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

30:00Well, how do you make slime, right? If everyone's doing slime, if all the kids are doing slime, well, how do you make slime? You need Elmer's glue. And then you go and you figure out that, wow, people haven't really priced in that Elmer's glue. Elmer's is about to have like, you know, a huge quarter or a huge, huge earnings call. So me and my business partner, we actually created a platform called Ticker Tags in the mid-2000 teens with Twitter. And we had access to the Twitter Decahose, which is a 10 % randomized sample of every tweet in real time. And we hand curated about 1.5 million word combinations that represented how people were speaking about every product, brand.

30:42And basically anything that was connected to any publicly traded company or meaningful to any publicly traded company in any way, we had organized into a taxonomy. So every company had like, you know, 300 to 1 ,000 combinations of words. Like what would be an example? What do you mean by that? So like if I'm Nike, what do I care about? So, okay. So you just mentioned slime. So which is one of my big trades. Newell Brands makes Elmer's Glue. All right. So Elmer's glue would be a tag for Newell brands. DIY slime, which is a product that utilizes white Elmer's glue when you're kids playing with slime, that would be a tag.

31:24Because to the extent that DIY slime gets more popular, that's something that someone who's invested in Newell brands might want to know. So we were actually monitoring in real time the frequency of mentions of those 1.5 million words and benchmarking them against historical norms, including seasonality. And so since it was organized in a taxonomy, when there was any type of anomaly in speech patterns happening across Twitter that were impacting a subject matter that we had curated to be impactful, potentially impactful to a publicly traded company, our system would flag that. So that's a platform that we developed and sold to hedge funds and sell side banks.

32:10And so what that was, was basically me taking my methodology of what I had done manually and institutionalizing it for Wall Street. And at the time, people expressed their opinions on Twitter about everything that they were doing in life, the way that people currently no longer do on Twitter, but do on, you know, in places like TikTok. Now, you know, Twitter is mostly news-oriented or finance or tech-oriented, right? Political-oriented. But people are not generally talking about the movie that they watched last night on Twitter, right? They're doing that on other platforms. But we sold that company to Jeffries Bank years later.

32:55Was that like a successful company? You know, obviously, you know, it's not that it was unsuccessful, but I guess, you know, it's all relative. So, for example, you know, you're selling the data hedge funds. Are they really receptive to this? Do they believe what you believe? Were they willing to pay? That's the coolest part of the story. I spent years flying to New York nearly weekly training the top sell-side banks and I would say, you know, probably five or six of the top 10 hedge funds in the world on how to interpret this observational conversational data and how to attempt to correlate it.

33:35And they just had very little interest. They had interest in the results, but they couldn't figure out how to build teams around it because hedge funds generally have individuals that are like mathematicians, right, that they were hiring from the West Coast to develop, you know, algorithms for trading like quant traders. And then they have very traditional fundamental analysts who are basically finance heads that would, you know, would crunch numbers and kind of do fundamental analysis. They didn't really have, you know, 20-something-year-old females on staff who were really savvy interpreting, you know, conversational data coming off it.

34:24And like, yes, this is a trend. This is not a trend. This is meaningful. It's not meaningful. So, it was a whole—you know, Wall Street, they do things kind of in the same way that they've always done things, right? And it's really difficult for them to stick their neck out and say, hey, you know, we believe this thing matters when there's no historical correlation between the speech pattern of that subject matter and the stock price or the earnings of that company. Because, like I said, speech patterns evolve. And that thing that they're talking about could be a new thing that was never meaningful before at that company.

35:06So that is unfortunate for Wall Street, but it's fortunate for retail investors, right? Because we now know, I guess I'm telling you right now, that this is still a data set that they're scared of. This is still a methodology that they have a hard time wrapping their head around because they can't really document the degree to which it's meaningful for a thesis. If you were to have someone come out and say, hey, I've been reading TikTok comments and I believe that this new show at the Spear in Vegas, Wizard of Oz, people are super hyped on it. And I like read 180 comments of people flying in from Europe next month to see it.

36:00And I think this just might be the one thing that Spear has done right. And it's going to be a game changing moment for the company finding product market fit. Sounds oddly specific. Is that actually a trade you're in right now or no? Yeah, so Sphere, the Wizard of Oz, Sphere was actually one of my largest wins of 2025. And it came from reading comments of Wizard of Oz the first 48 hours that it was out and essentially making a monstrously big levered bet. Sphere up 114 % this year. Well, it was a levered options trade, so it was a lot more than that. A lot of what I do when I have high conviction around a particular thesis that has, especially when they have a very defined window of time, when I believe others will start to acknowledge that ground truth.

36:58In the case of Spear, it was people counting sales of seats. So you're actually able to go in and see how many seats are available for a show that's a week and a half or two weeks out. And that's exactly what happened. So over the course of a few weeks, other, and it was cool because it was like retail analysts. It wasn't even like Wall Street, but other people that were trading Spear were like, hey, like we're seeing there's a lot of seats. We'd never seen seats sell out like this before for a show. So what I had interpreted from early reviews ultimately came out in seat sales that other retail investors started trading.

37:44And then Wall Street eventually picked up on it when the company came out and said that they're adding new shows because they're selling out all their shows. They're increasing their profit guidance. And yeah, the stock has more than doubled here over the last few months, exclusively almost because of Wizard of Oz. Do you remember, so the show's called My First Million. Do you remember when you made your first million and what got you there and how did it feel? Yeah, I 100 % do. I was working at a company called E-Rewards in Dallas, Texas with one of my best friends, Patrick. It was like not far past when I started this in 2007 with the$20 ,000 that I had grown to a few hundred thousand dollars.

38:32And I said, this is just absolutely crazy. I said, I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to hit a million dollars here, like within the next, I don't know, next year or so. And it was a few months later, I hit a million dollars. And I'll never forget walking into his cubicle and saying, I did it. I cannot believe my account. Just hit a million dollars. It absolutely melted my mind that that happened. And, you know, I wrote my book, I don't know, two years, three years later, laughing at Wall Street because there was this tracking service called Covestor at the time. And Covestor was like the first portfolio tracking service.

39:11I think they had 40 ,000 accounts in it, including mine. And it would monitor, you know, how well you're doing month to month total portfolio. And it would rank you publicly. and there was a while, a moment in time when I was the number one ranked investor on Covestor, which is just absolutely wild. And it was during that three-year period. And that's when I was on a few different business shows like Fox Business talking about it. And then I got a book deal to write that book, Laughing at Wall Street. And when I wrote Laughing at Wall Street, it was$20 ,000 to$2 million. It was 100 times your money in three years.

39:51And at the time, there was a small piece of me that thought, you know, am I just like part of the long tail statistical anomaly? Right. You flip a coin, flip a coin 100 times. If you get enough people to do it, somebody will land on heads 90 times and you'll think they're a genius. No, 100%. I doubted myself more. Now, I had a really defined methodology, and I knew the narrative behind every one of my trades. It was very sensible, right? Like, it wasn't like this mystery where I came up with some random formula, and it was just trading stocks on its own, and maybe the formula just happened to get lucky.

40:34I felt strongly that the nature of observational investing about simply uncovering some piece of meaningful information that others weren't aware of intuitively just makes sense, right? Like, it's not like this mystical thing that you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Of course it makes sense. You're just uncovering important information a little bit quicker than other people, and you're connecting dots a little bit quicker than other people. So in my head, I knew the methodology at its core was really valuable, but I still didn't believe that three years was enough. So in my head, I was like, if I can get to five years and keep this track record up, that would be insane.

41:16I got to five and I was like, okay, let's see if I can push it to 10. And then I got to 10 years and now here I am, I'm at eight. Like I said, I think I'm going on 18 years of average 70, you know, mid seventies, uh, total portfolio returns. And I truly believe I can hit 20. So like 20 is now the new number in my head. I want to go for 20 years and all I have to do at this point is not mess it up. But at the same time, it's very hard generating returns that are that high.

42:14a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. So let me ask you a couple of mechanical questions. Do you take profits every year? Do you reinvest everything?

42:43What are you actually doing with sort of annual, you know, cause you know, you compounded that rate for a long enough time. The number is actually much bigger than 70 million. Yeah. It's almost a billion dollars. So it, so what's in, this is where the biggest mistake I ever made was, uh, that I'm now resolving for the most part. So just about, I've been half of my life is trading public equities through observational investing, social or conversational data, everything we're talking about. The other half of my life has been an entrepreneur. And I've had some success as an entrepreneur and like a lot of entrepreneurs that have success, you start investing in other entrepreneurs.

43:25So I've been an early stage venture investor for 20 years. I'm actually invested in 160 early stage companies. And my performance investing in early stage companies is pretty much average. I'm on sync with just about any other average VC. I want to say maybe 10, 11, 12 % annualized returns. So, I have pulled out almost all of my gains every single year for the past 18 years and have taken that money and invested it in the private market. And that has been really unfortunate for obvious reasons. It's unfortunate because the opportunity cost of my capital is so high, but I never even believed in myself that much on the public side that I could continue to do that.

44:23So I was never like, oh, well, I'm just going to keep doing 70 some odd percent average returns. That never really seemed feasible. I felt like I needed to make my home runs in the early stage VC world. And I finally came to terms a few years ago with the fact that that was a really bad decision. And it's taken me about four years to pull myself out of early stage. because when you're an early-stage investor and that big of an early-stage investor, I mean, I was taking hundreds of meetings with founders annually, and it takes a long time to unwind yourself from that ecosystem. Yeah. So I don't know who it was, maybe Peter Lynch.

45:07He had like a, don't cut your flowers to water your weeds, right? Like he basically, he talked about with individual stocks, right? Don't sell your winners to diversify back into like losers. But in a way, what you were doing was at an overall level, if you were performing at 70 % in one asset, one strategy, and 10 or 11 % in the other, but you were taking the profits out, you know, that's a water your weeds sort of scenario. Yeah. And by the way, I love Peter Lynch, maybe more than any other investor, but, you know, I don't believe in any preset rule of investing like that. Like, my methodology is very clean.

45:49You know, you invest when you discover something that other people haven't discovered yet that will be meaningful to a trade, and you exit as soon as other people have figured that out. And that's it. That's literally the only thing. And if that stock goes up 100x or 200x, you don't sell it because it's up 200x. You know, you sell it when other people find out the information that you're trading. So one of my most controversial trades over a year ago was, you know, Palantir. And I went all in unbelievably levered in Palantir at$30 a share. And I was very public about it. You know, I have a YouTube channel, Dumb Money Live, and we did a multitude of episodes on Palantir and this really strong thesis that we felt there was this kind of 12-month window where the whole world was going to discover these things about Palantir that were really misunderstood.

46:49And I had never gotten so much heat, a lot of it from Palantir investors going, you're an idiot. We've been in this thing since six bucks. You're going to do this at$30 a share? Like, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, I'm not trading the information you are trading at$6. What was the sort of two-line reason you were so bullish on Palantir at that stage? Well, because people didn't even understand what they did, right? They didn't understand where they would actually sit in the stratosphere of the AI wave that was coming as a beneficiary of it. And Palantir was just starting to scrape the surface of this new product that they had with clients.

47:36and it was unstoppable, right? Like there was just going, we knew there would be this 12 month window when everything that Palantir had been working on for years, they finally had the case studies done with their first set of clients. And now they were just gonna start to steamroll and add to clients. So they were just scratching the surface of their TAM and the market didn't realize that. So what was interesting about Palantir is that they were so overvalued at the time based on fundamentals that people were like, there's no way you could be going in levered on Palantir at$30 a share with its valuation already so out of whack.

48:21And my response to that was the valuation is irrelevant to me. I don't look at valuation. I don't look at PE. I don't look at anything like that. all I look about is there is new information that's about to come online for Palantir that will bring in a whole new group of investors. And once people see this information, however they're valuing Palantir today based on the information that exists, this is new information that will be settled into the stock price. And that's exactly what happened. And Palantir went from, you know, 30 to 160, right? Or whatever it went to. 180, 190. Mechanical question.

49:02You say, you know, I went really big into this. I made a huge bet on this. What is that? And you're taking leverage, which could cut both ways, right? So obviously leverage will increase your gains, but it'll quickly sink your portfolio if done incorrectly. How much are you actually, let's say you have, I think you said something like$70 million portfolio. Let's say you have$70 million and you get a lot of conviction about something, what are you actually betting at a high conviction bet at this stage? Is it, are you putting 1%, 10%, 30 %? Like what are you putting out there? And then you're levering up and then how do you manage that risk of that going south?

49:42Yeah, and by the way, just to be transparent, it's 70 million-ish of returns, right? Of gains over that time. And those gains were taken and put into other things like private companies, right? So I'm not managing, that's not my public portfolio. Let's say that's gains. You've got to pay taxes. A lot of your stuff sounds like it might be short term because it's almost exclusively short term, right? And then you're reinvesting that into your addiction in startups. And so there's a lot of it's going that way. But percentage wise, percentage wise, when you have a high, what I call just a high conviction idea, I'm usually investing between 5 % and 10 % of my entire liquid portfolio into that idea via options.

50:31So if you're wrong, you just lose 5 % to 10 % of the portfolio. And a good example of where I did that and was wrong, I think two or three, maybe three weeks in a row, maybe four weeks in a row, and I lost like 30, 40 % of my portfolio was during COVID, during the pandemic, when I was kind of tracking the virus coming out of China. I was, you know, using Google Translate on a lot of medical reports coming out of China to assess how big of a deal that virus was. And it became very clear to me that it was going to be a global pandemic. And, you know, global pandemics only do one thing to financial markets, right?

51:16So I was essentially taking, I think, 10 % of my portfolio and putting it into puts in the S &P casino stocks, Vegas casino stocks and airlines every week. And the market wasn't moving down. The market just wasn't accepting COVID for what it was. And I got to a point where I was like 30 % to 40 % of my portfolio was gone. And I did it again the week after, and that week after was the first week. The market cracked and it went down 2%. And then the next week is where it really hit. And that was one of the biggest trades of my life. And over the course, I think that year was like a 370 % annualized return total portfolio, something like that.

52:06And it was partially because I had shorted the pandemic early on, even though it was a little too early. It paid off. And then two days after it bottomed, I had a selection of, I think, 14 or 15 companies that should have never gone down at all. They should have only gone up as soon as we realized there was going to be a global pandemic. And everybody would be stuck living in their house for, you know, working in their house for a year. So, you know, companies ranging from Hewlett Packard, where everybody would want to go buy printers for their house, to Peloton because you can't go to the gym.

52:41You got to work out at your house now. Shopify because, you know, you're shopping online. Amazon, obviously. You know, Campers World because one of the things you can do, you can still go camping. Boat stocks. You know, I bought a company out of Canada that nobody even had ever traded before that owned Schwinn bicycles because, you know, Schwinn had a run of the biggest bicycle sales in the history of the company. I think that company went up 8x, 8 or 9x over the course of nine months. So, you know, I had these 14, 15 companies. So I was like, these companies should be doubling right now. And instead, they were all down like 30, 40, 50 percent just because the whole market traded down.

53:23So I always knew that I was going to go levered long in these 15 companies, but I didn't want to do it until the market became less erratic and irrational. So once the markets finally started to normalize and come back up, I took all the gains from shorting the travel stocks and the market at large and just put them into levered positions in these 15 companies, which is obviously the trade of a lifetime. So that was a huge year. about the biggest dollar gains you've ever had? I don't know, by the way, I don't watch enough of your content to know how much you talk. Like, do you disclose, like, how much you make on these things?

54:03Do you say, like, I got a 10 million active portfolio? What do you actually say? I don't know what you're transparent about. We're very open and transparent. I think that year I made 30 million in the market. So that was like 30 million in one year. And it was a wild ride, didn't it? I think the most interesting part of that narrative was just before the pandemic, I had made the worst trade of my life. And it was actually a trade that was psychologically damaging to me. Like, I lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade just months before the pandemic started. and probably the thing I'm most proud of myself of is I was so down and out about that trade that I still found a way when I had come out with all that conviction on COVID to actually still go all in on my thesis on COVID even though my account was so brutally damaged at the point that if I got another one wrong I mean, so it was like I could have gotten that would really have wiped me out.

55:17I mean, not wiped me out, but it would have been an unbelievable, unbelievable damaging implosion for me to have two monster trades in a row go wrong. The one that went wrong months earlier was a company, QSR. They own Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons. And I was so convicted that the company would have the best earnings quarter in its entire history because two of the three companies they owned both had anomalies on the positive side. Burger King had the Impossible Whopper, which was unlike anything the company had ever done before in terms of sales traction. and Popeyes had the crispy chicken sandwich, which is during, this is the chicken wars, if you remember.

56:10It was the Chick-fil-A, yeah. Yeah, at the time. And that crispy chicken sandwich that Popeyes had, it would literally sell out in like two hours every day. Popeyes, no one had ever talked about Popeyes ever in the history of the company until this crispy chicken sandwich. And I was monitoring both those trends And I was like, they're both going to report the best quarter in the history of their quarters at Burger King and Popeye's. And then you have this third piece, which was unfortunately the biggest piece of the company, Tim Hortons. And Tim Hortons is just, you know, they're a Canadian coffee and donut shop.

56:52Okay. And the company had basically been around forever. it had not been doing awesome, but it was kind of flatlining. They would have to have had a really bad quarter to screw up my trade. And it was just happened to be a really difficult company for me to extract information on through the methods that I use because it was Canadian and people just didn't talk about it that much, right? There was nothing happening there. So it was like, I saw zero reason why they should have this anomaly of a bad quarter, which is exactly what happened. They just happened to have randomly one of the worst quarters ever, which statistically, the chance of that happening were so low, and it crushed my trade.

57:43I lost all of my money on that trade, and it was like a third, a full third of my portfolio. The wildest piece about that, And this is where there's a lot of self-reflection because I take a lot of pride in going in deep and doing really intense comprehensive due diligence where sometimes if I have a high conviction trade, I will put 60 plus hours of due diligence into the trade where I like to joke that I'll uncover every piece of contextualized information on the company globally through every social media. anyone who's speaking about any of their products. I will visit, I will sometimes travel if they're a retailer and visit stores and talk to store owners and clerks.

58:28But because there were three things I was having to deal with, Burger King, Popeye's, and then Tim Hortons, I just assumed Tim Hortons, how bad is it gonna be? Well, they had the Tim Hortons annual meeting a few weeks before earnings in Florida that I didn't realize they had this meeting. But if I did realize that and I had done my homework, I would have been at that in Orlando for that annual meeting. Not because I would have gotten in, but I would have hung out at the bar. And I would have talked to all the franchisee owners because from what I understand, there was a revolt at that meeting by franchisee owners because the company was doing so many things wrong.

59:08Their sales were just getting slaughtered due to recent decisions that corporate was pushing on the franchisee owners. And they were very public about it at that meeting. It was really harsh. And if I was just in the building, right at the bar, I would have been well aware of that. So going back, I learned that, you know, you really have to be comprehensive in your research if you're going to take a levered bet on a thesis that you have. And you can't be lazy. What are the bets you're looking at now? Because a lot of these examples are from the past 17 years. Where are you now? On the AI side, you know, two of my favorite AI picks, you know, right now.

59:55One is Bloom Energy. You know, the energy trade is a big one. And it's one that's really, really, really misunderstood, I think, by most investors. So, Bloom Energy is a company that just has a really different approach to powering data centers, right? They're not using big gas turbines. You know, they have a technology that they've worked on for, you know, 20 years that is actual, you know, DC technology where instead of combusting gas, it's actually a chemical change that creates the energy. And they have a really quick timeline to energy for a data center. So if you have a data center and you could actually get energy through Bloom and get your data center up and running six to 12 months quicker than getting on a wait list for gas turbines and going through all the various approvals, that's a really big deal.

1:00:58And that's why Bloom Energy has, I think, they're up like five or six X, right, over the past eight or nine months as people are starting to realize this. But there's still a lot of controversy around the company. So, again, it's somewhat unproven. They only have a couple big hyperscaler deals, you know, ones with Oracle. I think there will be others that will be announced in the near future. But it's a new technology. So, people are still somewhat skeptical of it. And then you have, you know, news events that happened like this last week where now we're building data centers, you know, in space, right?

1:01:37You know, now that, you know, SpaceX is preparing to IPO, all of a sudden we have this narrative pop out of nowhere where, oh, didn't everybody realize that we're just going to be doing, you know, compute data centers in space now? Like, that's, oh, that's like right on the horizon. Like, a couple years, two, three years, yeah, we're just doing data centers in space. Like, this is the noise in the market right now, right? So, like, oh, we're doing data centers in space and we don't even need any down here. Like, oh, well, if you're powering those with solar, you know, why would we want to value an energy company, you know, here in the U.S.

1:02:16if you're just going to do them in space with solar? So the market is so ADD that it's changing week to week, month to month based on whatever the hype story is that will, you know, either positively or negatively impact companies in the space. But for me, I think Bloom Energy is definitely one of my favorite AI plays right now because they will be the company that will enable data centers to get up and running, I think, meaningfully quicker over the next three to five years. And I think that's a company that's just going to see its earnings double basically year over year for the next three to four years.

1:02:59And I think they're still very much misunderstood. They're actually going to be the topic of my next Dumb Money Live episode. I'm going to go in deep on Bloom Energy. We spent like a couple months doing deep analysis on the company. Do you publish all your, like, do you publish your portfolio somewhere? Do you publish your trade somewhere? Um, we don't, I won't ever publish trades. I sometimes speak about trades on a really high level. The last thing we ever want is other investors trying to mirror our trades because that's not what we do, right? We don't think it's a healthy behavior. I always tell investors to steal my ideas and run with them.

1:03:40So take the idea, then poke holes in the idea, do all of your own research, right? and then come back to me and tell me where I was wrong. But ultimately, then go off and make your own trade based on your own risk reward because we all have different degrees of risk tolerance and we should all have a different take on an idea. So I love sharing ideas. I don't really share trades. I'll be honest with you because this is not my world of expertise. I'm a founder first, and my investing is very sort of simple. I basically own a couple of, you know, I own some indexes and I own stocks that I understand.

1:04:25I've owned them for a long time, you know, tech companies basically, because I grew up in the tech industries ever since college. And then my investing outside of that is private angel investing, again, tech. And lastly would be, you know, my own private equity where it's businesses that like individual businesses that I can own and I can affect with things that I know how to do operationally or promotionally with this podcast. And so you're interesting to me because on one hand, I think, well, first of all, you're interesting because the story is great. Like, oh, I turned$20 ,000 into, you know, I've made 70 million in gains or something like that.

1:04:59That's an incredible story. I think it's interesting because your approach, like just the way you describe observational investing actually lines up with a lot of the great investors do and say, which is that they don't sort of spreadsheet themselves as that. They try to understand, like surface out the signal from the noise. What is the actual important thing I need to know about this company that I can believe before it is obvious, true, and proven? And, you know, the market sort of response to certainty. And if you can handle uncertainty, you could do quite well. At the same time, you know, sometimes you say things like, you know 99 % of the other 99 % of us can go do this and we have sort of this i think i've heard you say you know uh the game is rigged wall street is rigged but it's rigged in our favor and um you know that part i think seems untrue like if if what you've done is true it's in many ways because you have a very unique skill set and upbringing and background no no that's the that's it i let me just sort of explain that because i think it's important i think i the The last thing I would want is people to listen to this and be like, oh, okay, cool.

1:06:05I can just go and trade levered up off of observations. And I too will turn$20 ,000 to$70 million. There's a reason that's not common. That's not a common result. There's a reason you get a book deal. There's a reason people will follow you because it's not a common result. Everybody does. And I think one of the reasons it's uncommon is not because it can't work. That's not what I mean. A lot of it is interpretability, right? So interpreting the signals, trying to figure out what is actually important. Is it already priced in? What does this mean? who benefits from that? The second order effects of that.

1:06:34That's not like, you know, something incredibly, you know, simple that everybody is going to do. So there's a big difference between anybody can, yes. Everybody can is different. And so like, I view it very similar to startups where, you know, an entrepreneur can come on here and they'll say, look, it's not rocket science. I'm not any smarter than you guys. I just did this, this, this, and this. And it's true that any, that was in the capacity for anybody to do, but definitely everybody won't. and definitely everybody should not try because they don't have either the nature, the disposition, the risk tolerance to be able to go do it.

1:07:07So I just think you're interesting because you're this sort of like puzzle. Normally, if I hear a story like this, it's too good to be true. It violates a lot of the sort of like fundamental wisdom that people have about investing where you want to buy a share in a great company and hold it for a long time. Things that I have sort of accepted from a certain school of thought around this. So I think you're very interesting because you violate some of those. And I think that that works and it works for you. And I think it's very cool, but I hesitate. I hesitate because I think that this is not something that a lot of people could or should do.

1:07:39So, so I couldn't disagree more. I did. I agree with some of what you're saying in terms of, yes, I mean, over a long period of time, you know, doing, you know, generating almost a hundred million dollars from, you know,$20 ,000 or yeah, that it's, that's not easy to do. obviously. But I will say this. I think the biggest issue is simply bucketing money and having risk capital. So I think the number one issue preventing someone from doing this is thinking that they have this one bucket of capital for their life savings, for their future kids' college, for their retirement. And they think about that money all as one.

1:08:26And this is something that's a little foreign, the concept of being a regular person and observing something and connecting the dots and saying, you know what, I'm going to put a levered bet on that because I just discovered this. You're not going to do that unless you have your money properly bucketed. And the one thing I teach people is you have to have risk capital. I don't care if it's $50 or$50 million, you shouldn't be waiting until you're part of the ultra wealth class to think that you have risk capital to take risk with. You need to have risk capital starting with day one. So everybody should have a big money account.

1:09:09I talk about this in Laughing at Wall Street. Everyone should have a big money account. And the big money account is the account that, that yes, you get wealthy quickly with. And you do that by taking big swings on things that you really believe in. And the only way that you're going to psychologically do that is if you fund that big account with money that is not being stolen from other areas of your life. So I call it, you know, there's this whole concept of like frugality or trade-offs where, okay, maybe you mow your own lawn, Maybe you make your own coffee. Maybe you clip coupons. Like people don't want to clip coupons to save a dollar.

1:09:53But if you think about every dollar in your life as potentially being$100, 100x, which is 100 % feasible over a long period of time, if you invest aggressively with leverage and get a few wins, then you'll clip a dollar coupon. Because that dollar coupon is clipping a$100 coupon. Okay, you're going to make your own coffee because instead of saving$5, you're saving$500 a day, right? So all of a sudden, you discover all of this money, newfound money in your life by making little tradeoffs in things all over your life. The difference is every time you make one of those trade-offs and you save$5 for making your own coffee, you take that$5 and you put it into your high-risk account.

1:10:43Bucket, right? By the way, this is not financial advice, right? It's just like this is how I did. I'm just saying like I hope I'm inspiring people because I just understand something. I graduated in the bottom 25 % of my high school class. The bottom 20. Today, the way college is, I could not even had, I would not have gotten into any university in the United States. Okay. Pretty much today in 2025 with my grades. This is why I love doing the podcast. Because you can get people who make their money in all different ways. We just had John Morgan, who's like the guy on the billboards, personal injury law.

1:11:23And he's a guy, you know, he's the biggest personal injury lawyer in the world. $2 billion a year. and then he started his career working at Disney World as Pluto. Like he would be in the costume. And then he started, because of that formative experience, he took the money from the law firm and started building little like attractions, like fairs and places you go and buy tickets, like the Museum of Crime and History, things like that. And he's made a killing doing that. So you have that guy comes on and tells about how you make money that way. Another guy says how you do it this way. So what I love about the podcast is I get to hear these people who come on with completely different blueprints and playbooks that they 100 % believe in.

1:12:03And I get to listen and I get to decide. I get to decide for myself, does that sound like something that's interesting or would suit me? And I hope the listener does the same because I don't agree with a lot of what you said, but I found it all very interesting. And there's some things you said, if like, I'll be totally honest. If you have like a paid course somewhere, I would be like, I can't run this episode because I feel like this guy is selling this dream to people that, hey, yeah, you just got to just go get in the TikTok comments, find an observation, lever up, baby, make a trade. One trade will change your life.

1:12:34And it's like, that is a scary principle. I think that is a heretical idea to a lot of people. It's why it's very interesting to me to hear it, to talk about it. Why is it important to you that people really, that the average person who's listening, they believe this and they go take action on this? Because, you know, like I said, it's not that you're running a fund, right? So you're not soliciting investors. You're not selling a course saying, I'll teach you how to do this. Trust me, it works. You're not doing any of those things, which is usually why people really kind of pound the table and say, you could do this.

1:13:04Just believe, just go for it. My overriding purpose is to inspire every human on earth to enter the investing class, right? Because I think it's the only way we'll ever solve the wealth gap. So like there's no way to solve the income gap. The income gap is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve. The wealth gap is a problem that's solvable by bridging more humans into the investor class. And so everything that I do on X, everything that I do on YouTube, every podcast that I do has a single mission to inspire other people to start investing on their own. And by all means, if that means just throwing money in the S &P and an ETF, awesome.

1:13:48But there's no reason to stop there, right? I know that people love the concept of actually hope and having an opportunity to do something truly great in their life because so many people, when it comes to income, are stuck. Their job is not going anywhere, okay? And by the way, I am not a proponent of people quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs and taking all this massive personal risk to start businesses. I think there are very few people that are capable of doing that. And I think that this roadmap is way more achievable for people. Start making trade-offs. Come up with a big money account.

1:14:32Do it through making trade-offs in your life and frugality. Learn how to use leverage. Learn how to take big risk with other people's money, because I call it other people's money because it all comes through trade-offs, in things that you believe in because you can do this. And by the way, there is nothing cooler than when you're just a regular person and you just make a grand slam in the market, right? And you 30X your money, all of a sudden you have financial independence in life. So I don't know many things that are more important because it just, it helps solve so many other issues. And so many humans are just depressed because they look at their life and they're like, this is my job.

1:15:15These are my expenses. This is inflation. Holy crap, I'm screwed. I will never be the person I want to be for me or my family. And I want to inspire people that it doesn't have to be that way. And you also don't need to be taking big risks with your retirement money or any of that stuff. That's why I'm like, I'm very clear. If you're going to do this, do it with money that's bucketed, right? Right. For risk. You know, this isn't just about investing. The same methodology of being able to identify change in the world and tailwinds and trends should apply to career. it should also, you know, like it should apply to entrepreneurs as well.

1:16:06Right. Because like I'm an entrepreneur, like I'm about to start another business. And that business is directly tied to the analysis that I'm doing, discovering change in the world. Right. So like, you know, we're about to embark on this journey of abundance. and it's not going to be like we just hit the age of abundance in five years and we're not working. Like, no, the age of abundance is going to like slowly happen. It's already happening. It's going to like happen over the course of decades. And it's just lots of tailwinds and trends. It's like people will be working a little less. People will have a little more free time.

1:16:47People will have more flexibility to dive into the things that they care about, right? Wealth signaling will, I think, become even bigger in the future than it is today. There's just so many changes that are massive that are happening in the world that if you're an entrepreneur trying to figure out, like, where do I spend my time? Or if you're just someone that is figuring out where's your next career path? Or if you're a young person, where's my career path? Like, you need to be doing more analysis on where the opportunity is because these are some of the biggest decisions of your life. It's not just about trading a stock.

1:17:26Especially in Silicon Valley, you see this all the time. People will take a job and it's like, you realize you're investing all of your life force, you're creative energy, and you're getting these stock options, but you never thought about this like an investor. You're just happy you got the job versus you should be looking at the job market the way an investor looks at these companies. And even if you're not investing capital, you're investing your time, right? So that applies totally there. You said you're launching a new business. What is it? It is related to the jet industry, private jet industry, which I believe will be one of numerous beneficiaries of us kind of entering into this age of abundance with people having more.

1:18:09In fact, I'll just quickly state that if you want a glimpse into the future, you need to simply look back into our past from the pandemic. Because that one year of the pandemic, when we actually had an abnormal amount of time as humans, we had never experienced anything like that throughout our lifetime. when we had excess time to actually do what we wanted to do. And we also just happened to have excess money because of this wild stimulus that happened during the pandemic. So if you want an example of what the age of abundance is going to look like in terms of the winners and the losers, just look back to that one period of time.

1:18:51What did we do when we had more time and more money? We dug into our hobbies. We dug into our interest. We kind of did things that now that we're back to this world, right? Like we do a little bit less of. But if we truly get, you know, the industry of intelligence and automation and robotics to help us do the vast majority of work, the repetitive work at least that we do today, I think the entire world has an opportunity to become more creative, spend more time with their families, with their friends, doing things that are meaningful. Travel, certainly, I think, is something that we can all count on in the future as becoming a larger industry, not a smaller industry.

1:19:44I am ultra long on the private jet sector, even though myself, I carry too much guilt to fly private. So, you'll never see me on a private jet. But I'm very bullish on the sector. That's amazing. Chris, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you. And people can go find you. You got your show, Dumb Money Live. It's on YouTube. That's where I watch it, at least when I tune in. So thanks for coming on. And by the way, the only place I am personally is X. So at Chris Camillo at X. But dumbmoney.tv has all the socials. So thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Very cool. Well, that's it. That's the pod.

1:20:26I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my day's off. On the road, let's travel. Never looking back.

1:21:04Thank you.