Money Expert: The GREATEST Wealth Transfer Just Started (Don’t Miss Out!) | Chris Camillo

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Money Expert: The GREATEST Wealth Transfer Just Started (Don’t Miss Out!) | Chris Camillo"

Introduction

In this episode of The Iced Coffee Hour, hosts Graham Stephan and Jack Selby engage in an enlightening conversation with seasoned investor Chris Camillo. Released on February 3, 2025, the episode delves into Chris's unique investment strategies, his insights on the evolving market landscape, and his visionary outlook on the future of wealth transfer, particularly focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and humanoid robotics.

Why So Many Investors Lose Money

Chris Camillo opens the discussion by addressing a critical question: “Why do so many investors lose money?” ([01:46]). He attributes this trend to the influx of a new generation of investors experiencing the market post-pandemic. These investors often plunge into high-risk assets like crypto meme coins and meme stocks driven by fear of missing out (FOMO). Chris emphasizes, “Everybody wants fast money. They are chasing fast money.” ([02:51]), highlighting the pitfalls of speculative trading without proper research or strategy.

Chris's Portfolio and Investing Philosophy

When asked about his own portfolio, Chris describes it as “wild” and “not normal” ([02:53]). He explains that his investment approach revolves around identifying transformative, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Chris believes that most market gains come from being smart in ways different from the mainstream, focusing on emerging trends that Wall Street often overlooks.

Social Arbitrage and Trend Investing

A significant portion of the conversation centers on Chris's investment strategy, which he terms “social arbitrage”. This approach involves detecting societal changes and trends early and connecting them to companies likely to benefit or suffer as a result. Chris shares compelling anecdotes, such as his early investment in Newell Brands triggered by the slime-making trend among children. He recounts, “I traded Newell Brands via stock options... the stock was up 17%. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but for a stodgy company, that was a big deal.” ([13:11]).

Chris further elaborates on his method of leveraging conversational data from platforms like TikTok to gauge public sentiment and emerging trends. By analyzing thousands of comments nightly, he identifies shifts in consumer behavior that precede market movements, giving him a distinct edge over traditional Wall Street analysts who rely on outdated data sources.

Impact of the Pandemic on Investments

Discussing the pandemic's influence, Chris reveals how he capitalized on the sudden global shift caused by COVID-19. Initially losing 30% of his net worth due to short-term puts as the market reacted sluggishly to the virus outbreak ([07:45]), he eventually made significant gains by shorting sectors he anticipated would decline, such as casinos and airlines. However, the experience also led to distractions, including ventures into NFTs and startups, which temporarily derailed his focus but ultimately reinforced his commitment to his core investing principles.

AI and Humanoid Robots: The Next Big Opportunity

The crux of the episode revolves around Chris's bold assertion that the “embodiment of artificial intelligence”—humanoid robots—is poised to drive the greatest wealth transfer in history. He believes that AI-powered robots will revolutionize industries by providing infinite physical labor, fundamentally altering the economy and society. Chris passionately states, “There’s nothing more important than being part of the investor class. It’s not a question. You better darn start investing right now.” ([12:58]).

He envisions a future where humanoid robots handle everything from manufacturing to household chores, addressing labor shortages and enhancing productivity. Chris highlights companies like Tesla with its Optimus division, Figure AI, and Optronic as leaders in this transformative wave. He predicts that these advancements will not only create massive investment opportunities but also improve the quality of life by alleviating humans from mundane and physically demanding tasks.

Future of Investing and Wealth Transfer

Chris discusses the impending wealth transfer estimated between $80 trillion to $115 trillion over the next few decades—a shift driven by the younger generation's adoption of technology and AI. He underscores the importance of “risk capital” in achieving substantial returns, urging listeners to allocate resources strategically to capitalize on emerging trends. Chris contrasts his proactive, trend-based investing with conventional methods, emphasizing that understanding societal shifts provides a competitive advantage in the market.

Advice to Listeners

Towards the end of the episode, Chris offers invaluable advice for aspiring investors:

1. Start Investing Early: “There’s nothing more important than being part of the investor class for one’s financial life.” ([103:03])
2. Immerse in Trend Research: Utilize platforms like TikTok to identify and analyze emerging trends before they become mainstream.
3. Manage Risk Capital: Allocate a portion of your portfolio to high-risk, high-reward investments while maintaining a safe investment base.
4. Learn from Mistakes: Accept that making critical mistakes is part of the learning process in investing.
5. Engage with Communities: Join investment communities to share ideas, receive feedback, and stay informed about market movements.

Chris concludes by reiterating the necessity of adapting to the rapid pace of technological advancements and the importance of aligning one's investment strategies with societal changes to secure long-term financial success.

Notable Quotes

• “Everybody wants fast money. They are chasing fast money.” – Chris Camillo ([02:51])
• “There’s nothing more important than being part of the investor class. It’s not a question. You better darn start investing right now.” – Chris Camillo ([12:58])
• “It's about being smart in a totally different way than others. That's what pays dividends.” – Chris Camillo ([18:49])
• “I invest at a point of information imbalance... that's when I know that the information I saw is now being reflected in their data. That's when my window is closing.” – Chris Camillo ([46:57])

Conclusion

This episode of The Iced Coffee Hour offers a deep dive into Chris Camillo's innovative investment strategies centered around social arbitrage and emerging technologies. His insights into leveraging conversational data and identifying transformative trends provide listeners with a fresh perspective on building wealth in an evolving market landscape. By highlighting the impending significance of AI and humanoid robots, Chris underscores the importance of staying ahead of technological curves to capitalize on unprecedented investment opportunities.

For those interested in pioneering investment strategies and understanding the future of wealth transfer, this episode serves as a compelling guide, blending personal anecdotes with actionable advice.

Transcript

[Chris Camillo]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Chris Camillo]

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[Graham Stephan]

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[Chris Camillo]

The market is rigged in our advantage because we can see the world changing in a way that people that work on Wall street just can't. 70 record closing highs so far for the it's not about being really smart. It's about being smart in a totally different way than others. Market has gained almost $3 trillion in.

[Graham Stephan]

Value since the election.

[Chris Camillo]

Big changes that are happening quickly are the biggest opportunities for investors. But they don't happen very often. And occasionally there's one that comes around once in a lifetime. And this is it for me. This is the biggest trade of my life. I firmly believe that the embodiment of artificial intelligence is going to radically rebuild our world and change our economy unlike we've ever seen in our lifetime. Think about what it's like to have access to infinite physical labor. What would we build? How would that change our world? There's nothing more important than, than being part of the investor class. It's not a question. You better darn start investing right now. You better go get a Robinhood account or get whatever right. Just start doing it. I promise you.

[Graham Stephan]

Chris, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. Really appreciate it.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, Been wanting to do it for a while.

[Graham Stephan]

So question number one. Why do so many investors lose money?

[Chris Camillo]

Maybe since the pandemic, this new generation of investors that are all about funding fomoing and weird crypto meme coins and meme stocks. And you have like these new asset classes that are super risky options, right? So like, I think if you remove that from the, like from the investment class. I think if you remove those things, it's very hard to lose money.

[Graham Stephan]

I guess what we're seeing on our end is a lot of people making these speculative trades where they're going in and buying something because it's hyped up, they're buying at the peak and then it drops. You're like, ah, crap, I got the wrong one. Sell, lock in a loss, move on to the next one.

[Chris Camillo]

Probably either one really young or relatively new to investing. Okay? They're gonna go through that period and it's gonna be a costly short period of Their life months to a few years, they're gonna learn those lessons. Sometimes, like, you can read all the books and you could listen to us talking about what not to do, but you just have to go through it yourself. Right. And I think every investor has to go through a period of making critical mistakes. Cause everyone wants fast money. I get that. That's the answer to your question. They're chasing fast money.

[Graham Stephan]

What does your portfolio look like today?

[Chris Camillo]

Dude, my portfolio is wild today, but it's not normal. This is not a normal period for me.

[Graham Stephan]

Sure.

[Chris Camillo]

And you follow me a little bit. So you know that every decade or so there's like a generational opportunity. If the change is happening really quickly, then there's even a bigger opportunity. So big changes that are happening quickly are the biggest opportunities for investors, but they don't happen very often. So you go back late 90s, after I graduated college, you know, the dot com boom, that was one of those times. Right. And the birth of the smartphone, that was one of those times. You know, cloud computing, another one of those times. And certainly there's, you know, I just turned 50 guys like, like a couple months ago, and I never thought I would see in my lifetime this much change that is this big, like, as humanity, this quickly. It's freaking wild to me, actually, during the pandemic, when Covid hit, that was my biggest year. You know, everyone knows that because it was the biggest change that had ever happened to our civilization. And during our lifetimes. Right. When you take every human on Earth and they start not leaving their home, that changes the things that they buy, changes the things that they do with their money, the things that they care about, which changes the profits for every company on Earth. Right. And that was a huge opportunity to monetize. I didn't think I'd ever see that again. This is bigger, you know, the age of artificial intelligence, the age of robots. This is freaking wild.

[Graham Stephan]

So is this a way to say that your portfolio is skewed heavily towards what you believe is a once in a decade opportunity?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, maybe once in a lifetime at this point. Yeah. And so, like, I'm really putting myself out there. Like, dude, I went all in when. When ChatGPT first came out. Do you remember, do you remember the first time you got on ChatGPT?

[Graham Stephan]

When was that? Two years ago? A year ago, Give or take.

[Chris Camillo]

I. I got on chat and I do this. I remember this because I remember the first time I held an iPhone in my hand. I remember exactly where I was and it wasn't mine. They were passing it around at a pool party and it was like the week the iPhone came out and I spent like five minutes on it and I was like, oh, this is something, this is something. And I made the most levered investment of my life in Apple at the time. And it paid off, obviously. And when I got on chat GPT for the first time, I was like, dude, this is, this is, this is something real. And I'll never forget it because Dave was out of town and Jordan wasn't. I was like, jordan, I don't know how to get the YouTube show up because Dave does all that stuff, right? So I was like, I don't know how to get dumb money up. And I was like, but I can get a Twitter spaces up. We got to get one up today. I just got to talk to people who have been on this and I just got, I got to go, I got to start evaluating opportunities. And so we got on a Twitter spaces and I think it went on for like two and a half hours. And we were just openly talking to people that were using chat GPT and just basically going through like a creative session of who, who would win from this, who would lose from this. Like, I was like, I didn't know how much time we had before the rest of the market figured this out. It could be a day, a week, a month. But I had to figure it out quick because if there were a couple companies that were obvious beneficiaries and I could detect those companies before anyone else, that could be a life changing thing. So we had that, we had that Twitter spaces and it was awesome. Like I had people that were using it at call centers and I had a guy who's like, hey, I've been in call centers for 20 years. We started using it a couple of weeks ago. Game changer. It's going to take over everything. Our entire industry is going to collapse and like get taken over by these automated kind of AI answer bots. And so we just kind of brainstormed and I ultimately made a decision and I did an episode on this on Dumb Money. I was like, Nvidia, it's the only thing I could think of for sure. I just said this it. I'm going all in on Nvidia. That was like January 23rd, what do you think?

[Jack]

That was it by all in?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah. So all in, like a big part of my portfolio was in, on, in and on video. Now I didn't leverage that much. And the reason why I didn't go in levered is because I Was unsure the degree to which the rest of the market would like pick up on that over a known period of time. So when I'm trading an option, options have, you know, windows and something has to happen within that wind time period. So you could be right. But if the rest of the world doesn't kind of come to terms with that thing that you found and agree with you within that short window of time, then it doesn't really matter. So my regret is, you know, I didn't go in levered. I just went in. Really? I went in. Really?

[Jack]

That's your regret is you didn't go in lever.

[Chris Camillo]

I didn't go in levered. You don't know me, man. I will put, like, I've talked about this, like right now, like, dude, if you had seen my account the last week, you wouldn't even believe it. It's just.

[Jack]

Can you tell us?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I mean, I've been heavily levered in Tesla for the last month. Heavily, like ridiculously, irresponsibly.

[Jack]

What, what is. But okay, I'm curious though. Like when I hear that, I think that could be anywhere from like 15 of your net worth to. It could be, yeah.

[Chris Camillo]

Okay.

[Graham Stephan]

Are we talking like it's 10 million plus?

[Chris Camillo]

So I have a liquid trading account. Most of my assets are tied up in privates, right? So I'm invested in like over a hundred private companies and startups. I also have operating businesses that I'm invested in. But. And then any excess returns I get, I basically donate to foundation. I have a foundation that benefits, you know, pediatric cancer, autism, leukemia and animal welfare. And that's another big part of my life. I'm trying to grow that into a billion dollar foundation. So I put millions of dollars into that foundation when I have a good year. But my liquid trading account, like is not that. I mean from. It's a low, it could be a high seven figure to low eight figure account in any moment in time. Right. And so I've had like 20% of the account in options that would go to zero the next day if it didn't go my way. So we're talking about millions of dollars in options that could go to zero in one day. And it started out as like 300,000 in options, but then it's 2 million two days later, you know, so it's wild to see your account going up like that.

[Graham Stephan]

How did you make your money? Could you take us back to the beginning? Like how you even got started doing something like this?

[Chris Camillo]

Oh, sorry. Yeah. So I mean, I've Been investing since I was like 13 years old. I was like a nerdy finance kid before that existed. Now it's common now kids do this. This is like cool to be a financial hustler as a kid. Not in the 80s, man. Not in the 80s and not in the 90s. When I grew up, I was the only one. I was literally the only one I, I tell stories about. I would hang out like kids now hang out in like boards, like amongst people that have like interest. That was my like interest was investing. And there were web boards like Yahoo Web boards in the early, early, early days of Yahoo Web boards for finance. And you would post a message and I just sit there all night and wait for someone to respond and post another message. Could you imagine?

[Graham Stephan]

I used to do that on a call.

[Chris Camillo]

You know what it's like on like stock twits now or Twitter or X when you put a message on Tesla and there's like 10,000. I would literally post a message with like my thesis. I'd be like, here's my thesis, you know, on this stock. And I just wait and wait. The next morning I would wake up and the first thing I would do is pull up that message board, go, oh man, two people commented on my thesis. Dude, this is huge. That's how hard it was to be a retail investor. Self directed investor. We didn't exist. But I was investing since I was 13 and that's how I developed this whole concept, what I call social arb investing, which is I wrote a book about it and 2010 called Laughing at Wall Street. But it's all about detecting change in the world and then connecting dots between that change and the companies that would benefit or be harmed by that change. You want to surface the change quicker than others and then you want to connect the dots to the benefiting companies really quickly. And there are more elements to it than that. You have to make sure that the rest of the world doesn't already know about that thing that you discovered. When I say the rest of the world, I mean Wall street and other retail investors. You want to make sure that there's nothing else happening at that company that could be more impactful than the piece of information that you think is going to impact that company positively or negatively. You also want to make sure that that information that you think is going to impact that company is actually meaningful. It's a needle mover, right? So I always tell the same stories because they're super relatable stories. Like, you know, 10 years ago when kids started playing with DIY slime, they would make slime in their house. Right. And that became a really popular trend. And I was able to surface that trend pretty quickly when it was happening. And so I was like, oh, this is big. Like, every kid in the world is making slime with their moms and in their house and playing with it. Well, like, how do you make this stuff? Oh, the primary ingredient is Elmer's Glue. That's interesting. So who makes Elmer's Glue? Newell Brands. Oh, they're public. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, this is a stodgy old company that grows at like, 2 1/2% a year. And Elmer's Glue is roughly 2 1/2% of their revenue line. Okay, so, like, how much are they going to grow Elmer's Glue? Oh, Elmer's Glue hasn't really grown in 40 years, but now it's sold out in every store around the world. Literally sold out in every single store around the world. So you have to assume they're ramping up production of Elmer's Glue. So earnings were, I don't know, a few weeks later. And this trend had been going on for a couple months now, or a few months been ramping up. So I traded Newell Brands via stock options, and sure enough, the company had, like, its biggest earnings, like, ever in recent history because Elmer's Glue sales were up, I think, like 60%, which was. Doesn't sound like a lot, but for a company that's only growing at two and a half percent a year, when you have a two and a half percent revenue division, that's up 60%, that's a big, big deal. So the Stock was up 17%. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but you have to remember that this was a stodgy company. And the option premiums were, like, that big, only because no one was trading options.

[Jack]

Some poor soul was probably just selling calls, thinking he's, you know, nothing's gonna happen.

[Chris Camillo]

Nothing.

[Jack]

The stock never jumps.

[Chris Camillo]

The stock never jumps on earnings.

[Jack]

You know, someone actually bought my option.

[Chris Camillo]

But. But the story, the story that goes all the way back to my childhood was I. So I was always a hustler. I would do garage sales on the weekends like this. Before Gary Vee was talking about garage sales, I would buy, and I would literally take the bus around the city of Dallas at, like, five in the morning. I would study the sales in the newspaper. The night before, I would literally study the sales. And I knew that garage sales were managed by women.

[Graham Stephan]

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[Chris Camillo]

I literally study the sales and I knew that garage sales were managed by women, older women and they were really good at pricing jewelry and antiques and stuff like that. But any item that was male oriented like train sets or baseball cards or watches or like anything that was male oriented they just kind of discarded and didn't care about because it wasn't like up their alley. They didn't really understand it. This is pre ebay when you didn't know what things were worth unless you had like a price list and a book and you would look it up to see what it's worth. So I would look for garage sales that listed items that were male oriented knowing that they were more likely to be mispriced priced at the estate sale or the garage sale and I would then take the bus and you could usually only get one sale in to be first acts you had to be first. So I would get there at five in the morning and just sit outside the house until they opened up. And you know sometimes I hit nothing. Sometimes I would hit stuff. I'd start every morning at the 7:11. I would get snapple flavored iced tea because it was really early in the morning. I want to wake up. You know, I didn't drink coffee as a kid, so that was like 13, 14 years old. And one morning I walked in the 7 11, they didn't have any lemon flavored Snapple iced tea, which I used to get. And I was like, what's going on? He's like, well, instead of having two full refrigerators of Snapple, this is back in the day when Snapple was everything. There was only half of one door Snapple. He's like, there's competitors now, Arizona, other iced teas. He's like, that's all we're going to have for now on. So I went home, talked to my older brother who's a stockbroker. I was like, can I make money on this? He's like, well maybe. He's like, he taught me how to short Snapple through put options, right? And so I had $300 saved up from all these garage sale trades I'd done. I gave him the $300 in cash. I said, can you do that for me? He said, yeah, I'll buy some puts on Snapple. They have earnings in a few weeks, whatever. So he bought the puts and that was. Snapple was one of the hottest companies in the world at the time. That was the first earnings. They missed earnings because it said inventory was building up in the channel because retailers were not giving them as much shelf space. So I was a 13, 14 year old kid that saw something that people working on Wal didn't even see. And that stayed with me. I was like, how did I see that as a kid just going into 7? How do the guys that work on Wall street that manage billions of dollars, how did they not see that? It's just so right in front of your face. And what I realized was that people that work in the financial industry, their brains aren't tuned to like see things like that. They're focused on financials, they're focused on technicals, sometimes they're part of a herd mentality and they all kind of live in one area of the country, or at least they did back then. They were mostly male and they mostly thought one way. So there were lots opportunities to see things in areas of life that they weren't really focused on that they would miss. So the same way that I would look for male oriented items at garage sales, I spent a lot of time in my early years trying to detect change with female oriented trends and products and brands or brands that were young or youthful because an old white guy on Wall street didn't really pay attention to things that were youthful or female or things that started trending in the middle of the country. So I remember some of my big trades from in the day or like P. F Chang's or Cheesecake Factory. Because think about a guy who lives in Manhattan, he just never seen a PF Changs. He doesn't understand the degree of buzz that was happening in places like Texas when there were people were eating Chinese food for the first time. Right. Or thought they were eating Chinese food. Like he didn't understand. It was like a three hour wait to get in that place. He didn't, they didn't understand how big of a deal that was that they would be able to open hundreds and thousands of these places and everyone would be exactly like that with three hour waits. They thought it was probably a fad. But no, like people outside of these cosmopolitan regions had never had Chinese food. So it's all about, I always say it's about, it's not about being really smart. It's about being smart in a totally different way than others. That's what pays dividends.

[Jack]

And then what job did you get that you worked at for a while to then go into investing full time? And, and after that, what were some of the most pivotal trades that you've made in your entire life? I love the stories. Maybe like a big swing one and a big, you know, positive swing and negative.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I mean so like I traded a lot as a young kid and I was having fun with it. I was kind of, it was kind of a bit of a gambler. I was trading options. I was trade through college when I was at smu. And then I kind of, you know, you go through a life where you, you start doing other things, you know, and you just get distracted. And that's what happened to me. Like I just stopped trading for a while. I just wasn't interested. And it wasn't until I guess my mid-20s, mid to late 20s, when I was having a real life with a wife and planning a family and wanting things, big things like houses and stuff like that. And thinking about my retirement and like, you know, you grow up and you're like, dude, life is expensive. And I was working just a normal job. I mean, my job was at a tech company. I was helping to build the world's first online research panel. I helped build a company called E Rewards that ended up controlling about a third of all the research panel in the world. Meaning anytime someone's doing a study, someone has to answer that study. And we basically took research panels and moved them Online. But it was, at the end of the day, it was just a job. I was making good money. I was making like $200,000 a year.

[Graham Stephan]

That's fantastic.

[Jack]

When was this?

[Chris Camillo]

This is in like the mid 2000s, early to mid 2000.

[Jack]

I mean, that's an incredible income.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah. But I had accelerated my career. I was a bit of a hustler in my career as well. Right. So I climbed the LA pretty quick. And I was a sales guy and a biz dev guy. And I just, you know, it's just, I was a serious person. Right. Like, I, I just, for better or worse, like, whatever I'm doing in my life, I'm, you know, I'm serious about it. And I'm pretty aggressive. And, and so I was aggressive with my career and I was doing well, but I still wasn't doing as well. I wanted, as I wanted to do. I want to do way better than that. I was like, there's no way I can really climb this career any, any further. It was really tough. I was getting frustrated because, you know, I was looking at guys around me who were like, sea level. I was like, I should be. I should be making that much money. I should be making a million a year. I was looking at guys on Wall street going, I should be making a million, 2 million a year. But it's hard when you're in a career, you know, and that's what I'm talking about when it comes to the income gap, I was in a good place. But for most people, but not for me, you know, a lot of people are in that same situation, but instead of making 200k a year, they're making 60 or 70 or 80 or 30. And quite honestly, they didn't have the privileges that I had in my life. You know, I grew up, up great family, wealthy neighborhood. I had access to all kinds of smart people, you know, and. And I, I could take risk. Most people just don't have the ability to escape. They don't have that escape velocity. There's no way to escape whatever your income is, whatever your profession is. So the only way for me to escape it was through the market. And I knew that I was like, in the market, I can do whatever I want. I could be whoever I want. I could, like, have a job that pays me this much, but I can make this much in the market. I started with $20,000. I actually had 87.0my name, and I took 20,000 of the 87,000. I said, I'm going to take this 20,000 and I'm going to do the type of trading I did when I was a kid. Just trying to connect dots, look at change and connect dots. I'm not looking at financials, I'm not looking at technicals. By the way, I'd read every investment book as a kid, every single one. I was like, none of that stuff's for me. I tried it all. I tried investing in commodities. I used to go to commodity store and I would buy silver, bricks of silver, and read the Silver Pricer and like, screw this. I've been in this for nine months. I'm up five bucks. They're sold back in store. Commodities, not for me, right? I was like, I went through every type of trading technicals. I was like, this is boring. I can't look at these charts all day. I'm like, this is just not my. It's not my temperament, man. It's not. I don't want to live my life like that, looking at computer screens and charts. It's not me. So I was like, I had to find something that worked, that I was willing, I was going to have enough fun with to get serious with. So I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to see if I can do it. I start with 20,000. And then there was this thing called Covester. Covestor was the world's first portfolio tracking service. And their tracked like 45,000 accounts. A lot of them were ex hedge fund guys. You would load up your account and they would see how well you're doing. You competed against real traders around the world. This was back in the 2000s, a long time ago. Well, sure enough, I was doing pretty well. I turned that $2,000, $20,000. Like, I'll never forget this. I turned into like, oh, my gosh. I was like, at 400,000. I was like, 20,000. I was like, I have 400,000. I remember going to my buddy Patrick, who's my best friend who worked at the same, said, I'm going to turn this into a million dollars someday. Like three months later, it was a million bucks with my trading. It was crazy. And then a little bit later, it was 2 million. And so I became the number one investor on Covester in the world. That was the tracking. And then I got a bunch of media attention for it. And I was like, on the new. I was on, like, Fox Business talking about it. And then I got a book deal to write a book about this methodology, how I turned 20,000 to 2 million in two years. And I said, this is it. I got $2 million. I'm done. I'm done working. I'm quitting my job. Quit. I quit. Like I was done. Like I'm never working again. And I said I'm going to take the year off and write the book. So I went, I took the year off. I was having twins that year. My wife was pregnant with twins. And I worked out of a Starbucks. Every day I go Starbucks. And I'd write my book every day for a full year. And I wrote the book and it's called Laughing at Wall Street. It came out like 2010. And it's all about my life and how I got there and all the stories of all the trades that got me. I literally talked about all the big trades that got trades like Uggs, trades like Crocs back in the day, all this. What do you call it? What's the Gene company? True religion. Is it like all these old school companies back then they were party. It was all like female and youth. Every heavy female, heavy youth trends. I was picking up on all these trends a little bit quicker than other people connecting the dots and about all stupid simple stuff. Stuff that an idiot could see. Like there was nothing sophisticated about anything that I did not. I'm just like a big idiot at the end of the day. Like there's nothing. So I'm aggressive, I'm resourceful, like I think big. But like I barely passed high school guys. Like I was the bottom quartile of my high school class. I've always been a little bit off in the way that my mind works and I just like I never could figure like books and stuff and just. It was never my work. Like if you give me something I'm interested in, I'm all in today. As you know. I told you. Like I'm up from 10pm to 2 to 3am every night. Every night of the year. All I do is social research. All I'm doing is reading comments on TikTok videos looking for the next thing that's trending. That's literally all I do every night, seven nights a week. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, everything. But so I had all these big trades, man, and it just. Before you knew it. Yeah, I mean it just kept growing and growing and it's never stopped. And I'm on my 18th year of social arb trading and I know this is so hard to believe. I don't believe it myself. Every year I say to myself the last year was the last year that this is going to happen. And like it happened again and it's happening again this year. My account's up like a hundred percent again this year, even if you think.

[Jack]

It'S a bit overhyped. AI is suddenly everywhere, from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. And if it's not in your industry yet, I guarantee you it will be very soon.

[Graham Stephan]

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[Chris Camillo]

It happened during the pandemic. You guys know the pandemic. I talk about this publicly, so I'll talk about this. So I made 30 million the year of the pandemic, trading on a starting with an account that had 4 million in it. So I turned 4 million into like 34 million or something like that. Or like I made 30. I was up 35 million at one point, but it was because I was converting Chinese newspapers and medical reports. I was using Google Translate on every single person in China that was in the medical industry talking about COVID when it was breaking out over there and I became obsessed. I was like, this is it. This is the big one. This is the one I've been waiting for my whole life. Not like happy that have a global virus, right? But I was like, I knew that things happen really big that the world just does not, not me cannot mentally grasp until it's, you know, right in front of their face. And if you can capture a little bit early, these things only come around so often. AI is one of them, right? Robots. But by the time it was Covid. So I, I took, dude, I took like 10% of my account buying put, weekly puts and I lost all my money every week for like three weeks. I lost 30% of my net worth in three weeks because the market wouldn't move. I was like, this is crazy. A virus is about to, to literally stop the entire world as we know it. We're about to have our first pandemic of our, of our generation, of our lifetime. We never knew this is possible. The market's going to crash. And it didn't crash. And no, no, like, no one's talking about. I'm like, why is no one seeing this? Why is no one seeing this? And I remember like CNBC had this episode, the first day at the market dipped 2%. And I was watching the CNBC and I never watched CNBC, only to see when they would see what I was seeing and start talking about it. And all the guys on like Fast Money were all like, like, this is the moment we've been waiting for. The market dropped 2%. Here's your chance to get back in the, to get in the market cheap. I was like, what? The market was like breaking all time highs. It dipped 2%. And their reaction was, what an opportunity to buy more. I'm like, I almost put my fist through the television. Cause I was gonna go broke if, if this happened a few more weeks. So I just gotta stick with it. I did it again, weeklies another way. And I was basically buying puts on the S and P. And I was buying puts on casino stocks and airlines. So it's casino stocks, airlines, and then the S and P at large. And then when it hit, it hit. And man, it hit. And so it was like, it was like it hit. And I know I, I feel terrible talking about this in a positive way because it's like the most devastating thing. It's like in my mind, I'm like, I'm like, I can't do anything about the pandemic, but I can make money and then use that money in a good way to help people. And that's what my life is about. That's why I put all my money in the foundation, right, to help kids. But like, I was like, I'm gonna make a lot of money. Like, with money comes power, comes leverage to do good in the world. That's my whole philosophy. So, yeah, it hit, hit big. And it was, the money was insane. It was big. Way bigger than what you just saw, like on a daily basis. And then the, the craziest part was the whole time I was like, this is wild because there's like 15 companies where this is actually a Good thing, not a bad thing. Shopify, Amazon, Peloton, companies that make anything that would be. Be advantageous to people that don't leave their homes anymore. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, RVs, RV companies and pet company and, you know, all the stuff that ended up booming because of the work from home. But I was like, it's too early. The world doesn't see it. So I had all these companies ready to go and I was going to buy call options on all of them. But I was like, I can't do it until people are like flushing this trade out. And I wait two days after the market bottomed, when it started to come back up, like, I think it's time. And so I put on all my long trades, I got on my short. Put on all my long trades, and that's when it got really nuts. And it's like, what would you say.

[Graham Stephan]

Your biggest dollar amount day is back then?

[Chris Camillo]

A few million dollars, 3 million in a day or something like that? Yeah, but for an account that was started off at like 4 million, you know, like at the beginning of the year, the account was four million, four and a half million. So it was crazy. And then I made. And then the worst part is after that year, it messed with my head and I went a little crazy. Crazy. And you know this because I had dinner with you shortly afterwards.

[Graham Stephan]

You were telling us about.

[Chris Camillo]

All right, it is what it is. I'm gonna put it out there. I got into NFTs, okay? I got a little. We all went a little crazy during the pandemic. We all go crazy in our own ways, okay? I went nuts because, like, I joined this text group and a lot of really interesting people. It all started with that. You know, Logan Paul was on a. On a chain with Gary Vee and about 12 other guys that bought Crypto Punks. And one of my buddies is on that. As soon as they got off of that, he texted our group and he was like, guys, I just got off this crazy zoom with Gary Vee. And you're like, we're all buying Cryptopunks. I was like, I want to buy a crypto punk. And so I bought my cryptopunk. And then it just went nuts, the whole nft. And I bought all these NFT projects early and it went nuts. And I just got addicted. It was fun. We were all stuck at home during the pandemic, and I had this really cool group of, like, really interesting people, and we all got into NFTs together and we were talking about them at 2, 4 in the morning. We're just having fun with it. It was like little mini communities. It was one of the funnest things I had done since I was a kid. Like little pieces of art that were kind of investable and we're all kind of mentally insane from the pandemic anyway. And like nothing was real. I didn't, there were meme coins, it was GameStop. Like I was like this is the future of art, you know. And like I went in, I went in deep and, and, and I ended up actually not losing money believe it or not, because I actually sold Most of those NFTs relatively close to the peak because I saw what was happening to the market. It was a liquidity issue. You have to have additional liquidity. And when I realized that Coinbase, their NFT marketplace wasn't really anything that anyone was going to do, it's like I gotta get out of this. The problem was I was so consumed by NFTs that I missed the entire reversal of that market the next year. And I held onto some of those positions too long and I wasn't shorting the market where I definitely would have been if I wasn't so distracted. And I probably lost $100 million that I could have made year. I think so. And I also did, I know I, I, I part, I had this concept of working with the creator economy to build real businesses. And I partnered with this ice cream kid, Dylan.

[Graham Stephan]

I remember that, yeah.

[Chris Camillo]

Poured millions of dollars into doing a super fun ice cream shop in Manhattan. And for various reasons, like a multitude of reasons that were out of our control, it just, that business didn't work. But it's not about the money I lost in that business. It's about my time. Time. So I became really distracted for about a year and a half, two years and it was a critical two years when I could have really killed it. And after that whole experience I said that's it, I'm back. I'm not letting anything else distract me. In fact I said I'm not investing in startups anymore for the most part. Like because I used to take, I'm in a hundred, almost 150 startup investments. Right. I was like too much my time. I'm going all back into the thing I'm great at. I have a 17 year track record of like 70 plus percent annualized returns in the market. What am I doing doing anything else but that? It had to be insane, right? Like why would I do anything but that? And so I got back in it And I've been back in it now for a couple years and I've had two of the best years in my trading. It's wild. It's been wild. And I, you know what, I love it so much because I'm re engaging with my community again. And there's like, I have thousands, you know, we have 50,000 our Discord, like thousands of people that do this type of trading, social arp trading that I kind of wrote a book about, you know, 15 years ago. And they love it. And we're just like a community and we're looking for change in the world and we share ideas. And I'm back with Dave and Jordan. We're doing weekly shows again. We're just talking about the stuff we see. And you know, a lot of times it's little stuff. It's a brand popping or a brand falling apart. Like I talked about that right now. Like, you know, Nike I think is still falling apart right now. And there are other brands that are really hot pot I'm investing in. So we try to get ahead of the trends and invest in them. It's. It's literally that simple. And how fun does that sound? Funnest investing ever.

[Graham Stephan]

The big moment, I think where I remember your channel was popping off the fake Pokemon box. So that live stream.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, but that was like a different thing. That was the nft, you know, that was during the NFT days. And so one good thing came out of that though. I met a guy, Gary King, Pokemon from that and I, I had this concept. Logan Paul bought the most expensive Pokemon box. So I was gonna buy the most expensive one on top of that. And I was gonna auction off and give it away for charity to my foundation, just to have fun. It's like this, it seems so fun, Pokemon. And so I did it and it didn't really make much money. Like, I ended up giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to kids charities. But the market had come down on Pokemon a little bit during that period. But I met this guy, Gary King Pokemon, and he introduced me to another guy, Matthew, who is starting a Pokemon trade show. He's like, this guy's really smart, Chris. You have money, you believe in this world. I'm like, I do believe this world's going to be big. I believe like that whole, that whole world of anime and trading card games is a world that most people on Wall street and they don't believe it. They don't understand it, they think it's too nerdy. I love nerd culture. I think nerd Culture is going to grow massively over the two decades. And so I wanted to invest in nerd culture. And I was really trading PSA at the time, like collectors. And then it was funny because that got acquired by Steve Cohen. And I have a good story about Steve Cohen, too. I can talk about. I've never talked about it having this leagues, but he bought that. And I was like, dude, I was trading that I want to. And he. He acquired it. And I was like, that's BS because that stock was going to double if he didn't acquire it. So I invested in this trade show, and now Collecticon is like a major, major trade show. We're doing 18 shows next year. It's weird how when you do things in life, you never know how they're going to play out. So I tell people, just do a lot of stuff, meet a lot of smart people, and just engage with people in a positive way and do good things for them. You never know how it's going to come back and reward you. Because that whole time that I was doing Pokemon stuff, I didn't make any money from it. It was just a fun thing. I was having fun with. With all these big Pokemon people. Like, there was nothing in it for me at all. Like, zero. It cost me money. I threw that. Did you come to that poker?

[Graham Stephan]

I was there, and you gave me the empty boxes, and I still have them on display.

[Chris Camillo]

So do you know. And Steve Aoki did that with me. So that party cost me $100,000. So you're like, Chris, you just spent $100,000 to give away $300,000 to kids charities, and you got nothing from. From it? At the time, I got nothing from it, but I ended up meeting a guy, and everybody really thought I was very nice by doing that for the community. And they were like, this is a guy that we can introduce to people. I ended up owning a big chunk of this trade show. Now it's a huge global trade show worth potentially insane amounts of money. So it's funny how life rewards you in weird ways. You just got to go out and do stuff and do things.

[Graham Stephan]

I'm really curious when you do social arbitrage, because I think that's really interesting. What do you look for specifically? And before you go into that, I do want to say that I've seen Macy honestly picks up on a lot of things before they become mainstream. One of the things that she's gotten really into that I've never heard of before, and they're gaining a lot of popularity. The little figurines called smiskis. Smitskies. You've heard of this?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I've heard of everything. This is all I do.

[Graham Stephan]

She's into this, and she's showing me these communities on, like, Facebook and Reddit. It's like a smisky smy. They're big in Japan. And she was like, oh, my God, this place sells smiskis. And we bought like, 12 of them. And some of the stores, they're so popular that they limit them to, like, two per customer, these little figurines. And, like, there's a rare one. And. And I'm thinking, like, this is something that before anyone else gets to it.

[Chris Camillo]

And like, you know, so you have to understand something. So Wall street, we always say that Wall Street's rigged. It's rigged in our favor. Like, that's. And it pisses me off when people say that Wall Street's rigged for, like, institutions and hedge funds. It's not. It's rigged in our favor. Wall street still today, their best alpha, the very best alpha that Wall street has is access to credit cards data. And they've had it for, like, a decade. So they get. I have this data now, right? So, like, they get all the credit card data, and they know what people are buying and selling and, like, weeks behind. So, like, they know what people were buying and selling two weeks ago, like, not selling soon, what they were buying in stores. But the data is dirty. It's not that great. It's not even that reliable. That's the best data they have. But we have better data than them. We have data that they are not willing to even look at, and it's data that. That they wouldn't even know what to do with because it's just their. Their heads don't work like this. So, you know, I had a company, ticker tags. We were the first social data intelligence company for hedge funds. So I taught hedge funds how to interpret social data, conversational data. Like, so when I say social data, what I mean is conversational data. People speaking to each other, real humans speaking to each other about what they're doing that night, where they're going out, what they want to buy, what. What shoes they like. Like, what movies they like. That data is so rich. And it is the gold standard for investors, because what do people do before they buy something? They think about buying it, they talk about buying it, right? They converse with their friends on social like. And specifically, the gold standard, I tell everyone for the last six years has been comment data on TikTok video because back in the day I used to analyze Twitter and my intelligence platform. We had a deal with Twitter. We basically had 10% of all the tweets in real time. And we created an index of 1.4 million word combinations that represented every brand and product on earth and anything that would be spoken that could be relevant to a publicly traded company and we would monitor the volume of conversation around that topic. So I can tell you if people were starting to talk about, about that thing that you just mentioned, right. More than a month ago or a year ago, I can tell you people are starting to talk about the iPhone or how many people talk about the iPhone in the seven days before its release compared to the five years before that in that seven day period. So using conversational data to measure interest in granular topics that are really important to publicly traded companies. So that's data that anyone in the world has access to. Just go on TikTok and start reading comments of trending videos. Videos literally just do that. That's what I do. That's how I'm generating all this money. I'm reading comments of TikTok videos. That's my alpha.

[Graham Stephan]

What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that like smaller things? Like before we go into robots, I'm like, give us small examples.

[Jack]

If the average viewer out there wants to try to take something away from this conversation and implement it in their own investing strategy, would they go and make bigger sized plays on fewer companies or, or more plays on more companies? How would they?

[Chris Camillo]

That doesn't matter so much. Like how you trade doesn't matter that much. Everyone focuses so much on the product. It's all about alpha. It's about finding information that other people haven't found out yet that's meaningful to a publicly traded company. It's that simple. So I think Crocs are crashing right now. So I'm shorting Crocs. I believe that Birkenstocks are doing really well this holiday season. So I'm long Birkenstock. I believe that Elf Cosmetics is doing better than the market thinks they're doing right now. So I'm long Elf. I believe that Nike's not doing so great right now. So I'm short Nike, so I won't be right on all this stuff. But I'm getting this through mainly through conversational data. I can see what people are talking about. I see how they're talking about it. I see where the buzz is. Vans are doing really bad. Vans is, you know, the company that owns vans. VF Corp. Also owns North Face. North Face isn't doing too good right now either. And so they're trying to pull a turnaround, but the turnaround isn't working because I'm evaluating people speaking about vans and like no one's speaking about vans. It's just not happening. So I'm short VF Corp. So these are kind of the, some of the little trades that I'm involved with right now that might only last a few weeks. And no, I'm not putting 10% of my portfolio on them. But this is more historically what I've done. Right. You know, fun trades I've talked about in the past is there was a time about a decade ago when women started to transition from wired bras to Bralettes. Bralettes are bras without wires in them. Victoria's Secret made their brand on wired bras. Bralettes cost about a third of what a wired bra cost. The margins are much lower. And Victoria's Secret didn't even sell them when they were coming in to style. Right. So it was hugely detrimental to Victoria's Secret when women wanted unstructured bras.

[Graham Stephan]

I don't know this, I mean, because.

[Chris Camillo]

I see people starting to use the word bralette. And I said, what is the word bralette? Oh, okay. Now once you see the little bit, then you start researching it. Then you start research and you're like, oh my God, a lot of women are talking about Bralettes. In fact, at the time, they're talking about either wearing bralettes or no bras. This is like during that no bra. So it's like it was like this error when people didn't want push up bras because Victoria's Secret built a reputation on, on wired push up bras, which were really popular for 20 years. Right? And so this is really detrimental for that brand because one, they were late to start selling Bralettes. And then even when they started selling bralettes, the market for bralettes were so cheap and the margins were so thin that every customer that bought a bralette and sell instead of a bra, they made less money on. So they were getting killed from every angle. So if you're the first to detect that change in the world and then connect the dots to who's going to win, who's going to lose, who is the winner? Aerie. Aerie was one of the first brands to start selling Bralettes. So they benefited from the bralette trend. Victoria's Secret was harmed by the bralette trend. So That's a really weird, random example, but I have about 80 of those over the past 18 years. So the past eight, when you say, chris, how did you turn? You know, I've generated, I don't know, 70 or 80 million or $90 million from $20,000 over 18 years. Right. And the weird part is that if it wasn't for all those gains being short term and me paying taxes every year, like on all those gains and me pulling so much money, I pulled almost all my profits out every year to invest in startups and private companies. If I would have just left all that money in my brokerage account and maintain those returns, that 20,000 today would be like a billion at least, I think. But you asked, how do you do that? I did that from roughly 75 trades that happened over 80 years. The brawl trade, the. This trade. Oh, elf. I just talked about elf. My first elf trade was when jeffree star, who's a beauty influencer, did a YouTube video talking about their elf putty primer, which is a $7 putty primer. We. I know you guys don't know what primer is, but putty primer. Yeah, so.

[Graham Stephan]

So it's what you put on first, right?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah. So elf was this really junky brand that they only sold in drugstores, pharmacies, cvs and walgreens. Right. It was a junky brand. And jeffree star comes out and does a video and says, this seven dollar putty primer is as good as this $50 putty primer. And he did this whole video. You know how many views it got? Like 12 million views. So you know what I did? I went to the walgreens by my house, and I just stood there, right there by the putty primer, by the elf. I just stood there, and all day long, moms came in and girls came in, and they would just go back, oh, why are you here? We saw the jeffree star video. Oh, cool. You know, watch. They didn't just buy the putty primer, they bought the putty primer. And then they would maybe get one or two other things from elf because all of a sudden now elf is like a cool brand because jeffree star said it was. So I actually went out and I found the wall street analyst that covered elf and cosmetics brands for one of the big four banks. And I called them up on the phone, just randomly. I'm like, hey, you know, I know you cover this sector. I just want to ask you, have you seen the Jeffrey star video? He's like, who's Jeffrey Star. I hung up the phone. That's all I needed to know. Right? So it was like Wall street didn't even know. They don't watch YouTube. YouTube, right. These guys are these sell side analysts at Goldman and B of A. They're not watching Jeffrey Star makeup videos on YouTube. I am. That's where I get my alpha. Okay, so that. But that's how, but that's how you do it. That's how you do it. So elf was $7 a share. $7 a share. And I went all in on elf and unfortunately I exited most of my elf at about 14, which is like a couple months later, like almost. It, like almost doubled pretty much in like a few months. And, and the funniest part about it was that on the earnings call they called out the ELF primer putty and it was like it was a primer putty prime, whatever. I was like, man, it's so cool when you. And that's what I call the point of information dissemination. So I invest at a point of what I call information imbalance. When you have information that the rest of the world doesn't have at the point of information parody, when that information has been disseminated amongst other investors in Wall Street. Sometimes that could through an earnings call. Sometimes it could be because an analyst did finally pick it up or sometimes because the credit card data starts showing big charges and then Wall street picks it up and they start trading it. Have you ever noticed that stocks sometimes move like a week or two before earnings? That's the credit card data that Wall Street's trading. So I actually spend, I spend six figures on data every year. So I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy institutional data, the same data the hedge funds buy. But I don't buy it to trade off of it. I buy it. So I can see when they're seeing what I saw earlier. And that's when I know that the information I saw is now being reflected in their data. So my window is closing. That's when I exit. Does that make sense?

[Jack]

It does. How long if someone wants to do some sort of social arbitrage investing, should they research something before they actually make a move?

[Chris Camillo]

So I sometimes I the top of the funnel where I find something on TikTok the discovery. The discovery is very exciting as you find it and you're like, wow. Once you discover something then you have to vet it. You have to make sure that it's real. So I will look at Google trend data to see are people searching for that thing. I will look at web stats data. I will go to the stores where they sell that product and start talking to clerks and verify, hey, show me your hottest product and see if they're going to tell me the thing I think they're going to tell me. Right?

[Jack]

And that real quick. Did they ever ask you, like, why? And you tell, oh, I want to make an investment.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, so what? I, I try not to lie. I'm not like, comfortable lying to people. So I tell them that, that I'm doing research, you know, like, I'm just doing research. Like, I, I do trend research. I'm like, hey, I'm a trend researcher. Which is true for my investment.

[Jack]

But that's never led into a conversation of them being like, maybe I should invest.

[Graham Stephan]

No, if they do, it's one.

[Chris Camillo]

I'm just saying that would be interesting. These are, these are clerks, that sort. Do you remember when Under Armour started making their. What do you call, undershirt?

[Jack]

The tighter thing?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like. That was like seven, eight, nine, eight, eight years ago. Cold, cold gear. Remember the cold gear? Under Armor, swimming cold gear. That first winter that they were making cold gear, it happened to be a really cold winter. And I went to the Under Armour store because I had seen that people were talking about this everywhere. I went to the Under Armour stores and the outlet stores, and I'll never forget it. I asked the guy at the store a month, like, are people buying this, you know, this cold gear? He's like, he's like, sir. He goes, we have never experienced anything like this in the history of the company. It is crazy. We cannot keep stock of it. We're manufacturing as much as we can make. I'm like, thank you very much. I remember coming out of that Under Armour store. I remember the outlet mall I was at and calling Jordan and Dave on the phone being like, dude, we are going all in on Under Armour today. I was like. I was like, the market was already closed, but I was like, tomorrow morning. We were going all in on Under Armour. But like, so you, you want to, like when you get in a trade heavy, you want to leave nothing on the table. You want to make sure anything that you can investigate to like, prove your thesis. I call it in my book. I call it. You have a thesis? My thesis is that this thing is going to really benefit this company this quarter. But that's a thesis, right? You have to prove out the thesis. So, like, anywhere where you can pull data, speak to people, interview people, like, you got to get all the data you can. And so what's really cool about having a community now? Like, when dumb money, like, when I find something, like, I'll just share it with them. Be like, guys, I found this. Like, poke holes in my thesis or help me prove my thesis. And now like, to be part of a community of investment nerds that think the way you do. First of all, it makes it more fun because I'm not a loner. My whole life I've been a loner investor. Like the weird investing kid. No one else invested like me. You have all these technical traders. You know, the technical traders, they're like, they're like a class of their own. They all relate. I don't relate to them at all. Wall street traders that are like fundamental traders that analyze spreadsheet. Like the Analyze fundamental. That's boring as crap to me. Like, I never want to do that. I don't relate to those guys at all. Reading comments on TikTok videos and looking for trends and connecting dots to the next big thing. That is freaking fun as hell. Like, I would do this for free without making money. The fact that I'm able to make this much money doing this, like, I'm watching TikTok videos and that's my job, is just watching TikTok videos and reading comments. And it's pretty cool because you feel like a really deep connection to the world and culture. Because I'm reading literally thousands of comments a night. So I'm reading what all the youth is speaking about, like what everyone's speaking about from every demographic, no matter who you are, what you look like, where you live in the world. Like, I have a really good sense, sense at, like, how people are feeling, what they're doing, what they're liking. And it feels good to be that attached to the world. But it's like my profession, but it's kind of fun.

[Graham Stephan]

How do you know if you're late to something? Because you talking about this has got me running through my mind. Of all the things that I'm thinking that I've noticed that people my age and younger are gravitating towards. And the one that really stood out to me, it's in the refrigerator over here, is fairlife protein shakes. And I'm like, my gosh, the last year year, we have been obsessed with.

[Chris Camillo]

These fair life proteins for like five, six years.

[Graham Stephan]

But exactly.

[Chris Camillo]

So.

[Graham Stephan]

So I'm late to it.

[Chris Camillo]

So that wouldn't be definitely late to it, but also when it comes to. When it comes to milk products, believe me, I've had numerous opportunities to trade. It's dairy, it's, it's, you can't trade dairy in the public markets right now. It's very difficult. I, I, I, I've had numerous opportunities to trade dairy, dairy. I have tried, I've considered trading like commodities. Like you just can't do it. So there's no way to trade that stuff.

[Graham Stephan]

Here's another one that I found interesting is that about two years ago, year and a half ago, Macy's been a big fan of Starbucks. She stopped going to Starbucks and she complained that the prices were too high and she instead started going to Dutch Bros. Dude. And Dutch Bros started popping up everywhere in Vegas and they were paying an absurd amount price per square foot for these little retailers, retail kiosk sort of places. And I was thinking to myself back then, I'm like, if she's doing this, not going to Starbucks, how many other people are preferring Dutch Bros. Dude, you.

[Chris Camillo]

Don'T watch our show enough, Graham. That's been a storyline on our show for years. Dutch Bros and the Starbucks short, the great Starbucks short this year that was one of my biggest trades of the year. The Starbucks short. Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

So I'm on the right track.

[Chris Camillo]

You're absolutely on the right track is everything. So you're organically seeing things to your life and that's great. We live in a digital world now. What's really cool is that you don't know if things are going to hit you a week late, a month late, a year late, five years late. But if you're proactively reading thousands of comments every day of your life, you're going to pick up on that stuff the second it happens. Right. And so I'm being proactive where you're being reactive, which by the way, there are a lot of opportunities to invest just by being reactive. When you, because a lot of times you'll see it first by chance because someone in your life, it could be Macy, just by chance, you're seeing it quickly. But I don't want to take a chance. I want to see it quickly every time. But to answer your question, what you just asked is the hardest part of my process. Trying to discern the degree to which that information that you discovered is already well known by the investing public is a little bit of an art and a science. So what you do is you have to leave the real world and go into the investment world where people talk about stocks on stock boards and seeking alpha and analyst reports and news stories and anywhere where someone is talking about that stock you read everything. You read every quarterly report going back multiple quarters. You want to see if there's any mentions about that thing that is part of your thesis. So if your thesis is that Starbucks is becoming too expensive and therefore Starbucks people are not going to Starbucks anymore and they're switching brands, to what degree are investors aware of that? Are they talking about that? And are they deciding to sell their Starbucks or short it because of that? To what degree do sell side analysts talk about that in their reports? To what degree has the company admitted that? So it's not a black or white thing. There are a lot of gray areas. And it's the toughest part because people, people are like, oh, when do you sell? You sell when you hit information parity. Well, how do you know? You don't always know. You just have a feel for it. Like, okay, I think people kind of know what I knew. So I'm going to maybe sell half. Right. Once you know for sure that the world knows about this, you're out of the investment. And it doesn't matter if you made money, lost money, what the stock did. I only trade information. I don't trade stock price. I just trade information, information. So, like, and like I said, it might get into your, you know, our eventual conversation about robots.

[Graham Stephan]

Let's talk about robots.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

I can tell you you've been gearing up this entire episode.

[Chris Camillo]

I love it because, because you know what? Like, there are all these small trades and they'll go on forever and I'll be doing them forever. But the big ones don't come around that often.

[Graham Stephan]

Okay.

[Chris Camillo]

And occasionally there's one that comes around once in a lifetime, I think. And, and this is it for me. Like, this is it. This is the biggest trade of my life. And it's the ro. You know, the fancy way to say robots are humanoids is embodied AI. It's the embodiment of artificial intelligence. Right. And you probably heard Jensen, it and video talk about it a lot. The last six to nine months, you hear Elon talking about it a lot. I've talked about it constantly. But I firmly believe that the embodiment of artificial intelligence is going to radically rebuild our world and change our economy unlike we've ever seen in our lifetime.

[Graham Stephan]

Start us out with why robots? Where did you first come up with the concept of robots are going to take over? This is going to be the, the next great wealth transfer, so to speak. That this is it.

[Chris Camillo]

It's just the biggest change, biggest change to our life. And with that big of a change Comes opportunity, right? Eight years ago, I was introduced to a couple kids that had came out of the UT Robotics program in Austin, and they were making exoskeletons for the Defense department and for NASA. And they were generating a ton of money, like $30 million of contract revenue, making basically Iron man suits. I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And this would make for the dumbest investment of my life. So I'm not investing in you. And I said, no. But I kept up with them over the years and every time I go to south by Southwest, I meet with these kids and I'm like, oh, they're really advancing their stuff. And then one day they started making humanoid robots and they pulled me aside, this is about three years ago, and they said, we, we are having a moment with humanoid robots, with actuator technology, which are the muscles of the bots, with sensor technology, and with whole body control, which is how the robot controls itself and walks and balances and articulates. And the founder of this company, Jeff Cardenas, said, chris, within low single digit years, I'm going to have a walking humanoid robot that is going to be able to function in a commercial and industrial setting and do physical labor at close to human speed. And I was like, you know that if you actually were to achieve that, it would be the biggest thing that was ever invented. He's like, I know, and it's going to happen. He's like, I guarantee you it's going to happen low single digit years. And I was like, well, you're probably crazy, but just in case you're not, I'm going to write you a check. And I wrote him a check, a small, smallish check for me. And I kept up with him. And I was like, maybe I should research this stuff a little deeper. I started researching humanoid robots, the viability of them, the history of them, how real this was. Then Elon talking about it, I was like, oh, Elon's talking about this now? This is kind of interesting. And then I got a call a year ago from a venture investor that I had kind of educated on robots. He's like, did you hear about this company in San Francisco who's raising like 700 million backed by Microsoft and OpenAI making humanoids called figure AI? I was like, not really, but can you introduce me to the founder? And he did. And I ended up making a pretty large investment in that company. And then I also went back to Jeff and I said, jeff, what's going, going on with your robot company? And I can't say anything too specific here tonight, but there's some big, big things happening with his company as well. And I ended up just started to hang out with Jeff and be like, how can I help? I want to be part of this. And Now I'm like 300 hours deep into humanoid robotics research. I converse with humanoid engineers around the world. I talk to other investors that are invested in either figure or Apptronic or both. And we talk about this seven days a doing deep research. We're analyzing the technology, we're trying to assess how quickly it's going to be adopted by the world. Because we're investors in these companies, we have, like, insight that almost no one else in the world has from their CEOs that I can't speak about on this show because I'm under NDA from both companies. And all I can say is that what I have seen with my own eyes is unbelievably real. And this is happening. This is no longer like a 50% or 90% or 95%. It's like 100%. We are going to have humanoid robots that are going to be doing commercial physical labor that will be able to do any job on Earth before long. And we're going to have access to infinite labor in our world. Think about what it's like to have access to infinite physical labor. What would we build? What industries would evolve from that? How would that change our world? Imagine, you know, there's a hundred million people in the world who spend the bulk of their prime years when they should be getting married, having kids, having a joyous life. They spend those years taking care of a parent or grandparent. Not often in our world, but in most of the world, that's common. That's insane. It's actually insane. Could you imagine spending the bulk of your prime years just wiping the butt of your granddad? Well, that's a story that Jeff tells about his grandparents, and that's one of the inspirations of why he started apptronic and for 10 years has been trying to build this humanoid robot. And we have a few of these humanoid companies around the world. Not many. A few that are truly real and commercial and scalable, that are going to be, I think, become some of the largest companies on Earth. And right now, they're very small, except for one Tesla. Right. And so Tesla is not small. But the funny thing about Tesla is all the exciting stuff happening at Tesla right now, hardly anyone's paying attention to. The only thing that matters at Tesla, which is their Humanoid division, their optimus division. So I put out a tweet thread back in January this year, almost a full year ago, and it was a 15 part tweet thread when no one was talking about humanoids. And it was how the optimist division of Tesla by 2030 could be valued at $10 trillion based on them only producing a million and a half robots at $100,000 a year lease rate, which is going to be the going rate for commercial robots. Yeah, lease. So commercial robots will be leased to the world. So they won't be. You can't buy them. These are robots that you'll see in factories, the robots that you'll see in warehousing and logistics facilities all around the world. There's demand for tens and tens of millions of these robots. And it's not because these companies want to displace humans. No of them do. These companies simply want to grow. They simply do not have the physical labor they need to grow. So these robots will allow them to grow. Depending upon who you believe, we have somewhere between a 50 million and 350 million human labor shortage by 2030 for physical labor. So we need 50 to 350 million human physical labor laborers and we're just not getting them. If you talk to these companies around the world, they cannot find young people to do these jobs that older people are doing physical labor, laying foundation to all this stuff. So the demand is through the roof. But forget about the demand. I mean, imagine having infinite physical labor on Earth. What can we build? What can we do? How would our lives change? Imagine every human, as you got older, you had someone to take care of you, to help you get up, get out of bed, get to the bathroom, someone to take your trash out. It would allow you to live a more productive, humane life in your older years. It would dramatically increase like the quality of life for almost every human on Earth.

[Graham Stephan]

This to me seems like it would drive down the cost eventually just about everything. Like let's say building a house is a good example. When you remove the labor component and you're able to employ these robots that work 24,7 perfect without making any mistakes. The cost of these things should go down as companies profit margins increase.

[Chris Camillo]

There's one problem with your thesis and there's a paradox, and I don't have the name of it. Off topic, my head is related to coal. And the concept was the more coal that we were able to find back in the day when coal was the energy that everyone used, the cheaper coal would become. Right, because you'd have unreal amounts of coal and we get really cheap. Do you know what happened as we started to discover more coal?

[Graham Stephan]

We used more coal, right?

[Chris Camillo]

We use more coal. So maybe the things that you're thinking of today, the style of house that people like to live in globally would get cheaper. But what we will demand out of the world go up. So the same way that we live in mini mansions now that never existed 25, 30 years ago, that's become common now. People expect that now. No one ever expected that. Now we all grew up in like 1500 square foot houses, right? So what we might expect, Graham, in like 20 or 30 years might look very different from what we expect today out of life. And so, yes, if we were to live exactly like this in 30 years, it could be super deflationary. But if our expectations on life climb that high, if we start to enter an age of abundance where everybody wants all this stuff, right? Whatever it is, Everybody wants a humanoid. You know, nobody wants to cook anymore. No one wants to clean their house anymore. The humanoid does everything for you. Everybody wants this and that. It might radically change the economics of your thesis. So it's like we can't really visualize. Visualize that.

[Graham Stephan]

But really quick, I just want to mention something to you guys that if you run a small business, you know that managing things like payroll benefits and taxes could seem like a full time job. It's an absolute hassle. But with today's sponsor, Gusto, who by the way, I've been using them for years and absolutely love them, it doesn't have to be that way. For those unaware, Gusto is the all in one payroll, benefits and HR solution built for small businesses like yours. With Gusto, payday is a breeze. No more manual calculations or tax headaches. And with automatic tax filings, filings in all 50 states, you could save hours every single month. Plus, Gusto offers health insurance, 401k plans, time tracking, and even access to certified HR experts all in one place. So you could focus on doing what you love, which is growing your business.

[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

And here's the best part. You could try it free for three months.

[Jack]

Seriously, guys, this is kind of like a full circle moment for me because when I first started working for Graham, I originally created myself my S Corp. And guess what I used. I use none other than Gusto. I have continued using them this entire time because they are seriously that good. Go to gusto.comice to get started today, that is gusto.comiced or click the link down below in the description.

[Graham Stephan]

Thank you, Gusto, for sponsoring today's episode, because genuinely, I have used their platform for years. I absolutely love it. I don't go anywhere else. I would highly recommend them. Thank you again. It is so cool to have them as a sponsor. And now let's get back to the episode. You know the feeling when you're working out and your earbuds just keep falling out as you're leaning over, or if you're on an airplane but your current headphones just aren't cutting it? Yeah, same. That's why I've been recently loving the Raycon Everyday Earbuds, the sponsor of today's video.

[Jack]

Honestly, they've just been a total game changer for me. The sound quality is amazing, they're super comfortable, and they actually stay in your ears even when you're moving around. And I'm not going to lie, I have some weirdly shaped ears because earphones have never fit in my ears, but the Raycons actually do. Plus they've got features like active noise canceling and a 32 hour battery life. They're perfect for literally anything.

[Graham Stephan]

And of course, my favorite part is that they're affordable. Like they've got all the same features as the expensive ones, except they start at half the price. You can't beat it.

[Jack]

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[Graham Stephan]

I got the green headphones with the concrete case. Jack got the black headphones with the sunset case. And you could get whichever one fits your style the best at a discount. All you have to do is go to buy rake.comiced for up to 20 off of your order. Again, that's buyraycon.comiced for 20% off site wide. Trust us, you're absolutely going to love it. Buy raycon.comiced thank you so much, Raycon, for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the podcast. What are the biggest misconceptions people have right now for humanoid robots? Do you think people are more in favor of this? Or do. Do you think they look at this and say, that's going to take my job. This is bad for the society. We need to stop this?

[Chris Camillo]

I think almost all people will support it, but there will always be some that say that. I mean, the truth is there's never been A time in history where a technology that displaces human has not created more human jobs, not less. Because what will happen is once we have access to all this infinite physical labor, it's going to create tremendous demand for new industries, new things. Right? That will require humans, right. To be able to manage and do more companies, more sectors, more things in life. Right. Maybe what we visual, maybe what we understand is work in 20 years doesn't seem like work today, but it will be work in 20 years. Maybe we all become entertainers, I don't know. But life will change, and we just cannot perceive how that life is going to change. So initially, people will be scared like they always are. They were super scared back in. In the day when we had technology, right, for the first time and it started to automate old jobs. What happened? We have so many more jobs now because of technology. Right. No one would have ever believed that a social media manager would be a job. If you showed someone 40 years ago, what do you do? Oh, I make memes for, like, that's not a job. Like, yes, it is. It's a hard job. It's a hard. And like, no, you don't actually work in 2024, but like, you get what I'm saying? So, like, when we think about what a job looks like in 2014, 45, we would laugh at that today, sure. But in the future, they'll be like, this is a serious job that does a lot of good for the world and makes people happy and adds value to the, To. To our civilization. But we can't comprehend that today. And only this type of technological advancement will allow us to enter that future age. Right? So I'm not, I'm super excited because, listen, my life is awesome, but most people in the world don't get to live my life. And you know, things like humanoid robots are going to solve so many problems for so much of the world that doesn't have access to the things that we have access to at the top 1% in the U.S. are there any.

[Graham Stephan]

Downsides that you could think of? Can you make an argument for the reasons there could? This could be a problem.

[Chris Camillo]

I think there are a lot of downsides with AI that scare the hell out of me and everyone else, and I think they're super valid. That scares me because it's very hard to control. You can't touch it, feel it. The embodiment of AI is way more controllable when it comes to laborers or robots that help us in the house or that help us at work. Or to help us build civilization. Where it gets a little bit scary is when you start taking those robots and doing things in the military with them. Right. And you have, you know, battlebots, and you have the little things from Black Mirror that will attack your home. Millions of robot bees. That scares the hell out of me. But I think the robot companies that I work with right now are all pretty adamant that they are not getting involved in any of that. So I think when you think about embodied artificial intelligence, you have different sectors and the sector that I'm referring to, which are humanoid robots to rebuild the earth in a way that benefits society and more people and humanity and helps us in our homes and helps the elderly and helps health care. Right. I don't think anyone's going to have an issue with that. I think drones and battle, all that stuff gets very scary very quickly. But I wouldn't want to merge those two worlds together because I know the CEOs of these companies and they certainly are thinking about positive things. Right. And only positive things for our world.

[Jack]

What is the current state of humanoid robot engineering? What companies are at the forefront of that? That and kind of what. What is the product that they've been able to produce so far?

[Chris Camillo]

So there's three in the us There's Tesla with Optimus, there's Figure AI in San Francisco and there's Optronic in Austin. Apptronic has been mostly kind of fly under the radar, I think on purpose. But I think we're going to hear a lot more about Optronic in the next year. There is Boston Dynamics, which is owned by Home Hyundai. They actually made an experimental robot for 10 years. It's the one that we all saw videos of and we think it's really cool. Yeah, well, the dog, but also the big one that would do the flips and stuff. Oh, yeah. The problem is that's an experimental robot that has, you know, hydraulic actuators. It costs like over a million dollars to make. It's not a commercially viable robot that you could put in a factory where you can put in a warehouse to move boxes. Do you know how many boxes are moved a year commercially? Like, just thinking, what would you guess? Just get like commercial boxes move from trucks to warehouses.

[Jack]

Did you say in the world or globally?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, globally.

[Graham Stephan]

Just take a wild, I guess probably 10 billion.

[Jack]

No, I'm going to say. I'm going to say 2 trillion.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah. So I did some cocktail napkin math. I'm pretty good at it, but it could be off, but I, I estimated about 9 trillion box this year. I think there are some stats that support a number in that range, but just that, that alone moving boxes. And by the way, nobody, no human on earth should have to live their entire life moving sheet metal from 2ft behind them to 2ft in front of them for 45 years. Lower back issues. Their older years are horrible. Right. Those jobs won't exist for humans in 30 years and that's a good thing. We need to take care of these people in the interim time. And by the way, like I said, no one's displacing these humans anytime in the next 1020. We need more physical, not displacing the ones we have. We need to keep the ones we have, but add more next generation. They don't want to do that work. But these bot companies right now, it would blow your mind how advanced they are and how quickly they're moving. Like every month. It would literally melt your mind. The things that I've seen, it's wild how quickly they're moving and I haven't even seen everything yet. But they will be doing commercial work next year. There will be Humanoid robots in 2025 in factory set settings doing physical labor jobs next year in small batches. There's a lot of learning, a lot of edge cases. Right. So they'll be working in controlled settings. We're going to try to get them up to human speed, right? Because right now they're not fully at human speed. But I think people in this sector are adamant that they can get up to about 120 to 150% of human speed eventually.

[Jack]

And they wouldn't have like nine to five work hours.

[Chris Camillo]

They'll be working 23 plus hours hours a day. So the batteries last about four hours. In some cases they're hot swappable. In other cases they're rechargeable. I mean, there's a lot of different approaches and different companies are taking different approaches and that part's not even that important. But they'll be able to work 23 hours a day. Yes.

[Jack]

Robots hot swap the battery.

[Chris Camillo]

They will be. No, they will be. No, no, they will be. They 100%. That's already going to, that's going to happen. But again, the humans, if any humans were to get to splice, they're going to be doing better things that are probably making more money than they make currently. So. But this is happening, guys. It's not happening like right this second, but we're not talking about 10, 15 years away. You know, when Elon says something, I Don't believe it, but it might be true. But I don't assume it's true. But all this talk that if you read between the lines, the stuff Elon's been saying about humanoids, it's not fully true, but it's kind of true.

[Graham Stephan]

Kind of reminds me of, like, in the 1940s and 50s, how having, like, a TV in your house was like a rich person person thing. And then they became really common. The Internet. Having a computer in your house was like a big thing in the 90s. In the early 90s, like, you go to grandma's house, she didn't have a computer. Now they're common. Everyone has one. That a robot could be like a rich person thing.

[Chris Camillo]

10 years initially, yes, but eventually everyone died.

[Graham Stephan]

50 years from now, it's. It's like a common place. Every house has one of those, like, little robot workers. Cleaning, cooking, laundry, housekeeping, gardening.

[Chris Camillo]

Ask a mom about this, how badly they want one, right? I mean, you ask any mom if you had a bot in your house that would literally just go around picking up stuff and did nothing else. She'd be like, soul. It picks up stuff sold. It also does your dishes. It also does your laundry. It also does your closet. And when it turns from spring to fall, it redoes your closet based on the fall stuff. It'll take all the spring stuff, fold it up, put it away. It knows what you like. It knows how you like things. Things, Right. We're talking about generalized autonomous robotics. We're talking about robots, guys. This is not decades away where you will be able to speak to the bot using large language models. It will interpret what you said. It will learn on the fly and do whatever you need to have done.

[Graham Stephan]

Are relationships going to be obsolete? Are people going to choose to have relationships with robots?

[Chris Camillo]

I think think the thing that threatens relationships more than anything else is not so much the robots, but the artificial intelligence bots that are companion bots that are more digital. I don't necessarily know that the human, like, the robot form. Eventually, maybe, but, like, my mind's not there. That's kind of crazy. Yeah. Eventually, yes.

[Graham Stephan]

It's going to be indistinguishable.

[Chris Camillo]

What is wild is if you were to study what's happening right now, now with companion bots, meaning artificial intelligence, not physical bots, but just AI companion bots. It is some of the stickiest technology we'd ever seen in our lifetime. It is so sticky once people start using those companion bots to converse.

[Graham Stephan]

Dude, I'm seeing news stories of young Men falling in love with these bots.

[Chris Camillo]

It's happening all the time.

[Graham Stephan]

There's one, there's like a Game of Thrones bot that like, remember that? And like told the like. I guess the guy was a little mentally unstable, had his own issues, but like was deep in this bot. Like having conversations as though it's a real person taking everything to heart.

[Chris Camillo]

I know this. That's happening, that will happen. I don't think I like it. I do like some of the mental health stuff. Because anyone could have access theoretically to the best psychologist, right, who gets to know you and understand you. Again, these are things at the top 1%. We all have access to it. Most people don't. To have access to like state of the art, the best psychology, right? The best custom for you education is going to be radically reformed.

[Jack]

Physical health, I think would be crazy physical health, right?

[Chris Camillo]

How about having your bot trainer at home? Have you trained like, like your physical therapist?

[Graham Stephan]

But I'm saying this is, this is the epitome of population decline. Because someone doesn't need to go out and be social. They don't need to meet anybody. They could have one robot that serves every single purpose. A friend, a companion, a lover, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a personal trainer. You download whatever you want to. They're everything you want. You don't want to talk to them, you tell them away.

[Chris Camillo]

That's a deep, dark wormhole. I will tell you this. I'm older than you guys. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. And you know how people say, oh, and they look at videos of people when they went to parties, how they're interacting and engaging and what it was like, I'm going to tell you right now, it really was that good. Like, it real. Like it's no bullshit. Like, I reminisce, I talk to my friends all the time. I'm like, do you realize how lucky we were that we got to be in high school in the late 80s, early 90s? And we're all like, dude, it was incredible. Like, no phones, no anything, no record of anything. People all talk to each other. But you would engage deeply with other humans all the time. Like you are constantly just looking in the eyes of your friends and just engaging and hanging out and having these moments all the time. There was never a phone. It didn't exist, exist. I do agree with you. It scares the hell out of me because it's not an exaggeration. That time period was so special. It was phenomenal. It was great. I would do anything to go back There. I even say I hope that the metaverse can replicate that world so I can just go back and relive some of it, because it was really that good. And I have massive concern about the way that this is messing with our heads right now. No one's head's more messed with them. I told you, I spent hours a night on TikTok for my career profession and it has rewired my brain to where I can no longer watch a movie anymore. I can't sit down and watch a TV show.

[Graham Stephan]

I started watching Netflix 2x speed. Yep. They offer a feature too. I would do that because I'm like.

[Chris Camillo]

I would do that slow.

[Graham Stephan]

Like, I'm so attuned to YouTube algorithms. Or I'm like, there's a pause for a few seconds. I'm like, skip, skip, skip. That's crazy.

[Jack]

What does Macy think about that?

[Graham Stephan]

I don't watch it with. I don't do that with Macy. But if I, if I'm like traveling on a plane or something like that, or I'll just put it on.

[Chris Camillo]

I force myself now. I say, hey, this show's great. I know it's great. I'm taking my phone. I'm not gonna. I'm force.

[Graham Stephan]

Oh yeah, I have to put it away.

[Chris Camillo]

And it's so slow. And it's like. But I'm like, I can't. If I don't do this, my brain is gonna get so warped. And it's like, I know what it's like to be a 15 year old. Like, it's horrible, guys. It's like, it's horrible.

[Graham Stephan]

But you hear stories of, of people like they're getting married later, they're having kids later, they're having their, know, intimate experiences later in life. They're more.

[Jack]

But.

[Graham Stephan]

But I think all of that's a reflection of just people are glued to their phones, not having social interaction.

[Chris Camillo]

And robots are going to more than that. It's more than that. So I think about this all the time because I have kids that are 14, twins. They're too small, they know too much. So if you look at relationship TikTok, everything you would ever want to know about the opposite sex, about how to engage, they know they know too much and then they get angry and expectations get high. Like there's so much information. People talking about relationships, we were so dumb 25 years ago. You would just, like when you were kind of ready to get married or whatever, whoever was in front of you who you were kind of attracted to. I'm not talking about Me personally, like, I got lucky. I got very lucky. But a lot of people, like from my generation and older is like, oh, like she was at my job and worked at the cubicle next to me and was kind of pretty and like, that's how people ended up marrying people. Now I got super lucky. But most people that you were just dumb and you were forced to doing that. And you know what? It benefited you because you ended up not overthinking anything. Okay. You just like, you made it work. Yeah. What? You didn't look for the perfect person. You didn't have these lists, like, have you seen these, like TikToks where it's like the 800 icks that a girl gets? Like, it's because it gets to a point where it's like, dude, like, you're never. No one's ever going to be happy with a mate anymore because you're looking for all these things in comparison.

[Graham Stephan]

But my point is, you see that and then you could program AI or a robot to be perfect, but to be imperfect enough, it's like a slot machine where it doesn't give you a win every time, but it gives you a win. One in seven enough that keeps you going and hooked. So the AI or the robot is not going to be perfect, but it's going to pull away just enough to make you want to change, chase it. I think it's going to be scary when it truly understands human nature to be able to push back as much as needed, to give you rewards, as much as you need to stay addicted to it.

[Chris Camillo]

I know it's going to be scary. And I'm, you know, I'm glad I'm just an investor and I don't think about that stuff because honestly, when I go down that wormhole, it's depressing. It's depressing for me because I. I see what, what's happening and it's not. It's not good emotionally for people and like lifestyle. Like, you're saying no one. Yeah, no one. They're just staying single now. And I see so many people, like, because I read so many comments. The comments that I read more than anything else are like, I'm fine being single for the rest of my life. I see that all the time. They're like, I'm happier alone. I'm happier. People are like, they've given up. They just don't even deserve. Desire it. And that's what's messing with my head. Because you think about a dystopian future when the concept of a relationship as we've known it throughout our human history? Does that. Could that theoretically kind of go away when you could have children without being. You know what I'm saying? Like, you look at the way we have children now and with science, we can do that, I think, in 20 or 30 years with, without even doing any of the stuff anymore. So it's like, it's a really dystopian future. And I see it happening. I really do. I'm seeing it in comment data right now, and I kind of ignore it because it has nothing to do with investing. But I can't get away with. I can't get away from it.

[Graham Stephan]

Where do you think that's coming from? Where is the frustration underneath all of it? It didn't seem like this was like 15 years ago when I was in high school. None of. Of that was a thing because there's.

[Chris Camillo]

An echo chamber of people that are just as angry as you are and you're able to converse with them or read their comments and read their. Watch their videos. There's millions of these videos that are like, women are terrible. Guys are terrible, right? And then they just get in that echo chamber of we're not going to hook up with guys anymore, or like, we're done with women, we don't need women, we don't need to be married. You get nothing from it. Blah, blah, blah, you know, like. And listen, a lot of the points that people are making are valid on both sides. Both sides are valid. That's the problem is that intuitively when you read this stuff and you see these experiences that these people have had through marriage and relationships, you're like, I don't want that. Forget about that. And that's why I say it was nice a time when we were dumber and we didn't overthink everything and we just kind of did things that intuitively maybe don't make that much sense if you're overthinking them, but you end up having this really cool life that's dirty and messy and maybe your relationship isn't perfect and maybe kids is hard and they're not perfect, but like, at the end of the day, like, it's part of life. And like, I'm worried that we're overthinking everything because we have access to so much information and so much like, like engagement with each other of exposing all these thoughts all the time.

[Jack]

I agree. I think we could be overthinking things because you also. I run into the constant problem of having DOG come at me from every Direction, same sub subject matter. Two completely conflicting ideas about that subject matter. Telling me this is the truth. This is whether it comes to diet, whether it comes to dating, whether it comes to fashion, all of that stuff. And everyone has their own objectively correct opinion. And I also think there's maybe also a chance that we're not overthinking, but we're, we're producing just numb humans. What do you think? To the tune of people just spending and whittling their time away on social media and not really having to ask them themselves, what is the meaning of all of this? Because they can, I guess, find, you know, escape solitude and just go on their phone and pass time.

[Chris Camillo]

It, it is, but there are benefits to it too. We can all find our niches now. Yeah, it was very hard to, and hard to do that in the past. Like I talked about owning Collecticon and all these people, like they all have communities online, you know, and, and yeah, they end up consuming a lot, but a lot of what they consume is in their, in their niche, in their, their passion. Right, Whatever that, whatever that is. It might not be relatable for me, but I do feel that people can find. People don't feel that they're an outcast anymore. The outcast is going away because there's a community for everyone and you could find like minded people and you could hang out with those people whether it's digitally or consume their content. And there's like something joyous about consuming content of people that think like you and you don't feel alone right. In, in life because like there's a lot of people. So like, there are some positives here, is all I'm saying. There's positives and negatives. I mean, listen, I get to, I get to ingest robot content all the time. I'm friends with all the robot youtubers now, right? Like it's, it's awesome. And we're all robot nerds. And I'm like, I'm a hybrid investment nerd and a robot nerd and bring those worlds together. And by the way, like, getting back to the robot thesis, I think Tesla, most Tesla investors are not invested in Tesla for the robot division. That blows my mind. It hasn't even, it hasn't even like scratched the surface yet of Tesla investors.

[Graham Stephan]

People are seeing Elon Musk's timelines and that his inability to hit what he says and saying, okay, he's talking about robots. That's probably another 10 years from now. Let's not focus on that. He's still he still hasn't even gotten his full self driving. That's like, completely hands off. I could text on the phone and work on my computer and look back at the past passenger and, like, not have to keep my hand, like, on the wheel.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I, I love what you just said because that is the biggest, like, piece of information asymmetry ever in that. No. He cried wolf so many times like this one now that he actually is on to the biggest thing that's ever happened. No one believes him. I love, like, I think about it all the time. I'm like, I even. I was saying this a year and a half ago. I was like, no one is going to believe Elon and his humanoids because he already lost his reputation when it comes to timelines on autonomous driving. So, like, no one's going to believe him. And by the way, I'm not saying this is going to, like, happen overnight either, but it's not decades away.

[Graham Stephan]

I think people were disappointed when they saw his humanoid experience and humanoids were serving people alcohol. And it was obviously like a comedian behind, like, speaking with people.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, yeah, it was teleoperated, which, by the way, in the robot community, there's like, nothing wrong with that. Teleoperation is the gold standard in how we train robots using artificial intelligence. So you teleoperate the robot, but every millisecond of that performance of how the robot interacts with the human, what they do, the sensors in its fingers, the way that it walks, the way that it moves its arms, the reactions, that's all training an artificial intelligence model so that in the future you could have those exact robots in that exact setting without being teleoperated. The only way that they're going to learn how to do that on their own is either to go through a teleoperated training data set or put it in a simulated data set like they have in Nvidia. Nvidia has robotic simulated data sets. But, like, we have to train the robots. This is not an easy process, guys. Training robots to basically think like humans and act like humans and engagements with the real world environment around them is not an easy thing. That's going to take years. But it will happen. It will happen. And eventually we'll have generalized autonomous robots that can do anything. You can drop a thousand robots in a company, and the foreman could be like, I need you to do these tasks. And they'll be like, okay, can you show us how to do them so we know exactly how to do them? Like, yeah, my crew will show you how to do them for an hour, and then I want you to do them with the other 20 trucks. And they'll just go to work like that's going to be like. You won't have to train them more than that.

[Graham Stephan]

How does Google's quantum chip fit into this? Is this a part of the equation where their chip could somehow power these, like, way faster and make them way smarter? Or, or the, the two separate?

[Chris Camillo]

I think they're. I think they're separate. But the concept of quantum computing is super interesting when we think about just generally how we're going to advance artificial intelligence over the next decade, decade and a half. And the quicker we advance artificial intelligence, Artificial intelligence and robots go hand in hand. Remember, this is called embodied AI. It's the embodiment of artificial intelligence. There's no doubt that quantum computing, once we start to commercialize it, will further advance artificial intelligence, not just to be generalized, but to be super artificial intelligence. Right. So to have artificial intelligence that's actually smarter than humans, and when you combine that with autonomous robotics, you can really have wild things happen right on Earth. To me, what we can achieve with this is just wild. So as an investor, remember something, guys, I have never seen a point in my lifetime where we have pulled forward revenue as investors as aggressively as the last four years since the pandemic. So what I mean by that is when we have industries emerging, as soon as we start to see that this industry is developing and it's going to happen, we start to look at the revenue it will produce, like with Nvidia. And we don't have to wait 10 years for that company to grow into the valuation anymore. That valuation gets sucked forward, which is kind of interesting as an investor. So if you can catch something that's really large, it has a large total address. Addressable market, like physical labor is about a third of global gdp, believe it or not. And some people think that once we have infinite physical labor, that physical labor could be larger than our GDP today in 15 or 20 years. So this is the largest industry on Earth, theoretically. Not even theoretically, it is the largest industry on Earth. And if we crack the code, which we already have, it's just a matter of engineering scaling this out. Now, Wall Street's going to catch onto it very quickly, and I think they're going to pull forward those revenue models of what does it look like when you're. You're printing millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of robots, and they're being leased out at these rates because the value of the bot is that big, you're going to have companies that are massively larger than today's companies. That's why when I thr. I'm not like a Kathy Wood, I don't normally throw out big numbers. Like I threw out in January when I said Tesla could be a 10 trillion. Just their optimist division could be 10 trillion by the end of 2030. I thought about that tweet thread a long time before I hit the button to send it out. I was like, no, I really believe this. I really believe that that is real. And at the time Tesla was like a 400 billion company or 300, 200. It was like at its low. I really believe that. And I think fast forward a couple years. The concept of having these $10 trillion companies is not going to be that spectacular anymore or that seem that obscene. But the TAM is here. The total addressable market is gigantic.

[Graham Stephan]

How much does it affect it if the overall market right now is very expensive? When you look at it objectively, I mean the market, the PE ratio is only been this high in like the 1920s, 2000s.com bubble. A lot of people do say that we're in a bubble now and the market is too expensive and then it's overvalued. How does that play into all of your thesis? Or is that even something to be concerned about?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely possible. It's really. We're living in a very difficult time to assess what's coming in like 24 months, which is crazy. Like if you went back 15, 20 years ago, we can tell you exactly what's coming in 24 months. You could look at all the technologies and you could be like, there's no way this technology is going to grow more than this much in two years. Now try to assess the next 24 months. Do you have a clue? Do I can't even imagine. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the next 24 months. So we're living in a period of time where technology and innovation are accelerating at such a rapid pace that it's become almost impossible to predict what our world is going to look like in just two years time. So could we, we be in a bubble? Yeah, we could be, but we could also not even remotely be in a bubble when it comes to some of these new sectors like AI robotics. Right. If you think about the concentration of, of like productivity, like what, what happens to a company like Amazon if they have infinite physical labor? Just what, what, what happens to a company like that? You know, Amazon works off of very small margins. What happens if they can operate at meaningfully higher margins? Like, could you imagine, like, Amazon could be 10 times the size it is today. So we could be in an overall bubble. There might be a lot of companies that get crushed because of this new world that don't survive it. You know, I did. We did an episode on Dumb Money where it was like talking about all the SaaS companies, software companies, like, will any of these survive? Could we see a day in like 10 years where all the big SaaS companies basically go away, like Docusign and Salesforce? The list goes on and on? Well, a couple of these companies innovate with AI so aggressively that they become, you know, valid companies in the future. The rest of them just go away. And all this gets wrapped up to a very small number of comp. Like, look. Look at what's happened the last five years. A small number of companies have assessed all the markets cap. Does that continue? Maybe. If so, maybe both things are right. Maybe we're in a bubble for a lot of companies, but for other companies, we're nowhere near where they're going to end up in like 10 years.

[Graham Stephan]

Where does bitcoin fit into all of this and what is your thought on?

[Chris Camillo]

Man, Bitcoin is one of those things. I'm always a guy. It's like, I'll never pretend to know everything. And I've thought so much about bitcoin over the past 10 years and I always come to the same conclusion. I just don't know. I don't have any thesis on bitcoin except for one, and it's a strong thesis, and it has nothing to do with the viability of bitcoin or whether it should be higher or lower, or whether it will actually be meaningful to our society over the next 20 years or be completely irrelevant. My thesis revolves around the fact that the young generation does believe in crypto and bitcoin, period. Period. Whether they should or shouldn't does not matter. As an investor, they do. In my generation, we had gold bugs and I always made fun of them. Okay? I was actually sitting next to Steve Forbes a couple months ago at lunch and I was making fun of gold bugs to the table, completely forgetting that he is the biggest gold bug ever. I was so embarrassed. And we had a laugh over it. But I was like. And I told him. I was like. I was like, Steve is like. Like, the gold bugs used to be weird people. You're a weird. I told him, like, you're a weird guy, dude. Like, like, gold Bugs have always been weird old guys. You know, they're like, with these and they're like, oh, you know, inflation, blah, blah, blah. I was like, now it's. No, it's not weird to be a bitcoin guy. In fact, it's cool to be one. It's generally accepted. In fact, the entire young generation are all crypto guys. I run, I speak to everybody day, right? So you're going to have what, 80,000,100. I've seen numbers as high as $115 trillion of wealth transferred over the next couple decades, two and a half decades. As that wealth gets transferred over, it is undeniable that a decent portion of that younger generation is going to choose to have some portion of their portfolio or their wealth either directly at their magic themselves or their wealth manager is going to do it for them who are also young because everyone's younger, right? In the next generation generation. And now that we've institutionalized these products, I don't see how bitcoin doesn't continue to massively grow just as a result of wealth transfer and nothing else. Nothing else. That's my thesis. That's why I'm aggressively invested in bitcoin. I'm still worried about the safety of bitcoin, right? The security of it. Willow is like one example. It's not, it's not unsafe now. It's not unsecured, secure now. But things are going to have to happen over the next 10 or 15 years to keep it a secure asset class. I'm also concerned about regulatory. But right now, the regulatory environment looks good. So unless that changes, that's not a concern for me. So right now all I know is that every year more young people are going to get wealthier and more older people, I hate to say it, are no longer going to be holding their wealth. They're going to, you know what old people do? They get older and then they go away. I mean, it's just the reality of our lives. And is that not the only thesis that matters at the end of the day? So, like, we don't have to overthink bitcoin.

[Graham Stephan]

So how could somebody watching follow in your footsteps? Where would you recommend they start?

[Chris Camillo]

I mean, I have that old book. I think my publisher pays me like a quarter every time they sell. It's out of print now, but you can still buy them on Amazon. It's still a valid book. It's laughing at Wall Street. It's the name of my book from 2010. Obviously we have Dumb Money. Dumb Money. Live my Twitter account Chris Camillo. But I've done so many podcasts like this. I've done so many interviews. If you want to go down this, the social arb kind of rabbit hole, there's a ton of content on social arb out there. Now honestly, my favorite is the chapter that Jack Schwager wrote about me and unknown market wizards, which is a book that's come out every eight or nine years about the top trademark traders in the world. He wrote a 34 page chapter about mind style of investing. And in that chapter he did a better job explaining what I do than I can explain myself. Somehow he's just a better writer, I guess, than I am. So you can read about social arb trading, but at the end of the day you just have to start, just do it. And here's my biggest thing I want to talk about. The biggest thing that separates the those with a lot of wealth from those that don't have wealth is risk capital. People don't think they can afford to have risk capital in their life and that's just wrong. So like I turned in three years, I turned 20,000 to 2 million. That's a hundred times your money. Now not everyone's gonna be able to do that, but you can do that over 20, 30 years. Definitely. But you could only do it if you are aggressively investing that money in things you really believe in.

[Graham Stephan]

What's the difference between that and gambling? That's where my mind.

[Chris Camillo]

It's not everything that we talked about. Did it sound like gambling or did it sound like intuitively paying attention to.

[Graham Stephan]

The world difference between you who I think is way smarter than me, not.

[Chris Camillo]

I barely graduated high school. You got to remember that I told you that. Like I'm not.

[Jack]

I think.

[Graham Stephan]

Well, here's, here's the difference is that I think you look at it from a very logical standpoint. And most people do not go in with the passion that you, you do for finding those opportunities. Most people go in for the sole purpose of getting rich as quickly as possible while, while, you know, operating on fear.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

And it's the fear of I don't want to lose my money or I want a fear of missing out on this and I'm going to go and throw my money in that. Oh no, it didn't work sell or something's going up. I don't want to miss out on that buy.

[Chris Camillo]

All I can say is there are people that have been following my story now for like, I don't know, 12 years, following us on YouTube for eight years. That are just regular people. Some of them are UPS drivers, some of them are dentist, some of them are, you know, homemakers. Every profession in my community, and I've watched them literally over years go from being totally intimidated by investing or, like, doing all the stupid stuff, to now just finding things in their everyday life that they are like, this is a big deal for this company and then putting a lot of money in it. And they text me all the time, they DM me. They're like, chris, you're not going to believe how much money I made this year. I literally, for the first time in my life, I made half as much money from my brokerage account than I made from my real job. I'm like, I know, I remember. I was there. And then one year you're going to make more, and then you're going to be like, how the hell this happened? You were just a regular Joe. And 12 years later, you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from your poor portfolio. I know for a fact that every, any human on earth can do what I do, because I've seen it. Not just from me, I've seen it amongst all these normal, regular, just normies that have done it. Watch YouTube, watch, don't watch the guys that are hawking stuff on you, but, like, actually watch people that talk about real things on YouTube. You watch me. Just do it. It's not hard. I'm reading my book if you want. I mean, just do it. Just start investing. The thing is, you have to immerse yourself in this world. There's nothing more important, guys. There's nothing more important than being part of the investor class for one's financial life. It's not an option. It's not like, should I start investing? Oh, it's not a question. You better darn start investing right now. You better go get a Robinhood account or get whatever, right? Just start doing it. I promise you. Don't do anything stupid. No meme coins, none of that stupid stuff, right? Just invest in companies. Live your life, Start connecting dots, start looking for trends, start looking for, like, how is culture evolving? How is consumerism changing? Like, we, as normal people have our, like, feet in the real world in a way that people on Wall street just don't. We see things before them. We are we. The market is rigged in our advantage because we can see the world changing in a way that people that work on Wall street just can't. They're reading data that's weeks and months old. We're seeing it evolve in Real time and just start doing it. Make mistakes, lose a little money here and there, right? No big deal.

[Jack]

So what then to you separates the people that are successful at investing versus the people that fail at it?

[Chris Camillo]

You just have to have a long term mindset. You have to know that you're not good at, have you ever been good at anything when you first started? Like, but at the end of the day, as long as you're putting money in the market and not doing crazy, weird stuff, I don't know how you, I literally don't know how you lose over the long term. Like, like, if you're not doing weird, crazy stuff, you're, I don't know how you freaking lose at this game. It's just a matter of how big you win. And the more you do it, the more aggressive you get, the more comfortable you get. We were like, you know what? I just made all that money because I saw that, that this Apple phone was gonna be a big deal and no one else realized it. And next time I'm gonna put more money in, next time I'm gonna add a few stock options, I'm gonna learn how to do stock options. I'm gonna put a little bit of leverage in, right? You're like, you have to bucket your money. That's the big thing. Nobody knows how to bucket their money. Every individual on earth needs to have a big money account where they take money that is not their retirement. Not for vacations, not for education. Take money that they ordinarily would have blown on something random, right? And say, you know, what is it worth me clipping a $2 coupon? Maybe not. But if you look at that, every dollar, like a hundred dollars. If that $2 coupon is $200, is it worth clipping? Now, see, I think of every dollar, like $100. Cause I know I can take that dollar, invest it aggressively like rich people do, and grow it 100x over some period of time. If you think like that, all of a sudden you find yourself clipping, flipping coupons. All of a sudden you find yourself mowing your own grass. Because you're going to take that money that you saved by mowing your own grass and you're going to put it in that big money account. Not your normal brokerage account, but an account where you get to invest like wealthy people do, not worrying about it, not worrying about losing it, right? Maybe there's a startup, maybe there's a guy in your, from your college or from your work who's really smart and doing ambitious things. Look for those people in your life, are they starting a company? Go start hanging out at your local startup accelerator, listening to real. You know, there's people in life, they're out there doing crazy things, right? They're just working harder than everyone else. They're taking big risks or starting companies. Every major city has, like, an incubator where you can go listen to founders talk, and you could start meeting entrepreneurs. Just, like, meet them. Just maybe you start investing in startups. You know, hit one startup that could be 200 times your money, right? So, like, but that's the world that anybody can be in if they want to be in it. You don't have to be wealthy to be in that world. You don't have to invest. You can just start hanging out with those people and speaking to them. Meanwhile, you're cutting. You're, you know, you're mowing your own lawn, you're clipping coupons. And instead of, like, I always say, like, hey, you want to buy the 800 TV? Would you wait a year? And instead of $800, I guarantee that TV will be 600 bucks. Like, well, nah, 200 bucks. I'd rather have the TV this whole year. But what if that 200 is 20k now? Would you wait a year? Well, I'd wait a year for 20k. All of a sudden you're going to start delaying purchases to save a little bit of money. So all the stuff that you talk about doing becomes a lot more interesting. Like, a lot of people might look at the stuff that you do and be like, graham is too frugal for me, man. I'm just not doing it. I don't care about saving a buck here or there. But if every one of Those dollars is $100, all of a sudden they start doing all the stuff that you say to do. You know how you have all those YouTube accounts of people talking how to save money in a million different ways that all of a sudden becomes really appealing. If every one of those dollars is a hundred bucks, and if so, if you take that money, I call it other people's money. It's money that was never yours. You were going to spend it or you're going to give it to someone else. But you made a decision to get your haircut every four weeks or five weeks instead of every three, three weeks, you save a little bit of money there. But that money goes in your big money account. And that money you use to aggressively invest, you're not like investing in the S P500. You're investing in individual stocks. Or maybe a little controversial. Maybe you invest with leverage, maybe invest on margin, you know, maybe you buy maybe earm ups.

[Jack]

Jack, tell me more.

[Chris Camillo]

But here's the thing.

[Jack]

How can I borrow even more?

[Chris Camillo]

But here's the thing. If you're borrowing money that's part of your retirement account, maybe that's a problem. If you're borrowing money that's in an account that's designed to be high risk, high reward, right? I have that account. Like everyone should have that account. Even if it starts with only $5 in it. Because it's shocking how quickly that account can grow over time. Shocking. Believe me, I, I, I've seen it. Not in my own account, but like in all these other accounts and people in my community. And like I don't do coaching. I don't take, like, I don't generate, you know this, I don't generate any money for Mike Mini. I don't do any of that stuff. Like I don't sell a single thing to anyone. I'm just like, dude, I'll tell you what I'm investing in. If, if you share your ideas with me, I'll share them with you. And by the way, I made more money from YouTube. People don't realize this. I've made more money from YouTube than almost any YouTuber. But I mean make no money from YouTube advertising or sponsors. I've never taken a sponsorship. But the ideas that I get from my community on stocks I've probably made $40 million from. You know, so it's like I extract value out of the ideas that people that watch our channel and comment. That's sound kind of weird, right? But like the community is what I make money off of. Like thrice ideas.

[Graham Stephan]

Honestly, your enthusiasm gets me so pumped up. Like we're filming this right now. It's midnight. I know it's midnight.

[Jack]

I'm ready to load up the Robin.

[Graham Stephan]

Hood account right now on a Monday night. And I'm like pumped, right?

[Chris Camillo]

Wait till you see the robots, man. When you see the robots, you are really going to get jacked. No, it's, I want everybody listen. If there was one word of advice I'd have for people right now, it's do your homework on robots. Do your homework on humanoids. Just do your homework. Watch the videos, just do your homework. Go out, don't listen to me. Spend 30 hours just researching humanoid bots and watch the channels. There are a few really cool like YouTube channels that are tracking this stuff. Watch them so that you're mentally prepared. If and when you choose to make an investment and whether it's Tesla for their humanoids or some other company.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah. Could you do us a favor? Could you send me the best resources that someone could look at for humanoid robots and we'll link them in the, in the description. Michael Saylor gave us a whole bunch of resources that people could look at for Bitcoin and he listed them out like, go look at this and this and this and this and watch this video. We'll link to that in the description and just make it easy on someone that if they want to learn, just tell us the best resources that the average person could just go read or watch or listen to. Done something.

[Chris Camillo]

These guys are my friends. I'll list them for you.

[Graham Stephan]

Yeah, thank you.

[Chris Camillo]

Absolutely.

[Graham Stephan]

I'm curious how you balance doing all of this with also having a family and two kids.

[Chris Camillo]

Oh, it's easy because like I, I, you have to remember that it, this is, I trade on this. Like, I don't have screens, I don't study finance. Like, I just have fun with it. Right. So it's like it's the easiest social arb. Trading is the easiest thing in the world to do because I can do it in the middle of the night. Right. I told you, after my kids go to bed at 10 is when I do most of my research, like 10, 10pm to 2am I'm not totally consumed. I don't want, I don't read the Wall Street Journal, I don't watch cnbc. I don't, like, I'm not on stock boards and stuff like that. I don't trade. I don't have to, like, I don't care if the market's open or shut. Like, I don't even check my account. Some days, believe it or not, people are like blown away by that. I'm like, there are days when I don't even check my brokerage account. In fact, one thing I suggest everyone does is try to go three days without checking your brokerage account. It is the greatest thing you'll ever do in your life. Just go three days, don't check it. You might be up, you might be down. You don't need to look at your stocks. You don't need to do it. Occasionally you do. You really don't need to do it. Like with my type of investing, there's nothing that's going to happen day in or day out that I need to be looking at my stocks.

[Jack]

How often do you check your brokerage account?

[Graham Stephan]

Multiple times a day. Question. But in fairness, I Wake up and it's my routine before I get out of bed. I buy stocks, I buy index. Basically I buy three ETFs every morning in the same amount, no matter what, before I get out of bed. And then I like to check them.

[Chris Camillo]

Throughout the year, pouring more money into equities, which is like the most genius thing anybody can do. Like if you just do that alone. In fact, we should do a whole episode sometime about the triple leveraged ets because we did an episode years ago on this and we did a ton of research and we have a really strong thesis on this, that it might, might actually be the best investment that anybody can ever make over long term.

[Graham Stephan]

It works when it works and it doesn't when it doesn't. That's because I've looked into the same thing. There's like a 2x because technically the best investment over a 20 year time frame was like a 2 to 3x leveraged S&P 500. And the drawdowns were significant, but the upside was massive. But my point being is that like maybe there's, there's a theory over the next 10 years, if we see a stagnant market or a lost decade, where we see decade over decade -10% from where we are today, that is going to crush you.

[Chris Camillo]

Yes, that is true. That is true. But generally the concept is if you have a lost decade and you're continuing to contribute to it over the time period that when it eventually comes. So it's all about time. It's all about duration. Your time duration. Right. And it ha. It's only right for people, people that have a ultra long time duration. And I think there's always going to be some level of risk reward. But if you have a designated bucket for that, you understand the tail risk involved with that. And your duration is really long and you don't want to spend the time to stock pick. There's something about that. Because if you look at the history of it, it's fascinating.

[Graham Stephan]

I could see that potentially making sense if someone's in their 20s.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah.

[Graham Stephan]

Not planning to retire until. Until 60 and they're disciplined enough not to sell and to keep contributing no matter what. And like you said, basically does not check their account. But just like every month throwing whatever they do.

[Chris Camillo]

It's not a total portfolio of philosophy. Right. It's not something you don't want to have your whole portfolio in that strategy. But there's something really interesting in it as a way to supercharge returns with a bucket. With a bucket of money. I'm kind of fascinated, fascinated by it. And I'm also a true believer in just like the asset classes over the long term. Yeah, there are some scenarios like Japan and whatnot, where you have lost decades. There are risk factors, tail risk anyway.

[Graham Stephan]

But I'm just ultra conservative. Like I still, I buy treasuries, I have the tax free muni bonds. I, I incorporate everything in my.

[Chris Camillo]

But do you have. Graham, do you have a, a high risk bucket?

[Graham Stephan]

No.

[Chris Camillo]

That's a problem. That's a real problem.

[Graham Stephan]

I don't think so. I'm happy. Just like if, if I could just lock in 5% a year, I'd be thrilled. The next 20 years I'd be set. I'm so happy with that.

[Chris Camillo]

But you don't know the degree of happiness of having a high risk bucket. It's so fun. But it has to be bucketed. You have to be able to bucket it separately. So you have to develop a different mentality. Mentality around what? That bucket?

[Graham Stephan]

Well, for me that's a bitcoin etf. Okay, that I guess is my high risk bucket. But I see that as like a 20 year. It could go to zero or it could be something. But I like the Bitcoin ETFs. It was very easy. I buy in.

[Chris Camillo]

Risk capital is magical. It's the one thing that I paid attention to my whole life. And I look at all the wealthiest people in my network and so many of them have done nothing but have risk capital. That's all they've had.

[Graham Stephan]

Could that be survivors leadership bias?

[Chris Camillo]

Perhaps. Perhaps, yeah. And that's an important factor. But risk capital is almost a necessity to building great wealth over some reasonable period of time. And obviously it's what you do with it. Right. But if you don't even have it, it's like you're not even even in the game. So I just think it's really important for people to find a way to have risk capital and to properly bucket that as risk capital and not intermingle. Intermingle the risk capital with other capital.

[Graham Stephan]

What percentage? Like if someone, let's say hypothetically has a million dollars, that's, that's their net worth. Between a house savings, 401k, investing taxable, like what percentage of that should be allocated to risk capital in your opinion?

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, I don't think. I would never answer a question generically because every individual is totally different. Right. So it's like when you say a million dollars, you can have a person, the answer should be zero in that case. In other cases, it could be 50%. Because every person has a different level of a different objective in life, right? Like I'll give you an example. Like for me, I have a very strong objective to build a billion dollar foundation for pediatric cancer, leuk, leukemia and autism, right? And so for me it makes sense for me to have a very large risk capital bucket because it's the only way I'm going to achieve that life goal. Another person, like Dave, for example, I tried to get Dave to put more money into one of our robot companies. I was like, I don't understand Dave. You have all the same information that I have right now. Why are you not putting more money? And his answer like really threw me off and made a lot of sense. He was like, I don't know what I would do with the money. He's like, why would I put more money at risk when I get no benefit from having the additional capital if what we think is going to happen happens? I wouldn't do anything with that money. I have no objective for that extra money, Chris. So there's no reason for me to even do that. And I was like, I was like. It reminded me that we all have different like goals and like we all think differently. Like he has zero need to build wealth beyond what he already has. He just wants to live his life. I told you, he's not here. He's in Africa. You know, he's just having.

[Graham Stephan]

Life, happy travels. Wakes up, no kids, no. Just could sleep in every morning. Just a very low key, just nice, friendly.

[Chris Camillo]

Meanwhile, when he went off to Africa, I had to drive four boys to a Zach Brian concert in Tulsa, which is a five hour drive in the rain. Last Friday night, got two hours sleep because they kept me up all night throwing Crocs in the room over my bed and then at 6:30 in the morning drive them home because a couple of them had.

[Graham Stephan]

You could have had a robot do that for you.

[Chris Camillo]

I know, right? But like that's the difference between my life and Dave's life. Like Paul, polar opposite. But you know what? I loved it, man. I loved it. It was ridiculous, but it was chaotic. I still not recovered from not having sleep that weekend.

[Graham Stephan]

But how do you make sure your kids don't grow up spoiled man?

[Chris Camillo]

I think about that every day. That's the one thing I think about more than anything else. Wealth destroys lives if it's not properly managed. I do not want to steal that from for my kids. Like my greatest moments in life. I have a picture of me and my wife with our first washing machine and dryer. And I remember that like it was yesterday. We were so proud that we can afford to buy our own washer and dryer. We got it from like Costco. It was a photograph of it. And then like her parents got us a mini washer and dryer, like miniature thing that we put on the shelf. I was like, how stupid was that? But like we were so, so happy. Like buying that washer dryer set was so happy. I was like, there are so many kids that will never experience the joy of making a purchase like that because by the time they're like 18, like what? Like I'm just would have that right. I was like, I never want to steal that joy from my kids. So I will never give them anything. Like honestly like that. That's my goal is to like now I don't get to choose that. Because when you're married you don't get to like unilaterally make, make choices. And so I have very strong opinions, but I'm only half of that decision. Right. My wife. So like we haven't quite figured it all out. But the one thing I love that I think a lot of people don't appreciate are charitable foundations. So all these people that have trust funds that are managed by attorneys and you have to be managed all this bs. Like the magical thing about having a charitable foundation is you can grow it as long large as you want. It will never go anywhere, it will always grow. And it grows tax free, which is super cool. And you're allowed to take a reasonable compensation for managing the foundation, for allocating the 5% that has to get distributed every year, and for choosing, you know, what mutual funds it's in. Right. And so you could allow your children to take over a charitable foundation that you've set up and they legally can only, only take a reasonable salary for the rest of their life. And health insurance, legally, if they ever take more than that, they can go to prison. So it's like this beautiful thing that exists that I think is a really good tool if you want to ensure that your kids are not going to go destitute, that they can have health insurance, that they can kind of take a reasonable salary, but probably not nearly enough that would keep them happy in life. And it's something that they don't have to do as a full time job. They're still motivated to go out and build a life for themselves and build careers, to generate real money for themselves and learn how to invest. But they do have somewhat of like a backstop there, right? And my big issue guys is that it's not like it used to be. I think the future generation of the haves and the have nots are no longer kids that just worked really hard and got into really good careers. I hate to say this, I think the future generation of have and have nots are the ones that inherit the most. Because when you look going back to that conversation about the what, 80 trillion now some people are saying 115 trillion because the inflation keeps popping up. When you think about either getting a few million bucks or not getting a few million bucks, that's the difference between the next generation of kids that are either living, living this life or living this life. That kills me. It never used to be like that. Never. There were the kids that had like trust funds were like far and few between. Back in my day, like I didn't even know anyone that had a. I remember I met the first kid that had a trust fund when I went to smu. No surprise, right? But even then there weren't that many kids at smu, which is like one of the wealthiest schools in the country that had hedge funds. In my surroundings circle now I look at my neighbors in my neighborhood, which is a really nice neighborhood, and I hear a lot of the parents talking about trust. I'm like, do all your kids have trust funds? What the is going on? Is that just normal now? And I'm starting to realize that it's not even just a trust fund. The inheritances are insane. Think about how many people are multi millionaires now. Just regular people and all Ohio just through the appreciation of their house. Okay, so your parents either have a house that's worth 1.2 million and you're going to get that that value or you don't like that could be the biggest differentiator for the next generation. That's very weird.

[Graham Stephan]

A lot of that's going to be sold for end of life care depending on how long people live. Medical ailments maybe not.

[Chris Camillo]

I don't think so. I mean, yes, yes, some of it will be. Some of it will be. You're right, some of it will be. But I'm not quite sure that much of it will be because we still have health insurance. Like there's still insurance, right? So that does take care of most end of life care. Maybe not as good as some people would like it to be. I think we're entering a new age of have and have nots. Purely based on class system, based on the degree of inheritance. Inheritance you get when your Family dies. I, I true, I think about this all the time. And the reason for that is I was like, I've always had this thought that I would give my kids zero, but like, if I give them zero, am I really, like, it's not like it used because in my world it's like, you work hard, you get a good job, and you build your life slowly over time. That's the, that's the environment I grew up in. But what if that doesn't exist in 20 years, you know what I'm saying? Like, what if that doesn't exist and like the majority of people in America are getting some level of inheritance and I was too rigid, you know what I'm saying? Like, so you have to kind of factor all that stuff in and it's, it's a lot to think about when you become a parent because it's a big decision to make. You don't want to ruin your kids lives by stealing joy from them of achieving things on their own. But if the world is changing and like our economy is changing such that it's normalized, that everybody has a starting point, that's here. And because we all started here, we literally start all ramen noodles. Like, dude, my first apartment was like 400 something a month. Like, I, I literally didn't have a car for a while because it broke down and I couldn't fix it. I was taking buses to work. You know, like, that's how it was in my day. Like, but that's just not how it is anymore. And as much as I hate that, that's just life. So you can't fight the truth. And so maybe there is a starting point that is a reasonable starting point that you should think about allowing or permitting your kids to start at that starting point. Is that an inheritance? Is it a trust fund? Is it taking over foundation where they can earn income? I'm still trying, me and my, we're still trying to figure it out. We don't have the answer.

[Graham Stephan]

The one thing I've found is that a lot of the parents that are wealthy that we have on the podcast, their kids turn out so well. When the kids start working for the parents or under them, different jobs or careers and the parents put them to work like your children, you could have them come up with their own investing strategies. Give them, hey, you get $1,000 because you helped me on this thing. You earned $1,000 from this. Figure out where to invest it. Let's do it together. Oh, you lost it. Where did you go wrong on that. How could you learn from that? Like, Ben Molluskid, such a standup act, and he's, like, working with Ben on these properties and, like, being there with contractors or Grant Cardone's daughter. My gosh. Sabrina. She's going and speaking at his gigs and, like, you know, doing sales calls. It's like, it's really impressive.

[Chris Camillo]

What?

[Graham Stephan]

He's kind of thrown her into this, and she loves it.

[Jack]

They also seem to have a lot of interest in that, though.

[Graham Stephan]

Oh, that's true.

[Jack]

I think it would be hard to.

[Chris Camillo]

Okay, I was going to say, say that. Yeah, guys, that's my dream. I would love to do it with my kids so much. You have no idea. Like, I see. I. I see Grant Cardone, and I'm like, oh, that they got a great relationship. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, by the way, like, I have an awesome relationship, but it's not that. And maybe they're 14, right? Maybe that's too early. And I don't want to push them too hard because, like, I feel if I push them too hard too early, they will revolt against it. And so, like, I want them to come to me if they. If there's ever a point where I can engage with them like that perfectly professionally, especially as it relates to investing you. Believe me, I think about all that. I want. I want it really bad. But listen, I also pushed them to watch Goonies when they were way too young and they were like, they didn't love it. I'm like, oh, we pushed on them too young. I should have waited a couple more years. So now I'm really careful to let them live their life and let them pursue what they want to pursue and let them come to me, and I would love to have that day.

[Graham Stephan]

They're probably the best trendsetters out there. Whatever they're into, chances are if they get in early enough stuff.

[Chris Camillo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jack]

Lastly, what is the secret to a healthy and happy marriage?

[Chris Camillo]

Oh, wow. That. That's a. That's a tough one, man. I think you're always still trying to figure it out. Like, I don't think anyone, like, ever has the ultimate answer. Like, I've been married for a long time, and I have a lot of friends. Been married a long time and a lot of divorces. And I feel like you're always just trying, trying to figure it out. But I would say what's really important is you have to find peace with yourself. You have to find peace with yourself. I think you got to work more on yourself than your marriage. I think if people are working on themselves and they're happy, intuitively happy. And they have a sense of purpose and they have a positive, happy life for themselves. I think it makes it a lot easier for you to come. Come together in that way as a marriage because you could focus on all the relationship stuff and that's important. But I think a lot of the core problems come from that are that they're internal problems that one of the people in the marriage have, right? So you both have to support each other and like pursue your own thing, whatever that means. It's like it's different for every single person, right? But a lot of the people I look at that have had failed marriages, like, I realized that, like they were not in a good place themselves. Like, forget about the marriage moment because you can never get in front of someone in between someone's marriage and know what's happening. But the individual person was not in a good place.

[Graham Stephan]

Was it one or both of them?

[Chris Camillo]

It could be one. It could be one. I think you both have to be in a good place, right? So like, if you have one person that's not in a good place, that could destroy everything. But I don't have all the answers, guys. When it comes to that is like the hardest qu. That is such. That is such a hard. Like I. I've always like pride myself to say, like to not pretend I know things that I don't know. And I honestly, I still like in addition to my own relationship and stuff, which you're always working on. It never ends. You're never like, hey, we're good in perpetuity forever. It's always like, you're always working on it. I watch because I'm on TikTok so much. Like, I watch a lot of relationships. TikTok like a TikTok of the sexes. You know, a lot of male anti. Female TikTok, a lot of female anti. I love. I don't know what it is. I love watching it. And I'm just like, gosh, it's. I mean, there's just like. I don't know how to solve this problem. It's a huge problem right now. Humanoid robots expect, I think, expectations. I think if I had to answer your question, Keep your expectations reasonable for humans.

[Graham Stephan]

That's fair.

[Chris Camillo]

Just humans. I would say one thing I'm really good at is I have great relationships with my friends, like going all the way back to high school. My wife can't. But she's like, I can't believe you're still so close with all of those Friends from high school and college, they're like, some of them are so crazy. And some of them, I'm like, you know what? I accept them and I have reasonable expectations from my friends, right? And I, A lot of times women will have expectations for their friends that are like here, that can never be met. Like, I think having reasonable expectations for your friends, for your spouse, for your kids, for your business associates, and not like expecting them to do things that are just unreasonable. Because, like, we're all different at the end of the day, right? Like, a lot of this conversation has been like, we don't all think the same, we don't all want the same things. I can't tell you what to do with a million dollars because your million might have a very different objective from your million because you might want very different things from him. He might be like, hey, if I don't, if I don't, if I'm not a billionaire, I'm not happy. If I'm not on my way to becoming a billionaire, I'm not happy. You may be like, I don't even want that. So like you, you can't have the same financial plan Every, everyone's financial, financial plan needs to be totally different. One thing I do like for people in terms of financial plan, I only manage one person's money in my whole life. It's my parents money. And I love this concept. Nasim Taleb talked about it a little bit and I think it was like black swan. But it's this Barbell theory of investing where you don't ever invest in anything in the middle. I know you're in lots of middle stuff, but like, you literally only invest in two things. You invest at the opposite spectrum. So you have extreme risks, risk assets, which are basically just growth equity, high growth equities, and then you have treasury and nothing else in between. And the concept is that everything that sits in between has a tail risk that the market underappreciates or doesn't fully acknowledge. Meaning there's always going to be some event that we can't anticipate that has the capacity to take down municipal bonds. We just haven't seen it yet, right? There's, there's some tail risk event that could take down everything in the middle. So why don't we invest the money that we needs to be safe in the safest thing that we know exists? Like a Covid or something treasury, like a Tre. You know, a Treasury is going to generate this much interest, right? And then you invest the rest of your money in, in the world. In the world continuing to go on like it always has and growing, which would be growth assets, growth equity. Right. Technology. And as long as we don't have some weird thing happen that is going to continue to grow excessively and then this is going to be what it is. So the only decision you ever have to make is how much I put at this end of the barbell and how much I put this in the barbell. What I love about that, it's not good for me, but for people like my parents, they don't have to think about anything. The only thing they ever to think about is at 7, 30, 60, 40, 50, 50, 40, 60. And as you age, it becomes more. As your timeline gets smaller, maybe you shift more of it over here. Yeah, right. And it's like it's the simplest money management, like wealth management strategy that nobody ever does. Nobody does this. Everybody overthinks everything and over complicates it. How much should I have in bonds? How much do I have in this asset class? How much do I have in real estate? How much do I like? What if you just stuck with the safest thing in the world and the least safest thing asset class and just invested in those two things and all you got to do is configure how much goes in each thing. I love it for like a certain type of person. Love it.

[Graham Stephan]

Well, thank you so much.

[Jack]

Yeah. This has been an incredible.

[Graham Stephan]

Tony Hawk. This has been Tony Hawk.

[Chris Camillo]

How about, how about Jeremy Piven?

[Graham Stephan]

Jeremy Piven, thank you so much for coming on and we really appreciate it.

[Jack]

We're definitely going to have to do a part two because I do want to talk about those leverages index funds. Absolutely.

[Graham Stephan]

Earmuffs, Jack.

[Chris Camillo]

They have, they have white papers on it. You can go deep. You can go really, really deep.

[Graham Stephan]

We're going to link to everything down below in the description along with your YouTube channel as well.

[Chris Camillo]

This is fun.

[Jack]

And the resources that you said to learn.

[Graham Stephan]

Yes. Yeah, absolutely everything is going to be in the description. Thank you so much. Like subscribe if you haven't done it already. And until next time.