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- [00:01]
Austin Hankowitz
Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to.
- [00:11]
Robert Krok
Kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance and keep an eye on your kids spending.
- [00:15]
Austin Hankowitz
With real time notifications, kids learn to.
- [00:18]
Robert Krok
Earn, save and spend wisely.
- [00:20]
Austin Hankowitz
And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place, Try Greenlight risk free today@greenlight.com Spotify Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone.
- [00:33]
Chris Camillo
Paying big wireless way too much.
- [00:35]
Robert Krok
Please, for the love of everything good.
- [00:36]
Austin Hankowitz
In this world, stop with Mint.
- [00:39]
Chris Camillo
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.
- [00:41]
Austin Hankowitz
Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments.
- [00:43]
Chris Camillo
But that's weird.
- [00:45]
Robert Krok
Okay, one judgment anyway.
- [00:48]
Austin Hankowitz
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate.
- [00:55]
Robert Krok
First 3 months only, then full price.
- [00:56]
Austin Hankowitz
Plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com okay, so this episode is going to be a little bit longer. We had a really good conversation with Chris Camillo. He's a legendary investor that turned $20,000 into 60 million by doing something called social arbitrage investing. He gives examples. He talks about a recent trade he's in right now. We're talking about a lot of fun things as it relates to investing and building wealth in a more sexy way. I think this episode's going to be great. We just finished filming it. You guys are going to love it.
- [01:27]
Chris Camillo
I'm blown away. Like this episode is just so incredible and I can't wait to see the audience's response. And I think it's very informative, but also in our typical fashion, really breaks down the harder topics in a way that anyone can execute on it. And so I'm super excited.
- [01:47]
Austin Hankowitz
We know this episode is a little bit longer than normal. It's actually probably closer to an hour and a half and our normal episodes are 30, 45 minutes. But we think if you stick around throughout that hour and a half, you're really going to enjoy the conversation. So that being said, let's jump into it. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Rich Habits podcast, a top 10 business podcast on Spotify, brought to you by Public.com My name is Austin Hankowitz and I'm joined by my co host, Robert Krok. Robert is a seasoned entrepreneur in his 50s with lifetime revenues of over 300 million. And I'm an entrepreneur in my late 20s, with a background in finance and economics. Since quitting my full time job in corporate finance a few years ago, I've built a seven figure media business and actively advise some of the most well known fintech companies around the world. Now, as the show name might suggest, every episode we talk about Rich Habits as they relate to business, finance and mindset. However, we try and bring you two unique perspectives. One from an industry veteran, which is Robert, and the other, myself, someone who's still in the process of building wealth and figuring it all out. So Robert, what are we going to be talking about in today's episode?
- [02:50]
Chris Camillo
In this week's episode of the Rich Habits podcast, we are joined by legendary investor Chris Camillo. Chris is most famously known for turning 20k into $30 million over a 14 year period of by implementing an investment strategy he calls social arbitrage investing. And I can't wait to dig into this. So for those of you at home that are trying to do the math, that's about a 70% annualized return on the entire portfolio every year for 14 consecutive years. It is not a typo. I'm not saying it wrong, that is the facts of what has happened here. So from 2006 to 2020, he turned $20,000 into $30 million. Then between 2020, in 2025, that has since doubled to 60 million. So 20k into $60 million in about 18 years time just by trading the stock market. And we'll dig in later with some of Chris's strategies and we'll provide some examples and ideas. But before that, Chris, we're excited to finally have you on the show. Spend a couple minutes, tell everyone who you are, we're excited to have you and we want everyone to know, you know, just what you're all about and how you got here.
- [04:04]
Robert Krok
Well, I'm excited to be here, guys. I've been listening to your podcast for a while. I feel like I've known Austin since he was like just starting out in this world of like finance as like a little kid. Chris.
- [04:18]
Austin Hankowitz
Chris bought stock in Austin very early.
- [04:21]
Robert Krok
And look at you now. Look at you now. I'm just, I'm just, I know a lot of people say this. I'm the most regular person, I'm the most underdog investor. I was just a guy with a job who started investing and before you know it, I was making more money in my portfolio than from my job. So I quit my job. And I don't know, that was like 15 years ago and here I am today. So it's that's, that's who I am. Just a person that likes to invest.
- [04:52]
Austin Hankowitz
Really, really excited to dig into the story and learn more about what social arbitrage investing means. Just so we're all on the same page, right? You've got your social arbitrage investing strategy which how you were able to quit your job, build your portfolio, build all this wealth throughout your life. A lot of people hear that and they're like, man, arbitrage sounds like fun. Like what are we doing? So what is your origin story when it comes to the social arbitrage investing strategy that you've sort of coined the term here on and maybe over the last decade or so. What are some of those examples of major winners that you've experienced using the strategy?
- [05:29]
Robert Krok
Yeah, social R makes it sound so fancy. I almost prefer the word just observational investor. That's really what it is. The entire investment methodology revolves around trying to surface change in the world as it's happening. Whether it's like shifts in consumer behavior, trends, shifts in culture, technology developments. So you just kind of see the world as it's unfolding in real time and then you connect the dots to investable opportunities in the market. So companies or sectors that would either benefit from that change in the world or be harmed from that change in the world. Honestly guys, that's it. Like that's the entire thing. It's something I've been doing my whole life without realizing it. When I was a kid in middle school and high school, I'd spend every Thursday, Friday and Saturday garage sailing. Like at 5, 6am this is pre ebay. I would ride buses around the city to garage sales that I had strategized on from the newspaper and thought were likely to have mispriced items like and the mispriced items were always items that were male oriented because most of these estate and garage sales were priced by middle aged females and they didn't know how to price a train set or a men's watch or baseball cards or anything like that, right? So I would buy these items and then flip them to dealers around the country that specialize in those items. And I'd make sometimes 100 or $200 a week one and I would but I would start every morning with a Snapple lemon flavored iced tea from 7 11. Snapple was like one of the hottest companies in the world on the stock market at the time. And then one morning I realized that instead of having two full refrigerators of Snapple at that 7:11, they only had Half of a refrigerator. And the clerk told me that that's the way it was going to be from now on because they had all these competing brands coming in. Like, I think it was like Arizona Iced Tea and others. I talked to my older brother. I was just a teenager, a young teenager, and I said, can I make money off of this? And he said, well, I can help you short Snapple with buying puts, which I didn't know what a put was, but he taught me about stock options. And sure enough, a few weeks later, Snapple came out with earnings. It was the first time they had ever missed earnings because competitors were taking more shelf space and inventory was building in the channel, and those options tripled. And I was hooked from that day on. And from that day on, I was a social ARV investor. And it was amazing to me because I saw something as a kid that anyone on Wall street could have seen. And I'm assuming they saw the same thing if they wanted. The problem is that that's not how institutional investors think. Institutional investors are generally, you know, math heads or, you know, they're either technical traders or fundamental traders, but they're so consumed by noise, and I wasn't consumed by noise. And, you know, I've evolved that strategy over the course of my life. And that's all that I do, is I basically just live my life. I look for change. It's just as a normal person and I connect dots and guys, that's literally it. That's the whole thing right there. And I always say this, like, everyone's like, oh, Wall street has this huge edge over retail traders. I'm like, no, we have a huge edge over them because we're actually living in the real world. Back then I got my ideas kind of like Peter lynch did in the 80s by going to the mall and doing that stuff. But today it's so much easier because we live in a digital world. So now all of the world's conversations are happening digitally and we could see them in real time for free just in the comment section of social media apps like TikTok. So if you want to, you can read what the world is talking, talking about in real time just as a regular person. And you could discover the new hot thing as it's happening and connect the dots weeks or months before it ends up in the Wall Street Journal before the hedge fund guy figures it out, right? And so, like, this is. There's never been a better time to be just a regular person doing this sort of observational investing, because I can guarantee you that these hedge fund guys are not going to spend three hours a night reading comments on TikTok and taking those ideas their firm, because they're going to look like an idiot. They're just embarrassed. They're like, that's not. That doesn't feel professional to them. And Austin, you know, one of the companies I grew and sold was a social intelligence company for hedge funds called Ticker Tags. And over the course of five or six years, I got to meet the largest hedge fund managers in the world, and I actually sold this data to them. And it was so frustrating because I was like handing the data to them on a silver palette and they didn't know what to do with it because it didn't have, like, a strong historical correlation. Because what I call conversational data, that's the data in the comments section of TikTok. It's always evolving and it's changing. The way these kids are speaking is changing all the time. And so Wall street likes to have like five years of correlation. And that's why they focus so much on transaction data, credit card data, that they buy for millions of dollars. But, you know, do you know how you find out what's going to happen in credit card data before it becomes credit card data? Conversational data, because people speak about what they're interested in, about what they're doing and buying and what they want to buy before they actually do it. So it's not as clean of a data source, but it's the earliest and the gold standard for discovery data. And it's a type of data that we all, as regular people have access to.
- [11:23]
Austin Hankowitz
I think conversational data, to your point, is kind of like that leading indicator, right? If we can figure out what the leading indicator is, maybe the lagging indicator of the credit card data, which is in then I guess, before the ultra lagging indicator, which is the company's profits. Like, that'll help you kind of figure out what that looks like. But I also want to go back to the Snapple story for just one second because I know there was someone that was listening. It was like, short put. What is he talking about? I'm so confused. So essentially what happened here, Chris, is like, you go to this gas station, the 7 11, you love the Snapple, and you're drinking it every day on the weekends before you go to these garage sales. And you realized, okay, Snapple went from two big freezers or big refrigerators to just half of one. That's interesting. Why would that happen? Maybe, oh, my gosh, that could negatively impact the company. All these competitors now are looking at and seeing, you know, all this new shelf space they can have. And maybe their Snapple customers are going to go drink some other, you know, person or other companies drink, which is going to negatively impact their profits. And so you said, how do I profit from the idea that a company's profits are going to go down? Right. How do I trade this? Which was, I'm going to short the stock. And all people need to think about when it comes shorting is to bet against. And so Chris said, I'm going to bet against Snapple as a company because their competitors are rising and they're likely going to make less money over the last, let's call it, you know, three months or so or a quarter for the earnings, which happened to be the case. And you tripled your money after that information came out that Snapple was now making less money because of competition. And that's just a clear example of saying, I notice I'm observing things around me that are happening in real time that I'm sure other people around the world are also enduring and observing as well. How can I make a trade around this new information?
- [13:10]
Robert Krok
That's right. And sometimes there's homework to be done. It's not that simple. So another story I tell all the time is when kids were playing around with DIY slime, right? They were making slime in their houses. And I started to capture a lot of conversation around DIY slime. I was like, what is this movement? I mean, I should have known because my daughter was actually part of that movement at my own house. But a lot of times we don't see things when they're happening right in front of our face. So, like, I was seeing all this conversation, I was like, what's going on? And I realized that every kid in the world was making slime at their house. I was like, well, how do you. Who sells this stuff? And you make it yourself. But there was one key ingredient, and the key ingredient was white glue. Well, who makes white glue? Elmer's. Sure enough, like, Elmer's Glue, for the first time, I think probably in history, was selling out in every store around the world. It's like, well, who makes Elmer's glue? It was this publicly traded company called Newell Brands. And Newell Brands was a huge company. It used to be called Rubbermaid. And Elmer's Glue was only less than 2% of their revenue. So that's a problem because, like, can it really even move the needle for this company if it's only 2% of the revenue. I mean, if they double their sales, that's only like a 2% increase. But I also found out that this company, Newell Brands, was an old established company that was barely growing at all. And a 2% move in growth would be monumental for this company. They were only growing, I think at the time, at a couple percent, 2, 3% a year. So I was able to surface that and I was able to trade that. And sure enough, in their next earnings call, guess what they were talking about. We have this segment, this Elmer's Glue. This is going wild, and we're making glue 24 hours a day. We can't keep up with demand. And it actually impacted their earnings. And the stock went up, I think, 16% that quarter. Now, I had a leverage position, which was a call option position, and I actually made 300% in just a few weeks. But it's all because I was able to surface some change that was happening in the world, by the way. That was change that any parent could see in real time. And I was able to connect the dots back to a publicly traded company. One part of my process is, is it a needle mover? At first it didn't seem like a needle mover, but then it did when I realized how slow growth the company was. And then I had to determine, is there anything else happening at this company this quarter that is more important or more impactful than this thing that I discovered? Because a lot of times there are other things happening at companies that are even more important. So that's so. So that could kind of ruin your trade. Right? But there wasn't. And so I went forward with the. Oh, the last thing. It's so important. This is like the most important thing of this observational investing methodology for everyone to understand is that if the rest of the world has already figured this out, if the stock market already knows about it, if other investors know about it, if it's already in the news, then you're not able to actually arbitrage the idea. Right? And so like, that is not always a black and white thing because sometimes some people know about it, but not everyone. So you have to make that determination. And I have a process for that. I actually wrote a book in 2010 called Laughing at Wall street where I talk about this whole process. And it's honestly a book that a nine year old could read and understand. It's not a complicated process. So much about investing is complex and, like, scary. What I do. I'm just telling you right now, I don't care I have guys that, that, that I've taught how to do this that are like mailman deliver packages for ups, dentists, homemakers, teachers. I have people, I have plumbers that have worked for me that have started doing this. And no matter who you are, I guarantee you this is a style of investing that anyone in the world can embrace. And that's what I love about it is I meet people around the world from all different trades and backgrounds and education levels. And it's truly an applicable investment style that you could have fun with. And you don't have to quit your job. You could just like start to apply it to your life. You become an observational person.
- [17:39]
Chris Camillo
Yeah, I want to touch on this because, you know, I'm living proof. Chris, I don't know how much you know about silly bands, but we went from a seven, eight person company to a 3,000 person company in 18 months. And we went from doing a couple thousand dollars in sales a week to doing million dollar weeks, all from this. What that's related to for me is going back to Peter Lynch. He changed my life. The book One up on Wall street, it taught me how to look at everything differently. Austin and I really have this as part of our daily message in the Rich Habits Network and podcast because we're always trying to tell people to look at the world and think like an investor and not a consumer. And being able to understand the difference, I think is key, especially in this movement of this social arbitrage method. And I think it's so important in Peter Lynch's book. I think it was one of the best books to really illustrate, go to the mall, figure out and just look at things differently. And that's how I have changed so much over the last 30 years of investing myself. And so I love that you touched on Peter lynch because I just feel like he was one of the first ones to really get away from the technicals only and really look at it from where the trends are. Especially now because we're gifted with TikTok and Instagram, so we can really stay on top of these types of trades and this type of movement because there's so much momentum that happens overnight. We saw the Saratoga water thing happen a couple weeks ago. They missed the boat on that one. They could have really latched on to that and probably moved the needle, but they didn't. But there's always something going viral and I love this and I think this episode is going to be one of our most impactful episodes ever because it's going to really Open the eyes to people. You don't need to be an expert at learning stock charts. You don't need to be an expert in options or puts or any of that. You just need to understand, and this is a message Austin and I live by, is that you just have to be ahead of the masses. You don't have to be first to a sector. You don't have to be first to a trend. Just beat Wall street and beat the rest of retail, and you will absolutely crush it. So I love this so, so much. So walk us through. What's a recent trade where you saw something that the pros missed? And how did you position yourself in that trade so that the audience can understand?
- [20:02]
Robert Krok
I'll tell you about a recent trade that I'm still in, and it's actually my number two position. Before I do, Robert, you mentioned Silly Band, so I just have to tell you my Silly Band story. Oh, gosh. I had a trade on Silly Silly Bands. Do you. Could you guess what? It was the publicly traded company at the time that benefited most from the Silly Band trend.
- [20:24]
Chris Camillo
It had to be. It had to be Target or Walmart, or was it a smaller company? Yep, Hallmark.
- [20:32]
Robert Krok
Nope.
- [20:32]
Chris Camillo
Okay, tell me.
- [20:33]
Robert Krok
Because I discovered the Silly Bands trend fairly early on, and I started doing my homework and I said, who's going to benefit from this most? Well, yes, they did sell them at Target and Walmart. Silly Bands was never going to be a needle mover for either of those companies because it was way too small of a piece of their revenue. But where Silly Bands was a huge needle mover was five Below. Five Below. It's very rare that a cheap product that cheap can become one of the hottest products in the world. And that allows five below, who at the time, everything used to cost $5 or less. Now they sell more expensive stuff. Was able to lean into that trend, and they drove massive amounts of foot traffic to five Below when everybody was trying to buy sill Silly Bands. And what happened was people bought their Silly Bands, but once they get them in the store, they buy 10 or 12 other things at five below because you can't. Not so Silly Bands was a massive driver of revenue for 5 below. And it was actually one of my biggest trades that year. So we have that in common.
- [21:35]
Chris Camillo
Oh, that gives me goosebumps. That is incredible. And I had no idea that was coming. I promise the audience that blows my mind. Wow, that's so cool.
- [21:44]
Robert Krok
People always say, well, Chris, do you remember this trend? Let me just tell you, you're gonna think I'M psychotic. There is one trend that's happened in the last 17 years that I wasn't deep into. Like, this has been my life, my whole life has been every single meaningful change that has happened in the world over the past 17 years. And researching how I might or might not be able to make money off that change in the world. So, like, if there's a trend, if there is a consumer trend, I was on it.
- [22:11]
Chris Camillo
I love that. I love it because, you know, people are always saying, get into real estate. If you want to get rich, get into this. And I always back it up from my own experience that really, estate is great, everyone should own it. But if you want to become really rich really fast, develop a product or a service and get it out there. Because we went from zero to, you know, 50, 75 million a year in sales. And it felt like overnight, even though it took like 18 months.
- [22:39]
Robert Krok
But Robert, that's so hard. It's not. It is hard to do. You know what's even easier? Let people like you do all that hard work and then let's just find. Let's find out when it happens and we could trade the people that are going to benefit from it. Austin was the one. He texted me the Saratoga deal and my text back to him was, yeah, this is huge. The biggest thing to ever happen on X going viral. But Saratoga is only 1.5% of the parent company's revenue. So I don't know if it's going to move the needle. But we went. But Austin identified it and we started going through that process together. And that's what a social arb investor does, by the way. You will only find one great social arb investment for every 40 or 50 things that you discover. So you have to have a big top of funnel, knowing that not a lot of things fall to the bottom that really are needle movers that other people hadn't discovered yet. Where you. There's not something more important happening at the company, and it's at a publicly traded company that we all have access to, to the stock market. But anyway, I'll digress. You want to. You want a current one, right? You want a current one. And I have one that I'm actually pretty excited about. And I. This is a company that I was there when the founder actually like pitched the company, believe it or not, to a small group of us. And I said, this is crazy. This is insane. And I was invested in the fund that wrote his first check. And I went to the fund manager and I said, I think this is a huge mistake. I think this company is going to go. Is not going anywhere. It was Robinhood. So I actually. I was actually had. I was in the first round of robinhood before it IPO'd. They finally won me over, and I went and acquired tons of private shares in robinhood before they IPO'd. But then post IPO, I lost faith in the company. And they had some rough years, and they probably had one of the worst consumer viral moments of all time with the GameStop trade. At the same time, they were operating in a regulatory environment that basically made it impossible for the company to do anything that they wanted to do in terms of expansion. So Robinhood just had some rough years. And then in an instant, literally in an instant last year, everything changed for the company. They now are in probably what is the most loose regulatory environment they will ever see. And the company, Robinhood, is working in an industry where the incumbents, their competitors, are so slow and so out of touch. Imagine being in an industry where you had essentially no competition, because your competition is just completely oblivious to the things that matter to the entire generation that you're trying to sell into. So Robinhood, as we all know, is just an investment app up. Except it's not. Robin Hood is run by founders that love them or hate them. These people that run Robinhood are absolute beast. And they are trying to expand into every single financial category. If it touches money, they want to own it. They are running Robinhood like Amazon. They are running Robinhood like Tesla, like Elon runs Tesla. Okay? They are running it like a company with 10 people in it. Even though it's a 30, $40 billion company, they intend to grow Robinhood to become the largest financial institution on earth. And I actually think these guys are going to pull it off, because I had never seen a management team so aggressive, a team that asks for forgiveness later rather than asking for permission before. They do things that are kind of risky, right? Like getting into sports wagering, which I predicted a year ago and calling it prediction markets. So they're like, no, we don't need a license. This is a prediction market. It's not sports wagering. And they're just doing it. So Robinhood is fascinating because I have this thesis that I really believe in, and it's. It's. I don't even think it's debatable. It's the. Well, the great wealth transfer. I've done a number. You know, as you guys know, I'm a YouTuber. Dumb Money Lies, my YouTube channel. My buddies Dave and Jordan, it's my passion in life. We just have fun with it. But we did a few episodes about this wealth transfer that's happened, happening, and it's, I don't know, 80 to $100 trillion over the next 20 to 25 years. And this wealth transfer is happening. It's undebatable. I guess we can debate how much of that money the boomers are going to use before it gets transferred. Right. But there will be a massive wealth transfer that's happening. And Robinhood basically owns most of the accounts of young people. So if you're 20 to 30, right, Austin, whether you're on Robinhood or an app like Robinhood, because there are some other apps like Robinhood, but Robinhood owns the bulk of that sector right now. Your accounts are really small, so they have lots of investors, but the accounts are pretty small. Well, guess what, those accounts are getting bigger every month. And I think There is a 20 year period where Robinhood is going to grow and to become one of the largest financial institutions on earth. Why? Because they manage the company like a startup. They're aggressive and quite honestly, they understand the nuances of the things that matter, like ui. Like, I place. I'm not a big sports gambler, guys, but I placed my first sports wager or prediction market waiver on Duke a couple weeks ago on the March Madness. And I, I kind of occasionally go into BETMGM and do stuff there's. And it's kind of clunky, you know, it's kind of just like, it's just kind of hard and confusing.
- [28:45]
Austin Hankowitz
Yeah.
- [28:46]
Robert Krok
This process of making this wager on Robinhood was as magical as their stock trading app is. Right. It's just, I can't even put it into words, but let me just tell you this. Once you're in that ecosystem, it's very hard to leave it. And so I believe last year that Robinhood was probably one of the most misunderstood companies on earth. And I went all in on Robinhood and I believe that journey is just starting still today. And it's honestly, it's a company that I cannot wait to see what they do the next 10 years. There's rumors now they're going to get into the real estate space and you're going to be able to buy and sell your house over Robinhood here in the next few years. So let's see what these guys do. But again, it's because if you're not on the app, if you don't. So one of the things I do every day, I Have coffee with my dog at a local coffee shop seven days a week. And I work from the coffee shop and I sit there and it's kind of like my porch moment where I'm like on the porch and just meeting people from the neighborhood. Every day they stop by and they talk to me and I meet young people and they come by. And I don't think people understand this. You guys know this. I have been waiting for 30 years for young people to actually meaningfully become part of the investor class. It's my life mission, is to pull every human on earth into the investor class. I think it's the only way that we ever solve the wealth gap is by pulling every human on earth. No matter where you live, no matter what you do, you must be in the investor class more so than ever during the age of AI, right? As the value chain moves a little bit away from human labor and a little bit more towards the industry of intelligence, right? You have to be invested in capital markets. So these kids, every one of them, they're investing, they all have the Robinhood, like, they're all investing. It never used to be that way. I mean, Austin, you don't understand. But I know Robert's going to understand what I'm about to say. When I was on yahoo message boards 20 years ago, finance, I would post a message at like 7, 8 at night on a big stock board, a big one. And sometimes I would have to wait till the next morning for someone to respond to my message. That's how few people outside of institutional Wall street were investing. It was like a weird hobby. Right, Robert, you remember that, right?
- [31:06]
Chris Camillo
I'm going to tell you a story. And this is back 20 years ago. Yeah. People would come to my office, and this is when I was in real estate in the bars. They would come to my office and I day traded and swing traded every single morning. And so back then, we had the big giant tube monitors, and my desk was filled with them, but I'm running bars and like. And this was when I was like 25, 27 years old. And back then, people would look around and they'd be like, what are you doing, man? And I'd be like, I'm just getting my train. I'll be right there. And they didn't get it. Like, nobody invested back then. They literally got their paycheck, spent their paycheck. And so it's like when you're early to this stuff, so many people are going to look at you like you're crazy or you're some scammer. And it's just, you're living proof that if you can connect the dots, as you say, that is where all the wealth is built.
- [31:58]
Robert Krok
But it's not just about small trends. That's what I'm trying to say. This is a generational shift. And it's not just in America, it's all around the world. We've been waiting for decades for people to enter the investor class, and now it's actually happening. Every single young person is becoming part of the investor class. And it's no longer a nerdy, embarrassing thing to do like it was when I was a kid. I had to hide the fact that I was, like, investing on the side. Now it's something that you're proud of, that you talk about if you're not investing. This is what kids are talking about in college, at parties, they're pulling out, they're talking about their trait. I never dreamed that that would be a real situation. And the entire world is not seeing it. They're not seeing how that is going to radically shift financial markets over the next two decades. They're not seeing it. And like, it's such a big shift. But you're. It's going to take time to see that cultural shift translate to massive amounts of money for whoever the financial institution is that is able to capture that generation's trust and accounts. Like I said, it's one that not a lot of people talk about because it's not going to happen overnight. But if there's one company right now that I feel could 20 30x over the next couple decades that I'm confident in, it's Robin Hood. And that's why it's grown to become almost my number one position. And it has to do with a cultural. It's a cultural shift where it's become cool and expected that you better darn well be investing. Because if not, who the hell are you?
- [33:50]
Austin Hankowitz
Now, before we jump to our next question with Chris, I want to call something out that's pretty important. It doesn't matter how you get interested in stock investing, right? It could be from social media, the comments section, TikTok videos. But what matters is that you're actually investing. So if you're looking for an online brokerage platform that's actually built during this century, give public.com a try on public. You can invest in almost anything, stocks, bonds, crypto options, and more. And if you're like us and you keep an emergency fund, you can take advantage of their 4.1% APY offered by their High Yield Cash Account Discover why.
- [34:26]
Chris Camillo
Nerd Wallet gave Public five stars for its ease of use and investment selection. Fund your account in five minutes or less and earn up to $10,000 when you transfer your investments over to Public. And for a limited time, Public is offering a 1% match on on all IRA contributions. So if you're finally investing towards a Roth IRA this year, do it on public and earn 1% match on all contributions paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the podcast description and.
- [34:57]
Austin Hankowitz
Robert I know we've been talking a little bit about Robinhood in this episode, but despite that, we are big fans of Public. We love the platform and we think that everyone should go check out Public. We've been using Public for half a decade now and could not say enough about how cool their platform is and how powerful it become over the last several years.
- [35:16]
Chris Camillo
Yeah, 100%. We love public.
- [35:17]
Austin Hankowitz
All right, let's now jump back to our interview with Chris. No, I love it. It's funny because I mean, to your point, my girlfriend, she's got her Roth IRA rolling, she's got her investments. We're talking about, you know, Shopify and like, when did that ever exist? To your point, 20, 30 years ago. Right? But it's so funny you mentioned Robinhood because like from a, you know, social beyond just like this, like let's call it secular growth trend of a, you know, asset shift from the boomers to their children, that's absolutely going to be like a continuous thing that's going to drive Robin Hood forward. But beyond that, just like from a social arb perspective. I don't know if you remember this, Chris, but about maybe four or five weeks ago, Robin Hood got the guy from Trivia hq, Rob, I think his name might be, and it was like a live question and answer. And if you stuck around and got all 12 questions right, you would win like couple thousand dollars. And literally I have a group chat with like, let's call it a dozen guys here in Nashville. We're all between the ages of like 25 and 30. And we're all like, guys, what are we going to do? We got to sit down together. We got to figure these questions out. Like, we all got to, you know, make money on Robinhood trying to figure this stuff out. And it's just like, you're totally right. I mean, Robinhood specifically is doing a lot of really interesting things. If it's their gold card, to your point, they're doing some, I think like cash delivery now they announced and some real estate stuff like they're pushing on the bleeding edge as it relates to financial services. And I can respect it a lot. But more importantly than just, like, what this specific company is doing, you've got this, like, 80 to $100 trillion of assets that will be passed down from one generation to another. And I don't know about you, but, you know, Ireland, my girlfriend, she's not going to get her inheritance after her parents pass and go, yeah, I think I'm going to keep it with the boring vanguards of the world. She's going to say, what do I do? Do I put some in bitcoin? Do I go get some of this? How do I make this more impactful to me and reflect, you know, my own personality as an investor?
- [37:11]
Robert Krok
Even more importantly, she will be accustomed to engaging with a brand and an app and a financial institution. It might or might not be Robinhood, but for a lot of young people, more than not, it is. And you're not going to want to, like, wait, what? No, I want to add to my existing portfolio where I feel comfortable, because they have all these tools and they make it so fun and you could check your net worth every day and you just kind of want everything consolidated. And also, Robinhood understands how highly engaging it is to have their fingers out into so many different markets to where you could do so much through the app. Like, you don't have to go on a different app for crypto if you don't want to. You can do your crypto there, you can do your equities there, you can do your credit card there, you can get cash delivered to you. Potentially, they might get more involved in banking as time goes on. Right now, they're like a pseudo bank, but eventually, who knows, they might become a bank bank someday as well.
- [38:06]
Chris Camillo
I think it all comes down to becoming frictionless. You know, the world moves so quickly, and I think Robin Hood has done it really well. And Austin and I have been talking about Robin Hood stock more and more in recent months, but they've just figured out how to be viral with a younger audience and be frictionless. It's like you alluded to earlier, it's so easy to do transactions in there that people don't back out because of fear, because they're unsure of what they're doing. And I think as that gets better and better, not just with Robinhood, with public and other companies like them, I think it's just going to open the door for more and more people feeling comfortable in getting out there and investing more. So I love that we're talking about this because it just brings me back to when I was in my 20s and no one invested. It just wasn't even a thing back then. It just was not. If you weren't 50, you didn't know anything about index funds, mutual funds, or what a stock really was. And so I just love really talking about this side because Austin and I are always alluding to that. Getting people out of the consumer mindset and get them into the investor mindset. And this episode really nails that. And I'm so happy.
- [39:17]
Robert Krok
Robert, do you remember I used to do when I was in college at SMU in Dallas? This was like in the late. So embarrassing, I guess mid, mid-90s, I would do something called touch tone trading. I would skip class, I would leave my. Go to the bottom of the business school, get on a pay phone, and I would trade options through the pay phone. And I would. It would. I would have to touch the tones and it could take me up to 15 minutes to place a trade. And then I would wait for like a computer operator voice that would repeat the trade to me and then I would hold while it tried to put the trade through to be like your trade 15 to 20 minutes sometimes. And if the trade didn't go through, if the market moved, you'd have to redo the whole thing. But that's how hard it was to place a trade. And by the way, that was through Fidelity Investments at the time. That was bleeding edge technology to make a trade because otherwise you are actually calling a person on the phone and doing the same thing. But nobody did that back then. That was like crazy.
- [40:22]
Chris Camillo
Yeah, I remember I would go to my cousin Tim's office at the time to make my trades and literally do that. He'd be like, what are you going to do? And I'm like, well, I got this 800 bucks and I'm going to do this. And we would literally call and get on the phone and you'd have to go through the prompts and then they'd get on and they'd write the ticket, like actual stock buying ticket, and process the order and you had to wait on the phone. It's just crazy to think. And now everyone listening realize you are living in the absolute golden age of, of technology and entrepreneurship and being able to build wealth from nothing. So please take advantage of it because this episode just brings back so many memories from when I was 21, 25, 26 years old. It was not like this, but when.
- [41:08]
Robert Krok
We speak about social arbor, I think it's really important because a lot of people look at my past 17 years and they go, well, that's great, I missed out on that boat and it's too late now. And look at the market. Let me just say something right now. The larger the change, the bigger the opportunity. The faster that change is coming, the bigger the opportunity. Okay? As an observational investor, there has never been a time in my multi decade investment career when I have and I've seen a lot. I was a kid in 87, going all the way through the dot com boom, the technology boom, the smartphone boom, the cloud computing boom, and I have traded all of them and done really well. I have never seen anything come even remotely close to what is on the frontier of the commercialization and the productization of artificial intelligence that has not even started yet. This is the biggest change I have seen in my lifetime. I think the next five to 10 years are the biggest opportunity that we've ever seen to be investors. Okay. I think I am more excited about my own investing the next five years, five, 10 years, than I have been the last 20 years. And if you're a young person watching this right now and you think you missed the boat, let me tell you something. I actually said this on another podcast early this week. If it were me, what I would be doing right now, because we all have school and jobs and stuff, I would be doing whatever it took, whatever it took to make a little bit of extra money right now, or to save a little bit extra money or to make trade offs in my life, to carve out a little bit of extra money specifically to put in like a high risk, high reward investment account or some partition of your investment account, because whatever money you're able to find or make the next few years, that you can invest aggressively in the new world, this new world of AI and the beneficiaries of AI, and not even to mention my favorite subject, embodied AI, which is the embodiment of AI, which is inside of robots. I'm telling you, you will look back in 20 years and you will say, oh my gosh, thank God I was able to have some money to invest in that, because you will then feel like you really missed the boat if you didn't quite honestly. So you should be really excited to be investor in 20, 25 and beyond.
- [43:32]
Austin Hankowitz
Now, before we ask Chris our next question, let's take a moment to talk about market volatility. A recent bank of America survey of wealthy individuals stated that by next year, these ultra high net worth individuals could be devoting up to 11% of their portfolios to to fine art and collectibles. Tariffs are going to have their own impact on the markets. But art has historically been an asset class celebrated for its lack of correlation to other popular assets for the last three decades. Sotheby's just had their first big auction of 2025 and it nearly topped the very highest end of their internal estimates. Not to mention the co founder of Blackstone right now has been buying a lot of artwork as well. Now, it's important to keep an eye on multiple asset classes, not only because we always preach diversification, but because we have our own investments in arts. We're both using Masterworks and have been using Masterworks to diversify our own portfolios for about five years now.
- [44:27]
Chris Camillo
That's right. Both of us invest through Masterworks, the sponsor of today's episode, and we've even interviewed their founder and CEO Scott Lynn on the show. Since then, they've crossed over a billion dollars in capital raised featuring artwork offerings that typically range from a half a million to $20 million. Although with masterworks you don't need to spend millions or even be an art expert. Expert Masterworks has offered investments in over 450 works and exited 23 works thus far, with investors realizing annual returns including 17.6%, 17.8% and even 21.5% on those works held longer than one year. Join over 1 million Masterworks users at Masterworks Art front slash rich habits, which is also in the show notes of this episode. Episode. As with any investment, past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investing involves risk sale returns are not inclusive of unsold works. Important regulation A disclosures can be found@masterworks.com.
- [45:31]
Austin Hankowitz
CD all right, let's now jump back to our conversation with Chris. Well, I want to get into that, but before we jump into the embodiment of AI and humanoid robotics, I want to go back to. I mean I just, I'm looking at the markets right now. Trump announced his 90 day pause on tariffs. We're filming this on April 9th and the S&P is up about 10%. The NASDAQ is up about 12%. This year has been the definition of volatility. We've been up, we've been down, we've been left, we've been right, we've been going in circles. It's been crazy. You have a portfolio that has averaged 70% compounded annual growth rate over the last, let's call it 15 to 20 years. How do you sustain a portfolio growing like that despite Choppy markets like we saw in 2022 and have seen so far in 20. Did you have like a really bad year and you bounced back like, like, how are you navigating that type of stuff?
- [46:25]
Robert Krok
So in the 2008 crash, I did some hedging. I started hedging about a third of the way through the crash. But my hedging wasn't necessarily extreme, to be honest. I just don't do much. I don't do much. I'm not a macro guy. I don't. I. I think I'm really good at what I do, but I don't pretend to understand, to have all the answers when it comes to macroeconomics or big macro movements in the market. What I figured out, thank goodness, over the past few decades, is that I cannot do that. I don't know if there's a lot of people or anyone, quite honestly, that is able to do that consistently. And so I don't pretend to be able to do that. I do have absolute confidence that the market will generally always have and likely always will recover from most situations. So I just don't do much. I try to do less when we're going through these times. And honestly, my account during times of high volatility, during market crashes gets destroyed. It gets destroyed. I've been very open about this. I was a little bit slow to hedge this last cycle with some of these tariff moves, and I lost millions of dollars over the course of a couple weeks. But that's okay. I don't sell either. Either. Okay. So there's never been a time when it hasn't when I haven't looked back a year later and said I'm better off because of that horrible market event. Because usually during these market events, as long as you're not retired, as long as you still have some form of income, as long as you still have some capacity to generate money that you can add to your portfolio over the long run. These sort of events always work, always have worked in my favor. And listen, the day that they stop working in my favor, meaning the day that capital markets falls apart and never recovers, I always tell people we have bigger issues to worry about at that point, right? So like, I am not going to consume myself with that 1/10 of 1% doom and gloom where the world is ending, it never recovers. The stock market is simply an expression of the world's innovation and productivity and humankind marching forward and doing great things. Now, if we ever stop doing that as humans, we're in trouble. But as long as we continue to find a way and we don't blow ourselves up. Up, which we might, but as long, but that's a bigger problem, right? As long as we continue to march forward theoretically, capital markets should continue to expand. And that has always been my thesis and always will be my thesis. So I don't, I, I am always aware that my portfolio can get chopped in half. 50%, worst case, 70%. Okay. I am prepared to lose 50 to 70% of my portfolio over period of time. So when I look at my portfolio I go, can I live with it being 50 to 70% lower? And as long as the answer is yes, I'm not doing much of anything. Do I try to hedge sometimes? Yes, absolutely. I try to hedge, but you know, usually my hedges don't even pay off. I try to get too involved with it and I end up spending too much money to hedge and I'm late on it. So it's like, but guys, you don't have to really worry about that stuff. I don't think. I just don't worry about it.
- [50:01]
Austin Hankowitz
I agree with you entirely. And that's what Robert and I really try and emphasize as well is like, we want as many people as possible to be invested into these tried and true blue chip index funds and ETFs, like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, because we believe as long as American capitalism will continue to trend into the future, The S&P 500 will continue to trend higher as well.
- [50:23]
Chris Camillo
Sure.
- [50:23]
Austin Hankowitz
We'll have, you know, the ups and downs that come with tariffs or you know, the coronavirus or whatever happens that causes the news cycle to do its thing. But as long as you have a long term investor mentality, everything's going to be just fine.
- [50:37]
Robert Krok
Could I just tell you something also? I want to remind you guys that I did just have a regular job. I was a regular guy. Like I, my job coming out of school and college, I had to restart two or three times. I was like way behind everybody else my age. I was earning half the income of all the other people I graduated with. And I was playing catch up. And then I did pretty good in my career, but I was like, I hadn't worked like that in 15 years, guys. And it's amazing. And like I tell everyone, I'm like, I know it seems impossible when you're starting with like 500 bucks or $2,000 or whatever it is that you can scrape up, but like I literally started with a few thousand dollars and now it turns into tens of millions. Over time, quicker than you would think. The first 10,000 is the hardest, the next 50,000 is the second artist and then the next 50 is hard. And then after that, quite honestly, and you probably you Austin, you've experienced this over the last few years, it gets meaningfully easier. It's wild how money compounds. It's wild. But you have to be invested. And I think the biggest thing that I think investors and just regular people don't understand and no one talks about, I love, I rarely even talk about it myself. This is something I started thinking, thinking about the last few years that I really want to propagate without, propagate without like amongst masses is people do not have high risk capital in their life. And I don't understand why. Like the, the reason why the, the wealthy continues to get wealthier and wealthier is because the wealthy has a bucket of high risk capital because money that they can afford to lose. So money that they're willing to invest really aggressively in companies that are super aggressively aggressive growth companies that theoretically could go out of business because they're so aggressive. Right. So, but like everybody should have a high risk, high reward bucket of capital in their lives. And I think the reason why people don't is because they co mingle their capital in one account and it's the retirement savings, it's their school, it's for the future of their children and it's vacation money. But, but like what if you just had a separate bucket of money? Whether it's a separate account or money in your account that you just have partitioned somehow and the only money that you put there is like money that you generate through trade offs. Like okay, I am going to, I don't know, I'm not going to drink coffee for three months at Starbucks. I'm going to make it myself. Like, you know, and I'm going to make 300 bucks. Like that might not be worth saving 300 bucks. But if you think about every dollar as eventually growing to $100, which is what I did literally over three years, my first three years of investing like all of a sudden that $300 is like 30,000. So like would you give up coffee at Starbucks for three months for $30,000? Yeah. You would, like, would you put off a big purchase of like a big item that you knew a year from now was going to be $500 less? Like probably not because you're like I'd rather have it now, you know, for 500 bucks. But if that $500 was $50,000, which actually is what that $500 is over 20 years or whatever, like you would put off the purchase a year. So like, if you could figure out how to get capital in your life that you're not afraid to lose because it's not coming from your, you know, life savings, it's coming from some other place and you're willing to invest that money the same way that wealthy people do, right? Maybe throw it in Tesla companies that you might be nervous about or companies like Robinhood, maybe utilize margin in that account, maybe utilize even options. As dangerous as options are, because in a conservative way, but like, because that money is high risk, high reward. Like, it's really hard, I'm going to tell you guys, it's really hard to generate 70% annualized returns. It's really hard to do that if you don't have leverage. Okay, so I have leverage either through margin or through options. I have leverage. And you probably shouldn't be using leverage in the same account that is earmarked for like retirement and kids and all that stuff, right? So like, I think, think bucketing money is something that no one constructively discusses. And having I call in my book, I call that a big money account. I said everybody should have a big money account. And if you have to do some doordash once a week that you normally are too embarrassed. Oh, you know, my favorite example is clipping coupons. Clipping coupons is something that nobody does in my world world. Okay. And because is it really worth clipping a coupon to save a dollar? But again, if every dollar is a hundred dollars, every coupon gets sexier. Okay? So like, you know, you might think you're above clipping coupons, but what if you started clipping coupons just to earn money for this new high risk, high reward bucket, Right? Like, honestly, there are a thousand ways that you could find money in this world. If you think of every dollar as $100, eventually. And I know time goes quick, 10, 20 years goes quicker than we all think, you will eventually be that guy with millions and millions and millions of dollars if you do this. I'm just telling you it's hard to not be that girl guy if you apply that methodology.
- [56:25]
Chris Camillo
Yeah, Austin and I talk about it all the time. And we use the side hustle method. We tell people, look, if in your regular income, you know, because the fake gurus always just say, well, don't save money here, don't save money there, just go make more money. But it's not that simple. We just always tell people, go get A side hustle, go drive on a weekend, go do doordash, go do whatever and take that 200 a weekend as if it doesn't exist and get that put away in your investment account. And I love this strategy because I'm always a believer little leaks sink ships. I'm a believer of that. And I'm glad you illustrated it because so many people say, oh well, don't worry about cutting back there, cutting back here, it doesn't matter. 100 bucks here, 100 bucks there doesn't matter. They obviously don't understand the compounding effect over years and years of doing that. So let's talk about this, this big risk bucket and break it down like 20s and 30s and then like 40s and 50s, 50s and 60s. What percentage of their overall investable capital should be in that big risk bucket in your opinion?
- [57:29]
Robert Krok
So I don't think of it as a percentage of capital. I think of it as capital that you can contribute to that bucket that comes from areas of your life where you're making a trade off or you're doing something that you wouldn't ordinarily do, but, but you're only doing it because it's worth doing for that eventual value of that money. Like I said, whether it's clipping coupons, driving door dash once a week, delaying a big purchase. And like you Mark, so basically what you would do is you say, hey, this TV cost 1200 bucks. We're planning on buying it this weekend, we're going to put it off for six months. However much we get it cheaper. When we wait six months, you're going to take the discount, let's say you get 200 bucks cheaper and you're going to buy the TV but you're going to take the $200 that you saved and you're going to put that money into this high bucket account. And the reason why, it's a psychology thing, if it's not coming from a trade off or from, well, I call it other people's money. It was never your money to begin with, right? Like it was just. So you're going to really think about it different, then you're willing to take a big risk with it because if you don't earn it that way, then you're never going to take the risk that you're going to need to take to generate, let's forget 70%, 20, 30, 40% annualized returns, right? You're never going to hit that grand slam because at some point you're going to find something in your life you believe in whether it's a stock or it could even be a person you went to college with who is always the most ambitious, smartest person. And after 20 years you heard they're starting this really cool company and you're like, well that's great, but I don't really have capital. I can't put $10,000 in a startup. That's crazy. You will be able to put that money in because you're going to have this high risk, high reward bucket, right where you can afford to either go into a levered public company, maybe put money into a startup of a person you really trust. I tell people, hey, this whole world of early stage investing, investing in private companies, you can do it now through secondary shares right on the market market. But it's higher risk, but you need to have that bucket. So I don't, so, so what I'm getting at is the percentage could change radically depending on where you are in your life. If you're just starting off it could be less than 1%, but for me it's now like 90%. Right. And the reason why it's 90% is because my overall kind of portfolio has grown so much that I can now now because I'm fairly conservative with the way I live my life, I can tolerate a huge hit and I can afford to invest most of my money in that manner. But also guys, it depends on what your goals are in life. Like, not everyone is trying to just become a billionaire. I am trying to accumulate a massive amount of wealth inside of a foundation because my life's mission is to help kids. I'm really into pediatric care, I'm into animal welfare and I'm also recently getting into elder care. So like I have a foundation that I would love to grow that into a billion dollar foundation. So I have a purpose in life that requires me to continue to take big risk because there's no other way I'm going to build this billion dollar foundation unless I take huge swings in things that believe in. But for other people, they might not have that purpose. Their purpose might just to have a little bit of financial freedom to be able to spend their latter years having more time with their children or doing something that they love to do and that might not require $20 million, it might just require a couple million dollars. So I think everyone has a different financial objective in their life. And I think that financial objective should be the thing that drives how aggressive they get with this strategy of having a. Because you know, you always hear the thing get rich slowly well, that's fine. You should do all the stuff to get rich slowly, but can't we also have a bucket that allows us to maybe hit our financial objectives quicker? I mean, maybe, right? Like, can't we do both? Like, why not do both? Why not get rich slowly but also maybe get rich a little quicker if things turn our way? Like, you got to give yourself a chance.
- [62:02]
Austin Hankowitz
No, I'm right there with you. And like when it comes to this idea of like a trade off, something that came to my mind real quick is I pay $105 a month for my AT&T phone bill. But theoretically I could switch to visible by Verizon at $25 a month, which is an $80 a month difference. And that $80 a month savings for a year's time is about $960,000. So now you do that for a year or two, you got a couple grand that you can put now into this bucket where you say, you know, I didn't do anything real different for this money, so I can take those big swings. And I totally agree with you, like how important it is to take a big swing in your life. And you're taking a big swing right now, Chris, as it relates to the embodiment of AI with humanoid robotics. Because of you, we are investors now into Apptronic and figure we're super excited about humanoid robotics and you know where this trend is heading over the next five, 10, 15 years. But you spotted this way before everyone else and you are taking a really big swing on this trend. And so can you walk our listeners through what is humanoid robotics? What is the embodiment of AI and sort of how you've positioned yourself to succeed as an investor assuming sort of this secular growth trend continues over the coming again, 5, 10, 15 years.
- [63:16]
Robert Krok
Yeah, guys, this is also the other, like this is like the biggest thing ever, quite honestly. And this is why I'm so excited to, to talk about it all the time. You know, we all know what AI is. We've probably been on chat GPT. There's some really cool new stuff about like text to image generation. You can make any picture in the world. Like it's unbelievable what's happening. But what's even more unbelievable that than that is taking all that artificial intelligence and putting it inside of physical things. Robots basically. Right. And once you kind of merge those two worlds, we're essentially creating something that we call an infinite labor machine. And whenever we talk about something like this, that seems too good to be true. Right. I always kind of Go through this exercise where I go to the extremes. And the extremes are if you push yourself out long enough, the timeline long enough, is this inevitable? And it's inevitable, right? Like we all know that if you, it's just a matter of timelines. So if you push out your timeline long enough, it's inevitable that robots will do everything, literally everything. So then the only question we have is timeline. I've been really fortunate that I was connected with some of the world's top roboticists seven years ago, before anyone was even talking about any of this stuff. And I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, right? And like I did not invest, but I was just really fortunate, like absolutely lucky, dumb lucky, that I just happened to meet who is now one of the top three or four CEOs in the world in robotics, robotics, seven years ago, when he was a nobody and crazy. And so I, because of that, over the past seven years, I learned a lot about the space. And I took a turn two and a half years ago when I realized it was becoming very real with AI. And now I'm probably one of the largest investors in the world into humanoid robotics. And I have seen things that most people in the world haven't seen. And all I can say is the inevitability of artificially driven robots in our world is coming way sooner than anyone would anticipate. It's not coming like in the next few months, but we're not going to have to wait decades either. These are single digit years. Robots are going to dramatically change our global economy. Because in nearly every industry category in the world, if you speak to CEOs and you ask them, hey, what's your number one concern? What's your number one bottleneck to grow? Growth. It's always physical labor. Physical labor is somewhere between a third and 50% of global GDP. And if you think about it, if we had access to infinite physical labor, meaning our ability to build whatever we want to build, right, that sector of embodied AI can actually be meaningfully larger than all of global GDP today, because there would be no more constraints upon what we're able to build as a civilization. So all the products that we use, even MET medications, all these things take massive amounts of hardware and manufacturing. It's unbelievably difficult. And it's the bottleneck of the world. It always has been. And we're about to remove that bottleneck and nobody sees it. So like, if you go back through history, there have been these moments, right? Like the wheel, what did that do to the world. Right. Like modern medication. What did that do to our ability to extend our life by 3 and 4x as humans? This is one of those moments and it's coming very quickly. And you as an investor, we could think about this moment two ways. We could either try to invest in the companies that are creating this technology. Now I'll share something with you that most people don't know and that's that almost every single big tech company in the world is working on a humanoid project. Right. It hasn't been formally announced, but rumors are in this little war in this little world of those of us that know all kind of the players and the roboticists is that Apple has transitioned their entire automotive team that they've had for almost a decade. Decade. They're now building humanoids at Apple. OpenAI, who just raised $40 billion, are aggressively moving forward with their own humanoid project. We know that Google has aggressively partnered with the big humanoid company Apptronic that we're invested in. We're also invested in figure they're doing great things. Tesla. Elon has come out and said that his humanoid division will dwarf the rest of Tesla. Before you know it, it's the biggest thing they've ever done. Done. Elon said there will be 40 billion humanoids on Earth by 2040. He might be a little aggressive with that number. So you look at companies like Facebook is getting into the humanoid world initially through software, but rumors are that they're following up with hardware as well. So they'll probably making their own humanoids at meta Facebook. We know that Amazon is rumored to be aggressively working on their own robotics and humanoids. SoftBank is making massive investments in humanoids and all of China has come out and said that they are going to lead the world in humanoid development. They have a $134 billion package to support robotics and humanoids. And I have a friend who's traveling all around China right now and there's like I heard there's upwards of 100 companies there working on humanoids across China. So this is the new arms race. This is perhaps one of the most important technological developments in human history in that we could be single digit years away from having a true scalable, infinite labor machine that will potentially bring humans into the age of abundance. Which kind of sounds crazy, but all we mean by listen, the dream of humans has always been to work less and to do jobs that were more fulfilling for humanity. And that's all the age of abundance means. It means perhaps we get down to something like a Four day work week rather than a five day work week. Perhaps, perhaps we're no longer, you know, it's easy for us to say, hey, there's not that big of a change for us. But most people don't live like us. Austin, right? People all around the world, there are still people that spend 40 years working in a factory doing the identical thing eight to 10 hours a day. And by the time they're age 55 or 60, they can barely walk because their back is in such bad shape. Okay, we don't think about this stuff, but this is like we do not want the next generation of humans to be living their whole life like that. Do you know there's over a hundred million humans on this earth that spend the bulk of their prime years taking care of a parent or grandparent during their elder years? Right? And so like I didn't have to do that, but people do that. And these bots, these robots, right, that are, you know, I know we're scared of them right now, but these bots have the capability of being the ultimate tool for humanity to allow all of us to live a more productive life, a more creative life life. And I personally am not afraid of them. Because yes, they will take some jobs, they'll displace our current jobs over a long period of time, but they will create new industries. They will make existing industries infinitely larger than they are today. And with that will become massive new demand for human labor. Okay. And the human labor I anticipate, just like every other technology displacing invention throughout all of humankind, will be a higher order of labor that will be more fulfilling and higher paying than human labor is today. So I'm a bit of an optimist, I'll admit that. But I do believe this is beyond the investor lens that we all wear is one of the most spectacular things we've ever had for humanity. I'm working with a company right now that I just got introduced to that has making robots for, for pharmaceutical labs for drug discovery that they believe in the next decade they can 100 fold the amount of drug testing to invent new drugs. Because they're taking this kind of crispr technology where we can use AI to assess what potentially would be new drugs. There's still a huge bottleneck because a human has to do all the test tube stuff and you get what I'm saying? So they believe over the next decade, blending a machinery and robotics in the lab, we can have a 100x increase in our ability to actually physically test new drug Discovery. Right. And so this is how we're going to cure cancer. Right. This is how we're going to make a meaningful, impactful change to the world. And the embodiment of AI means a lot of things. It's not just humanoid robots, it's lab robots. Robots. It's robots across a spectrum of industries that are going to make our lives, I believe, meaningfully better. But as an investor, you can invest in the companies that make the robots, but you can also think about how it's going to change economies and which companies are most likely to benefit. Remember, like whenever there's a big change. Okay. By the way, we can invest in some of these companies through private markets, through secondary exchanges. Right. If you want to, even as long as you're accredited. But also. So what companies would benefit most? It's just a good question to pose. Like, how about Amazon? Could you imagine Amazon with the distribution they have globally? What's the largest expense for Amazon? It's human labor. Right. It's just an interesting thought project. But these are things that we should be thinking about now because as investors, this might just be the biggest opportunity of your entire lifetime. Because these things don't come around every year. They seem to come around every 10 years or so. And some of them are bigger than others. Like the Internet was pretty big. You know what it. So this, I think, is bigger than the Internet. I know, a little controversial. I think it's bigger.
- [73:25]
Chris Camillo
Yeah. I've just got a couple more things that I want to back up on a little bit. Does this get us to a universal basic income faster? If we believe that a lot of this, robotics, humanoid robotics, is going to be in play in the next five years. Years. Because that's where I think we get to a better quality of life is building out this infrastructure of universal basic income for the people that will be displaced from some of these, you know, lower, you know, less skilled jobs. And so that's where I think things are going to go. And I think that's going to be actually really good for the quality of life. So what are your thoughts on that? And then I'll ask my last question.
- [74:02]
Robert Krok
I'll say yes, but, but when we say universal basic income, because this is something I think about a lot, the way that we express that in reality doesn't necessarily have to be a free check. You're just getting money. We can express it in a multitude of ways. We have a degree of universal basic income today with entitlement programs. Right. So we could see an expansion of those Programs, we could have new programs. We can have free health care. There are numerous ways that the world can express, you know, abundance to humanity without necessarily just handing you a paycheck and going, you don't work anymore. I do believe that with. If you look at population decline, I think there will actually be pretty significant demand for human labor, but human labor will not be what we think it is today. And what I mean by that is, if you go back 70 years, years, a lot of the jobs that we have today, including the one you guys have right now on this show, people would laugh at and say, come on, that's not a job. Like, you're. Yeah, though maybe the radio existed and there were, like, 15 people that had jobs on the radio, but the fact that, you know, 10 million people now think that they're a radio person through their own private pipe, they're like, that's just not a job. So stop trying to pretend that you can just talk about whatever you want to talk about, and that's a job. But it is a job, and we're actually delivering massive amounts of value in this podcast economy that we're in right now. I mean, it's crazy to think about that, but we have a podcast economy. So what I'm getting at here is what does labor look like in 30 years? We might look at that if we had a crystal ball and laugh at it and go, well, I guess no one works. I guess a lot of those people that think they're working aren't actually working, and they're pretending to work, and we have universal basic income. But I think if we could move forward 30 years, I'd be like, no, this is work, and I'm contributing massively to people's utility, and, you know, I'm helping people. Maybe we all become entertainers in 100 years. I don't know. But the definition of labor is something that changes throughout all of humanity. That's what I'm getting at. So we should not try to put too rigid of a framework around what the future looks like and how we define something like universal basic income. Because I think UBI comes with a very negative, a lot of negativity, because we're like, well, that's not a healthy thing for humans not to have goals in life and not to be productive. I believe that humans generally, many of us, will continue to have really, really strong missions and goals in life. What we're trying to achieve. You know, one thing I like to talk about a lot because I'm a really big animal guy. Okay, so I look at the animal world and animal welfare and I think there's so many things that I want to do. I want to do so much for animal. The way that we treat animals in the world seems so archaic in 2025, but we have bigger problems now, and that's why we still have haven't really moved the needle much. So in an age of abundance, society might have the bandwidth to radically change the way that we think about something, as some people might think as dumb as animal welfare, right? How do we think about that? Our food supply? How do we have a kinder food supply? Right? Like so there are, there are so many obstacles. There's so many things that we still need to do as a civilization that we haven't been able to get to yet because we're just trying to put a roof over our head. We're trying to feed people, we're trying to stay warm to an extent. Like we're. But guys, as we tackle those problems with infinite labor machines, right, that can grow all of our food and do all this stuff, and it's no longer expensive for the world to have a moderate life. Now we can tackle the next layer of problems that just weren't something that we were capable of thinking about in 25. Does that make sense?
- [78:15]
Austin Hankowitz
I guess Absolutely makes sense. All right, Robert, before we ask Chris our last question, let's give a quick shout out to our friends over at neo NEOS Investments. This episode of the Rich Habits podcast is brought to you by NEOS investments. NEOs offers ETFs that seek high levels of monthly income with a keen focus on tax efficiency while providing core portfolio exposure across equities, fixed income, real estate, cryptocurrency, and cash alternatives like t bills. Their ETFs may be especially interesting for investors looking to generate tax efficient, efficient monthly income inside of their own portfolios. Their funds may serve as a compelling income focused alternative or even complement to many of the investments already in investor portfolios.
- [79:01]
Chris Camillo
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- [79:51]
Austin Hankowitz
All right, let's go ask Chris. Our final question. We all know that Tesla is the only real publicly traded company right now that is saying we are building humanoid robots. It's called Optimus. We plan for it to do all this, hundreds of billions in revenue for us over the next coming several decades. How else can investors right now, tactically speaking, expose themselves to this growing, you know, sector that is the embodiment of AI? Is it through Nvidia, is it through hardware, is it software? Software is at the end somewhere on the value chain. How do they tactically go out and do something that's going to expose themselves to embodiment of AI?
- [80:29]
Robert Krok
I think there are, in terms of public companies, there are also some robotic, other robotics companies, especially in the health care space. But yeah, Tesla is an obvious one, right? Obvious, obvious one. Although currently investors are not focused on that. So Tesla is really volatile because investors are currently focused on the automotive side sector. Now at a certain point in the future, I believe investors are going to flip a switch and everyone's going to be focused on Optimus and maybe even FSD somewhere in between those two things. I think that will actually happen in the next 12 months or so. And I think Tesla will become a very large position for me also. Nvidia. Nvidia is dead set. If you listen to Jensen, listen to any of his talks, you know, all he likes to talk about is humanoids. Right. There's a reason for that. Humanoids and embodied AI might end up being one of the largest markets for Nvidia. Nvidia is dead intent on becoming the sole chip maker for a lot of these bots. So yeah, Nvidia is another way to express that thesis. There are a couple leading private companies. Apptronic is one figure. AI is another. The only way to invest in those is through secondary markets. You have to be, you can, anyone can do it, but you have to be an accredited investor. By the way, I'm not an investment advisor. I'm just sharing all the theoretical things. Not that people should do any of this stuff. I'm doing all this stuff, by the way. All of it. Right.
- [81:56]
Chris Camillo
So are we. So are we.
- [81:57]
Austin Hankowitz
We're right there with you.
- [81:58]
Robert Krok
Yeah, yeah. And, and, and then the other way is of course trying to identify. And this is, this is kind of A more difficult thesis but trying to identify the companies that would benefit most from automation, who will benefit most from automation, period. I believe that Amazon is very high up in that food chain as a company that's going to benefit most and also a company that is super aggressive in that space already. Amazon is the type of company that they are willing to invest incredible amounts of capital for things that will not pay off for five or more years. And they when we hit this kind of, of age of automation and robotics, which is coming very quickly, guys, have you seen some of those Chinese ports that are fully automated? Like Amazon is going to be one of the companies that have, has made and will continue to make the investments to benefit from that the most. So that's kind of where I sit in terms of expressing my thesis on embodied AI. There will be many other companies and new ones popping up all the time. I would recommend spending half an hour a week keeping up with the news flow in embodied AI There, you know, there's various people talking about this on x and on YouTube. Not hard to find. Listen, I talk about it. Hriscamillo on X. I talk about it all the time and we talk about it on Dumb Money Live on YouTube and it's something I'm super passionate about because I'm not really sure sure when we're going to get another super cycle like this. And I want to make sure that I'm making the most of this one because it's still in front of us. Like it hasn't happened yet. Right. Which is really cool.
- [83:46]
Austin Hankowitz
I could not agree more Chris. I think just like the last super cycle I think is like probably the iPhone, right? The smartphone, like that was like the last like real.
- [83:54]
Robert Krok
No, how about, how about cloud computing? I think computing.
- [83:58]
Austin Hankowitz
I will also give credit though to streaming services. I would say that has been a big, a big super cycle as well. But, but nothing to the point. Like I've seen the videos of the, you know, apptronic robots and the figure robots and I've seen these other videos of like the training data that goes into some of these things and it is the most mind boggling. Like if you are watching this right now on Spotify or YouTube I highly recommend going to YouTube typing in just like figure AI, robot demo or whatever and look at some of these videos of these robots that are. And, and let's make sure we're just like defining to before we wrap up the show is like these aren't connected to WI Fi, these aren't being programmed by some people that are behind the scenes. This is a real robot that is internally, you tell it to do something in natural language English and it will understand what you're saying. And it's not running it through like a chat GPT server. Right. It's all inside the bot doing it, figuring it out and using like reasoning.
- [84:57]
Robert Krok
No, I was gonna say, yeah, we, we call it general. What we're moving towards over the next two to three years is something called generalized autonomy in robotics where a robot using a foundation artificial intelligence model that's designed for robotics would theoretically be able to learn how to do a new task in close to zero time. So it visually sees a human doing something and you show it how to do something and then it could learn it because it's learned so many other tasks. Kind of like a human baby. As we all evolve were very bad at everything. These robots right now are very bad at everything. Over time they start to get very good at everything because they've learned such a diversity of tasks that they're able to kind of seam pieces together from other things that they've learned. So we're only low single digit years away from reaching that. And there's a lot of hurdles here with hardware hand articulation. But guys, we're getting close. We're not like months ago away, but we're not 10 years away either. Single digit years were your minds are going to melt in single digit years with what these bots are going to be doing.
- [86:03]
Austin Hankowitz
If you've not yet learned more about this secular growth trend, definitely check it out. Also learn more about the secular growth trend of the, you know, trillions of assets that will be passed down generationally and everything else that we've talked about on the show. Chris, what an absolute killer episode of the Rich Habits podcast. Thank you so much for joining us, man. Like every time we talk, I feel like I learned something new is just so inspiring and I hope other people who are listening right now, I don't think they will be intimidated, but I want them to go take action on some of this stuff, right? Go find that thing that you can trim 50amonth or a hundred dollars a month on, right? Make those sort of sacrifices or trade offs that you can go find and create that high risk bucket or you know, go do that thing that's going to allow you to read the comments section more methodically and make an actual trade about an idea you've observed if it's at the moment mall at the 711 or anywhere else around your life, like be observant and go actually be an investor now with this information.
- [87:01]
Robert Krok
Also be patient. Be, be patient. It takes time to reach wire your brain to observe things and connect dots. At first you're going to miss more than you catch, but over, if you're consciously thinking about it, it takes years but. But you, you will get there and you'll start to observe things way more keenly once you start to rewire your brain to actually see the things that are right in front of you.
- [87:25]
Chris Camillo
Yeah, I've been saying it a lot more recently, Chris, over the last, let's call it six, eight months of telling people to think more deeply. And in this instance of this episode, I think it's just really an exchange of one thing for another. Whether it's getting the side hustle to get you that money for that high risk bucket or you're trading off 30 minutes of doom scrolling for 30 minutes of research. Whatever it is, you have to make those changes to be able to think like an investor and not just live like a consumer. And then wealth becomes inevitable because you're doing all the right things. And Chris, incredible episode. I'm honored to have you on here. So excited. I can't wait to get this out to the audience.
- [88:09]
Robert Krok
Thank you guys. And don't forget, have fun with it. This is the only investment style I have ever been identified that's actually fun. Like you will never see me looking at charts and studying fundamentals. Come on. I'm reading TikTok comments to discover the next big thing. That's fun. That's like anybody could do that.
- [88:30]
Chris Camillo
Yep.
- [88:30]
Austin Hankowitz
Totally agree, man.
- [88:31]
Robert Krok
Thanks guys. It's. This has been awesome. We try to hop on YouTube once a week at Dumb Money Live and for us it's just a fun thing. Me and my two of my best friends, Jordan and Dave, and we just talk about whatever we found that week. If we find something cool, we share it with everyone. And I get as much from our community as they get from me. And like half my investments come from random people in my community that have learned how to do this for themselves. And I love it. It's worth just. We just share.
- [88:58]
Austin Hankowitz
I love it. Everyone go check out Dumb Money Live on YouTube. It is a great watch. I watch it every single time they come with a new episode because it's so well thought through. Chris, thanks again for joining us, man. And we'll see you next time.
- [89:09]
Robert Krok
Appreciate. Appreciate it guys.
- [89:10]
Austin Hankowitz
All right, Robert, Chris just hopped off. Let's do our post interview recap as we always do. If I just. Man, I love talking to that guy. He's been a mentor of mine for about half a decade now. And he is just so insightful. He's a wonderful storyteller. And not just that, but like he walks the walk, right? It's one thing to say, yeah, guys go, you know, don't just be a consumer, be an investor and look and be observant, stuff like that. And then he's like, yeah, I made like millions of dollars on peloton during, you know, pandemic or I made all this money on this trade and that trade. And it's just like it's cool that you're able to go from I don't know what I'm doing at all to now I'm curious to now I'm going to go use this high risk bucket. Right? I think that's a cool idea. It's so cool, man. I love it.
- [89:53]
Chris Camillo
It was a mind bending episode for me when he told the silly band story how he was trading and arbitraging and use his strategy back when silly bands were hot way long ago, 15 years ago. That was crazy. But then also I feel like I learned everything about understanding the markets better from Peter lynch, the book One up on Wall street and he touched on that before I could even bring it up. This episode, for all of you watching, please, please watch the whole episode. Share with a friend, share it with a family member. It will change lives for decades to come. Please do that. Because this episode I had goosebumps the whole time time. And it was incredible.
- [90:38]
Austin Hankowitz
I couldn't have said it better myself. Robert, if you are someone who is inspired by this episode, go share it with someone else that you know, you think is going to be inspired as well. I mean this is the type of stuff that gets people interested about investing and it just is a little bit of a step in the right direction. Right. He alluded to it. You should have sort of this like high risk, high reward bucket. But he said you should also do all the right things with your retirement accounts and you're investing. Like if somebody some of this social arbitrage investing is what causes people to get excited about just investing in general to go open up those boring accounts that are going to build wealth over time. Then we did our jobs right. We think Chris is an incredible investor. He is, golly. 20,000 to 60 million in about two decades is just unbelievable to think about. And he's so educated as it relates to humanoid robotics. And I'm really, really excited to see this sector of the market continue to mature over the coming years and decades.
- [91:33]
Chris Camillo
It's mindblowing. I feel honored that we get to do this every single week and bring on guests like Chris because it just really is so cool to see someone as accomplished and well respected as him reiterating the same message that we have over and over of what our audience and our listeners should be doing and then just adding that spice on top those other little tips and hacks to help people think different, differently and get ahead of the masses. So yeah, I'm really pumped to see this episode come out and if you're.
- [92:03]
Austin Hankowitz
Not subscribed, I'm looking it up right now to the Dumb Money Live YouTube channel. It's Dumb Money Live. They got140,000 subscribers. You go to their home page and you click on the live videos here. The most recent one is Robot Revolution. Truth or Hype, But I'm telling you, him, Jordan, Dave, they sit down for 30 minutes to an hour and they talk about this stuff in real time with comments and questions. So go check, check them out. Really, really incredible channel over there, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Rich Habits Podcast. If you've not yet trialed the Rich Habits Network, we're running a seven day free trial right now, which means no strings attached. You sign up, you create an account, you join our live stream, you ask us questions, you post in the school community, or maybe you watch some of the eight hours of video coursework that we've built for you and you stick around for seven days and if you absolutely hate it, you can cancel your subscription. Nothing gets char to your accounts. It's completely no strings attached, no hard feelings. Go check it out. We've got over 150 people that have joined the Rich Habits Network in the last six weeks alone and you guys are loving it. So there's going to be a link in the show notes below to do that as well.
- [93:14]
Chris Camillo
As always, thank you all for stopping by. We are so appreciative each and every week. And just always remember, share the episodes with a friend. Leave that five star review. Do that for us as we try to continually bring you tons of value, value and insights on how to handle markets like this when they're choppy and just really give you the best guidance and value that we can.
- [93:36]
Austin Hankowitz
Thanks everyone and have a great start to your week.