Chris Camillo: I put 70% of my portfolio in this ONE stock

00:00:00The world is still unsure about how this is going to play out. I'm not unsure. I'm willing to bet it all. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel never look too bad. Chris, good to see you again.

00:00:18Hey, Sean. How are you doing, man? I'm good. So we should start with a little intro. Sam, you weren't here last time Chris was on. Chris, can you do like the simplest explanation of who you are, number one, and then number two is your kind of unique philosophy

00:00:36and unique strategy that you've used to buy and sell stocks to invest. Yeah, I mean, I'm a regular person for most of my career. I've had a regular job. I'm not a financial analyst. I'm not a technical trader. I hate all that stuff.

00:00:50I hate technicals. I hate fundamentals. I'm like most regular people, right? Like a normal guy with the normal job that was trying to break out, you know, try to find a, find a future for myself because I realized that my job was capped, like 99.9% of people in this world. And, you know, I started investing something I call observational investing or social arb investing,

00:01:12which is really all it is is trying to detect change in the world, whether it's change in technological development or change in culture, change in consumer behavior. But you're trying to detect change and you're trying to connect that change, connect the dots to companies, that would either benefit or be harmed by that change. And then you're investing in those companies. It's that simple. One of many of ways that you personally observe is through social media comments. Yeah, I mean, like, think about it.

00:01:43Like, how do you observe change in the world the quickest? What do people do before they change their life? They talk about it, right? Before you can see the evidence of it, they talk about it. If you're a developer and you're changing the way that you develop software and you're adopting AI and your company. You're probably in Reddit forums with other developers speaking about it.

00:02:06And it's not always tech. A lot of it is just consumer behavior, right? Because I remember you had one that was around the sphere, which most people don't even realize. That's the big dome in Vegas, the sphere. It's a publicly traded stock. And I think you noticed, what was it, the Wizard of Oz? You were like, this Wizard of Oz show.

00:02:25Yeah, game changer, right? They didn't quite. nail product market fit the sphere until that Wizard of Oz came out and they're like oh take an old movie use AI to make it more interesting in terms of visuals to put it on this insane projection screen and then add some 4D effects like a tornado and the winds blowing and all this stuff and all of a sudden you created a unique human experience that would go viral on TikTok which is exactly what happened and now people from around the world from Europe are like we're going to Vegas to go to this sphere place to see this Wizard of Oz that we saw went viral on TikTok, right?

00:03:04And so, man, what a game changer. Did you buy it? Dude, yeah. So I heard him talking about it. So I started tracking it. It's up 220 percent. I mean, from the time we got in, which is like a 20-something bucks, it's up like 6x or something. Chris, I got to give you a little credit because anytime somebody comes on the pot and talks about

00:03:22investing, the goal is first to get context on, okay, before we listen and really drink the Kool-Aid on all the, your philosophy or your strategy. We like to understand, does it work? What are the results? And so you can talk a little bit about that, but I'll give one little point, which was last time you're on the pod, I asked you to make three sort of picks, three predictions, three, three stocks to look at. You said Palantir, Bloom Energy. It was at $92. It's now at $2.40, so it's up 165 percent since the last podcast. And then Nvidia, which is up a smaller amount, but those were your three picks. So I got to give you a little bit of credit. So here's the thing, like, I actually aggressively disagree with that type of performance analyses

00:04:05because the world's changing every minute of every day. So the day after the show, I could have found new information that would have put me on the opposite side of all three of those trades, right? And so the only way you could ever analyze any investor ever is through long-term audits over a long period of time total portfolio. I don't care if an investor comes on gives you five stocks and all of them rock it. It could have been based on beta,

00:04:33could have been based on the money. Like, completely luck, right? So don't give me any credit for anything from the last show. If you don't want, I mean, you feel free if you want, but all that actually matters is what's like the 10, 15, 20-year total portfolio track record in and out through multiple markets. Great. So what is it? What are the audited? What is it? 15-year results? It's like 68% over 16, 15 or 16 years.

00:05:01What does that mean in terms of dollars? What did you start with? I've generated about 80 million off of an initial $20,000 portfolio that I kicked off in 2007. Wow. And then do you reinvest new capital into that? The truth is that I took massive amounts of capital out every year, almost all of my profits, And so theoretically, if I kept it all in and maintain the same returns, which would have been harder because the account would have been larger, obviously, it'd be like at 700 million or something like that. But, you know, the truth is it's meaningfully easier to manage an account that is seven to eight figures than an account that's nine figures for obvious reasons, right? So you can never really compare apples to apples. You can't really compare me to a guy managing five billion. It's unfair to the guy that's managing $5 billion because he has restrictions.

00:05:58He's having to move large amounts of money. I'm able to be hyper flexible with what I do. But I would say that the sizing of my account is still meaningfully larger than just about any other retail investor in the world. What's been the worst? What year did you do the worst? Or what's been the biggest dip you had? I think it wasn't crazy.

00:06:18It was like 30% down, 20 or 30% down in the year. I think the biggest up years might have been like 300% in a year. So, but it's been relatively, relatively consistent. So, Chris, I want to ask you a question. After you came on and you talked about this observational investing, and I have to say, I obviously was a bit skeptical about most financial influencers on YouTube. I would just say, like, that's just a general stance I have. You should be more than skeptical.

00:06:47Yeah. So, but, you know, what you talked about is didn't, it's not like it was some insane. idea. Like you look for changes of where you see the world going, where you think demand is going, where there might be supply constraints, and those obviously might be interesting companies. Now, the question I have for you, because one example is, my kids went crazy about these thing called Nidos. Explain what these things are. They're basically just a pile of, it's just like a goop ball. I don't even know. What do you even explain it? It's just a squishy toy. It's a squishy toy that is slightly firmer, slightly higher quality.

00:07:20Squishies have been around for 15 years. But they were able to go viral this last year. It became a thing in kind of elementary and middle schools of like finding rare Nidos. You couldn't find them. So they had that sort of like that Pokemon card. This happens a lot of times with crazes, right? But is Nito a public company? Yeah.

00:07:38So Nito is a very tiny private company that's actually held by another private company that owns, I think, 27 private companies. And the company that owns Nito is one of those 27 companies. What's interesting is that this is a holding company that that generally doesn't move because they generate their earnings from interest payments and dividends paid by these small operating companies. To my knowledge, and the ticker is G-A-I-N, to my knowledge, they've never owned a company that has had a hyperviral product like Nido before. Can you imagine that Wolf of Wall Street call to Sean, like,

00:08:20listen, Sean, this is a small company and over Massachusetts that is sitting on breakthrough technology that is extra squishy yet firm at the same time. That's exactly what it is, man. That's literally exactly what it is. And by the way, whenever you invest in a tiny company like this, there's all types of unknown risk involved. So it's a really dangerous game to play. But I did bank the investment. It's a bit of a novelty investment and a novelty product. So the thesis is that if the, if NIDO can remain on trend through the holiday season and if the parent company is able to fully scale out supply, this is actually going to be a needle mover for the parent company to the, and you should see about a 30 to 40% increase in valuation at

00:09:12the parent company. Let's break this trade even further. There's always cool books on like, you know, Warren Buffett's first, like 50 deals or whatever. Let's do Chris's investment in Nito's. Could you say, how much did you put into it? When did you put into it? And like when you're saying there should be a 30 or 40 percent, what numbers did you look at to make this estimation of how much juice is on here or how much profit it can be had? You're basically looking at Hey, let's take a quick break because the team in HubSpot has put together something pretty cool. You know, in this episode, Chris is talking about the way he knows how to make money, identifying these trends, scouting the TikTok comments,

00:09:48making these big leveraged bets. That's great for him. It is amazing. Some people will like that. I personally don't know how to make money that way. I wouldn't do it. But I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill,

00:09:59about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, give rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth. things that I wish I knew when I was just getting started.

00:10:18And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. You're basically looking at how many Nidos you think the company can sell through the holiday season based on demand and how many they're currently selling.

00:10:39By the way, this is like a little bit of a science and a little bit of an art. And you kind of assess what that will. do to that company's bottom line, how that will increase dividends and what that increased dividend payment to the parent company will account for relative to the total valuation of the parent company. It's kind of a difficult exercise, and this is where AI comes in really great, because AI can help you do that exercise. So, you know, we're not financial analysts, and AI does an excellent job going deep into the financials of a company. like this and then like okay if they sell this many at this much of a profit margin it could have this

00:11:21big of an impact on the parent company and of earnings come the holiday season so again a lot a lot of estimates that you're making it was enough for me to invest i put like somewhere between half a million and a half and a million dollars into the trade it wasn't crazy i did it more because i loved the product and i loved the trade and i felt the trade's going to work and i wanted to be part of it so like For me, on an equity trade, that's not a huge trade for me, but I like it. And by the way, if you look at the past 17 years, I've made about 80 to 85 high conviction trades over 17 years. So the entirety of my performance is based on those 80 trades.

00:12:07And Nito was a high conviction? I wouldn't call Nito a high conviction. I call probably a medium conviction because the company is so tiny. that there are a lot of variables that could impact a minuscule company like that. But all 80 of those trades were publicly discussed, more or less as they were happening. So I'm really public with my ideas because I want my community to kind of provide feedback and poke holes in my thesis. You know, there aren't that many of us social arbitrators, observational traders. So I've always said that the community at large when we work together on ideas, sometimes I surface ideas, sometimes members of my community surface ideas.

00:12:52We cross-researched them. We play devil's advocate with each other. We poke holes in the thesis. And I always say as a group, we're more powerful than the biggest hedge fund because we have tens to hundreds of thousands of people now that are social arbitrators. and we come from every walk of life. So we have people from every industry sector, every profession, every demographic. So we have tons of people that have kids.

00:13:20When we do channel checks, when we do store checks, I'll throw it out in my community, and they will do store checks in every state. So we'll have people aggregating, hey, I went to this shop in Missouri. I went to this shop in Florida. Here's what the clerk told me, right? It's really, really fun, guys.

00:13:36Now, let me ask you a question about this. The specific question I have is, observing the trend, especially if you're a parent with young kids, it was actually not that hard. It was pretty easy to see, holy shit, every kid in the school wants it, and there's none on the shelves. They can't, you know, stores can't keep them in stock. People are banging on the door.

00:13:52So the by side of that kind of makes some sense to me. But all these things seem like fads. They seem like trends. I would never know when to exit a trade like this. I would never know when to sell because I don't think 20 years from now my kids are going to care about Nidos or the kids are necessarily going to care about Nitos. So can you explain how you think about the, the exit or the cell when it's something like this where it's like a trend or a wave that may not be enduring.

00:14:16Well, let's back up. It all is dependent upon the conviction level and the underlying thesis that you observed, right? So you have a thesis that you come up with that there is some new information that is likely to positively or impact this company or this sector that the market is not aware of you. or that the market underappreciates. Now, you have to ask yourself, to what extent is this a needle mover for this company, right? Is this going to meaningfully move the revenue needle, the profit needle, their cost structure, or the perception of this company? Is it meaningful? And are there other things that are happening to this company that are more meaningful than

00:15:04this one piece of information that I feel is a needle mover? Okay. And then you have to ask yourself, to what extent do other investors, institutional or retail, already know about this? Because it's not a binary thing, right? Some people might know, but does the market at large fully appreciate that piece of information? Or do they only partially appreciate it? So it's additive. And you have to determine, am I highly convicted in this trade?

00:15:34Because this thing that's about to happen or that already happened is going to be. be massively impactful to this company, and there's nothing else that's going to impact this company over the course of the next few weeks or the next couple of months. And there are virtually no other investors in institutional or retail that understand this yet. And to answer your question, Sean, the exit window is when other people come to terms with this information, right? When other people start to appreciate this information that you found, that you traded on, as soon as that information becomes public, like in the case of the sphere, when other retail traders, when financial press, when the company itself, an analyst started coming out what reports saying,

00:16:27hey, they're selling out the arena due to Wizard of Oz, this is going to be a game change or we're starting to revise our earnings estimates based on this new template that they found with the Wizard of Oz. And by the way, they can replicate this model now with other old movies. And it's a highly profitable model. And we now feel that they've kind of cracked product market fit at sphere, which is a game changing moment. When you start to hear about that in the press, when you see other investors talking about it on X, when the company itself talks about it, that's the point of information parity, and that's when we exit the trade. So you basically initiate an observational social arb trade at the point of information and balance.

00:17:16When you find some information that is impactful that the world doesn't know about yet, and you exit that investment as the world starts to appreciate that information, and that's not always a binary event either. Sometimes you exit it over time as more and more investors start to appreciate the information. Now, you try to ignore stock price. The assumption is that if that piece of information is meaningfully positive to that company, as other people start to surface that information, that it will positively impact the stock. But that's out of your control.

00:17:52The bottom line is you're trading a thesis. Your thesis revolves around one piece of information. And when that information gets widely disseminated to other investors, then you no longer have an information advantage. Therefore, you should be exiting that trade, whether you made money in the trade or whether you lost money in the trade for some other unknown reason. Maybe the market, maybe something else happened, is kind of irrelevant. So that's the entire methodology.

00:18:24That's everything I've been doing for 17 years. There's a lot more to it because, like, when you find this. narrative, right? You then need to, like, check every other piece of information that you can or data source to validate it, talking to store clerks, right? Maybe you're pulling web traffic stats. Maybe you're looking at Google search trends. Depending on the trade, there's a million different ways to validate the narrative thesis that you originated using alternative data or other information sources. It's just, it's a case-by-case basis. But this is everything I've been doing for 17 years.

00:19:03And it's very different from being a fundamental trader or being a technical trader. Has there been a time over the last 15 or 18 years that you've been doing this, where you've said, I'm quitting and I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going back to just index investing or something. Like, what was it a low point? No, I love this so much, guys. This is literally part of my soul. This is what I do.

00:19:25I have so much fun doing this. Like, you've got to realize, like, my methodology, entails reading comments on TikTok videos. I get to watch the world unfold. I get to learn about culture and consumer behavior and trends and what people are buying, what they're doing. It is the funnest research any investor could ever do.

00:19:45I'm not studying fundamentals or charts. What I do is fun as hell. Then every five years, I have this thesis that I go all in on. So five years ago, it was Pokemon and nerd culture, and I started this company called collecticon and we became the largest Pokemon trade show in the world

00:20:06and we sold it to Ari Emanuel a few months ago for an insane amount of money but we grew that from the ground up and I kind of take on one of those projects the next project I'm taking on wait can you tell me about this that's a big deal tell the full story before you tell the new project oh you want to know the story this is actually amazing

00:20:27I always tell everyone, don't do things for yourself. Just go out there and do things for other people, and it always comes back in your favor. Don't ask how or why. It just generally always does. So I'm really big into philanthropy. I have a 501 foundation. I support pediatric charity, animal welfare, and elder care. And back during the pandemic, I know nothing about Pokemon, okay?

00:20:54But Logan Paul bought like a $350,000 Pokemon box, which is set the world record. And I was like, man, that looks really fun. And I was kind of bored. I'm going to go do the same thing. But then I'm going to break it into like the 24 packs and auction it off for charity and then just donate it all to the foundation. And I'm going to also throw the world's biggest Pokemon party in Vegas because I ended up meeting all these Pokemon people. And they were the coolest, nicest people in the world. I'm telling you, I never met people so fun.

00:21:28And so I met Steve Aoki, who's a big Pokemon guy. I met this guy, Gary King Pokemon, who's the number one Pokemon guy collector in the world. And he was the guy that I think sold Logan, one of his biggest Pokemon cards. And I said, I want to do this party, guys. And they helped me put on this party in Vegas. And we agreed that a third of the proceeds would go to Steve Aoki's brain charity charities, like whatever. A third would go to Gary King Pokemon's autism charities, and a third would go to the charities I care about. So I bought this box for $375,000.

00:22:05We broke it up through the world's biggest Pokemon Party, donated hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. The party itself cost me almost $150,000 to put on. I made zero. All this was a massive loss and donation. to a bunch of charities. But what came out of it? I met all these really interesting people. And about a month later, Gary King Pokemon calls me.

00:22:33He goes, hey, Chris, I know you believe in Pokemon now. I know you believe that this is going to be really big and get bigger every year. One of the guys at the party wants to start a Pokemon convention. And he doesn't have any money. Can I introduce you? Maybe you would invest in it. I said, yeah, sure, let's do it.

00:22:53I had lunch with this guy. He lived in Texas. I said, let's just do it. This guy's been working in my conventions for 20 years. He had the perfect skill set to do it. Him and his two cousins were deeply passionate collectors and Pokemon collectors. I said, you guys are the perfect people to run this conference. Let's do it together.

00:23:14I invested, I want to say, $600,000 into the company. I took a minority but massive stake in the company. And I helped build this conference starting with one show in a small hotel convention room in Frisco, Texas. And four years later, we were throwing 20 shows, 700,000 attendees, the biggest Pokemon trade show in the world, massive success. And by the way, we all worked all the shows. Like, I would travel around the country and be the guy who was ticketing people online at 7 in the morning. We'd have 3,000 people online because we were trying to operate the show so efficiently because we didn't have much money. This was a huge business, too.

00:24:07I mean, 700,000 tickets are 400. There's got to be a nine-figure exit, right? Massive business, guys, massive. You wouldn't believe. I'm under NDA. I can't tell you the specifics of the sale, but massive exit. Can you say, generally speaking, these businesses, what do they sell for? Yeah, like on an EBITDA.

00:24:25Like, what's the EBITA multiple? They don't sell for big multiples because it's a physical business. It's not like a software business. But the amount of money we were generating from these shows was enormous. It was really profitable? Very profitable because we care deeply about the shows. and we ran great shows. We actually...

00:24:50I mean, just doing back of the envelope math, 700,000 times, let's say 60 bucks. That's, you're getting close to $50 million in revenue, let alone vendors. I can't disclose exact numbers, but I'm going to tell you the numbers were huge. And we started from nothing. And we built this all up over four years.

00:25:06But it wasn't easy, guys. Like, we were so frugal that we had our own rig. Because, you know, the most expensive part of throwing a convention is renting pipe and drape at all the conventions. So we bought our own pipe and drape, put it in a 18-wheeler, and the founder, operator of this business, Matthew, would drive the truck himself from city to city. It was crazy, okay?

00:25:31And then we would unload the truck with some local help, right? And we would set up the shows or some. I mean, there were points, because I have a bad back where after the first day, I was almost, I couldn't walk. And there were some shows I'd have to go home on day two because I hurt my back so bad from just like leaning over, ticketing thousands of people at the show. Because we would hire contract workers to help us, but we needed every hand possible.

00:26:00That's pretty crazy. And so we ran it like a family business. We were deeply passionate about the attendees. We would throw a concert every Saturday, midday. We had like Vanilla Ice would perform or like, it was so fun. And meanwhile, to this day, I've never bought a Pokemon card. So, like, I was an observer of this scepter. But the long story short, like, I had deep conviction in nerd culture and Pokemon specifically.

00:26:31And I think Wall Street doesn't, and just business, the business community generally doesn't appreciate the fact that there are millions of people that like collecting these cards. and no one had provided a fun place for them to physically go to once a year to connect with other people like them and trade these cards. Like we have sports card shows. We've had them forever, right, with baseball cards and whatnot. But no one had never really established a big show for, you know, TCG for like these table card games, right?

00:27:04Like no one had ever done it before. So it just intuitively made sense to me. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy. is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot.

00:27:24You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agenic customer platform for growing businesses. So I'm curious if this is something that others have been doing or there's people you look up, So for example, somebody who you wouldn't think is an observational trader, wouldn't call that, is Warren Buffett. But there's some great stories of where he did exactly what you're talking about. There's a story of the salad oil crisis with American Express.

00:27:57I don't know if you guys know that story, but it's basically, you know, at a given time, they were lending money, and they were lending money to this guy who was supposed to have salad oil dressing. And then they went and they checked the barrels and the barrels were just full of water, salt water, like seawater. and there was no salad oil at all and the stock is plummeting and Buffett he figured out what the central question was which is is this a temporary setback or is this actually going to be

00:28:20damaging to the trust of the brand long term and he believed in brands right that's why he has been on Coca-Cola and Geico and these other companies that he feels like have brands that have power it's the exact opposite of what Chris is it's like what won't change yeah so he well he was but still the

00:28:38the market research part of this is kind of shared, right? So the story is he goes into a store and he just watches the clerk and he watches customers with their credit card and he's basically trying to figure out, are people going to stop taking American Express because they no longer have faith in the good standing of American Express? Or is the American Express brand going to endure this? And really, the asymmetry was the market believed that this would damage the future of American Express and the quality of the brand. And what he observed in watching people was that the store, and the customers had no problem using American Express

00:29:12and that there was no issue. And he did the same thing, he did a very similar thing with Apple, where he had stayed away from technology companies for a long time. And then he realized like, oh, when he talked to Apple customers, he's like, not only would they not trade their current device

00:29:28for a cheaper equivalent device by somebody else, you can't pay these people to switch off Apple. And it was more of a social, psychological observation, not a technical or fundamental analysis of the business that led him to invest in those companies. So, Chris, it's a long-winded way of asking, who else has been great at this? What are the great stories that inspire you on this? Or do you feel like you're kind of the first one to popularize this? No, the concept of information asymmetry is not new to investing methodologies.

00:30:00The most famous person to adopt it widely would have been Peter Lynch with the Magellan Fund in the 80s. The difference is being a pure observational social arb investor is this concept that it shouldn't be part of an investing methodology, but it should be the only thing that you take into consideration, right? So Peter Lynch kind of blended this observational investing approach. he would famously walk the malls and kind of look at what stores had the longest lines at the cash register. Seems pretty simple, right? And he would combine that with massive amounts of fundamental research. You have to ask yourself, though, if the market is relatively efficient. And we know the market's never perfectly efficient.

00:30:54But if it's relatively efficient in terms of taking into account all the fundamentals and all the technicals, and you have all these investors that are trying to price a company based on all the known things, then if you're able to surface something that's unknown that is meaningful,

00:31:16you don't need to worry about all the other stuff. You don't need to have this robust, fundamental, technical approach that also happens to apply information asymmetry, when you come across it, you can focus all of your energy and all of your research on just finding new information that the market hasn't discovered yet and making an assumption that the particular company that you're trading is relatively efficient with all the known information and investors haven't fully priced in this new piece of information.

00:31:54So all you care about is that one piece of information asymmetry. It simplifies the way that investors can approach this game because most of us are never going to be technically proficient investors and never going to be able to compete with the absolute best, most pedigreed, Wharton graduated, like, fundamental investors, right, that are doing deep, deep fundamental analysis. and they've come to terms with the fact that this company should trade at a 29 PE as opposed to the 24 PE it's trading at today. I mean, I don't want to play that game. The easiest game to play, because you can invest a million different ways. So the question is, what is the best approach to investing? That the largest chunk of ordinary people can actually apply efficiently to markets and regularly do that in a fruitful way. and I strongly believe it's pure observational social arm investing.

00:32:57Sean, I actually just Googled this, and it's funny, I'm quoted as the source of Google for this story. So it could be a little bit of rock, but in 1966, a young Warren Buffett visited a movie theater on 45th in Broadway in New York to watch Mary Poppins. He went with the briefcase in the middle of the afternoon, later joking that it almost felt like he needed to rent a kid to fit in. This trip was his way of researching Disney

00:33:18to see if they had lasting brand appeal. And later that day, he bought 5% of the company at $4 million, and it was a 50% gain over the next year. And he says, selling it, which he did after one year, was one of his biggest mistakes that he's ever made. And by the way, so if he really believed that that lasting, durable brand appeal was there for Disney, right, did he also believe that the rest of the world came to that acknowledgement after a year? And if he did, then he didn't have any alpha after a year. and he was probably right to sell Disney. And Disney might... It's only 35 when he did that, by the way.

00:33:55So, I mean, you could also say maybe you just made a mistake. But you have to understand something. Whether a stock goes up or down after you sell might have nothing to do with you making a mistake because that's not your thesis. That's not why you invested. You don't have any alpha. So it could have gone up for a completely different reason.

00:34:14So you got to get out of the headspace of saying because a stock continue to go up after you exited, you made the mistake. That could be completely coincidental. It went up for something that you had no knowledge into, that you had no take on. How do you quantify that, though? Because, like, for example, Sean and I or the average Joe might have, like, an opinion on one company, their sales we think are going up. But that doesn't necessarily mean the stock will change.

00:34:42Okay, let's take a step back. if you are correct that a company is being impacted by something meaningfully and their revenue is going to go up and the rest of the investor class is not aware of that yet. If there's nothing else impacting that company during that trade window, it is highly likely. Again, there are a lot of factors. There's the macro market. The market could come down, right? But in a vacuum, that piece of information will almost always, in a vacuum, will almost always result in the stock going up. Because when a company makes more money than the market anticipates, the stock will go up.

00:35:28If you're able to surface something that will impact a company sales that the rest of the market is not aware of, when the rest of the world comes to terms with that piece of information, that will positively impact the stock price. assuming that there's nothing else going on with that company or the market at large. But I wouldn't overthink it. Too many investors overthink this. It's not that complicated, guys. Can you give a sense of volume? So I think you said something like 80 investment decisions 17 years. Does that mean you're making four-ish buy-sell trade decisions per year?

00:36:03Or did I hear that wrong? Because my hunch was that you're a little more active than that. Seems like in a given year, how many decisions are you, How many investment decisions are you making? So I'm referring to high conviction trades, you know, trades where I have a lot of conviction, and I'm generally allocating 5 to 30% of my total portfolio to buying that stock, or I'm allocating, call it 2 to 15% of my portfolio to buying options in that stock. By the way, when you say portfolio, is this like I have my trading, my fun, my fund,

00:36:40slush fund and then I have my boring safe nest egg over here? Entire portfolio, entire portfolio, yes. I think what Sean was getting at was like, do you have like a safety net? No. I mean, my public equity portfolio is my public equity portfolio. It's just one portfolio. So when I have high conviction in a trade, I will allocate between, like I said, I don't know, up to a third of my portfolio might be in that single,

00:37:10stock for that period of time that I'm in that trade. And Sean, to answer a question, in the early years, I would average one to two high conviction trades a year. Now, as we have more social media today than we had back 13 years ago, and the world is more digitally connected today, and it's actually easier than it's ever been to read into the world's conversations as they're happening. Like, as you guys know, I spend hours a night reading comments on TikTok videos because that's where most of the world organically shares what they're doing, what they're buying, you know, where they're going, like on a daily basis.

00:37:54I've increased the velocity of my high conviction trades. So there have been years now where I've had six or seven high conviction trades in a year where it used to be one or two. Right. And by the way, the more. The more change that's happening in the world, the more opportunity to surface a high conviction trade. So probably the biggest year I ever had was during the pandemic because the year of the pandemic,

00:38:22there was a tremendous amount of change happening in the world. We all started living at home, you know, working from home, right? We stopped going out. We started buying things that we would ordinarily never buy. We stopped spending money on those things and started spending money on these. these things because we're living inside of our house for a year straight. You know, we're buying bicycles and cameras for our computers and printers because the kids are doing homeschooling and all of these things.

00:38:50So we're buying Peloton because we're not going to the gym and we're working out at our house now. So, you know, we're shopping more on Amazon and Spotify. So, like, the more change, the more opportunity for an observational investor to surface that change and connect the dots to investable opportunities. When there's not a lot of change in the world, then there's less opportunity for us. So what I've been telling people is in the age of AI, we've never experienced this type of global change before,

00:39:21other than the pandemic, because AI is radically changing the way that we think about work, that we think about intelligence. Every company in the world is going to get hit positively or negatively due to the way that AI and unlimited intelligence is going to impact their sector over the next few years. So this is an amazing time to be an observational social arb investor because the world is changing so quickly. There's going to be so many winners and losers. So the game here is to figure out what's changing and the degree to which that change is good or bad for any given.

00:40:06company at any given period of time. Does this influence you, Sean? This is your second time talking to him. Has your actions changed since December? Not necessarily, because the main thing I do isn't like active investing in public equities. You know, if I did, maybe it would be a little more. But I don't know, I find it fascinating.

00:40:28And like you said, we talked to on one end of the spectrum, you know, sort of the Charlie Munger-Buffet disciples. We've had those value investors on. We've had, you know, Howard Marks, he's dealing in, you know, debt and bonds. And, you know, you have Radalia, you have all these different people. So I'm more of a right now in a kind of curiosity mode, not a, oh, great, let me switch up my style. Every time I talk to a really successful, really interesting investor, which for us on this podcast is like every month. But let me ask you a question.

00:40:59Your audience, what do you think the average, follower of this show looks like. Do you think the average follower of this show is capable of being a top 1% fundamental investor competing against literally 100... Well, I don't think that the average listener of this show couldn't be a top 1% in any type of investing.

00:41:27That's not completely untrue. That's ridiculous. I don't think that's ridiculous to say the average... person can't be able. That is that is patently false. Patently false. Where do you think, where do you think I graduated in my high school class? Just, just guess. Percentralize. Either one percent or the worst percent. I'm not sure where I should guess. But no, no, no, genuine, like genuinely, I, I generated 80 million off a $20,000 portfolio. Like, like, I, I am who I am. You know, look at the last 15 years of stuff and articles, like genuinely, like, objectively, like,

00:42:05where do you think I would have graduated in my high school class of a public school? Just back up. The question was, the average person of our show, are they a 1% investor? I don't think they are. Nor do I think they. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I mean, do they have the capacity to be?

00:42:21Also, no. Okay. Well, I'm asking you. So, like, let's talk about, if we talk about IQ? Like, what do you think my IQ? I had an IQ test. what do you think my IQ was or where do you think I graduated in my high school class? Just objectively.

00:42:34Just throw it out there. Middle. Sean? Well, you're asking the question, which tells me it's got to be the bottom half of your class. It's lower than that. It's bottom 25% of my high school class. I barely graduated. And I'll just tell you this.

00:42:51I don't recall my exact IQ, but I will tell you this. When I was in kindergarten, okay, I was the only one. only kid in the class that didn't know what my last name was. And they sent me to Manhattan to get an IQ test. And I still had that piece of paper. It was slightly below average in terms of IQ. Nothing crazy. They kept me in the class. I don't know why I didn't know my last name. I was just saying I was the only kid that didn't know my last name. I went on to do not a lot better through my senior year of high school, obviously. I was bottom 25% of my class. What about temperament? Because, like, you, again, we've talked to all these amazing people. A huge takeaway that I've had talking to a bunch of

00:43:38the investors in particular is that temperament probably matters more than IQ. And I think the, your temperament, the way you were born is likely just the way it is. You probably can't change it. I think Sean talked to Manish Pabri, and he said something, I think it was him, Sean. He said something like, I probably can't take anyone and make them great, but we could probably improve you a little bit. You know, I think he didn't say this, but it was like the analogy of you're born seven feet tall. And you could be better at basketball at six foot tall, but like, you know, freaks are freaks. And so temperament, I actually think is probably more important than IQ when it comes to this game. Okay.

00:44:15I would say that being a top 1% observational investor, just a top 1% investor, just a top 1% investor, generally is easily doable if you're willing to aggressively adopt being an observational purist investor. And the reason I say that is because what I actually do is so simple and so straightforward. And I've seen over the past seven or eight years since I've been public about this on YouTube, and I have hundreds of thousands of followers. I have people around the world writing me near daily. They are dentists.

00:45:00They are janitors. They drive trucks for UPS. They work in a parking lot, checking out cars, okay? And they will DM me, hey, Chris, I've been watching you for five years. I started doing this. I was early to this company or to this company based on what I observed in the world. it's that one investment has changed my entire life. And I tell people, if you have one or two home runs over 20 years, one or two home runs

00:45:34over 20 years, meaning you find something early and you put a meaningful amount of money in it, that could put you into the one or two percent range of all investors over that two-decade period. And that's all it takes. And a perfect example of that is Tesla. Okay, I actually wasn't early into Tesla, but do you know how many terrible investors otherwise? I mean, these are people that hadn't done anything in their entire life in the investing world and probably haven't done much since. Are 1% investors because they were behind the wheel of the Tesla in early days and they realized this is a game changer and they put some meaningful, not even that meaningful, just some reasonable amount of money into Tesla stock.

00:46:16and that one investment made them a top 1% global investor for like a 10 or 15 year period or 20 year period and changed the trajectory of their entire life. They're not hyper-intelligent. They're probably like any regular person. They're probably like most of the people that watch this show or any other show. And it's all about just understanding that that's all it takes because most people never even try this. Because I think I can't compete with pedigree investors from Wall Street. I can't spend six hours a day doing technical trading.

00:46:48They don't realize you don't need to. You can just go on with your life, live your life, just keep your mind open to potentially early discovering the next big thing. That's it. That's literally it. Like, that's all you have to do. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product.

00:47:07I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all. all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal bank account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield.

00:47:34It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members, FDIC. What are the things you have most high conviction in right now? My highest conviction trade, I'm like a broken record on this.

00:48:02It sounds so weird because it's not a small company. It's Amazon, guys. I have more money in Amazon, this most concentrated position I've had in a really long time. I always say the most concentrated position I've ever taken was Nintendo when they came out with the Wii

00:48:18because I was at the E3 conference and actually saw, because it's like a Buffet story, right? I actually saw the line of people interacting with the Nintendo Wii for the first time. I don't know if you remember that. Game-changing platform. And nobody on Wall Street believed it.

00:48:34Everyone on Wall Street was so hyper-focused on the Xbox coming out and the PlayStation coming out. Nobody thought the Wii was, going to be a big deal. I was there. I saw it in real life. I had 100% of my portfolio invested in a Nintendo ADR, which is a tracking stock that tracks the Japanese ticker of Nintendo. And I had 100% of my portfolio, I think, for a full year in Nintendo, until Wall Street finally realized how big of a deal that was. But Amazon, I just think it's the company that is

00:49:07best positioned in the world to benefit from the upcoming AI efficiency wave, which is once we actually start to see meaningful productivity jumps from the AI age, there's no company in the world that's going to benefit more from that than Amazon. I also think they are the nucleus of AI infrastructure. So, sorry, what's the observation you made here? Like, what, is this not from the TikTok comments in this situation? No, this is, this is a kind of a global cultural shift, and it's a big observation I've had for three years, which is based in part, I don't know if you guys ever read Nassim Teleb's book, Black Swan, but Black Swan theory essentially says that our minds are not capable of fully

00:50:04recognizing and appreciating anomalies in the market or the world that haven't happened before. I had this thesis in early days AI that AI wouldn't just be the next internet. It's not just going to be the next mobile phone or smartphone, but that it would be meaningfully larger than anything we've experienced in our lifetime. and as a result of that, we would see the biggest trades of our life happen as a direct result of AI. And even when the information was right in front of us,

00:50:43the market would not believe it until it actually shows up in the numbers because there's no precedent for what we're seeing in AI. There's nothing that has ever happened in our lifetime before AI that we can compare to AI. Now, I might, regret saying this in 10 years, but I don't think so. I think the concept of intelligence becoming infinite and free to the world is going to be the biggest change we've ever seen in humanity.

00:51:15So the reason why Amazon went down and has not really gone up as a company meaningfully, you know, recently, right, is because they have made such an aggressive investment in AI, $200 billion, now it's like 200, it's more than 200 billion this last year, CAPX investment in AI in a sector that nobody knows if it's going to pay off for them or not. Does that mean like, for example, did you guys is Siri, or what's their call Alexa? Did your Alexa just change where like now she like talks to you, like my Alexa just changed. So now it like talks like chat JBT, like I can ask real questions. I would see the biggest example is this, it's this simple.

00:51:59is betting the entire company on AI. End of story. As is some of the other big tech companies, right? They are leveraging all of their profits. They're leveraging their balance sheet. They are building out massive infrastructure unlike they ever had in the history of the company. They are making the biggest KAPX investment

00:52:20of any company in the world by a big margin in AI. And the world is still unsure about how this is going to play out. I'm not unsure. I'm willing to bet it all. They think that the infrastructure layer of AI, which is Amazon, okay, because Amazon understand this. They are a chip company, right? Their tranium, their chips alone, their Traneum AI chips are generating like $50 billion of revenue this next year. They are the one of the largest infrastructure data center companies in the entire world and their AWS platform and everything that they've constructed in cloud computing over the past 15 plus years sits at the center of this architecture infrastructure for AI.

00:53:10On top of that, Amazon is the third largest digital advertising company in the world. So as AI makes advertising meaningfully more efficient and targeted and effective and personal and rich for consumers. Amazon is at the center of that wave. Additionally, Amazon has spent 20 years building out the world's largest logistical infrastructure for the delivery of physical product to humans, an investment that no other company has even come close to making.

00:53:49That investment, even moving the margin needle, a few points, is a game-changer. for Amazon. So as we enter this new world of intelligence and automation and robotics, okay, Amazon already has the infrastructure as the world's largest e-commerce company, the largest logistics company, to benefit massively from the increases in productivity and efficiencies that infinite free intelligence. And eventually what we're going to see is embodied intelligence, right, with the robotics, right? This is going to result in productivity and efficiency gains unlike we've ever experienced as humans.

00:54:33And Amazon is the number one company to benefit from all of that. Sounds like you're giving a sermon. You're bought in. And by the way, they own like 15% of Anthropic too. They just, and that's what's so funny here. Now, if anthropic IPOs between one and two trillion, which who knows, I think there's a reasonable chance they will next year, Amazon will make more money off that IPO than the $200 billion they spent on CapEx that everybody's so worried about, right?

00:55:01And so, again, we are living in an age when the market has more noise than it's ever had. The stories are changing every day. Like, it's impossible as an investor to cut through the noise. So that's what's so difficult is I think most new investors, they just give up because they're like, I can't keep up with all this stuff. You don't have to keep up with any of it. Just find one company that kind of sits in a place where they stand to benefit meaningfully from something that you're seeing in the world.

00:55:35It could be AI with Amazon. It could be the fact, you know, one of my big trade thesis recently is flip-flops are trending this summer, right? Because last summer, there were $750 flip-flops made by a company called Roe, and now every person in the world wants to wear flip-flops because they're all. trend. You can go out at night to a club wearing flip-flops. And so there's a Brazilian company that is one of the largest, you know, makers of flip-flops. There's so many ways to kind of like arb change in the world. When you said Amazon was your most concentrated bet in a long time,

00:56:17what does that mean percentage-wise for you? Amazon right now is, is about 50% of my portfolio value. And on top of that, did you say 50 or 1-5? 5-0. On top of that, I have options in Amazon that account for another 50%. So theoretically, I mean, yeah, if you count the amount that those options represent,

00:56:53it could be like 70%. percent of my portfolio is Amazon right now. That's how confident I am in a trade. So after you make a bet like that, you know, Ed Thorpe has this cool book, you know, the famous investor, one of the early hedge fund guys where he kind of like a funny story is, he's like, I make my trade and then I just go and hang out for like six months and I just see what happens. And there's like stories of him like playing tennis throughout the day and they're like, shouldn't you be at work? He's like, I made the trade. Let's see what's going to happen. So are you making that bet and then kind of stepping away for a little while?

00:57:25Are you active every single day then? I love that concept, by the way. I've been saying for months, this is the summer to deep research your trade, make it, and then just walk away because 99% of the noise hitting this market on a day-to-day basis, week-to-week basis, doesn't matter at all. And there is not that much happening and changing. where you need to be that concerned about the market on a day-in-day-out basis. Now, I'm not completely just going off and playing tennis for the rest of the summer.

00:58:05I'm keeping up with what's happening in the market, but I don't think there's going to be anything that's going to happen over the course of the next few weeks to a couple months that would meaningfully change my thesis on Amazon. Something might. But my thesis on Amazon is fairly large. And it's based on something that I believe is going to unravel over the next few years, as opposed to unravel over the next few months.

00:58:33So it's a massive concentration risk that I'm putting on this trade. But this is what I do, right? Like you can't generate outsize returns without taking outside risk. You just can't do it. By the way, guys, I don't think that most people should be doing this across their entire portfolio. I always tell people like, not a financial advisor, obviously, but you've got to bucket your assets for different risk categories, right? So I think everybody should have a big money account. I don't care if you start with

00:59:05$50 in that account, but everyone should have an account where they're willing to take big risk for big gains. And you don't have to take your kids' college savings to put in that account or your retirement money in that account, you could just start making tradeoffs in your life. Like, I don't know, mow your own lawn or make your own coffee, but every dollar that you save, put it in this big money account

00:59:32and then use it to actually take a big risk every once in a while in something that you believe in so that you have a chance of becoming a top 1% investor. But do it with tradeoffs, do it with other people's money, right? Like, get your hair cut every five

00:59:50weeks instead of every four weeks. I don't know. Like, delay that big purchase six months. So the big screen TV is $200 less than it was six months earlier. Take the $200 you saved, put it in your big money investment account. If that's how you fund that account, then you're not afraid to take a concentrated risk. If you're co-mingling your money altogether, it could be really hard to take a big risk on something because it's psychologically difficult for you to throw the money. that much money into a risky investment. So you have to bucket your money. This is like one of the most important lessons for investors.

01:00:27I'm willing to do it, right? Like, if Amazon is the stock that takes me down as an investor and ruins my reputation, then let it be. Well, it's definitely not going to take you, it won't take you down. Well, I don't know how leveraged you are. But I mean, it's not like it's like it's not going to, it ain't going away. No, well, you never know. It could.

01:00:48But here's the thing, guys. have been so transparent about everything I've ever done in the market. I talk about everything. I talk about the good, the bad, the risk factors. And when I lose, I talk about how much money I lost. I do not advise anyone to try to mirror my trades. I just want people to see how I think. I want them to see how I think about risk, how I think about concentration, how I think about you know, observational investing. I just share everything with the world. And by the way, you guys, I think, know this.

01:01:22I'm one of the only, I'm sure there's at least a couple others, financial content creators. I've never sold anything. I don't have courses. I don't sell a thing. Is your community free? Dude, I don't even take sponsorships. Do you know that I haven't taken one sponsorship my entire life?

01:01:42I won't take $1 from an advertiser. I won't take $1 from a community member. The only thing that's ever been sold is we sell some t-shirts and hoodies at cost. You know what? I take that back. You know the value I get out of my community is collaboration. I get so many great ideas from our community, and they help vet my own ideas. That's probably made me more money than I could have ever made from courses and selling sponsorships and

01:02:14all that stuff. By the way, I have a lot of respect for that. I think, you know, A, I trust that. My trust goes up, like I said, I was very skeptical of finance and stock influencers and traders on YouTube, but, you know, the fact that you're not selling courses, not charging for a community, not taking sponsors and all that. That is, I think, extremely commendable and extremely rare, so I got to give you props for that. To be honest, I mean, here's the deal. Like, we always say it, like, if you're so great at something, which, come on, I mean, I've been great the last 17 years. I make an insane amount of money from my portfolio. Like, I don't need to do any of that. Like, like, the amount of money I make is public, right? So I don't, I'm very

01:02:56fortunate to not have to do that. And I just don't need to do that. So I don't want to do that. But I do have an overriding goal here. My goal, my mission in life, is to bring every human on earth into the investor class. And that's why I'm on YouTube. That's why I'm on X. That's why I talk. that's why I do shows like this. And I truly believe that this style of investing, it's something that you could do for fun. You could do it on the side. You don't have to quit your job.

01:03:23You just retrain your brain to start thinking about this stuff. And you might only get one great investment the next 10 years. But that one investment, if you have a big money account and if and when you find it, whether it's the next Tesla or the next whatever, you're willing to throw a lot of money behind it, that could be the thing that changes your entire. higher life. And my next big thesis is podcasters, which sounds insane because there's so many podcasters, right?

01:03:54Like, you got to be kidding, Chris. Don't we have too many podcasters? Let me just say this. In the age of AI that we're about to enter into, we are going to deeply appreciate humans, I think. That's my thesis. And while we will embrace technology and AI and. and efficiencies and all the wonderful things

01:04:15that's gonna bring to us, I think we will equally appreciate the most human, if human voices, and human personalities, and we are going to need that for connectivity to remind us of what's real. So what's the bet? Like, what would the product be?

01:04:33The bet is that we are just getting started with podcasting, and I believe the entirety of the future of media is new media, and podcasting, and podcasting, and podcasters will continue to get bigger and bigger. I think the most human of human voices will become infinitely valuable the next 10 years. I think within the podcasting sector,

01:04:59I think women are slow to become podcasters because we have so many brilliant solo creators that are women on TikTok, but women tend to be really intimidated by friction, by bridging into podcasting when you need to have camera equipment and editors and clippers and you need to have staff, right? It's, and you need to invest money and capital. So I believe the most talented women voices in the world are not yet podcasting.

01:05:30So I'm opening up a podcast incubation studio in Austin, Texas, where we are going to attempt to develop a very boutique studio, but we're going to attempt to identify the most talented women voices in the world that are currently doing content as solo creators and help them bridge into the world of durable, repeatable podcasting, which we believe is just getting started. I think if you move forward five to eight years, there will be hundreds of podcasts that are worth $100 million or more. I'm not doing this for the money. I'm doing this because I just, I know that this could be really big. And I have so much fun working with other creative people.

01:06:17I love podcasters generally. It's all I do is watch podcasts, right? And sit in on podcasts. But when I look at like women's podcasting, you know, 70% of podcasters are men. So I think there's this huge opportunity in the next few years as podcasting becomes more programmatic to help develop podcast into what they will be. Because I don't think the future of podcasting is like two people in a studio talking on mics.

01:06:45No offense. My show is three guys in a studio talking on mics. I think it will become, I think it will be that probably for financial podcasters and business podcast. But I think for like general audience podcast, especially for women, it will become more programmatic.

01:07:07When you say programmatic, what does that mean? Okay, so are you familiar with a financial audit, Caleb Hammer's show? Yeah, out of Boston. He's the third biggest podcast in the world on YouTube. Okay. His show is program. He has an actual program that expresses itself through a podcast format. Okay.

01:07:30So he has guest on the show. But he has a very formal program of entertainment, right? And so that is the future of podcasting. So we have to get more creative with podcasting. We have to take risk. Caleb took a big risk with what he did. Have you seen Friends Keep Secrets? No.

01:07:54What is that? You got to check this. You're going to love this. So this is Lil Dickie, the rapper, Benny Blanco, the producer. Yeah, I'm sorry. I have seen it. It's the greatest show ever, yes. To me, that's an example of what you're talking about.

01:08:07When I saw that, I was like a little bit mind-blown. And, you know, I'm doing podcasting twice a week for six years. And what they came in and did, I really feel like the real creatives have arrived into podcasting because now you see Conan O'Brien's got a podcast. And has a man, I just got a podcast. Like the real comedians at podcasts, the real creatives have podcasts. And now what they're doing to the format because they come from a different background is they're approaching it differently.

01:08:33Like they got a house and they staged the cameras and the guest shows up almost like a sitcom at the door and then they open the door and then they move from the kitchen to the living room and they have these bits that they do and the way they do their ad reads, you're like, oh, God, their ad read is more entertaining than my actual content.

01:08:49Jesus, I need to up my game. Sean, you got it. You just nailed it. Now, fortunately, again, like the type of podcasting that we do is kind of like, you know, like education and business and finance. I think we can afford to be very slow to change because it's just different for us. Like a lot of the people that watch your show, that watch my show, they primarily are looking to take something away from that show in terms of education and growth and learning.

01:09:22I think the personality entertainment piece is like 10 to 20% of the show. If we tried to make it 50%, we might lose our audience, right? But for the future of podcasting, I think it looks very different, broader-based. I think it's going to be exciting. And like, here's the thing, guys. Like, I've been talking about stocks for 10 years. Like, I love it, but I kind of like I'm bored by it. So, like, I like diving into these different areas where I get to be a bit more creative

01:09:51with other creatives and not just talk about stock. That's why I enjoyed the Pokemon thing. Like, I didn't collect Pokemon, but it was kind of fun being around other people that were passionate about something. And, like, in my mind, I'm like, how do I make money off this, guys? Like, how do I make money off a Pokemon? That's how I did it. I did it from starting the convention that the Pokemon enthusiasts would come to and enjoy, right? And you got to be the uncle and not the father, right?

01:10:19Somebody else ran it, and you got to pitch in where it was helpful and fun, but not necessarily the day-to-day. Is that right? I didn't have to do the full day-to-day. I got to kind of do the day-to-day when we would have shows, but behind the scenes, I wasn't working full-time for sure. But, man, was it a lucrative journey?

01:10:38And damn, was it fun? It was so fun. Thanks for doing this. Now I'm like, I have all these notes. Like all these rabbit holes, I'm going to go down. This, the podcast thing, the Collecticon, that's crazy. You got layers. Well, you know what, guys like, here's a thing.

01:10:55I'm really fortunate that I have this insane network of people that I'm constantly meeting with. A lot of them are hyper successful, you know, billionaires in the back half of their career or life. And I'm going to point like, okay, if you've had success and you can kind of do anything you want, like, what would it actually be? And I feel that for so many people on my network, it always comes down to having a bigger number. And I'm like, are you sure that you're making decisions driven by the right motivations? because is that bigger number actually going to give you fulfillment in the way that you think it is? And over the last couple of years, I've come to the conclusion that a bigger number for me is going to make no difference in my level of contentment or fulfillment in life. And I like the concept of grinding and creating and building and taking risk, but not if it's to like get a bigger number.

01:11:51So, like, if I'm going to do something the next three to five years, wherever my next thing is, like, I want the journey to be as fun as the outcome. So, okay, my outcome that I want is to land the top 20 global podcast by developing two or three shows over the next few years with people, I believe, are unbelievably talented. I want to build a great team around them. I want to, like, it's the gamemanship of, like, can I do this? There's tens of millions of podcasts. if I landed a top 20, how wild would that be? But I want the journey and trying to figure out how to win, how to get there to be fun. And I know I love working with creative people.

01:12:34I kind of, because I've been stuck in podcast world through the last seven years, I kind of get it, right? So like, and I love it. So like, whether I end up winning or losing, and by the way, if I win, I'm looking at adding to my charitable foundation. like my number is not for me, it's for the foundation. But the journey in how we get there will be fun regardless. Because I'm going to be around creative people. I'm going to be in a sector that I love. I mean, when in history could you take a few million dollars

01:13:04and start a media company, which is exactly what I'm doing right now? Like, could you imagine like 20 years ago? You couldn't do that. You just couldn't do that, right? Now you can land the top five show globally if you execute in three. years, two years. Isn't that wild? You could do that out of one studio with like 10 people, 10 or 15 people.

01:13:26Like, how exciting is that that you could play in this game and you could have a top five global media show in a couple years if you can find the right person and the right team and the right format? To me, that journey of just attempting to accomplish that is maybe. the funnest thing I will ever do in my life. So I'm really looking forward to this next thing that I'm doing. Hopefully we win, but even if we don't win, damn, guys, I'm at a point, I'm going to have fun. I'm going to have fun trying. Okay? And by the way, like, I tell this story to a guy. I had, I had lunch with a guy, massive exit. I don't know how much he's worth,

01:14:13but it's a lot. And I talked to him about this story, and he said, you know what, Chris, I'm going to buy this bonsai shop that me and my daughter go to. He goes, because it's my favorite thing in the world. Me and her go there and we just hang out there. And I'm going to buy it. And like, this guy's going to end up spending more time with his daughter. He's going to have fun because he's going to take this little bonsai shop. It's been around for 35 years and try to grow it with her, which is kind of cool.

01:14:40He's going to actually, he's an AI guy, right? So, like, he's going to actually, like, apply artificial intelligence into the growth strategy for the bonsai shop. he's going to maybe get some content creators and influencers to try to like take it global through e-com. Like there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do here, starting with a little bonsai store that you and your daughter love. And like, now, that's a great way to spend the next five years of your life. There's a lot of people that have made it that have enough money that they kind of can do what they want. Like we're so set on just like bigger number, more happy. Bigger number.

01:15:14No, no, no, no. I actually believe that there is a point when the bigger number has the opposite effect. It definitely 100% makes you less fulfilled and less happy. Well, you know why? Most people think that's like a Mo Money Mo Problems thing, but I think underneath that is you have no excuse left. You know, basically when you don't have a lot, you can always tell yourself, well, it's on the other side.

01:15:45this. And then once you get to, once you get there, there's nothing left to blame for any lack, any internal holes, any internal anxieties or feeling of lack or just dissatisfaction. And so you can't, you can't blame that anymore. You've lost the excuse. And I think that is a very, like, tough moment for people when you don't, you no longer can say, well, it's because I don't have that. That's why I feel this way. It's like, no, no, I feel that way because that's how I am. And I think that's a pretty brutal realization. At least that's what I've felt and what I've seen. That's part of it.

01:16:20I think a big part of it is that you become disconnected with other humans and you can't relate anymore and people treat you differently. And it gets harder to maintain and develop authentic real relationships. You can't do anything about this. When you become excessively wealthy to the point where nothing matters anymore, you just don't relate to daily things the same way as the rest of your family and friends and colleagues do. And they sense that. And then also when you meet new people and like you like, listen, you start going to certain types of vacations and certain types of dinners and you hang out.

01:17:03Maybe you have a yacht and maybe you fly private. And then it's like, well, this is what I want to do at my time, but I want to spend time with my friends. So maybe your friends are now on your yacht and doing. $5,000 dinners and your friends, or maybe you have to bring them on your private jet, and you're paying for them, and it makes things really weird, because then it's like, wait a second, are these people, they don't even rip on me anymore, they don't even treat me the same anymore, maybe because they're worried that, like, they're not going to be part of this lifestyle that I'm paying for only because they can't be here unless I pay for it,

01:17:40and I don't want to, I want to live the lifestyle, and I want my friends. friends to be with me. There's just so many problems that organically surface when you enter that stratosphere, which used to be like this many people, but in 2026 guys, there are a lot of people with excessive wealth. Let's be honest. Like, the number of people that have excessive wealth in 2006 for a variety of reasons, okay, are enormous. The number of people that fly private, The number of people to spend $3,000, $2,000 a night on hotel rooms and resorts, the number of people that are going out to dinners at these places where they're spending just wilds amount of money on a regular basis. The wealth class is huge. And I think that ultra high net worth wealth class is probably miserable because of all these factors.

01:18:35And it's really hard to stay grounded. it's exceptionally difficult to like stay connected. And you guys know there's nothing more important in life than being deeply connected with other humans. Nothing. And this thing makes it very hard to stay deeply connected. So it's almost like a hack not letting yourself get to that point. I know it sounds crazy.

01:19:03There is there is a sweet spot. I think there is a sweet spot for well, and it's different for every person. And you can kind of sense when you kind of get out of the range of that sweet spot because you can kind of sense these things starting to happen. And there are a lot of ways to knock yourself back down. One of them is starting a foundation and just giving money into the foundation, right? Like, it's not yours anymore.

01:19:26It's not yours. You give the foundation, it belongs to the foundation, and you get to do good things with it. Also, you can take that money and, like, you can invest it in other things that puts it at risk. But again, it's not yours when it's invested and e-liquid and put it at risk. So now your access to, like, liquidity and your access to money that you know is bankable becomes more reasonable. And, like, you don't push yourself into that stratosphere of overspending on a regular basis. I agree with every word you just said.

01:19:58Every word you just said, I totally agree with. But I think it's a topic that quite honestly, not only people don't talk about, but I think most people don't even think about. because like your brain doesn't my brain for some reason well like if you don't do it appropriately it sounds kind of douche if you talk about this stuff publicly i mean that's like easy like that doesn't mean it's not an important i mean like it's super helpful it's just helpful to like maybe a small group of people there was a great blog post on this by um julia think zow was their name she wrote to all the folks who were about to get rich it was right before the space x IPO and she was at facebook right before facebook had its IPO and she talked about what she observed and saw of the people who you know had been working really

01:20:37hard for a long time and suddenly the sort of shackles of liquidity were off them and now they had the money and what did you do and she talked about how people play that game and chris your point on disconnection is one that she made i'll read you a little part of it she's she's like um once money can buy you anything you become a bit of a character you can eat at fancy restaurants all the time you bring a full zoo and carnival and a chocolate train to your kids three-year-old birthday party you you know you become so cloaked by these fancy things shiny things that you can you can buy and that sparkling cloak can become so distracting that people can no longer see you. You become harder to connect with. And she talks about like the disconnection can lead to is a great source of unhappiness.

01:21:19You know, I saw this with a, I have a friend who got very, very wealthy through real estate, bought a mega mansion, 18,000 square feet. He's literally, not only did he move away from his friends and family, because we don't afford to live in that place, that neighborhood. That neighborhood has acres in between houses. But then even in his own house, he was disconnected from his own kids where we're, you know, in the West Wing and he's on the East Wing 10,000 feet apart. The money literally, I watched it, make him less happy because it would create an immense amount of social disconnection on many, many levels.

01:21:52And I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, I worked for this guy as a billionaire. And we went out to lunch as a group of us, five of us. And at the end, he was like, you know, he tossed his card in. But he basically was like, oh, should we all just put our cards in? And I was like, man, this guy, what a cheap billionaire. This guy didn't even pick up the tab. And I realized, like, actually, it wasn't because he's cheap at all. He's not a cheap guy at all.

01:22:13He's very generous. But he didn't want to change the social dynamic between us where it became this weird power dynamic or this weird, like, subservient thing. And he was actually doing us all quite a big favor by not doing that. So you start to see these little moments of possible disconnection versus connection. Facts. I always wondered, like, why am I seeing this? and none of the other people are very few that are in the same place seem to see it.

01:22:38I think it's because I've like retrained my mind to be an observational investor. So I'm constantly observing life and culture and like everything I'm just being hyper-observing about. And it kind of translated to this. And I was hyper-observing about this, the part, the birthday, like all the stuff, right? And I was like, damn, I cannot fall into that trap. I do not want to be miserable. like a lot of the people that I see, and you know, you've seen this, right?

01:23:06Like, they fall into the traps and then it's like, it never leads to a good place. But I will say this also, because a lot of people will see shows like this. I'm like, oh, it's so easy for you guys to talk about, you know, this when you have it. Admittedly, the sweet spot is pretty sweet. Okay?

01:23:25So, like, I'm just going to say, the sweet spot of wealth is pretty sweet. So don't mischaracterize what we're talking. about gaining financial independence is one of the most amazing things one could ever experience in life. What that buys you is actually insane. Being in full control over your time, how you spend it, who you're with, where you go, and never having to work for someone else again, that is magical. That actually is as good as you think it is. It really is. It's actually better. It's better. It's better.

01:24:03I remind myself, I talked to some of my friends, I'm like, hey, dude, I just feel like a reminder, dude, we hadn't worked a real job in like 15 years. Like, it's pretty freaking nuts. And my buddies are like, yeah, dude, we forget how good we have it. I'm like, I'm like, do you know, like how many of our friends and colleagues

01:24:22are still getting up every day and going to the job we had 15 years ago? And because we became independent investors and became part of, the investor class and aggressively invested money in equity markets. And now we're independently, financially free. We're podcasters and we're investing and we're working really hard. We're starting businesses and backing other businesses. We're probably working harder than we've ever worked in life. But it's optional.

01:24:50It's optional. And we're doing it because we enjoy it. And we're financially free to be at every kid's soccer game. We're financially free to be with our family and our, friends whenever we want, however we want. Like, I used to have the cubicle job for many, many years, guys. Many, many, many years. I had the job in the cubicle doing sales calls, right?

01:25:14And so I try to never forget how awesome it is to, like, not be in that position. So, yeah, I don't mean to rip on getting wealthy because it's pretty damn awesome. It's just keep it manageable. Because there is a point of diminishing returns. and then there's a point of deeply, deeply negative returns on every dollar you spend. Not every dollar you make, but every dollar you spend after that point. You're cool, ma'am.

01:25:42Chris, this is fun. I like having, we like having you on. We like talking to you. You've got to do a part three now. Dude, you guys are the best. I'm always up for it. I love it. Well, we appreciate you so much.

01:25:52That's it. That's the pod. All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q&A sessions with successful