this last week, kind of talking about some political issues.
And in his, you know, this is Bill Ackman, right?
Bill Ackman is known for doing deep, deep research.
It would take one of us like 15 seconds to realize this was like AI.
He said, it might be fake.
It might not be.
I'm like, what might?
It literally says it's AI if you just read it.
But this is the issue, right?
Like, we don't even know what's real and not real anymore.
There are a lot of dangerous things that are coming out of this,
but I don't think it's the job issue that everyone's so concerned about.
So you said it's extremely important to stay on the cutting edge of AI
and to educate yourself with AI.
What are the best ways to do that?
Like, how do you apply AI in your own life to better it?
And how if a listener out there wants to, like, learn more and adopt AI as deeply,
as possible to be able to use that in the markets, how would you recommend they do that?
First, follow the right people. You should be spending 15 minutes a day just catching up on
whatever happened in AI that day. You should do that every day for the next few years.
There's a guy on TikTok, I think he's on Instagram, called Nate. I mentioned us during the last show.
He's like the Mr. Rogers of AI in like 60 seconds. He'll spend nine hours researching whatever
happened in AI that day and tell you in 60 seconds. So like anyone could understand the way he
communicates. So that's like the one guy I tell everyone to follow. I forget his last name. But if you're
younger, you have to use AI. Like you have to use the tools for everything that you do. Like there's
so many tools, creator tools. You should be creating with AI. You should be using it for your writing.
You should be using it to help you with every single aspect of your life. There are hundreds of
AI tools. You should be using the top 15 or 20 of them on a regular basis because that's value. Like this is the
new world, this is whatever your new job is going to be, it's going to be using AI as a tool.
Because whoever employs you in whatever sector you go into is going to want to get five to
10 employees out of you. And you need to be able to show up to that interview and say, I can produce
10 people of work because I'm that good at utilizing AI to make myself more productive in
every single facet of everything that I do. And based on that job description, here are the eight
tools that I'm going to use so that you're hiring 10 people instead of hiring one person when you're
you hire me. Like, that's what I would tell. Like, I can't speak to the job, but like, no matter
what the job is, I can almost guarantee you that you can utilize that approach. And what do you
tell your kids to make sure that they're prepared to go into the workforce and make their own living?
Pretty much don't tell them anything because they don't listen to anything I tell them. So I
don't even try anymore. I try to get other people to tell my kids. I don't know, but not me.
Why not? It's funny because this episode will get a few hundred thousand views and every person will be
listening intently at every word you say.
Except for my kids.
And your kids.
It's just like, man, whatever.
My kids are now at an age.
They're 15.
You have to put Subway Surfer on the lower half of this and make it like a vertical.
Have you seen those like the brain rot?
Maybe.
TikToks where it's, you got to change scenes.
Yeah, you have like some video playing on the lower half and they can watch it.
I hope you guys get to experience this for yourself someday.
But there is nothing that you can do to win the approval of your kid.
There's just nothing that you can do.
at least not at this age when they're in high school.
So, like, my kids bring friends over to the house
and their friends are starting to come over to me,
like, Mr. Camilla, we saw your video.
I love this, I love this.
Like, they're watching, they're learning finance,
they're learning stuff.
And, like, my kids, nothing.
Nothing.
They want nothing to do with it.
And I'm totally fine with that.
That sounds like an act, though, right?
No.
If their buddies come over and they're like,
can we get an autograph and the kids are like,
I am just a big idiot.
I'm just a big idiot for them.
Is are your kids? No, no, no. Their friends are legitimately watching. Like, yeah, you know what, you know what's shocking to me? I was such a finance nerd when I was a kid, but I was the only finance nerd, maybe in the whole world at that time. This is going back to the late 80s, you know, early 90s now. Like, yeah, I told you guys story. I used to like touch tone trade options trading at college in the basement of SMU on a on a pay phone. It would take me 20 minutes to place one trade. I mean, now.
These kids are 12, 13, 14.
They're studying trading.
Like, dude, that is actually a good piece of information right there, like for Robin Hood.
Yeah.
Like, if that doesn't get you psyched on Robin Hood, I don't know what will because being like this gritty, having like a like a like a side gig, like investing is part of the culture of being young now, especially for young males.
And it's like a cool thing.
If you don't do it, it's almost like, wait, you're not doing this?
You're not trading.
You know, it's an interesting concept.
A lot of people talk about what age to give their kid a phone.
At what age do you give your kid the access to invest?
I wanted my kids investing when they were way younger.
They just wouldn't take on to it.
They just wouldn't do it.
So I started accounts for them.
I'm crushing it in their accounts.
They're doing great.
They're up 5X in two years since I started their account.
Yeah, but um and they don't care they don't check it they don't want to know how much money they have
They don't even care about them I mean my daughter my son doesn't even care about money
He's just he he he he he plays football he plays Madden when he's not playing football and he plays guitar and sings country music
He just doesn't care about money
Does that you do you pay for him when he goes out with his friends and he wants to go get a lunch do you fund his life
Kind of because with with with with with
with limits, with reasonable limits, right?
So, and that's a parent problem.
You're always kind of arguing with yourself over what's appropriate, what's not appropriate,
especially if you live in a wealthy neighborhood and you have to have that balance of we chose to live here.
And this is how people live.
These are the restaurants that the kids go to.
These are the things that they do.
And like you don't want your kid not to be able to engage socially and culturally in the world that you move them into.
So you have to make that choice as a parent that, hey, like, you have to balance.
Like, so yeah, you kind of have to, to some extent.
Like the thing that I've talked against my whole life, which is trust funds, I think trust funds are like the most evil, terrible thing that, like, you just can never do a trust fund for a kid.
But now the world is changing.
Our world is changing to the point where no one used to talk about trust funds.
Now it's like you have $100 trillion that are being transferred.
Will there become a point in the next 10 years?
I think there will be where if you are a kid that is coming into the world in their 20s with no money and maybe just a bunch of debt from college, you're not starting at the same levels as everyone else.
You're starting like 10 levels below everyone else.
So does having some sort of nominal starting point become just the absolute norm over the next 10 years?
I know it sounds crazy, but like, so the house next to me is for sale right now in my neighborhood.
And I'm friends with the real estate broker.
And I'm like, hey, you sell it yet?
Like, tell me who's moving in.
Like, who's looking at it?
And then I'm like, it's so expensive.
I'm like, who can afford to buy these homes now?
Because when I bought my home, it was 4X cheaper, you know, 12 years ago.
Welcome aboard via rail.
Please sit and enjoy.
Please sit and sit.
Play, post, taste, view, and enjoy, via rail, love the way.
He's like, let me tell you something.
Every single person I've shown that house to is getting money from their parents.
Every single one.
He goes, there's not one person that's looking at that house that's not getting help.
So it's just like, it's become like a norm.
I sold my house recently, actually, in L.A.
It was the same situation.
All, there were multiple offers on it,
but all were receiving assistance from their parents.
And their parents wanted to give their kids either a leg up
or, you know, big milestone events.
The kids are getting married, something like this.
And here's a house.
And I think that's going to be a lot more common
for parents to pay for a house than education.
Like, instead of going to college,
let me help you out with the down payment for a house.
And now you've got a place to live.
I totally agree. I think this is going to get so much worse and it's going to create a huge cultural issue with the haves and have-nots.
Everyone's complaining because they don't have the money to do this. They can't buy a home. They can't get ahead. Or you can if you have help.
and there are there's just two people now in the world that's just what we've become that's just how
our country has evolved there's been so much wealth accumulated that things are becoming so expensive
because of the people that have it so if you're starting out and you don't have that you're in
trouble I hate it like I don't have a solution to that problem yeah how much money should you
leave to a child I think about this all the time now so I'll tell you what I did
as opposed to starting a trust fund, I start a foundation and I want to grow the foundation to be infinitely large, hopefully a billion dollars someday.
It's kind of like my little goal in my head.
What's so amazing about a foundation is you can run the foundation and you could take a small salary.
The government actually regulates what you can take from a nonprofit.
So you can pull some expenses for your health care.
You can pull expenses for managing the foundation, but it has to be nominal.
I love that model because if you start a foundation or maybe start two foundations, if you have two kids, you could put them each as the administrator for each of your foundations.
You don't have to have this trust where you have an attorney that's approving things and you're having to make all these hard decisions.
you know that they would always, in a worst case scenario, be able to take a nominal salary and get health insurance from that foundation.
And the beautiful part is you tell them the goal is to never take money out.
But if you need to, you can legally.
And it just lives on forever.
And it lives on for generations, hopefully.
And it grows.
And the great thing about a foundation is it grows tax-free.
So once that foundation starts to go, you have to distribute 5% of the foundation every year to charitable causes.
to 50130s. But the foundation's always getting larger and larger. So it's kind of like having a
trust, but you're involving your kids in something that's productive, something that's giving
back to the world, and you know that they will always be capped. So for your foundation, is that
where you get the 20,000 to 60 million thing in your bio? No, foundation is separate. I started the
foundation like three years ago, so it's relatively new. So what's the 20,000 to 60 million? That's just
my brokerage account. That's just your personal brokerage account.
But then you transferred most of that over to the...
Yes.
So I transfer basically excess capital every year into my foundation.
And then the money in the foundation, you also invest to that?
Yes.
Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way.
I'm not allowed to invest on margin or options in the foundation.
How do you learn that the hard way?
So I opened the foundation and I get the account and I'm really pumped because I'm going to like, you know,
I'm going to grow this account like I grow my account.
You know, like we're going to have the biggest foundation ever.
And how lucky is this foundation to have me managing the money?
And we do.
We crush it.
Like, I'm doing really well.
And my CPA sends me my tax bill.
And there's like a $200 and some odd thousand dollar penalty fee.
I'm like, what is this from my foundation?
And he was like, oh, you can't trade on leverage.
you can't do that, any of that stuff in a foundation.
If you do it, you have to pay massive penalties.
So, like, I just didn't know.
I think I made more money off of doing that than the penalties I paid.
But that, yeah.
So would you then do it anyways if you're super bullish on a trade?
Yeah, what if your conviction is so high that the fee is going to be so small compared to what you could make?
I'm actually, when it comes to, like, the law and ethics, I'm, like, super conservative.
So once I realize I'm not allowed to do that, I haven't done it since.
Like one day I had like just like a few hundred dollars over.
It was they tapped into margin.
I freaked out and like I covered it.
So no.
No, I don't want to mess around with that.
But yeah.
So I do manage the foundation's account, but unfortunately no margin.
And it is frustrated not to be able to use more.
And it's frustrating not to be able to use options.
You know, my style of trading is, you know, a few times a year.
I get really high conviction around a piece of information.
And I want to make the most of it.
it, right? And that's how I make my year. You don't generate 70 some odd percent returns annually
over 20 years, which is where I'm headed right now, just investing without leverage. You have to
apply leverage. So what's the reason behind using options trading instead of buying a leveraged
ETF for a stock like Robin Hood? Well, I mean, they're pretty much the same thing if they offer
that, right? But I can get more leverage. The leveraged option, though, it's not technically
expiring so it wouldn't go down to zero for the for the leveraged ETF yeah but I want to maximize
my leverage around a thesis and that's why you do weeklies as opposed to but you still do
leaps like you do I never do leaps I okay my trading methodology all revolves around an
information window so it all depends on when I believe the information that I'm trading on
will become widely disseminated to the to the market so if that's
it's three days from now that I'm trading a weekly.
If it's three weeks from now, I'm trading a monthly.
Yeah, if it was like six months from now, I guess I would trade a leap, but that rarely happens.
Right?
So like I, the trade is defined by the information that I'm trading.
Like it all depends.
Like when I traded the Barbie movie, my thought was that going into the release, all the hype would happen.
And then Mattel would move up, right?
When they realized that Barbie was going to be a success.
movie that was centered around their biggest toy. So I bought options that expired on the Friday
of the movie release. And I actually exited my position before the movie actually came out
based on all the good reviews it was getting that week. Right. So you have to frame the trade
around when you think other people are going to come across the information that you came across
early that will cause that stock to directionally move in the direction you think it will.
Who would you say are the best CEOs that are out there right now?
Jensen, for sure.
Vlad at Robin Hood, Sam Allman, as a CEO, maybe not as a person.
Okay, like I know he's a controversial person.
And by the way, I do think the best CEOs are often kind of psychotic, right?
Like, they're not normal people.
I would not be a great CEO at that level.
Like I like spending a tremendous amount of time with my kids, with my dog, having coffee with friends.
Like, I don't want to spend the rest of my life continuing to level up in that manner.
But Sam Altman is a complete nutbag.
And like, that's who I want running open AI if I'm invested in Open AI because he is a guy that's going to do whatever it takes.
He's going to make sure that OAI doesn't leave any chips on the table.
You know, like he's going for it all.
Do you think OpenA.
Will ever go public?
Absolutely, it will go public.
So why?
Oh, it has to.
Yeah, they need the money.
They need liquidity.
They need more capital.
They'll continue to need more capital.
They'll go public as soon as they determine that that's the next tranche capital that's
required.
And they should go public.
Yeah, it'll be a trillion dollars.
Do you think it'll go more than that?
The biggest IPO.
It'll be the biggest IPO.
I've been saying this for two years.
People thought I was nuts two years ago when I said this.
two years ago, I said it'll be a trillion dollar IPO.
And I still think it will be, but I think it could, I think on IPO day, it could be closer to two trillion than one trillion with the way it trades.
We'll see if I'm right about that.
I know that sounds insane.
Yeah.
How soon until I have ads in ShatcheeBT, BT, when it starts recommending like, oh, this, go go to this local McDonald's here if you want a good place.
It has to have ads.
It just has to, and it will.
He doesn't like ads, but it will have ads.
So OAI did a deal with Shopify.
That's a really big deal, right?
Because like doing that deal with Shopify means that they will merge the worlds of commerce.
Listen, as an Amazon investor, my biggest tell risk right now is OAI and Shopify.
Because if OAI comes out and actually has like a 60 to 70% consumer market share of AI using that app,
And a lot of that commerce ends up getting pushed to a Shopify model.
That could be a little bit of an issue for Amazon at some point.
But I'm not worried about it.
That's like years, years out.
We like Shopify a lot.
Shopify has been a great sponsor of the channel for the record.
We use Shopify.
Thank you Shopify for sponsoring this episode.
Yeah.
I didn't even, well, I did kind of know that, but I wasn't thinking that.
That's a big deal for Shopify, though.
Didn't Open AI also do a deal with PayPal?
Yes.
I don't know as much about that deal.
They announced a deal and immediately PayPal went down.
Did they?
I don't know much about that.
Okay.
I think, listen, they have like a billion people using chat GPT.
It's incredible.
By the way, I don't know the degree to which you guys use AI, but like I'm so addicted.
All the time.
Like, and this is the thing.
Like, again, I'm going to go back to the iPhone moment.
There's no doubt in my head.
My conviction is 100% that AI is as big or bigger than what 95% of the people
the world think it is. I use it. I see it. I can't get away from it. I can't even imagine going back to a
world without it. Most of the world is just living to survive. Okay. Like the people concerned about
job loss like in the first world, like most people are just trying to survive every day.
And like when we talk about that, we do not want these jobs for our future generations.
Like, do you really want someone doing physical labor for 45 years of their life?
Do you know how many people do not get to spend quality time with their family during those crucial years
because they're working 60, 70-hour weeks?
That is not what we want for humanity.
Will we have disruption that will happen the next decade?
Absolutely.
Do we need to do everything in our power to try to help those people that are getting displaced temporarily?
Absolutely.
We need to figure that out.
But that aside, this is going to be the, I think, the biggest thing to ever happen to humanity.
Because I think 30 years from now, a lot of the people in this world will get to live a life similar to mine, which is I never missed a soccer game, never missed a basketball game or a football game on my kids.
Like when I've been fortunate enough to be financially independent because I've been an investor my whole life.
And when I show up to the soccer field, there's usually one other dad because it's a four o'clock game.
It's so hard to get.
Who gets off a work at four o'clock?
It's impossible.
So you get a bunch of moms, not even all moms, because sometimes you have both people work, right?
And so, like, I'm at these games.
I'm like, this is, I'm so fortunate.
Like, I've gotten to see every single piece in my kid's life and almost nobody gets to do that.
We could be entering an age of abundance and people talk about age of abundance.
Like, we're going to have all this nice stuff.
That's not what it's about.
It's about becoming a civilization to where people get to engage deeply with their family and friends and get to actually experience.
all of life. Like, we forget that most people literally spend their whole life in a cubicle or in a
warehouse, right? Like, that's... Well, we're in a warehouse. You know, like, well, you're by choice,
a really cool warehouse. Sure. But no, like, that is meaningful, okay? We're going to bridge the entire
rest of the world into, like, this wonderful life, hopefully when we get rid of scarcity. And we have
food and shelter and things for everyone so that, you know what, your job can actually be somewhat
creative? Wouldn't that be cool? Everybody could have somewhat, and I don't mean like an actual
creative job, but to actually have, do something in your life that you actually enjoy. I enjoy
what I do. Most people don't. Like, who's to say that we can't create a civilization where most people
get to do something enjoyable for their life? Why not? I think AI is going to help us get there.
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Do you think that AI will have any strong effects on the housing market,
or have you not considered that too much?
Everything will get easier to produce and cheaper to produce in time.
Which will decrease the price of housing.
It will decrease the price in housing.
I think the thing that AI will also do, like, right now, do you ever watch those home shows, you know, like, they've been going on HGTV for the last 20 years?
Like the renovation shows?
Yeah.
Or, like, just, you go in a lot of homes, right?
Yeah.
Most people's homes are designed, like I would have designed them when I was 13 years old, which, by the way, is still how I would design a home today because I don't know any better.
Most people cannot afford to hire designers and all that stuff.
Now, look what HGTV did.
Now people at least have a visual into like, oh, I'm going to try to replicate that my own.
AI is going to help people live in better places, right?
Like, it's going to help them design their rooms.
It's going to help them to dress better.
There are so many things that AI will improve.
AI is helping people improve the way that they speak and communicate via email.
Like, I used to sit over an email for 45 minutes to frame one paragraph.
Now I just write it.
like junk and AI makes it look beautiful in two seconds.
Like everyone's a great communicator now.
Like if everyone has the capacity to engage with the world in a professional manner because
of AI, like you can just take that with everything, with homes, with fashion.
Like everyone will have the capability to like actually express themselves.
Whatever their creativity is in their head.
If they have a song in their head, they'll be able to make it.
If they have a show that they want to make, they can do it.
If they want to, like, they want to be dressed better, but they don't really know how AI will help them.
They want to have a beautiful home.
That stuff matters, okay?
Like, they want to have a beautiful home, but they can't hire a designer and they don't know how to do it.
AI is going to help them do that.
It will also help them build homes cheaper and better, by the way.
What about in the short term for helping home affordability?
They just floated the 50-year mortgage.
They also floated mortgage portability to be able to take it from one to another, which I, I, I
person, I never think that's going to be able to happen. But what are your thoughts? I mean,
the 50-year mortgage, it's, it's dumb. I mean, it's optional. On paper, I think the 50-year mortgage
can be good. I think I come from a premise of we should borrow all the money we can at a low
interest rate and reinvest it at a higher rate. And that's been my life. I think that's like
the financial pyramid of life is people.
that give their money away and then other people take their money and make more money with it.
So I like the idea of people able, of people being able to actually just take out big loans at low guaranteed interest rates by the government.
But the problem is most people won't do that, right?
They're not going to reinvest that money.
They're just going to take out a bigger loan and they're never going to get equity from it because people have bad habits.
So I think long term it will be detrimental.
And I would, I hope it doesn't happen.
It seems like people are getting very fed up with the system.
I think New York was a prime example of this.
Mom Dami got elected that it's a sign that a lot of young people feel like they're priced out of the market.
They're priced out of the housing market.
Incomes have not kept up with expenses.
And so it seems like they're looking for any sort of solution that's out there.
Do you think there is a solution?
No, I don't think that's a solution.
The solution is to build more houses, if anything.
We all know what the, everybody knows the solution, build more houses, right?
Like, we know what the solution is.
We just got to actually do it.
But why do they make it so hard to build more houses?
I mean, people don't want the houses next to them sometimes, right?
Like, nobody wants a fourplex next to a single family home.
Also, you have all kinds of, you know, safety thing.
I mean, look at all the stuff we build into a house for safety that gets, like, taken off right away.
You know, like you have to have a banister here and then you take it off.
You have to do this.
Like we become overregulated.
It's just what happens in a mature society.
We become overregulated.
Things become overly expensive.
And I'm not sure how we back out of that, honestly.
I don't have the answer for that other than boomers have too many houses.
And maybe we tax having more than one house in a different way.
You know, Las Vegas does it really.
interesting. So in Las Vegas, you could have one property as a primary residence, and on that
primary, and you have to claim it every year, the property taxes are capped. And they don't go up
more than a certain amount. But on an investment property or a second or third home, whatever it
might be, if it's not your primary, they could increase your property taxes at a much
higher rate. So instead of it being a 2% increase, they could increase it 6%. Let's just say. It seems
It's like a fair system overall.
I think the big issue with taxes, again, is that we don't spend the money, right?
So no one wants to pay more taxes because you don't feel like it's going to be spent correctly to help people.
But if you have to have more taxes, I can wrap my head around the luxury tax thing.
I really can, whether it's a second home or certain items or beyond a certain degree.
Maybe that's part of the solution.
But again, what are you going to do with that money?
Nothing.
Exactly.
It's going to go, no, it's going to go into the office.
My God, it's going to get squandered.
I always thought it'd be cool.
I think about taxes all the time.
And like, if I had like nine lives, I would absolutely be a politician and try to be a Mr.
Smith goes to Washington for one of them.
I'd probably get crushed immediately.
I had this idea like, what if you had, like we have this billionaire tax or millionaire tax, right,
that everybody hates and I hate it too?
But what if you had that tax at whatever level it gets kicked in at, and you give control over how that money gets spent by the consortium of those that pay into it?
So it's a government, let's say for New York, New York puts us tax into place.
But if you're paying into that tax, we're only going to use that money to do something really great that we can kind of all agree would be a great thing, a problem that we could solve.
but we're going to allow almost like you get votes with how much you pay.
You guys who are all pretty smart because you're all billionaires,
millionaires,
et cetera,
right?
You have control over how that program works,
how it gets managed,
how you deploy the capital.
So let's do something great for our city with your money,
but we're going to give you control because we know that you guys will do a better job with it than us.
And instead of like coming down on billionaires for being billionaires,
why don't we like give them credit and be like,
hey,
I know you like that idea, but that's a lore.
I feel like that you're going to have billionaires that just end up having political power
that are going to then put like homeless shelters, you know, or like high density housing
way off in the boom.
Or they're going to be like this area here.
Our money's going to this park and we're going to make this the nicest park and we're going
to put this nice art piece in the Senate.
No, you have to have, you have to have a framework.
You have to have parameters, right?
You have to have objectives.
And I think if you did it, like, you have a framework.
Like, I think public private partnerships are really interesting.
Like Bryant Park in New York.
I don't know if you remember Bryant Park before it was a public private partnership.
But what they've done with that park is so outstanding.
It's a place that we go to every time we go to New York.
You know they have, like, one of the cleanest bathrooms in the city.
It's safe.
It's clean.
It's fun.
The park generates income.
It's this, like, beautiful display of a public private partner.
as opposed to other parks that just kind of spiral down and then there's no money to take care of them, right?
They were like, how can we make money from the park and then use the money to make the park better?
I think there's a solution.
Now, it's not an easy solution, but I bet you AI can help us solve it, right?
Like it's, there's something there.
And again, I truly do believe we're all talking about AI making all these companies more productive and these, we're going to have new industry and one of
employee is 20 employees now with AI. Is there a reason we couldn't do that with government? Why couldn't
we make government way more productive, way more efficient? Like, why can't we make government great
with AI? And we can kind of eliminate all the political banter and all the fighting. Like, there's
a solution to government in AI somewhere. And I know it's coming for us. And I'm super excited about
it. I hope we don't resist it too much. And I don't think that we can because other governments,
will like will take advantage of that opportunity.
And then it becomes a thing like, well, if your government's not using that, you're going to get left out.
Right.
You have to have an AI assisted government.
They're tools, right?
They're literally just tools.
Like our government, let's be honest, operates a lot better today with computers and the internet than it used to.
I have to say, like, there's some like government payment methods with like my driver's license and stuff that for the first time ever, it's like really easy to renew.
Oh, I just renewed my passport.
Right?
It was a pain in the ass to do like 10 years ago.
This took me five minutes to do online and I uploaded my own photo.
Yeah, it took them like 15 years to figure it out, but they finally figured it out and it is better.
It is helping.
AI is moving like 100x faster than the internet.
So if we can start to bridge those two worlds together, think how amazing it would be if we had like a really efficient, productive, hyper-intelligent government.
How cool would that be?
Like, how many problems would that solve?
I always thought it would be interesting to have someone campaign under the idea of
I'm going to let like some sort of open source AI large language model or something
decide on policy for me.
Well, I think it would be interesting.
Would you have made of mistakes it makes?
Well, if it was, the thing is it's a little bit better.
We're early ground.
I may not mean right now.
But at some point in the future,
that could be kind of interesting because I feel like it could prevent a lot of more catastrophic things that have happened,
such as like when, you know, Trump wheeled out like the tariff board and he showed it and it was like crazy tariff percentages.
I don't think that's something that AI probably would have cooked up.
Maybe it did cook it up.
No, no.
No, you know, you're throwing.
You're absolutely.
First of all, better prompting will solve most hallucinations, right?
That's right.
And in an agentic world and the ability to fact check itself,
and to validate information, like we're going to solve all the issues that we have issues with today
when it comes to AI hallucinizations, not being able to trust it.
But you're right.
I mean, AI even at the person level, the voter level, that's coming.
There's no doubt that's definitely coming.
But I'm more interested in just at the government level generally.
Like, let's have AI figure out how to get these parties working together to solve problems.
You almost like you need a mediator, right?
Like there's no mediators in government.
You just people fighting.
And that really sucks.
Like that's what really depresses me about politics right now.
I was on a Zoom a couple years ago.
One of my friends' dads is like one of the big guys in the Democratic Party and he's very old.
And he was telling stories of how it used to be when they would have leadership of the parties
just fighting to death for like days and days on end over policy.
And then he would host dinners at his house.
And they'd come to dinner and they'd have wine.
And they'd spend all night talking and riffing with each other.
And then the next few days, they would somehow come to an agreement.
And he goes, it's really sad because that doesn't happen anymore at all.
Like you do not have Republicans and Democrats having a dinner at somebody's house,
just hanging out, talking about kids, talking about stuff other than that policy.
So that when they get back into chamber, they're all of a sudden, they see each other as humans.
And they're like, come on, let's figure this out.
Like, that's sad.
So, like, you know, maybe we need AI to kind of be that mediator.
What happened?
Because that always does help when you get face to face with someone.
It's different.
It always helps.
I, when someone leaves a bad review at our restaurant, I always say, like, you know,
back when I don't do this anymore because it just drives me nuts, but like if I could just talk to them,
just talk to them, right? And be like, hey, you know, we have 65 employees, kitchen workers,
people working for next to nothing, servers. We come to work every day and just to make you happy.
And we're trying our best. We're getting, we're getting caught a million different ways every day.
Like there's nothing but problems in the restaurant industry. I was like, we're trying really hard.
We're sorry, you know, we screwed that up for you.
Let us make it up.
But like, we don't have to like go to war with each other because you had a bad meal or something.
But over Yale, they just go off, you know, because they don't have that, they don't have that like person to talk to on the other side.
What do you think is going to happen if the Trump tariffs are declared unconstitutional or they're shut down by the Supreme Court?
Do you think there's a chance of that happening?
Yeah.
I think it's more likely than not that it happens.
And then what happens to all the money?
that's been paid into it already.
How do you coordinate refunds?
This is why I bought Elf Cosmetics on the dip.
I'm hoping that that happens and, you know,
they get some of that tariff, tariff money back.
But how do they get it back?
Who's going to refund them?
Who's going to coordinate?
Here's how much you pay it.
I get it back.
Is that just on like a tax filing?
That sounds more complicated to give it back at this point than just to say,
hey, you know, we're going to stop tariffs from this point onwards,
but what you paid in is going to go into a fund.
Knowing how the government works, I would imagine that the government will put that onus on the taxpayer to tell them what was paid in tariffs to then show the proof that that was paid.
And then they get to deduct it going forward.
They always put the on us.
So I assume that's how it would happen.
You know, they're not going to automatically pay back.
They're going to hope that you don't care or you forget, right?
So you're saying if I ordered a couch and I know I paid a higher price because of the tariff,
I could claim on the couch that I paid an extra 10% and that should be a right on.
I don't know if they would do it at the consumer level or at the company level.
Probably the company level.
But if they do it at the company level, the company certainly would have the ability to then refund you.
So, but I would imagine they would probably put it on the company to say, hey, how much was paid in tariffs?
Let us know.
It becomes a big cluster for the company then because they have to do a lot of admin work to then reimburse you, right?
So do you think that's why Trump promised the $2,000 stimulus checks from tariffs in that it might place more pressure that if the Supreme Court says, no, this is unconstitutional, Trump could then say, guys, I promised you the money. It's not my fault. This is the Supreme Court. Places maybe a little more burden on them to vote in favor of it.
I think the two things are definitely attached because he announced it right after.
Yeah.
I think part of it is like, hey, we made all this money from tariffs.
Now we're going to give it back to you so that the Supreme Court is like, oh, there's no money left to refund.
So that if they rule in that way, you're essentially having to do a massive stimulus, which would be terrible, by the way, very inflationary.
That could be a disaster.
Like if he pays the $2,000 and then on top of that, they have to print more cash to pay back.
all those tariffs, I mean, I can trade around it. But I think that's generally a bad thing
an inflation. It's the exact thing that we're trying to get ourselves out of. We're trying to
stop this inflation cycle, right? Like, I don't think we need to just be handing money out in that
way. I think what we do need to think about doing right now, and I hope someone's thinking about
this, if not maybe AI can think about it, is I think we need to start some sort of a fund for
eight-eye displaced workers. Like there needs to be something there. We might need to have some
emergency procedures in place to allow people to claim unemployment for longer periods of time.
If we do get into this vicious cycle where we have a period of time and people are displaced
and not able to get trained up for new jobs, what I think they should do is put money into a fund
that is used towards education of AI. So that if someone loses their job to get unemployment for
longer than six weeks or eight weeks or ten weeks, however long.
They have to go through a training program of AI to be able to learn something new,
and that should be free.
100%.
Absolutely.
Do you know how many people resisted computers back in the day?
How many people resisted the internet?
I remember back in the late 90s, so many people that I was around were like, I'm just not doing
that.
I'm not going to get a job where I have to deal with that.
and they really thought they could just stay away from it.
You can't.
I don't care how old you are.
You have to figure out how to use the computer, how to use the internet.
You got to get on email.
I mean, do you know how many people were, like, refused to get on email as executives
back then?
It was wild.
They're like, no, my assistant will do it.
I'm not getting an email account.
Like, think about how crazy that sounds today.
So there's a lot of resistance to AI.
It's coming.
Everyone has to learn it.
They will learn it.
I think everyone will learn it.
Like I said,
we are not going to take major steps that are uncomfortable to change the way that we live and work unless we absolutely have to, unless we're at a point of catastrophe.
And I think if we start seeing, you know, schools in China and we're hearing that, you know, 12-year-olds in China are basically operating at college levels of intelligence because they've converted their system to AI, I think we'll start to convert our education system to AI.
But that's what it might take, right?
We're not going to just proactively start to say,
hey, we have AI learning in every single school now.
We already have evidence that it works, right?
Like you learn 5x faster in like, what, like 30% of the time?
But do you think that they're actually learning
or do you think that they're just applying AI in lieu of their brain?
No, have you seen these studies?
They're freaking insane.
So basically, if you're really into soccer, you are into soccer, right?
I like soccer.
Yeah, you like soccer.
I do. So if you're really into soccer, it will teach you everything through the lens of soccer. So whether it's math, whether it's English, history, like, it will literally figure out what your interest are and it will teach you hard concepts in ways that you can relate to personally. So it's still teaching you the same concepts. It's teaching you how to problem solve. It's just using methods.
that are more geared to your DNA and to like your personality and your style of learning.
So where it works exceptionally well right now is with autistic kids.
But it will work really well with everybody else too.
The reason why it works really well with autistic kids or people that have learning disabilities
is that the school system generally isn't set up to like educate them in a way that they're
capable of learning, but the AI can do that.
But truthfully, even people that don't have major learning disabilities all kind of learn in slightly different ways.
And we could definitely enhance that process through like personalization.
What it really comes down to is personalization, not to mention the fact that what is the chance that you have the best teacher ever when you're, you know, in a small town in Kansas?
Like, maybe, maybe not, right?
So everybody would have access to best in class models and education and approaches.
Is it any bit of you, this is speculation, but concerned about AI being used to like feed bad ideas or with malicious intent?
Like we were talking earlier about if you're just having a conversation, oh, where, you know, where should I go to eat?
These are the things that I like.
You could have advertisers or companies paying some sort of large language model to recommend their own.
restaurant over other restaurants. And obviously that's a pretty harmless example, but that could also
be taken to a different degree where you have, you know, covert advertisements being paid, or you have
or a political agenda being shown as though it's like the truth, even though it's more subjective.
You see that a lot with Chachibati. Yeah, AI alignment's super important and it has to get solved.
On the advertising front, my assumption is it will be fairly transparent and noted out similar to when, you know,
I was around working in search marketing when Google was created.
And I remember when they started kind of, you know, putting those ads in, you can definitely tell.
Like there was a lot of conversation back then, a lot of controversy around how they were identifying the ads versus the organic information.
I assume the same sort of conversations will happen now.
If necessary, I would imagine government would get involved in regulation if they needed to.
but hopefully it will be self-policed.
The good thing here is that we have like a relatively small number of very large models, model companies,
and they have a lot to lose by not doing this the right way.
And I don't think they're overly concerned about squeaking a little bit more advertising revenue right now.
Like I think that won't be a big issue.
I'm more concerned with like...
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You know, someone using AI to create a terrible virus.
That's the thing that keeps me up at night.
As someone who only really uses ChachyBT,
what are the main differences and arguments for it against the other main AI?
It changes every few weeks, right? So it's like the models are all changing all the time. You know,
everybody's really hyped right now for Gemini 3.0. It's coming out like any day. What do you use
if you have something come up and you just pop open your phone? I use chat GPT because it's what I used
in the beginning and that's just how it is, right? Like we get used to using something. And then now it has
so much history on me that I'm afraid to change because I'm like, but it knows so much.
I don't want to have to like, I want my, I want my agent to have two and a half years of data
on me.
Like, it knows how I like to speak.
It knows, like, what words I don't like to use.
Like, it knows a lot.
Like, I have a pro.
I use the pro model, right?
So it has more history, more memory.
$200 bucks a month is like nothing.
compared to what I get out of it.
So I actually think the market on the consumer side is massive.
When Sam Altman puts out these numbers of how much money they're going to generate
and everybody's like, there's no way.
I'm like, oh, yeah, he will.
When AI can do anything for you, you'll pay out for it.
Because it's like it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you're used to paying to get those things done.
So for the people watching, what do you think are the best opportunities today for them to look into?
or potentially invest into?
The stocks that I'm most heavily invested in right now,
Robin Hood's my largest holding.
I think Amazon will ultimately be the biggest beneficiary
of AI and robotics long term.
The shorter term trade that I'm in right now
is Bloom Energy.
So, Nvidia came out a few weeks ago
and basically announced their new architecture
of their new chips.
And it's really interesting
because they're moving from like a 48-volt power consumption
to an 800-volt DC platform.
An 800-volt would mean that you could have like bigger pipes going to the chip system
so that it's way more energy efficient.
And you could actually use like small, like, it's just way more energy efficient, right?
And so it just happens to be that Bloom Energy is a company that has like this,
direct current type of energy platform that is perfectly suited for an 800-volt DC connection.
So I think Bloom Energy is going to be probably the biggest beneficiary the next one to five years
of data centers around the world wanting to get a direct current kind of fuel source to power their
data centers. So the stock is already up like five or six X in the last six, seven months,
because people are slowly starting to learn this. But energy is a big part of this story,
as you guys have probably heard, right? Like there's a concept that eventually the cost of AI
will basically just be the cost of energy. The real story right now is time, time to compute.
So how long does it take for you to get your data center up and running? And if you can get your
data center up a year earlier or six months earlier because you have an energy source that
works now. The amount of money that you can make in that six months off the compute is so insane
that you would pay anything for it. You know, Bloom Energy, I guess you can say that would be my more
kind of like more of a short term speculative. I don't want to call it speculative. I did a tremendous
amount of research. One of my good friends, Shianchu, has done a report on it. You can
You guys can read it.
It's on my Twitter.
But that's like my big energy play right now.
That and a company out of Canada called the symbols TAC.
Transatlantic.
Yeah, transatlantic.
I think that data centers are going to move into Canada, Alberta, and they're one of the
companies that's prime to benefit once data centers finally move into Canada.
There was a big issue with no money wanting to be in Canada earlier this year, do the Trump
administration and do the fact that Canada is a very difficult place to do business. So if you don't
have to go to Canada, you're not going to Canada. But now we're at a point where you have to.
Like, you just need to go where there's energy. And so this company, TAC, they have excessive amounts
of energy that they can power data centers with in Alberta. Alberta is kind of like the Texas of
Canada. It's the least regulatory burdened environment in Canada. So I think that,
that's going to happen here in the next few months.
So that's another kind of more speculative trade of mind.
And for the average person out there, what percent do you think they should have in cash of their portfolio?
So I think that I'm not a financial advisor, to be clear, the only people that I, whose account I advise are my parents.
And your kids.
And my kids.
I think a great way to think about kind of portfolio positioning.
Again, you've heard me talk about this is bucketing.
So you have to bucket your money in, you know, how much money do I need in the safe bucket?
How much money do I want to grow, right, in the growth bucket?
And then you can call it the get rich slow bucket, right?
And then everybody needs to have a get rich quick bucket.
That is the most important thing that nobody has.
you absolutely must have a bucket of money where you're going to get aggressive, you're going to take big risk, maybe put on some leverage, invest aggressively in things that might or might not work out.
You must have risk assets.
And every wealthy person has risk assets.
People that are not wealthy for the most part don't.
You just have to properly bucket them.
So I think for most people, don't put any money.
in the get-rich-quick bucket,
unless it's coming from trade-offs
you're making in your life,
that you're not worried about losing.
So to Graham, who has,
what percent cash do you have right now?
It's over 20 percent.
Over 20 percent cash,
and then how big is your risk asset?
Bucket.
10?
Really?
To 15 percent?
Are you cutting Bitcoin?
Yeah, I just count,
I just count Bitcoin ETF in that bucket.
And that's that. Other than that, no, everything else is growth, just safe.
Safe, yeah. So, like, you save a lot of money on coffee, right? I think most people would prefer not to save money on coffee because it's not worth it because they're like, I'm just saving like $3.
But if you think of that $3 is growing to $300 and then every single day you're saving $300.
All of a sudden, you're taking grams approach towards saving money.
on coffee because like for me I don't care about saving three dollars but three hundred
dollars a day that starts to get interesting so like you have to think about every
dollar in your life is a hundred bucks because you could definitely hundred extra
money over your lifetime if you're investing aggressively and then all of a sudden
you're fine you're clipping coupons you know you're making your own coffee you're just
doing all these different things I'll wash my own car you know maybe I'll just like
take the the later flight that gets in a slightly less optimal time but
I'm saving a hundred bucks, but that's like $10,000 when I retire.
Is it worth getting an extra $10,000 when I retire to like get in three hours later?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like when you think about money as being a hundred times more valuable than it is today,
and I know that sounds like an insane number, but I did it.
And I'm kind of just a big idiot.
So like, like anybody could do it.
Cash, I have like very little cash.
but the reason why I have very little cash, almost like a nominal amount of cash,
is because I know that I have enough equity.
It's not going to zero.
So in my mind, I'm prepared for a 70% drawdown at any point in time,
meaning I'm prepared for the market to go down 70%,
or at least the things that I'm invested in to go down 70%.
What would you do if the market went down 70%?
That would be rough.
It's done it before.
Like, it's happened.
Would you like sell the restaurants and then put that then into the stock market?
No, I, I, I, I, no, because it would come back.
Like, it's not going down 70% and just staying there.
It's like, that would be insane.
Right, but to buy more.
Oh, to buy more?
But Japan did that.
Japan went down quite a bit and stayed there for decades.
That was a different time.
I do not see our current capital market the way that it works and the way that, how productive we are with capital here.
and the growth engines that we have, especially now,
that's just not, everything is a tell risk concern.
I'm definitely not living my life that way.
Because, like, again, it depends on what your goals are.
So when you ask how much cash do you have,
I think the better question is, like,
what's your ultimate objective?
Because if your ultimate objective
is just to continue living your life the way that you're living it,
then maybe you do want to have, like, a decent amount of cash
and a lot of money that's invested conservatively,
and you might not even need to have like a high risk bucket.
Like if you wouldn't live any differently
if you came into $10 million,
then what is the point of putting your money at risk
to earn $10 million?
There's no point in doing it.
So it always starts with what your objective is.
What is my objective to build a billion dollar foundation?
The only way that I'm going to do that
is by taking big swings at things I have high conviction in,
hopefully making a lot of money,
getting it in the foundation, right?
So like my objective is,
different than yours and probably different than grams.
So, like, you just got to know what the objective is.
You said that you really enjoyed our talk with Sahil Bloom about wealth.
Yeah.
What's something that you've noticed when it comes to that?
What have you found is you've made more money?
There's definitely a sweet spot for wealth.
You don't want to have too little and you don't want to have too much,
but they're equally uncomfortable on both sides.
Probably the most depressing days I've had in my life are the days that I've,
shortly after I've made a tremendous amount of money, like a tremendous amount of money.
money that I never thought I could ever make in my lifetime, whether it's due to an exit and a company or an insane few months in the stock market, because you see your account get inflated and you look at that number and you're excited for like a few hours to maybe a day. And then it hits you that you just achieve something that you've been trying to achieve for so long. And you're just like, it's not what you thought it was. Right. Like it's just really not what you thought it was. And the reason why I'm saying that is because I've,
already hit the sweet spot.
Right.
So like early on, it was that great.
Like when you go to becoming non-financially independent, to becoming financially independent,
that is the biggest high in the world.
It opens up your entire life to spend with family, to spend with friends, to travel,
not to have to think about what you want to order when you're at a restaurant.
Like that is like living life at its very best.
To actually get to that point in life is, is so,
amazing and that's what I want for everyone in the world.
But once you hit that, you go above it and it's like not what you think.
Not only is it not what you think, it's like the opposite of what you think.
I'll give you the perfect example.
Like the last few years, we started traveling on spring break to these resorts that are like
2,800 a night, you know, 3,000 a night, stuff like that, right, with our kids and stuff.
And they're so nice.
It's like the nicest resorts in the entire world.
And we get there and you have people that are just like bowing to you
and any little thing that you need.
And everything is so gorgeous and beautiful.
And the food is everything's perfect.
And after a few days you're like, this kind of sucks.
It's like if this is what it's like, it's not fun.
It's like you've gotten to a point where there's no energy.
And I told my wife recently, I'm like, I'm done with that.
Like, but you know what really stinks?
is that once you've, there are some good things about that, that once you go back, you're like, oh, man, this is from, but man, you've kind of experienced this ultra luxury that once you've experienced it, now you have an issue with just regular good stuff.
And so that's why I call it the sweet spot.
You want to get in there and stay in there.
Like I know everybody wants to like do all this crazy stuff with all this excess money, but,
like when you're having like having conversations with you're in a room of people that are just
ultra ultra wealthy they kind of suck you know like I hate to say that but like for the most part
they kind of suck um I kind of pride myself as spending all almost all of my time just being
normal like with normal regular real people doing real things like that's why I go to a coffee
shop every day and just hang out and talk to strangers and just like
you get in these certain circles and it gets weird.
How do you know if you're in the sweet spot?
That's a great question.
First of all, I think it's different for everyone, right?
Like, so my sweet spot might be, I know you're going to want a number, right?
Like, you're going to want a number.
So the number for me used to be, it used to be 10 million, I thought.
Like, nobody needs more than $10 million.
Now we're in such an inflationary, scary environment that maybe you need to rethink that number.
I don't know, but that's traditionally, that was always the number for me.
I was like, I never want more than that amount of money because I just know what's going to
happen over that amount of money.
People just, your life changes.
You just, you just, you have to continue to like, so like that's where the, that's where the foundations are so awesome, right?
because you can build towards something,
but it's not about you just getting a nicer car,
a nicer jet, right?
Like, because I don't know what more you need at a certain point.
And life really does get worse.
There's way more problems.
Like I have, I joke at my buddy who has a, you know,
he's in the yachting world.
He's just always complaining.
He's going to watch his show, by the way.
He knows who he is.
He's always complaining when he does these yachting trips.
He's like, he's like, gosh.
you know, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my AC broke and they're charging me $30,000 to fly to fix a button on my AC, you know, or like a pump broke and that's $40,000.
Or we're stuck at this port for two days because no one can get out here to fix this or like he just spends so much time logistically dealing with problems.
So like there is a lot of truth to the more money, more problems.
I would say more stuff, more problems.
Well, that seems like like a character trait of that guy because I instantly,
relate to that. Just if there's a little issue, like the other day I spent three hours trying
to fix an outlet. And it's just a minor thing. It shouldn't take me, but I just get fixated.
It seems like that's more, it's less about the money and more that that's him. He'd be the same
way if he had $10,000 in his account. Totally. And truthfully, he's in that world because he loves,
he loves the world. So it makes sense for him. For me, I think the sweet spot is getting to a place
or you get to do everything that you want to do in life.
Like for me, like, I'm going to take my kid to the Georgia UT game in Athens, like,
tomorrow, right?
So that's awesome, just to be able to do that.
Like, tickets are super expensive, but I can handle it, right?
Like, it's awesome that I didn't need to worry about the cost of those tickets.
It's also really fun to be at a place where you have friends that do crazy cool things
because like I can go on his yacht, you know, like I can go in that guy's jet, but I don't, I don't have the burden of all that.
I think there is a sweet spot and life becomes actually almost more miserable above it than it was below it.
I think life is worse above it than below.
I really do from everything I've seen.
And not to get too dark, but it's like when you have literally everything and then you're above that level,
and you continue to look for dopamine hits,
it generally only takes you in one direction.
Drugs, affairs, you know, like whatever.
It's just dark places is what I've seen.
Depression, right?
Like, you get to the top of the world,
and it's kind of a scary place.
So I like staying in the sweet spot.
Like, and I think,
I think you have to kind of get to the top of it
to realize that you don't like what's above it.
And then you realize,
then hopefully you have common sense.
to come back under it.
Was there any other moment in your life that you realized that you were at the top of it?
And it was a scary, lonely place aside from this experience at this resort?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I mean.
What was the first epiphany?
I mean, it was the year of the pandemic when I just saw my account balloon that big.
And I was like, this is like you just, you almost feel like for me.
And maybe because I grew up like, maybe it's like Catholic guilt from growing up.
But like when you have that much, I mean, you see people.
talking about there shouldn't be billionaires, right? I don't believe that, by the way. But for me,
I question myself every single day, what do I deserve and for me to be this fortunate to be in
this position right now, how accountable should I be to others to be doing something with this
that has nothing to do with me? So I felt like a really big weight on my shoulders. Like,
like wow like I just I just came into all this success what do I owe for it like like and maybe that's
just me but I felt there was even more pressure on me and that's when I started the foundation and
starting the foundation just relieved me of so much stress because now I had a new mission a new
objective that was not about me that I felt was healthy and positive and made me proud to be able to
to put more money in it. And every time I put more money in it makes me proud. And like,
I developed this awesome way because I'm all about efficiency. So like, I don't take any money out
of the foundation. And the way that I figure out how to disperse checks at the end of the year is I just
go to my friend network. And anyone I think is kind of generous or like a generally good person,
I'm like, do you have one charity that you work with who operates efficiently and does really
meaningful things where you think a check that's like $10 to $50,000 would actually be a meaningfully
beneficial and that you trust them. And then all these people like, yes, I actually do. This is the
most amazing charity. And they tell me about it. And they're excited. And then I'm like, I just need the
name. Nothing else. Just tell me where to wire the money. And I just, I wire the money. And not only do I
know that money is going to a place that's going to do good with it, but I just actually,
built a deeper relationship with the person that introduced me to them because that was an important mission for them
So it like it like like adds depth to my friend network
And like they might not be in a position in life to cut that check, but I am
But like I trust them and they trust that charity so like I don't have anyone administering the like I do it all myself
I realized I should have reached out to you to invest or donate I should say in Ryan Trahan's
latest challenge well yeah, well
That was a whole great series.
He was staying in all 50 states, the coolest Airbnbs.
And every day was like a new sort of thing where you could, what was it?
The Wheel of Doom and a $50,000 check would cause him to spin the wheel of Doom and he has to like take on a challenge.
That would have been a great thing.
And he reads off a little message that you could say.
Well, next time, call me.
I think the most interesting charitable entity in the world is actually beast philanthropy.
I don't know how much you know about them.
And I know he gets a lot of crap,
but they have this mission behind the scenes
that is way bigger than just donating money.
Like, they want to change the world of philanthropy
over the next 20, 30 years
and, like, deeply ingrain it into everyone's life.
And I just think it is so cool.
So that's been one of the big people of people.
Why does he get so much hate?
I never understood that.
Like, people want to find a reason why what he's doing is bad.
Is that because people don't think
that it's possible to make a lot of money
and then do a lot of good?
Yeah, they think you built your empire
on the shoulders of common people.
I think it's a misunderstanding.
I deeply,
deeply disagree with it,
but it exists.
And I do think
there is just a complete misunderstanding
that a lot of wealthy people
don't just want to hoard their cash.
Most of the people I speak to don't.
They would love to do good things with it.
they just don't trust anybody.
They definitely don't trust the government, so they don't want to give it back to the government.
And they're even skeptical and have a lot of cynicism around philanthropy.
So that's what, and I do too.
And that's why it's like if there's not a relationship there and it's small to medium size, I'm not interested in it.
People love to build you up and tear you down.
I mean, it's no one's immune to it.
Is anyone ever been immune to it?
I don't even know.
Mr. Rogers.
Is he?
I think he's the only one I've seen.
He's never been.
I just don't even know who Mr. Roger.
You don't know Mr.
Jack's showing his age here.
Mr. Rogers.
I don't know who that is.
I think Mr. Rogers' neighborhood?
No?
Oh, my God.
I'm sure if he was around today, he would have gotten canceled by now 100%.
Yeah, I, I, I, I.
Who is this adult hanging around children all day?
Exactly.
There's, there's always something.
But, you know, this is, uh, this is, uh,
Listen, this is the best time in history to be an investor.
Like, there's no doubt about it.
I continue to be more excited about the next few years than the last few years.
Even though, like, the first little bit of this AI cycle is over, like, it's just going to get so much bigger.
You can't even wrap your head around how big this is going to get.
How much of the world is going to change.
And what change comes opportunity as investors.
So even if you're just starting out right now, like,
you have to find money to put into an investment account.
You just have to.
Whatever it takes, drive an Uber while we still have drivers and Uber's.
I truly think every dollar you can figure out how to like get through any means.
You can turn into 50 or 100 bucks through aggressively investing the next five to 10 years.
Is there any investment you won't make?
No.
Restaurants.
Oh, well.
Well, no, I have two, but they are passion projects of mine.
I've talked about this.
Restaurants are the worst use of capital.
What's really fascinating about the restaurant industry,
and I have two super successful restaurants that me and my business partner fully own,
but almost every restaurant in the world is set up in a similar manner.
And basically investors will invest in a restaurant, and you have an operating group.
And that operating group will take 5% off the top before the investors get any money back.
Well, the problem is most restaurants will only make 5%.
So if you're investing in a restaurant, likely you're never making your money back.
The very best restaurants make, let's call it, a 15% profit margin.
So if it takes you $5 million to build out a restaurant, because that's often what people
we'll take to build a restaurant out these days. And that restaurant knocks it out of the park,
like really knocks out of the park and is doing $10 million of revenue. Then that restaurant is making
$1.5 million of profit in like the best of all best case scenarios. But the management firm
took 5% off the top. So that's 500K just to them. They make their money no matter what. Okay.
So that leaves a million dollars.
Now investors will get their money back before the management company takes any profit share for themselves beyond the 5% they already took.
But it would take you five years just to get paid back.
And then once you get your paid back as an investor, the management company takes half of the profits after that in addition to the 5%.
So now you're looking at only half a million dollars a profit that goes to the investor pool.
You're basically making half a million dollars on a $5 million investment that knocked it out of the park.
So you're taking on one of the riskiest investments in the entire world that is almost definitely going to fail in the hopes that it becomes one of the top performing restaurants and you could make 10% on your money.
Who on earth would do that?
What was the restaurant we went to with Joshua Weissman?
Jose Bazaar.
Yeah.
And how much was that building?
I think their buildout was like close to 50 million, 60 million, 40 million, something like that.
Yeah, so we looked at this restaurant, and it is incredible.
It is one of the best places to go on the strip.
If you have time, maybe tomorrow, go and check it out.
Would highly recommend it.
But we're looking at the buildout, and Josh was saying this buildout cost over $10 million.
The oven alone was $1 million.
It was a million dollars.
And I was looking at this thinking, okay, it's got to be like five or six.
Ten might be like pushing it.
Yeah, it was more than $40 million on this buildout.
just on the build out.
Vegas is a bit of an anomaly place, right?
So like maybe it was a vanity project, but if it wasn't, you know, Vegas is a weird market, right?
But even in Vegas, like, I'm telling you guys, there's never been a worst time to start a restaurant.
There's never been a worst time to invest in a restaurant.
The cost inflation is through the roof.
The insurance inflation, I pay almost $300,000 every year for liability insurance.
between my two restaurants. That used to be under 100K just a few years ago. So it's tripled
in a few years. So we pay more in liability insurance than most restaurants make. How profitable
are your restaurants? We're profitable. We're on the top end of the spectrum. So like we're in
that 15% profit. You know, one of my restaurants makes almost almost $10 million. I have 65 employees
of that restaurant, Chelsea Corner. And, you know, I think I have like maybe 2530 at Milo Butterfinger.
in Dallas.
But these are both restaurants that I'm super passionate about.
I used to work at Chelsea Corner in college.
So it was me and my best friend going back, Lynn,
and we went back and bought the restaurant
that we both worked at in college,
and we rebuilt it, and it's become a neighborhood institution,
and it's a place for our neighbors,
our friends, our family to come and hang out.
We get a lot of joy from it.
And it just happened to grow
into like one of the best performing restaurants in Texas.
So great, we knocked out of the park.
It's awesome, but that's not why we did it.
We did it because, like, we really enjoy, like, I enjoy joy just, like, walking into the restaurant and seeing people I know and sitting down with them.
I spent my entire career in intangibles, you know, investing in tech companies and analyzing publicly traded companies.
It's nice to have something tangible that people can enjoy.
And so that's the only reason, I think, to open a restaurant is if you want to dedicate your life to it.
Because I'm there every day, like, almost every day, I stop by.
both of my places. If you're doing it for money, you're absolutely crazy. And people complain that
drinks cost $16, $18. Dude, the restaurants are generally not making any money even with the $18
drinks. We paid $35,000 to get our napkins cleaned, like, enrolled and brought back to us
and to get like the mats done in people's uniforms on an annualized basis. The expenses and, okay,
How much you think it could cost to clean an ice machine?
Oh, gosh.
My guess is probably $1,500 to go through and, like, clean out everything.
It's like no.
I think it's like $6 to $800.
We have three ice machines.
They're supposed to be cleaned every three months.
So that's call it $1,500 to $2,000 every three months.
So we're basically paying, I don't know, upwards of $5,000 to $8,000 a year to clean our ice machines at one restaurant.
Now, how many restaurants do you think?
actually do that. Oh, very few. Very few. But, you know, I eat there, right? And so, like, I wanted to be
clean and hygienic and my neighbors eat there. So that's a commitment I have to them. But it is so
expensive to operate a restaurant. And the lawsuits, they never end, right? What do you get lawsuits for it?
You get, you get, you get, there was a fight at our restaurant a year ago. A kid started. A kid started,
to fight and then these other three kids, one of them hit them in the face. And so they're suing
each other and then they sued us just for no reason. And they're like, oh, well, you should have
had more security or something. It's like, what can we do? Like we're getting yelled at for serving
food late and like some kid quickly punches someone else. Like that's my responsibility now. Well,
guess what? We're $120,000 into legal bills a year later, just trying to get ourselves all.
off the case and that's something that our insurance is paying for but believe me we're going to end up paying for it so it's like
This is why our insurance has gone from like you know 80,000 combined to 300,000
It just keeps going up because we live in this place where people just feel comfortable doing stuff like that and nobody cares
No one cares that we have almost 70 employees that it's their livelihood
That because we have to pay this money we have to pay them less now
It's like it sucks.
It's a bad business is all I'm saying.
Like you do it if you really want to love it and like if you want to become your life,
but you do not do it for money.
I'll tell you that.
Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming out.
Really appreciate it.
You're actually here because we're doing a meetup for the index and really happy you're
able to join.
For those unaware, by the way, we meet quarterly.
It's all for like business owners, high-end entrepreneurs, investors, things like this.
We meet up quarterly, monthly Zoom calls.
If you're interested in joining that, by the way, you're our honorary member.
The link is down below in the description.
I'm glad you're able to make it out to Vegas for this.
It's awesome.
We had a Zoom and I talked about robots for a few hours and I thought it was awesome.
You got everybody very hyped.
I'm hyped in robots, man.
The robots are coming.
They are definitely coming, just not as quickly as people think they're coming.
but they're coming and I think that will be the biggest
the biggest thing to happen to our economy in our lifetime.
I'm going forward to it.
Well, thank you again.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you guys for watching.
Also, you may notice it looks a little bit different in here.
Yeah.
So I don't know if we're going to reveal quite yet why it looks different,
but it looks a little bit different.
The members know.
The members already know.
We did a members video.
All right.
Well, we moved the podcast studio.
There we go.
I shared it.
Thank you guys for watching.
Till next time.
See ya.
