← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Exposed: The Wall Street SCAM Hiding In Plain Sight -- And How It's Robbing You | Chris Josephs PT 2
00:47:24
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- [00:01]
Chris Josephs
Get that Amex gold cart ready.
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Tom Bilyeu
I'm way too tired to cook tonight.
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Commercial Announcer
You read my mind. With the gold cart, we can get up to $120 a year in statement credits. Are you feeling the Cheesecake Factory? Five guys? Either of those sound good?
- [00:15]
Chris Josephs
Yes.
- [00:16]
Commercial Announcer
Which one? Both pay with the gold card to receive up to $10 a month in statement credits at participating partners Uncover more ways to reward yourself@americanexpress.com explored gold enrollment required terms apply.
- [00:30]
Tom Bilyeu
If you work in university maintenance. Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time
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Chris Josephs
left on the clock.
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Tom Bilyeu
So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. This is part two of my conversation with Autopilot co founder Chris Josephs. If you're just joining us, make sure you go back and listen to part one, because things are about to get wild and you're going to want that context. In this episode, we get into how members of Congress are leveraging public perception, how AI is helping decode political market signals, and and why the trading activity you're not seeing might be the most important of all of it. Let's jump right back in. So given your interaction with Millennials, Gen Z, what do you see as the future of crypto? You made passing reference to it as like I'm going to rug the next guy, dog eat dog. What? What's the vibe? What does crypto mean to them?
- [01:45]
Chris Josephs
Crypto means the way to get rich. I think for the easiest way to think about it, the attention spans, the the expectations, I think of younger people. I'm on the cusp of Gen Z Millennial. I still am millennial. But I grew up watching people get rich with crypto. I think crypto is the ticket to get out of ticket to get rich, where if you were to give people an option, you got a 25 year old sitting in front of you, you give them option to buy bitcoin and you give them option to buy the S&P 500. I think nine times out of 10, if they're if they know the space and they know what bitcoin is, I think nine times out of ten they buy bitcoin as opposed to the s and P500. Why? Because I think they see bitcoin as the higher risk, higher reward, and the only way to live the life that you want to live at 35, 40, it's not to go slave away and make, you know, however X money at a corporate cubicle. It's you got to do something else. Is it side hustles maybe? Is it buying bitcoin and then bitcoin a hundred X's like it's been doing for the past ten years? Maybe, but that is what they're choosing. And I think crypto represents the get rich quick. Not necessarily get rich quick might be a little bit extreme. The crypto represents the way to get out of your socioeconomic path much faster and at a higher chance than stocks in S&P 500, things like that.
- [03:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. Okay. Yes, that makes sense. So do you guys have any sort of data on how younger millennials and Gen Z are investing their investable dollars? Is it like some massive amount is going to crypto?
- [03:25]
Chris Josephs
So I on Autopilot, we don't have any crypto portfolios.
- [03:29]
Tom Bilyeu
They have crypto trackers.
- [03:32]
Chris Josephs
So here, let me take it back. We do have portfolios, but we have portfolios in crypto of like, you know, like unusual whales. Is a portfolio on Autopilot called the. The companies that own crypto on their balance sheet portfolio. Lack of a better way like MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy, Tesla, GameStop didn't do this, but there were rumors that GameStop was going to add bitcoin to their balance sheet. And we have portfolios like that. Another portfolio is a guy by Wolf Financial. He's a big guy on Twitter. He's awesome. He has a portfolio called the crypto bull portfolio and he created a basket of stocks that he will benefit from crypto, coinbase, Robin Hood, MicroStrategy, again, some of these mining companies. So we have access to those and those are pretty popular, to be honest. But on the actual kind of numbers of however much percentage are investing in cryptos, Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, Verse, Stocks, S&P 500, Tesla, Apple, I don't have the numbers on that, but I mean, I would wonder what ChatGPT and them would say. But my, my intuition, my instinct is that the younger people are investing more and more in crypto and I think Robinhood's data on that shows it. Their product roadmap shows it. Coinbase is one of the most popular apps. Cash app has a crypto at angle. They're not. These companies are not marketing. Come in and buy Apple and hold it for a hundred years. They're coming in and marketing. You can buy any crypto you want on our platform. And Trump, you know, the Trump coin, that doesn't help, you know, but that narrative I think is becoming more and more relevant, especially in the Gen Z era.
- [05:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. That is watching people grapple with the fundamental structure of the money system, not knowing why it feels so broken, but reaching for the things that they see be successful around them. So you watch a guy get rich in crypto like overnight by betting on dog whiff hat and which I hear is way down, but you see enough of that and you not only speak to the gambler that is inside the vast majority of humanity, but you show them an opportunity where it feels like the house doesn't always win. And in fact the saying got created because the house was always winning. And we wanted a system where we could have a shot where it's outside of the clutches of the people in the club. What do you make of the meme coin phenomenon? This to me is like the, like Bitcoin has great cover story. Meme coins do not in my opinion.
- [06:22]
Chris Josephs
No. And they do get a lot of hate on social media. But I think the thing about them is it's a lottery ticket. The easiest way to think about it is I can go to the gas station, I can buy a hundred dollars, I could buy a $20 scratch ticket and hope to make a hundred. Or I can go to Pump Fun Moonshot, any of these apps and find a trending coin, put that same $20 in and make a thousand dollars. I think that's what meme coins represent. And yes, you know, they can be. Are they securities? Are they not securities? It doesn't matter. I think they are pure gambling to the nth degree and they are a lottery ticket for people to try and get rich. And I, I've experienced it like I was in early on the jail stool, the, the Dave Portnoy coin jail stool. So meme coins become representations of culture. So if you're early on in culture, if you're chronically online, you can make a lot of money in meme coins. You just have to be early and you have to be in at a certain market cap without getting kind of too nerdy.
- [07:33]
Tom Bilyeu
But I like the nerdy list.
- [07:34]
Chris Josephs
Yeah. So my take on this is if, if you get into a market, if you get into a crypto coin, a meme coin before like a million dollar market cap, you have the chances to ride that thing from a million dollars to 10 million to 15 million. And then you sell out of it and you kind of get out of it. The stages of how you kind of do this and people do this on Twitter all the time. You got to be very, very careful because it's a dog eat dog world in that chats that you have no idea about that are plotting how to launch this cultural meme coin, pump it up and then sell out of it while they are kind of talking to their, their community on Twitter. The, the, the. And I might mess up the timeline a little bit of this with the jail stool, but Dave Portnoy, they've all wanted him to launch his own coin. He did. Salana is the new network that allows him to do that. He had, he talked about one coin. I can't remember what it was. He tweeted about it, the coin went up, you know, 30 to 40%, something like that, maybe even 100%. He then went on Twitter and he said like, hey everyone, I tweeted about this coin because I bought it and it's up 100%. I am now going to sell it. And he sold it and then the thing falls and it kind of gets killed. So what did everyone on Twitter do? They call it, start calling him out. They say, hey, you're going to jail. That you just rug pulled. Like you are being so open, obvious about it. You're going on Instagram filming yourself saying that you were doing a rug pull. You are going to jail. So again, culturally relevant people started capturing on. Then guess what happens? Someone made a coin called jail stool and it represented Dave Portnoy rug pulling his crypto community and they gifted it to him and they said, Dave, this is your jail stool coin. This is going to be the coin for you to go to jail. The whole like barstool community and everyone on Twitter caught notice it started getting big on TikTok as well and he started pumping that coin. So it became like a ironic kind of thing of hey, you guys are telling me I'm going to go to jail via this jail stool coin. Well, I'm just going to pump this coin up and I'm going to have this one try and go to $1 billion market cap. That's kind of the game he wasn't in. He. That coin went from a million dollar market cap up to 20 million market cap in like two or three weeks. He couldn't get it over though, the $20 million market cap because in the meme world, you know, you cannot hold these things forever. You gotta buy it and you gotta Sell it after two hours. Buy it, sell it after two hours. That whole little kind of game. So it was just funny and it caught the culture. Just people were fascinated with it because it would keep going up and down and he would be publicly talking about it. And he's the first kind of crypto person that has ever been so openly talking about trying to pump and trying to pump specific coins. And again, going back to what we were talking about, being culturally transparent, it's like what Trump is doing with all of his stuff, he's clearly pumping it. Portnoy then sees what Trump is doing is like, well, if the President of the United States is doing it, why can't I do it?
- [10:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Actually going to jail.
- [10:41]
Chris Josephs
Yeah. And then he starts doing it, and now, you know, the coin is worth zero, but that is how the kind of sell.
- [10:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Or he's still holding up and down.
- [10:49]
Chris Josephs
He's still holding that one. Yeah. And he then started tweeting about a com like jail stool 2 or something like that. He made a second jail stool coin where people were kind of sending stuff. But again, going back to what meme coins represent, it's culture, and it is lottery tickets, get rich quicks schemes.
- [11:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, man. This. This one is beyond fascinating to me. The way that I view this is
- [11:18]
Chris Josephs
that
- [11:20]
Tom Bilyeu
what people are doing is essentially saying, okay, there's a mechanism here that I know works that I can get people excited about something, and in getting them excited about it, the value comes out of nowhere. And it's. It is literally just enthusiasm. Now, I believe people should be able to spend their money on whatever they want. So if people want to gamble, I think they should be able to gamble. People want to gamble on. I think I can time the excitement of this better than you. I think I can read how excited people will get about this better than you. When meme coins first came out, I thought, oh, maybe people don't understand that there's, like no utility here. And then over time, I realized, oh, no, no, no. They just all think that they're going to be the ones that understand this better than the next person. And so it's a bunch of people playing, like, this perverted version of the GameStop thing, where it was like, okay, we're all gonna hold, right? Yeah, we're all gonna hold. We're all gonna hold. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we're pure of heart. Knowing that some massive percentage of them were not pure of heart. And of course, they all start selling in the end and it crashes down.
- [12:23]
Chris Josephs
It's like a don't Stabbing your neighbor in the back kind of thing.
- [12:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, exactly. It's like one of those games where it's like, okay, how long can I get people to believe that I'm really in this, that I really believe in it and get this thing going. But everybody ultimately is there to make money. So everybody knows at some point I'm actually going to sell this thing and can I play that game? Well, it. It is utterly fascinating. It triggers the gambling, video game playing, like, all the things get rich quick. To your point about that, this is one that we are really going to have to grapple with, because this is that you're encountering the architecture of the human mind. And this is just the way the mind works. And people want to gamble and people want a chance, and people love getting caught up in it. It's the same reason that people gamble on a basketball game, because now it makes a game more interesting because there are stakes. It's like your everyday life, you have this little thing that you can do that you can check on your phone every now and then that gives you this tremendous dopamine rush. And, yeah, we're going to have to contend with this culturally because you're going to see wealth come and go. It will get accumulated into the hands at last check. And admittedly, this is probably a couple years ago the last time I looked at this, but it was, if these numbers aren't literally correct, they are directionally correct. 5% of wallets capture 95% of the economics. So you're gonna get the same thing again. We're a small group of people who maybe are in Telegram and WhatsApp groups that are pumping these things more intelligently than you. So they know when they're gonna go up or go down. Those guys get out. It becomes the cascading effect of, oh, the real influence here is gone. Then everybody scramble cells. And the people that, you know, had the audacity to go take a shower and didn't see that this started to collapse don't get out. They're left holding the bag. And on a long enough timeline, across enough meme coins, they. They end up losing.
- [14:13]
Chris Josephs
Yep.
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Tom Bilyeu
And so at some point, people are not going to feel good about this anymore, and there's going to be some kind of backlash.
- [14:20]
Chris Josephs
I don't know. Yeah. And I mean, the broader question, too, kind of going back to what you first were talking about is like, is that the reality is people are doing that more than investing in stocks now, too. And, you know, you get. Say you get your paycheck every week you get a thousand dollars to play around with. You got two options. Do I put it in the stock market or do I try and turn it into 20 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand in meme coins? Uh, we saw this probably like five, like three or four years ago with sports betting. And now sports betting has become like we, we've been going towards a more degenerate world. Like it's so clearly obvious. You know, sports betting now becoming legal. You now can kind of bet on anything with these prediction markets, which is a whole nother world that, that got big because you could bet on the election last year. That's only going to get bigger and that's going to become more and more widespread because it's going to be democratized through the brokerage accounts. And you know, you can make, you can agree with it or not, but it is going to be happening. This idea of going towards a more and more degenerate world is fascinating. And what we are trying to do with autopilot and I think like I get personal about this is because I think that path is wrong. I do. I firmly do not believe.
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Tom Bilyeu
Fine, wrong. Why wrong?
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Chris Josephs
Because I don't think that it sets that individual up for like the long term success of what they actually want to do. And when, whether it's education that solves that, whether it's regulation, I probably don't want it to be regulation. Education may kind of help with that. My solution to it is technology. But when I say kind of what's wrong with it is I firmly believe 10 times out of 10, an individual should be taking that paycheck and putting it in the active stock market. Investing in something that has a tangible ability to grow with you as opposed to kind of gambling it and trying to make a lottery ticket. And more chances than not, you're going to lose money on it.
- [16:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Hang tight. When we return, we talk about the loophole that lets politicians profit without ever breaking the law.
- [16:24]
Chris Josephs
A vacation rental should come with support, not surprises. That's why VRBO comes with a VRBoCare guarantee and 24. 7 life support from real people. So if something goes sideways, VRBoCare can help. If the host cancels verbocare if the
- [16:37]
Tom Bilyeu
listing says heated pool but there's actually
- [16:38]
Chris Josephs
no pool to heat. Definitely a verbo care thing.
- [16:41]
Commercial Announcer
If my teenager starts calling me Leslie
- [16:43]
Chris Josephs
instead of mom, that's a family thing. Leslie.
- [16:45]
Commercial Announcer
That makes sense. Sorry.
- [16:46]
Chris Josephs
Book with support, not surprises. VRBoCare and 24. 7 Life Support. If you know you're VRBO terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details.
- [16:54]
Commercial Announcer
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- [17:25]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, we're back.
- [17:26]
Chris Josephs
Let's get into it.
- [17:29]
Tom Bilyeu
If you knew that people would make the exact same money for themselves by yoloing and meme coins that they would make in the stock market over a 20 year period, would you care anymore about which path they chose?
- [17:46]
Chris Josephs
If the end result is the same,
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Tom Bilyeu
well, one end result is the same. They will make the same amount of money. But that's the only variable I'm going to allow you to check and then you have to make your decision.
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Chris Josephs
Yeah. So I mean, in that scenario, I don't think this is an issue between the investing in the stocks. I think they're the same. If you're ending up at the same end goal 20 years from now, you end up with the same amount of money. Or maybe not even. Well, at the end, at the, at the end, if you're making the same amount of money, I think that is fine. I think the problem with that is the people don't make money in these meme coins to the same degree that they can make money in the other alternative, which is the stocks, the active invest.
- [18:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, no, I get that. I just wanted to see if you have any other reason why you'd want to see people migrate away from meme coins into the stock market. So I do. So I am more and more convinced as I spend time live streaming that I am the old man tilting at windmills. But I really want people to understand how money works. Here is why meme coins should be legal. People should be able to do whatever they want with their money. Because I have just an overriding thing that that is your fucking money. And if you want to sit in a circle and light it on fire, that is your business and nobody should get to tell you otherwise. Having said that, I would still want to see people invest in the stock market. Not that they should be forced, but I would still want to see people invest in the stock market because of how money actually works. So I don't think people understand why the public markets exist. The reason the Public markets exist is companies are making a trade off with potential investors. They're saying, look, I want to build this company, but I don't have the capital to do it. Oftentimes just cash flow in and of itself, like you might be profitable, but the amount of time that you have to outlay the cash into the ingredients, in my case making a protein bar or somebody else, the car parts, whatever, it's just the lead time is so long. Even though you're wildly profitable, you still have to borrow money in order to cash flow out the length of time you need to. So, hey, dear public market, I'm going to let you own a piece of my company which is going to let me actually go build this thing. And that's going to advantage us both. I'm going to be able to create this self sustaining economic engine and you're going to be able to make money off the back of that. If, if I'm able to pull this off now, I may not be able to, and that's why I call it gambling. But if I'm able to pull this off, then you're going to get money and I build the thing. Now the reason I really care about that is I think people lose sight that when a company is able to aggregate capital, they are able to make something that makes the world better. And you need only look back in time and go, oh wow, we used to die really young. Even if you just grant me that, that we've figured out ways to for instance, deal with microbes. Cool. Very advantageous. What is the mechanism by which you get that level of innovation? And the answer is the aggregation of capital. You make enough money that somebody doesn't have to go work on a farm. They can instead be a scientist in a lab looking at a thing. Or maybe you just like air conditioning and now you can actually live in Florida and not hate your life. So. Or you can survive a winter in Germany because you have a heater. These are all technological advances that were born out of people innovating with companies. Take coal mining. If you look at the graph of the reduction in deaths of coal mining, it drops by. It drops from let's say 100% all the way down to like 10% of what it was before the first safety regulation. Okay, so what dropped it all the way down? Just commercial innovation. It was like, oh man, replacing all these coal miners that keep dying sucks. And so businesses spring up creating these innovations that are then able to keep people safer as a kind of selfish act towards just building this economic engine. And so if people understood that, they would understand the thing that I'm worried about, which is because we are inflating the money supply. And that is an oversimplification, but it is so directionally correct. If I could just get people to understand, okay, that whole thing that I just laid out, this is how you have modern society and why moms don't die in childbirth and a whole host of other things. But modern society is brought to you by the aggregation of capital leading to innovation. When you start inflating money, what you end up doing is you derange the system. And now people are forced to gamble in some way. Now, if you were only forcing them into the stock market, okay, you still have wealth inequality that's gonna rampage out of control, which is what's happening. So wealth inequality brought to you by inflation. People think it's something else. It's inflation. But now what we're seeing with these younger kids is meme coins brought to you by inflation because they're forced to gamble. But they see all the corruption that you've been pointing out in the stock market. So, like, well, that's a little slow anyway. And it's corrupt. Don't love that. So let me do this other thing, which is effectively sports betting with no sport, or it's the blood sport of culture.
- [23:00]
Chris Josephs
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
And I'm just like, man. Now, there's not that secondary effect of, oh, you're also leading innovation. A meme coin is not going to lead to innovation. So that makes me not just sad, that makes me extremely worried I will be dead. I'm already rich, and yet I'm the one banging the drum trying to get people to understand. I get why you're mad, but just being mad is not going to make your future better. And so now, at some point, and dear community of mine, they. They need and want to be seen for the emotional distress that they are in. I see you, I hear you. I feel it. I get it. But you can do a thing now that will allow you to get out of that dark place. But to do that thing, you have to piece together how does the world actually work if they can build that up and go, oh, okay, cool, I get how this game is played. Then they can lobby for the right changes to how we handle politics. Then they can put their money in something that's slower. It's maybe not as cool, but it will build their wealth while allowing them to invest their values. But to invest your values, you have to know your values. Okay, one, I'll put A period there and see if you any, if you can tear any of that down, please. I want to get smarter.
- [24:34]
Chris Josephs
Yeah. So I think there's two kind of pieces of that where I guess I'm on the other. I'm not fully on the other side of the fence with it. But the idea of the investing is purely gambling. If you're going off of like if I have, if I have a hundred thousand dollars and like I think the meme coins is kind of what I'm getting at with the difference of them. If I have a hundred thousand dollars and I can invest in meme coins or maybe not a hundred thousand, that's a lot. $10,000 invest in meme coins or invest in stocks, the, the markets. The end goal is still the same. You could still end up with the same amount of money. I think like the real, the reality of these meme coins coming in as a new form of gambling is so blatantly obvious. There's no utility to it. There's. It's all just scamming and it's all just dog eat dog world getting get out as fast as you can. But the upside of it is it represents your ticket. It represents your, your, your Willy Wonka ticket. You know, you can get out of wherever you are and you can go and buy, you know, a house if you make. Because you see people making hundreds of thousands of dollars with luck on the, the stock market side. Like I don't the idea of it being purely gambling. I think there are a lot of elements of it that are gambling with especially you know, some of these options contracts, things like that. That becomes more and more of a gambling in my opinion. But investing in, you know, the future that you want. Kind of going off of your argument of, you know, I want to invest in this AI Genetic company because I think it's going to cure cancer If I got $10,000 and I'm investing in that company and investing in the future cash flows this and that. I don't necessarily see it as gambling and I don't think it is the same kind of psychological framing of it as the meme coins because I am investing and I am supporting and I want that company to win. But I also am going to reap the benefits. I'm going to protect myself against inflation. I'm going to kind of do this and that. How. Why do you think that the pure kind of investing landscape is gambling? Are you saying it's gambling against inflation? And you know, maybe this one AI Genetic company is going to crush it while the other one doesn't. That's kind of the gambling between the two. Like, how do you. How do you differentiate the gambling with meme coins and the gambling with the market if it's not investing in companies that you kind of believe in?
- [27:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Coming up, Chris reveals which politicians are currently crushing the market and how you can legally mirror their trades.
- [27:09]
Commercial Announcer
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [27:41]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, we're back.
- [27:42]
Chris Josephs
Let's get into it.
- [27:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Gambling has a definition, and the definition is roughly to take risky behavior for a desired expected outcome. So the stock market, by that definition, is just simply gambling. It doesn't meet any other definition. You are saying, I think this company might make it. There's no guarantee that that's true. So it is risky behavior for a desired expected outcome, which is that it goes up in price and I will be able to sell it to somebody else. This is why you're not actually rewarded financially unless it's a stock that pays dividends. You're not rewarded financially for holding it. You are only rewarded financially for selling it. And the sales price is not based on fundamentals. It is based entirely on sentiment. So now this isn't even does this thing continue to make the amount of money that it was making when I first bought into it? It's what do people believe will be the future state of it? Even if that wasn't true, it's still gambling that the price is going to go up. I have learned my lesson that getting people to accept the notion that it's gambling probably doesn't matter. The reason that I bring up the gambling is because I think it is immoral to print money precisely because it forces people into asset purchases. Because you have to be in an asset.
- [29:05]
Chris Josephs
Protect yourself against the inflation. Correct.
- [29:07]
Tom Bilyeu
The bad news is that there's risk. The place where there is effectively no risk. It's not you can never get to zero because somebody could rob you. But the ability to save money. To me, I believe the government has a moral obligation to create a system in which the average person can simply not spend their money and they will be able to retire and right now, you're not in that position. Inflation, even if you save every dollar beyond just the absolute things you need to survive, survive, the value of those dollars will be inflated away such that you'd never be able to stop working. That's immoral to me. I am so desperate to reorient the world to that immorality that they will understand that assets are just confusing enough that if you're right, 40% of people don't do it. And so once you say 40% of people are just that, that is not a world I'm comfortable living in. So I'll continue to beat the drum. I don't need people to get on board. If people want to say, tom, it's not gambling, fine. I'm not going to spend my time arguing there. I just want to say, can we agree that to keep up with inflation, you have to own assets 1000%? Yeah, as long as people agree with me there, then I'm just like, okay, well, now can we agree that that's immoral? If they won't agree that it's immoral, then I have to press the angle on, okay, but this is risk.
- [30:32]
Chris Josephs
Yeah.
- [30:33]
Tom Bilyeu
And so all of those people could end up in a really terrible position anyway. But that, that's. I'm just trying to get people that.
- [30:40]
Chris Josephs
Yeah. And I think, like, so going back to kind of what I get passionate about is like, I see, like what we're doing, kind of even thinking about the gambling, because set the meme coins aside, your argument is actually valid, too. Also, in the financial world, and this is the argument of passive versus active investing, should I take my money and gamble on these individual stocks, or should I take my money and do the least amount of quote unquote gambling and put it just in the broader S P500. What we're trying to do, and this is again, like the cultural shift that we're seeing is the majority of Americans, human psychology, they will not go off and just put all their mark money in a s p500 passive. Just say, hey, guys, this is going to turn into $2 million in 30 years. If, if, you know, we keep the same averages of growth we've had in America for the last 30 years, and we grow 6% on average every year. You know, there's a big, kind of like, everyone's just assuming that America is just going to continue growing at this pace. And then in 30 years, when I'm 16, it's 2065, Apple's going to be worth $20 trillion as opposed to what it is now. And yes, the argument of inflation will come in and inflation will naturally drive up the market as well. The good kind of tidbit, and maybe you know, the information on this is if you take out inflation adjusted returns, the market is roughly flat over the past like 15 years. So your argument of like, even if you're investing in these companies, they are not providing and they're not creating any extra value on an asset based price besides just the natural inflation that is happening with the broader monetary supply. So you have to be invested in something. You have to be invested in the stock market. With what we're trying to do, kind of even with Autopilot, it's trying to capture this like cultural phenomenon of okay, you have to invest in individual, you have to invest in the stock market and you personally are going to try and invest in individual stocks. You are going to try and buy the companies you like. You're going to try and gamble on, you know, this company versus that company. The majority of it though, again, it's a dog eat dog world. It's not necessarily rigged for your emotion to buy and hold forever because the majority of people don't do that. You end up buying high at the top because you read about it on Instagram and you end up selling low because you think the world is ending. And then you end up buying high and selling low. And the hedge funds and the whole monetary, the whole Wall street knows this about you and they're rigging the systems to make these volatile fluctuation swings to play with your emotions, to make you buy high and sell low. What we're trying to do. And again, this is why the meme world is just so much harder to kind of get people to partake in it but do it more responsibly and more less pure. Yolo Lotto Ticket is with our app you can go in and you'll be able to. And this is where the future of where I think active management goes is you can go in and say you got 10 grand instead of you having to go and make the decision of I have to buy individual stocks because I still need that upside. I still need to find the nvidias of the world. I still need to find Apple when it was a billion dollars and it turned into a trillion. I need to find Palantir when it was $19 and now 80. I have to buy these stocks, but I don't know how to do it. My emotion drives me nuts, it makes me sad and I just am so kind of sick. Of it. I'm not going to try it. I'm just going to go and play the YOLO meme game. I know I should be playing that game, but I'm going to play this game because it's easier. I understand. If you're in early, you win. If you're not, you lose. Much easier to understand than watching palantir go from 20 to 60 to 40 to 80 to 70. It's just too hard to play that game with. What we're doing with Autopilot is we're trying to build out a marketplace of high quality active investment strategies where instead of you making the decisions on your own, you can come in and you can find a high quality guy, you can find someone that you trust, you can find this proven active investor and say, hey, I'm going to take the entire burden of stock picking and I'm going to give it to you. You deal with those day to day swings. I will just passively watch and you tell me the commentary of what's going on. But if we're winning together, let's go. Love it. We're up. If we're losing together, oh, we all lost money. But at least it wasn't me having to deal with the mental decision of fuck, I lost myself money. Instead of like, oh, I was following someone I trusted more and they lost me money. I can kind of live with that. And I think that is one of the early solutions where we're still early with this, we aren't there yet. This is a brand new market, this is a brand new category. But I think it's the next step of where we are going as a society and how to get people to do what they want in the meme coin world, but do it in a much more responsible way where they are not losing 99 of their money and they are still partaking in the system, but doing it with a, with protection against it. And I think like this is where again I get passionate about it. So I'm rambling here, but the Pelosi tracker I think represents that well where, when people were going in, yes, you can follow her. The corruption, it's ridiculous, it's horrible. But if you take a kind of step back, it's you as a user, as a investor, you know, you have to invest in the stock market. It sounds pretty reasonable to go in and just do whatever that person does. She just happens to be the third most powerful person in America and absolutely crushes it and passes laws that benefit her stocks. That's awesome. Sounds pretty Reasonable to invest and do whatever that person does. Because when they go up, you love it. You love it, you're happy with it. But if they lose you money, you are not panic selling. You're not going out selling on the bottom saying, oh my God, the world is ending. Because you're sleeping at night saying like, okay, I'm down 10%, but the third most powerful person in America, the one passing all the laws, is also down 10%. That sounds much better. I'm going to hold. I'm going to keep going. And that, I think, is how you get to the end goal of having a less degenerate society. Having more people actively invested in the stock market and protecting against, you know, this whole world of the inflation to come. Because the first principle of what you're talking about is 1000% correct. If you have your money in your bank account, you are going to lose. And you can even put it in your 5 high yield savings accounts. You're still going to get taxed on that stuff. You probably don't even know you're getting taxed on those monthly interest payments. You're still going to lose. You need to have some sort of money in asset inflating securities. That is the stock market. That's the best thing we got right now and everyone should be doing it. That's, I think, like where I want us to go and that's where I'm trying to push us as a society to say, get everyone, get involved in the stock market. Oh, you don't want to make the decisions on your own. Perfect. We have an app, lets you connect your personal broker and then you just follow the person that you want to invest alongside and you let them do the picking for you. It's no, there's no simpler, easier way to do this. Why are you not doing it? Because, oh, by the way, if you don't do it, inflation's going to eat at your buying power and you are not going to be able to buy your Chipotle bowl because in 10 years it's going to be worth $18 instead of 12.
- [37:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, that part of what you guys are doing, I think, is utterly fascinating. We live in such a socially connected world where it's like, hey, I'm following someone, like unusual whale. And if that guy is able to get a vig off the people that follow him, it's basically taking the model that has historically only been available to people that have a lot of money and can get the attention of people like this. And it's like this whole New crypto class of, like, almost cybery punk type guys who are like, hey, I'm going to be doing this thing anyway, if you're on a ride of my coattails. I'll be very curious to see how people respond, though, when their money's down and it's just one guy that you can, like, look at and be like, yo, we'll see about that. I want to talk more about investing based on your values. So one of my hobby horses is we are in a cold war with China. Lord knows I hope that this never becomes a hot war, but we need to be at least prepared for that. When you say invest based on your values, what value set do you mean exactly?
- [38:44]
Chris Josephs
I firmly believe, and I think you were saying it earlier, your money builds the future that you want, whether you like it or not. If you have $10,000 and you're putting your money in Apple, your $10,000 is helping Apple build out the future that Apple wants. If you want the world to kind of, if you align with what Apple believes in, you should be happy. Because it's like, my money is supporting Apple. My money is building out the future of what Apple wants. Taking a step back, say, I got a hundred thousand dollars and I got my retirement account. I want to invest in Pro America. I think everyone in this room, everyone probably listening for the most part, if you are American, you benefit. Your incentives align with a better America means probably a better life for you. You know, we got autonomous vehicles coming soon. We got robots coming soon. We got AI coming soon. This is a great future if we do it right. And whether you agree with that future or not, you might want to take some of your money and invest alongside some of those companies that are building out the future that you do want. Where this gets tricky is kind of the broader point that you're talking about with, with China, with our adversaries, with even, like, whether it's kind of political powers or even just socioeconomic things, it's, if I have a hundred thousand dollars with the financial advisor, or I'm investing it on my own, I can invest in Amazon, which is, you know, the American e commerce giant, or I can invest in Alibaba, which is the Chinese e commerce giant, which one do I want to follow? Which one kind of aligns with the future that I want? A better Amazon probably leads to a better American future. A better Alibaba probably leads to a better Chinese future. And if you are in the agreement of a better, a more stronger, like a stronger China creates harder problems for America, theoretically, you should not be investing in supporting that Chinese company because your dollars are helping build China or your, your dollars are helping build Alibaba, which is making China stronger. That is like what we are trying to do. And where I also get passionate about is like, I firmly believe that your money should build the future that you want and you should have those investment decisions and you should make sure that every dollar that you have invested in the stock market aligns with the values in the future that you want. If you are anti oil, you should not have, you know, some of your money investing in Exxon and mobile and some of these gas companies. If you are anti, I don't know if you're like anti topic conversation now. If you're anti Elon, you don't like what Elon's doing. You know, you could be saying all these things but like at the end of the day, if you are having money invested in Tesla, you are going, you are helping build Tesla. It is in a, it's not aligned with the, the values that you personally have. And I think a future where you can make sure that your money builds the future that you want is a future that gets more aligned with the individual and is probably better for the society as a whole. And I, the thing that people don't understand is like a lot of people do have money with probably companies that they don't believe in. I don't know how you, if you manage your own money if you have financial advisors. But my aunt for example, she has money with her financial advisor. Her financial advisor was investing in Alibaba. They had X amount of money in the Chinese company because they believed that, you know, Alibaba's undervalued. Let me go make money, let me go do, let me do this with it. Which is his job, I guess. But if you were to tell my aunt that, I bet you she would not want that. I bet you she personally would be like, look, invest my money, manage it, but don't put it in X, Y, Z companies because I don't want my money to support them. I would rather have those same dollars and go support something else. You know? Yes. You know, swing trading, you know, maybe you think there's a technical analysis on the Alibaba chart. You put a thousand dollars in, you try and swing it up to $1500, you make 50%. You get out of it like that I think is fine. I don't see any problem with that. But the long term idea of taking your 401k and having it support Companies that you don't believe in and align with your values, I think is a problem. And I don't think there's any product out there that is really solving that just yet.
- [42:51]
Tom Bilyeu
It'll be very interesting to see how popular that is and then what that does to the landscape of whether it's American companies or global companies. It'll be very interesting. I have a feeling ultimately people are probably more motivated by where can I make money and look for the hot thing? And I hate Elon, but boy, you know, he makes a nice car. And so I expect that stock price to keep going up. We will see. What do you think is going to be the effect of AI in the way that people invest?
- [43:21]
Chris Josephs
I think that AI is going to have a lot of kind of aspects in the individual trading. Kind of like me managing my own money. I can talk to an AI. I can have it give me insights, I can have it give me feedback into my portfolio. I can be like, if I'm about to sell, you know, for example, there's a short term capital gains and a long term capital gains. If you own a stock for over a year you get taxed 20% if you sell it. If you own a stock under a year, you get taxed 40%. So if you're about to sell Apple and you're mailed to make a thousand dollars, but if you hold it in another four days you're about to, you could sell it after those four days and you're good to get save 20% on taxes. Maybe AI, there's an experience where AI can tell you and just be like, hey, by the way, if you hold it for four days you will save 20 on taxes. And me as an individual, like, I love that. Like, oh, I had no idea. I didn't, I wasn't. I'm not deep in this enough to know those nuances. Be on top of this to that degree. I think AI will drastically improve the education around how to not lose in the stock market for the individual investor on the actual kind of like broader range with, you know, deep research, things like that. I think that is going to drastically help it as well. But that is more in like the equity research, the people that are doing the active studying of the companies that's going to change their industry probably drastically. But for the everyday individual investor, I think it's going to make investing easier. I think it's going to make it more educational and probably better because the AI will be able to help you in situations where you would not have known if you didn't have them.
- [45:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I think AI is going to absolutely change the game from the way in which AI can recognize all the patterns, the changes. You talk about a swing trade, that kind of stuff, being able to alert you based on either an algorithm that somebody like, I imagine a world in which unusual whale is publishing his algorithm. And so it's like, okay, there's, there's my base, but you can tweak it as you see fit. Yeah, that's going to be so.
- [45:28]
Chris Josephs
And we, we have this now. We have we. So with Autopilot, we have the Pelosi stuff, the politicians, we can go and invest alongside them. But we are a marketplace of active investment strategies. So you can go in and you can follow unusual whale strategies. We have other strategies, but one strategy we have is by a pilot named Dr. Lopez. He's an AI expert, Ph.D. from Wharton, wrote a book on how to use ChatGPT to pick stocks. We worked with him to create a stock picking prompt where we use GPT 4.4.0. And we have it every month parse through 200 plus stock fundamentals. You know, the report, the reports, things of that nature. Couple that with macroeconomic data, couple that with the, the month, the prior month's stock news headlines. Use ChatGPT's API and then have it create a scoring system where it picks 15 stocks. And then we take those stocks, we publish it on our app, and then people can go in and invest alongside those strategies. Year to date, that thing is actually outperforming the market by around like 6 or 7%. I think it's up 3% while the broader market is down 6%. I think I checked that yesterday. That strategy has $40 million following it. And it's great. It's popular because people are like, can this thing do it? It's so much easier to just let an AI algorithm do it for you. We then took it a step further and we were like, chat GPT is cool. How did the other strategies, how did the other platforms do. So we now have a deep search. We did the same prompting using the same APIs, but we are now using the, the AI platform of deep search, which is the China one, the one from Alibaba, I think. And they that we created a deep search portfolio. So now we're going to see which one of the, the platforms are smarter. We then two weeks ago launched the Groq portfolio. So now we got a portfolio with Grok. GROK is picking stocks and each of them choose different stocks. So it's really really fascinating to see. And I think to your point, the broader question is it's like, can it pick stocks better than hedge funds? You know, we'll have to see on
- [47:41]
Tom Bilyeu
a long enough timeline, I guarantee it. Yeah.
- [47:43]
Chris Josephs
And this is. I get very excited with the AI stuff just based on that. And I mean, you could take it a step further. Like we can create algorithms where you can have it pick, do everything that we just talked about, but say, go find the diamond and the rough companies. Go find the companies that no one's ever really talking about. Go find the companies that you know based on what Trump is talking about with tariffs and talk in working with Zelensky on some mineral deal. Is there a stock out there that will benefit from this? And it does its research and then it spits out five or six random companies you never heard of. And it's like, you know, there's a company called alb. Why is ALB interesting? Why does that have some insights into what is going on with Trump and Zelensky and all them. Oh, it's because like 60% of their construction in their. Them taking the utilities out of the ground is happening in Ukraine. So if Trump signs a deal, a mineral deal with Ukraine, that stock clearly, obviously will benefit. And, you know, the Stock goes up 5% once that deal is signed. I think that's also where AI will drastically help. It will find diamond in the rough companies that the average everyday person just can't find and won't have the time to do the research on their own.
- [48:58]
Tom Bilyeu
This is a wild future, man. You guys really have your finger on something. This is extremely interesting. Chris, if people want to follow along with you, where would they go?
- [49:07]
Chris Josephs
So on Twitter, it's probably where the biggest. My personal Twitter is. Chris J. Josephs, the Pelosi tracker. Pelosi tracker, just at that. I think that is probably the best spot to see us, where we are exposing the corruption. We're trying to get them banned from trading again. That. So any support on that is great. On our main socials, for our Autopilot, it's all Join Autopilot, that's on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. So you can go follow us all there. And then if you want to support the cause, if you want to kind of check out the app, you can do it. It's all free. The only payment part of our app is paying for the subscription to get the automated trading. But you can go check it out. All the performance numbers are there and it's just Autopilot on the app. Store. I love it.
- [49:47]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, everybody. Speaking of things I love, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [49:54]
Chris Josephs
Peace.