EMERGENCY UPLOAD: Stock Market Investors Are Losing Everything - How To Profit! | Chris Camillo

Northwest Registered Agent: Start Your LLC Today at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/ich Monarch: Use code ICEDCOFFEE at https://monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50! Ethos: Get Your FREE Life Insurance Quote at https://ethos.com/icedcoffee Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at https://shopify.com/ich Follow @DumbMoneyLive Here! Chris Camillo Twitter: https://x.com/ChrisCamillo *𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗨𝗦* 𝗜𝗚: https://www.instagram.com/icedcoffeehour 𝗝𝗔𝗖𝗞: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby 𝗚𝗥𝗔𝗛𝗔𝗠: https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheIcedCoffeeHourClips 𝗫.𝗰𝗼𝗺: https://x.com/TheICHpodcast 𝗧𝗶𝗸𝗧𝗼𝗸: https://www.tiktok.com/@theicedcoffeehour 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆: https://open.spotify.com/show/5c2uoXBQkOjIiCOf60jJj7 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-iced-coffee-hour/id1515070058 Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:09 - 40% Drawdown, and Leopold Margin Call 00:09:24 - The Amazon Thesis 00:15:09 - Making $10 Million in a Single Day 00:16:16 - Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent 00:17:20 - Investing vs Gambling 00:21:14 - Critics and Copycat Trading 00:28:06 - The Capex Panic 00:31:49 - Concentration Risk, OpenAI, and "Too Big to Fail" 00:34:38 - Sponsors: Monarch & Ethos 00:37:20 - Manipulation, Citadel, and Who Really Broke Leopold 00:41:45 - Why You SHOULD NOT Listen To Chris 00:45:46 - The $20K to $80 Million Trade 00:51:00 - Can Anyone Consistently Beat the Market? 00:54:19 - Sponsor: Shopify 00:55:24 - Leopold Aschenbrenner As An Investor 00:59:43 - Leverage in the Market and the Attention Trade 01:05:23 - The BEST Trade Every 5-10 Years 01:12:22 - Everyone Is Wrong About AI 01:16:05 - The Coffee Cup Theory: Distribution Moats Win 01:22:28 - SpaceX at $1.6 Trillion, and Never Loving a Stock 01:31:26 - Where to Find Asymmetry In The Stock Market 01:37:10 - If Intelligence Is Free, Which Skills Become Valuable? 01:43:55 - Is This 2001 Again? 01:54:19 - Twitter Distractions and What He Got Wrong on Sweetgreen 02:00:00 - Content Creation and In-Person Communities 02:08:06 - College, Networks, and Why Relationships Are AI-Proof 02:14:28 - The Amazon Trade Isn't Over For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [email protected] Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan & Jack Selby will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan & Jack Selby are part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Graham Stephan?

  Chris Camillo, how did you make $10 million in one day on a stock trade?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  It should have been a 30 to $40 million day for me.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  This is the fastest growth for AWS in nearly five years.

• 0:40Speaker 04

  AI is really impacting almost every single industry.

• 0:43Graham Stephan?

  The figure that's being thrown around is like the 20,000 to 80 million.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  80 trades over 17 years, and every one of them has a story. You only need to find one good trade every five to 10 years to be like a top 1% investor.

• 0:59Speaker 05

  The most important thing in hitting is waiting for the right pitch. You only have to have an opinion on a few things.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Over the course of a couple of weeks, I have one of the biggest drawdowns of my investing career. I just happened to have the same major investment as Leopold.

• 1:14Graham Stephan?

  What are you paying attention to right now in the stock market?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  This is the biggest moment in the history of capital markets. I'm so sick of listening to these old guys that have so much conviction that this is going to happen. We just don't know. Trade is not over. In many ways, it's just beginning.

• 1:38Graham Stephan?

  Chris Camillo, Wednesday morning, you texted into our group chat, "Finding cash wasn't easy today, but added to my Bloom Energy and Amazon, knowing it could get a lot uglier before the market rationalizes, but been here before." Wednesday afternoon, a few hours later, you texted, "I don't know of many people who are as immune to volatility than me, and there was a moment this morning where I legit almost threw up, then picked up more Bloom Energy and Amazon." Thursday afternoon, 24 hours later, you texted, "This is so close to an eight-figure-up day. Unreal." I'm curious, why did you almost throw up?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  When it rains, it pours, guys. It's just, I feel like this happens to every investor every time. It's like you have these bad days, these bad weeks, at the worst possible times in your life. It's like when you're on family vacation, spending way too much money, or when you need money for something else and you're like already drawing down your account for something else in your life. I have a couple of things going on right now that I needed to withdraw an insane amount of money for my account for. So like, I already kind of watched my account dip because of something I need, right? Something I want to do. Right as that happened, over the course of a couple of weeks,

• 3:00Speaker 02

  I have one of the biggest drawdowns of my investing career, 40%. I've been worse.

• 3:05Graham Stephan?

  How do you lose 40%? That's a lot of money, because the market only went down a little bit.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  That's so crazy. I mean, I got caught up. I just happened to have the same major investment as Leopold, right? Like, you know this. I was very early on Bloom Energy. He was very early on Bloom Energy. Both of us compounded and levered into Bloom. We sixxed, seven, eightxed our money on Bloom, even without leverage. Like, Bloom is one of the biggest investments I've ever made. Bloom got cut by, I don't know, 45%? It went from, what, $300 a share to $165 over a short period of time? That was one of my largest positions right there.

• 3:51Graham Stephan?

  What price did you buy into Bloom Energy? I bought Bloom Energy all around. I bought a few hundred shares at like $70, bought a few hundred at $100 and something, bought a few hundred at $300 and something. So I was buying kind of like all around, but I ended up getting obliterated on Bloom. Fortunately, not that bad, because I was selling some calls in the shares and I was doing some tricky options that hurt me and helped me at the same time. Overall, I would say I probably lost on Bloom, but it's okay because I made it up elsewhere.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Here's the thing. So my account was slaughtered. And don't feel bad for me, because you guys know this. My account was hitting all-time highs. Like, before this started, I was starting from a very good place, which is why I decided, hey, I can afford to take out these huge chunks of money to do these other things that I want to do in my life, other investments, other projects, right? I didn't expect, within the same week, for my account to get crushed 40%. So it was kind of a big mental hit. I also knew, without knowing, what was happening to Leopold. I knew what he owned. Whether or not it was someone manipulating that to try to mess with him didn't really matter to me. I knew that he was getting margin called.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  He had to be getting margin called. I assumed he owed something in the range of 10-plus billion very quickly. And I knew that was what was driving the down cycle in Bloom Energy and Nebius and a few of these other AI names, in addition to sector news that was pushing it down, right? So because I knew about that forced downflow, I knew it was going to revert. I just didn't have the timing, right? And so here's where you get into what I do. Everything's a probability game. I knew we were days away from having that trade reverse, because at some point, his margin call would end. And Bloom did not deserve to be at $165 a share.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Like, it was outrageous. In fact, all of these names, they were... The entire sector move was completely ridiculous and fueled by not just his margin calls, but I knew all of Korea was getting margin called. Basically, every levered fund in South Korea was getting liquidated over the same time period, because what are they invested in? Bloom Energy is one of the biggest names in South Korea, right? Basically, all the Leopold stuff is all the South Korea stuff, which is all the Chris Camillo stuff. So me, Leopold, and South Korea were all getting crushed at the same time. So what are you going to do? Fortunately, I'm not managing an institutional fund. My account is more liquid. I have more control over it.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  And I wasn't 4x-levered like Leopold. I was like 1x-levered.

• 6:39Graham Stephan?

  So a lot of people are accusing you on Twitter of irresponsible risk-taking that you shouldn't even be discussing publicly. What do you say to that?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  That's insane. Like, I have full control over the risk in my account. You guys know this. Like, no one is more obsessive over every move that they make than me. So first of all, let's start here. We all have different investment objectives, right? My objectives are very different than yours. They're very different from other investors. The entirety of my brokerage account is a ultra-high-risk, ultra-high-ward account. I'm trying to grow that account into a billion-dollar account, right? That's not going to happen without concentration. It's not going to happen without leverage. And it's not going to happen without me making really bold bets

• 7:33Speaker 02

  when I have ultra-high conviction in a trade. I only get that conviction a few times a year. So when it happens, I have to go all in on that trade. It's all about probability. I know that every time I go in on a high conviction trade, there's things that I know I don't know, and there's things that I don't know that I don't know, okay? I know that there's an infinite number of things that could happen that could zero me out on that trade, because they're usually levered. They're usually on margin. They're usually with options. I'm a big boy. I've been doing this for like close to 30 years, okay? So like, I know what I'm doing. I know the risk. I know that if I make six of those trades in a row, that account is pretty close to being gone, right? I get that.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  There is a theoretical, in an ultra-high-risk, ultra-high-ward account, there is a theoretical there that that account can get wiped out. I know that. I'm willing to take that risk. Hasn't happened yet. Hasn't even gotten that close yet, right? 40% markdown. I basically had another 20% of the account at risk. And by the way, that Wednesday... I had a lot of options that expired on Wednesday. All got zeroed out. Okay.

• 8:49Jack Selby?

  How much money?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Seven figures of options that got zeroed out that day. That I had, there was a 24 hour trade that got zeroed out. Again, I knew that we were close to the end. I knew that the liquidation had to end within a matter of hours to days. And I was willing to take that risk because even though I got wiped out on that Wednesday trade, if it would have turned that day, it would have been, it would have been insane. It would have been like a 25 to 30 X investment. I, we're talking about tens of millions. And that's the trade that I had been working all spring and summer. That is the highest conviction trade I've made in years. I was hoping it would play out before earnings. But if it didn't, earnings was my last shot.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  And because of the things that happened running into Amazon earnings, I had an exceptionally high degree of confidence that it's not about Amazon nailing earnings. That was obvious. It's about how they would handle the earnings call. And these are things that other investors generally don't think about that I'm obsessive with.

• 9:53Jack Selby?

  So walk us through the last month. At the peak, how much were you down?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  All right, I'm gonna, not gonna get like super granular because people have started, and this makes me really nervous, especially with the Leopold stuff. Maybe I'm paranoid. Over the last couple of years, I feel like there's one or more people with a lot more money than me that for whatever reason, they want to mess with me and my trades. And I've seen it. I've seen it with some of my trades that are easier to mess with when it comes to like mid caps, small caps.

• 10:26Jack Selby?

  How do they do that?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Well, as you guys know, like I run a very anti Wall Street kind of content and I have for 20 years. I poke fun at the institutions of Wall Street. Now, but some of those guys are my best friends. But I've been harping on Wall Street for two decades, saying that it's the world's largest skimming operation. I believe it is. I don't think that people should have the world's money parked in, you know, institutional accounts that basically skim money every year to not perform any better than you could perform being invested in a passive fund. And I think that's probably pissed more than a few people off. And the same way that I think Leopold probably pissed more than a few people off being a cocky 20 something year old

• 11:12Speaker 02

  that is managing like $40 billion of capital and is now taking probably more media airspace than the citadels and the King Griffins of the world. He put himself, he put a target on his back, right? I'm not saying like I have that big of a target on my back, but it's something that's on my mind. So I'm trying to stay a little less granular these days about my exact trades and exactly how I position them. But it's eight figures. I was down eight figures, right? Or a little close to eight figures.

• 11:40Jack Selby?

  What chance would you have been wrong?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  I would say there was probably a 20% chance of that trade not going well on Friday. So I was like, I was like 80% confident. And, and the 20% again are kind of things that I knew I didn't know and things that I didn't know that I didn't know. I mean, we're in a situation with Trump and Iran. We don't know what's going to happen any night of the week. You know, Amazon, I was confident was going to beat their numbers. I mean, I was obsessive with you guys. I put so much work into this trade. It's obscene. Going right into that trade last week, I was still searching for every theoretical data point that I could find that would allow me to properly assess the degree to which they were likely to beat their AWS number.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Now, you know, I think Amazon had predicted like a 22% beat. I think the whisper number was like 25% on the street. And I was confident it was going to come somewhere north of 25. So the only question in my mind was how are they going to handle the call? Now, this is the nuance in the social orb trade here. If you look at how Google handled their call and you look at how Microsoft handled their call, you have to look at Amazon management. Okay. And you have to look at Jassy. He's a smart guy. He sees what happened to Google. He sees what happened to Microsoft. Microsoft flawlessly handled the capex question, right? They got in front of it and they were basically like, hey, we don't have any capex risk, guys.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  If the demand doesn't fully materialize as we see it right in front of us, we can redirect it. And so I knew it was, it was, to me, it was like a 99.9% chance that Jassy was going to handle it the same way in his own way by basically saying, hey, we know this is scaring you 200 billion. We're actually going to increase to 220. But guys, not only do we see the demand, it's factual, it's happening. But if something catastrophic happens, the majority of the money that we have in capex projected the next year, we can take off the table because it's towards equipment that we don't have to commit to until the very last piece of that data center. Right?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  So I felt confident, like there's no way that I was going to put that much work into Amazon this year. And even after what happened to me on Wednesday and the week before, because I've been losing money like every week, right? There's no way I was going to watch Amazon knock it out of the park and me not participate. I wasn't even nervous. That's just so crazy. Like I was actually in my truck, driving to Austin when earnings happened and I wasn't even following it. Like I was just like, I had a real sense of calm over me. I was like, hey, if I have to do this and I think it's going to work out. I just didn't know how well it was going to work out.

• 14:39Jack Selby?

  And so I'm suspecting you probably took your portfolio down to like the low seven figures, which is somewhat of, I mean, for you.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  It wasn't that low.

• 14:49Jack Selby?

  It wasn't that low.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  That low. It was like, it was still kind of in and around high seven figures, low eight figures.

• 14:56Jack Selby?

  But you had previously lost close to eight figures in the portfolio. And now then you, for this Amazon trade, put a few million bucks into Amazon call options and and it was a heavy investment.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And blue, and blue, Amazon and blue.

• 15:10Jack Selby?

  Are you willing to say how much you put into those trades for the?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, I don't know, like a couple million dollars of options and.

• 15:18Jack Selby?

  Expiring when?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Friday, the next day, basically. Yeah. So, and on top of that, my account was fully levered. So I basically had to sell stock to make this happen. So I had, I had to liquidate. I had to liquidate millions of dollars of equity that was less important to me in order to make that options trade.

• 15:38Jack Selby?

  And so you ran it up about eight figures.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, about 10 million in a day.

• 15:43Jack Selby?

  And how did that feel? Like, like walk me through looking at your portfolio and seeing that it's up $10 million.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  I will tell you this. Making money like that after you lost money feels better, much better than just making the money. Right? Like there's something about seeing your account get crushed and then making a really bold move to make it all back plus some. Cause I, I ended up doing better than what I lost. It was like a few million more than what I lost is what I made. It was the best feeling in the world because you know, it was the hardest thing in the world to do. And you, and you force yourself to do it because it was the right thing to do. I would say from my sense, it would have been bad risk management for me not to do it. If you know, if you know how much work I put into the trade,

• 16:34Speaker 02

  you would think it's really bad risk management not to make that trade.

• 16:37Jack Selby?

  So if you had millions of dollars in call options expiring in one week on this one bet that Amazon would have a good earnings call, what would have happened if the recovery on Amazon came two weeks later?

• 16:48Graham Stephan?

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• 17:01Jack Selby?

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• 17:10Graham Stephan?

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• 17:17Jack Selby?

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• 17:25Graham Stephan?

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• 17:31Jack Selby?

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• 17:37Graham Stephan?

  It's northwestregisteredagent.com/ICH or click the link down below in the description to get your LLC filed.

• 17:44Jack Selby?

  Thank you, Northwest Registered Agent for sponsoring this episode. So if you had millions of dollars in call options expiring in one week on this one bet that Amazon would have a good earnings call, what would have happened if the recovery on Amazon came two weeks later?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  I have resources to continue that trade, just not as large, right? So the trade the next week would have been smaller and the payoff would have been smaller.

• 18:11Jack Selby?

  And you would have just kept rolling that.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I would have kept rolling it for a few more weeks. If I, if I had confidence that there was a trigger event that week that gave me a meaningful probability of winning on the trade. Okay. So like, I can't say this with confidence now. I'd have to like assess the trade at that moment in time. But the Amazon earnings call was a big event, like it was a meaningful event. Which is why I say there was an 80% chance of me hitting the trade.

• 18:41Graham Stephan?

  So what's the difference between what you're doing and gambling? Because when it comes to options, you could be right about the stock and just a little off on the timing, and that means you're wrong overall.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  I hate the gambling analogy because gambling means so many things to so many different people. Again, it all starts with what your objectives are and what your risk tolerance is. And on top of that, you have to understand that I do excessive amounts of probability analysis. So I essentially run through every theoretical scenario on that trade that could happen that I'm aware of. I look through every scenario, good and bad. And I make an assessment on how likely each scenario is to play out based on actual research. In this case, over a hundred hours of deep research at Amazon.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  And you're playing probabilities. So I guess theoretically, everything in life is a gamble. If you want to look at it like that, I mean, walking outside your door is a gamble because there's a theoretical possibility you could trip and die, right? So that's why I hate the analogy. It's not like investing versus gambling. It's like, do you understand the risk you're taking? And have you done the work? Or are you just willy nilly throwing money out there that you don't know what the hell you're doing? Like, this is what I do. This is my entire life, guys. So I live for this. And like I said, I think there was about an 80% chance that I would nail that trade. 20% chance I wouldn't.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I'm gonna take that every single time. And by the way, 80% chance of not doubling your money, 80% chance of like 6Xing your money. I mean, that's insane. In fact, I knew when I placed that trade that I was going to be disappointed in myself for not making that trade larger. I knew that that trade should have been triple. It should have been a 30 to 40 million dollar day for me. I knew that. But with my account hemorrhaging, with all this stuff happening in my life, I was just like, I just, I wasn't mentally prepared to make the trade. That was my fault. Like, I should have, it should have been a 30 to 40 million.

• 20:55Graham Stephan?

  Do you feel bad about not making 40 million dollars?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I don't feel bad, but I do feel, I knew I was going to regret it. When I made the trade, I wasn't like, I'm gonna regret making this trade because I'm, might lose my money. It's like, I am going to regret not going bigger into this trade.

• 21:13Graham Stephan?

  So it's so funny that I was just telling Jack this, there's a stock I got for 20 bucks. I sold it at 55, but had I waited just an hour later, I could have sold it at like 68. And I was telling Jack, man, I lost all this money because I could have waited a little more. But at the end of the day, it's like, you're just kind of picking reasons not to be happy.

• 21:32Jack Selby?

  Also, it was like a thousand dollars. So like, there's a difference.

• 21:34Graham Stephan?

  Oh, no, it was $9,000 after tax.

• 21:38Jack Selby?

  I don't even know what that means.

• 21:40Graham Stephan?

  It was, it was more than a $10,000 profit for waiting like two hours.

• 21:43Jack Selby?

  Okay.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  You know, like honestly, God, honestly, God, this is what pisses me off so much about the, and I'm not pissed off, but by the way, I love all the commentary on X. Like, yeah, my account blew up this last week. I told you guys, I was eating dinner alone in Austin on Friday night at a really nice restaurant, sitting in the corner at a table. And it took me like over two hours just to do all the replies to one single thread on X. I love it. I live for that. Like, I have waited for decades to have a generation start investing, to have a generation caring this much about investing. I don't care if they're critiquing me. The bottom line is, they care.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  This is literally the entirety of my life is to try to get every human on earth into the investor class, and it's actually starting to happen. So I invite it. I invite the criticism, but I also want people to understand that the majority of investors right now, they're just paying attention to noise. They're all part of the herd, right? Like, that's not how you generate alpha, right? That's not how you knock it out of the park. You have to be an independent thinker. Everything I see on X right now is noise. Like, the easiest trade right now is just not to pay attention to the noise and just actually try to assess the ground truth in something, anything.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  If you can figure out the ground truth in anything and place a bet on it, you're gonna win.

• 23:17Graham Stephan?

  I want to show you this tweet that went pretty viral on X. This person retweeted, admittedly while pissing my pants as my account was hemorrhaging. Those are the hardest trades you'll ever make, but could be the most rewarding. Please, people, don't get into a trade that makes you piss your pants. This is high-risk stuff, belongs in the sports betting slash prediction market bucket. Entertaining, sure, and it worked for Chris, but you're far better off just buying and holding great companies using an amount of money that won't make you lose sleep at night or piss your pants.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Don't tell people what their account objective is or what their level for risk is.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  In my account that has an objective to generate outsized returns by taking concentrated levered bets on high conviction trades, there are going to be moments where I have high conviction, and I feel that the probability is high that I'm going to win. But there is some probability that I'm gonna get wiped out on that trade. And in those situations, I'm a human and I'm nervous, okay? And I'm gonna get nauseous. I might throw up. I might piss my pants, whatever, right? Like, that is the reality of someone that manages a high-risk, high-reward account that makes high concentration levered bets on high conviction calls. That's not everyone, but it's me. And it's not just me.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  There are a lot of people out there that choose to have a separate account or a portion of their account where they want to take levered, concentrated, high-risk bets on things they believe in, that they put the work in on, that they believe will end up with a good outcome, but know, because they're smart enough to know, that it's far from a guarantee. And it's okay to be nervous. It's okay to crap your pants for a second, okay? While you're waiting for that earnings report to come out. Like, I don't see that as bad, but again, it's because of the type of account that I manage, okay? It's my objective. It's my risk tolerance. It's not yours.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  It's not that, guys, but there are a lot of people that want to do that. And like, we're allowed to, and it's not a bad thing. And then when we turn tens of thousands of dollars into tens of millions of dollars in a high-risk, high-reward account, because we put in the work, hundreds and hundreds of hours on these trades, and I've been doing this for 18 years. If you don't agree with it, don't agree with it. I'm not asking you to do it. But there are a lot of people like Chris, I would like to start with a little bit of money and put in a lot of work and take risk with a designated account. Not my kid's college education, not my retirement account, right? I want to do it the right way, and I'm willing to take on that risk.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  And it's gonna lead to some scary moments, dude. Like, there's no way of getting around that. There's just not. It's like, we're human.

• 26:16Graham Stephan?

  Do you worry that a small subset, or maybe actually a larger than small subset, they're not smart enough to make that nuanced decision of, hey, this is a high-risk bucket? And they're just gonna full pour into like, hey, what is Chris in that? Oh, he's buying this? All right, let's go all in. And they lose it.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's like a million ridiculous things that a person could do in the world from actual gambling on sports casinos, YOLOing your money on option bets. There's a bunch of imbeciles that will tell you to do that, right? If you're one of those people, you're likely to find them and do it, okay? And I hope you learn your lesson the hard way.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  It's, it's not likely to be because they're, and if they, if they do it because they're following me, I don't know what to tell you, man. You're gonna, if it's not me, it's someone else, right? Like, but again, take even five minutes to do your research on me and understand who I am, why I do this, how I do it, how I frame risk, high risk, high reward in a designated account. Like, dude, I'm not gonna apologize for it. Like, there are, for every one of me, there's like a million people that are doing the stupidest things in the world. Like, you just can't, we're adults, guys. I mean, we're adults. If we lived our entire life worried about, you know, the degenerate gambler

• 27:42Speaker 02

  that's gonna misinterpret something that they see out of context, then none of us should be on X talking about anything. None of us should ever talk about anything because someone might read one line out of context and do something crazy or stupid. And by the way, hopefully, if they do that, they learn their lesson. They don't do it 100 times over.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  You know, like I'm not their parent, guys. Like, I'm not going to stop sharing my life with the world. Like, I, I share what I do for a reason. I don't make money off it. We all know that. I don't have, don't do anything. I don't have courses. I don't even take sponsorships. I don't do anything. I literally share my thought patterns for the world to like poke holes in and then take his ideas, take the ideas, do their own homework, risk management, like do what they want with it. But like, I don't tell people what to do with their accounts and I don't want anyone to tell me what to do with my account or what I should be writing on X.

• 28:36Jack Selby?

  So what's something that you see on X that is objectively noise that a lot of people believe, but you were able to find the ground truth about? And how did you find the ground truth?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  I think the best example of this is the cap X story. Like, it's been driving me nuts all year. So this is wild to me that we're even having this conversation because it like at no other time in my life, would you have companies coming out and saying, we are so blown away by the demand that we are signing, contractually signing, multi-year demand for this product that we are going to go out and leverage the entirety of our balance sheet. And then on top of that, we're going to borrow debt because this is the biggest opportunity

• 29:24Speaker 02

  we've ever seen in the history of our company to compound returns on our money over the next few years. And then, and by the way, these aren't just random startups. These are like the biggest, most well-run companies in the world by teams that have historically been highly conservative when it comes to cap X. And they're telling you this. And then you have these numbskulls who work at sell-side banks and like rando retail investors freaking out because the company is reducing their cash flow. Like, that's not what these companies are supposed to be doing.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Like, the entire purpose of capital markets is to invest your money into entities that can take your money and do something bigger and better with it. Right? That's why we're investing in these companies, right? Because they have an edge. They have access to resources and distribution and knowledge and, and like that other companies don't have. Like, they're, they're basically leveraging their alpha, right? To compound returns for us. So we want them to do this. Like, it's called a growth company for a reason. They, they basically borrow money at this rate and they make money at this rate.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  I mean, like, this is how it's always been until this year. Like, it's just wild to me. So you're saying that these people that don't know a thing about their business, they're not in these meetings where they're signing multi-year contracts with essentially every one of their companies that they do, do business with, right? Like, that we know that these random investors know more than Jassy knows about his own business? Like, I'm going to take that bet all day long. So it's like, but here's the problem. That negativity is what goes viral on X. It, it drives all the engagement, right? And then there's all these guys with newsletters and guys like Burry that are out there for engagement and selling money with newsletters.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  And they're just like, it's sickening to watch all these retail investors get pulled into that. Nothing that I did with Amazon was special. Like, I did not see anything. None of my research resulted in me finding like a needle in the haystack that no one else could see with Amazon. It's all very obvious stuff. That's so crazy. It's like, it's not like I did something special here. It's just that I'm not getting caught up in the noise. It's just right in front of our face. Is there an anomaly that could potentially impact Amazon in a negative way? Of course there is. But that would be the anomaly. People are acting like the anomaly is that what Amazon is saying is the truth.

• 32:20Speaker 07

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• 32:49Speaker 02

  And, and by the way, like, there is some degree of like concentration risk with a lot of the compute demand coming from Anthropic, coming from OAI, right? People just are worried that they're not going to make good on their compute contracts. So what? Like, in the event that OAI did blow up, which, again, if OAI and Anthropic blow up, there are so many things that could happen, right? First of all, the government can backstop them.

• 33:24Jack Selby?

  And they will.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  They probably will. Like, how did we forget Too Big to Fail?

• 33:28Jack Selby?

  That's what happened, by the way. 2008, you have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the government. They would not let them fail.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  I think these retail kid investors are too young to really, to have lit. If you live through Too Big for Fail, to fail, you really understand it, right? Like, it is highly likely. I mean, there's been nothing more important that I can remember in the last 25 years than AI right now to like so sovereignty. Like, you see what's happening with China? Do you really think that our government is going to let OAI, OAI and Anthropic fail? Not because we care about those two companies, but the avalanche that would happen after them, right? So what would happen? They would come and they would backstop, stop them and they would help negotiate

• 34:16Speaker 02

  a deal to transfer that to other entities that have the technical infrastructure and the balance sheets to take them over, right? And those new entities, however many are involved in that deal, would take over the compute contracts, right? It's, it's just that simple. And I think everyone is also concerned. I mean, there's, there's a lot of concerns. And this is where the opportunity is, right? Because like, no one understands AI in, in the financial world. The world of finance has become so short-sighted and like ADD that I don't think anyone does deep research anymore. Neapol does. I mean, there are a few people that do deep research.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  But most of the research I see getting printed is just copy and paste. It's very surface level or people are just going for engagement and clicks. But like, if you do the research, it is, it's, it's like so clear that it would be an anomaly for the value of compute to just go away quickly anytime in the near future while these contracts are meaningfully important for these hyperscalers.

• 35:34Jack Selby?

  What did you learn this last month about investing and risk management?

• 35:38Graham Stephan?

  Six years ago, I was working for Graham for completely free. And then we launched this podcast and I started making a little bit of money and I was investing every single dollar I earned. And that turned into me buying my first property in 2021 and my second property in 2025, which is exactly where we're filming right now. But here's the part nobody tells you. The more you build, the messier it gets to manage, which is exactly why we've partnered with Monarch. For those unaware, Monarch is the personal finance app that tracks everything. We're talking accounts, investments, spending, income, you name it. Without exaggeration, this is something that I've been doing myself manually for years, probably since I was like in my early twenties. I'd be writing down on like a computer notepad exactly what I was spending, where the money was.

• 36:20Graham Stephan?

  But Monarch aggregates it all perfectly so I could see it all in one dashboard.

• 36:25Jack Selby?

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• 36:33Graham Stephan?

  They even have an investment view where you could see how your portfolio is doing compared to the S and P 500.

• 36:38Jack Selby?

  And it spots stuff that you would not think to look for with AI insights? Like, has your spending actually gone up or is it just inflation?

• 36:44Graham Stephan?

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• 37:19Jack Selby?

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• 38:00Jack Selby?

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• 38:06Graham Stephan?

  Again, that's E T H O S dot com slash Iced Coffee. The link is also down below in the description. Application times may vary, rates may vary. What did you learn this last month about investing and risk management?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  The thing I learned more than anything else, not just this month, but the entirety of this year, is that for the first time ever, there are single accounts and small groups of influential people, both on the retail side of Wall Street and on the institutional side of Wall Street, that can meaningfully manipulate the market over a short period of time. It's because we're so digitally connected, right? Through X and there's so much of a herd mentality right now around the subject matter that is so confusing and so intimidating to people, meaning AI. Whenever you have the driver of a market,

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Being something that people don't understand.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  There is an opportunity for people to manipulate the market by showing confidence one way or the other, even if they're faking it, right? So if 99% of the market really doesn't understand AI on a day to day basis, and I believe that's the case. When someone comes out that has an institutional pedigree and says something, you're going to either think that they know what they're talking about or that they have information from somebody. And that's exactly what happened last week with Ken Griffin and Citadel. Because when Citadel came out and said that they thought that interest rates were going to go up, there was an assumption that they knew something. Okay?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  That type of power is insane to me. I don't know what we do about it. But the market is more easily manipulated today than ever before.

• 40:05Graham Stephan?

  Talking about that, do you think that that was done on purpose to margin call Leopold? And take over his fund?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Yes, I, I, I think it was done as part of the trade. Uh, obviously, part of the trade was just the market doing what the market does. What, you know, we, we had Kimmy come out. That was creating a lot of concern that Chinese open models were going to basically, you know, democratize compute. That was a false assumption, at least for the moment. So there were narratives that were already putting him in a bad situation. Additionally, Leopold made some bad trade decisions. Leopold might ultimately be right with his thesis.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Meaning that AI and AGI is going to eat all software. So he had long bets on various AI and he had short bets on software. But he's a bit young and naive to fully assess how long it takes sometimes for things to play out. Because he just doesn't have that degree of experience. So he actually did make some mistakes with his thesis. And he opened himself up to the possibility of being manipulated. So yes, absolutely. I think people piled on. I think the Citadel, it's more likely than not that Citadel saw the opportunity. They know exactly what's going to happen.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  They knew that they would be one of two or three people in the room when he was forced to liquidate. And, you know, they ended up making, I think, two to two and a half billion dollars last week on this trade. Citadel did. Quick two to two and a half billion dollars that made the month, it probably made the quarter for them off of one trade. This is what they do. This is a big boy game, right? And like, that's on Leopold. Like you gotta, you gotta know that. Probably learned his lesson now. But I learned that in the short term, it's less about ground truth today than it ever has been. Meaning as an investor, if you're making short term leverage bets, there are more things that you don't know than ever before.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Because any number of influential people or influential groups can come out and manipulate the market on a day to day basis. Even if what they're saying is incorrect, wrongly assumed, or just outright made up for manipulation.

• 42:42Graham Stephan?

  So why couldn't this happen to you?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  It could. And that's something that I need to assess with every trade that I make. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to make the trade. I told you that I thought there was an 80% chance of that trade going right, not a 99% chance. I think that's a very fair assessment of the risk of that trade. I was like 99% sure that my work was correct on Amazon. And they were going to knock it out of the park. And they were going to say these certain things during the earnings call. That's exactly what happened. The other 19% that could go wrong are other things. Iran, Trump, some other thing happening overnight, some other rumor that got started on Amazon. I don't know.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  There's, like, I think honestly, guys, if this was like a couple of years ago, it would have been like a 95% chance that I was going to get that trade right and a 5% chance I wouldn't. But because of these factors, I'm calling it 80/20.

• 43:43Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Which I think, I think is a fair assessment of the risk.

• 43:46Graham Stephan?

  Who should listen to you and what type of person would listen to you and wind up losing everything?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Well, I think every investor should listen to me for my ideas. And then they should take those ideas and do their own research and try to poke holes in them and try to bet them, come up with their own thesis that might or might not have anything to do with my idea. And then assess their own level of risk tolerance and make the trade that's correct for them. Okay? Um, one of the things that I do that I think I don't get enough credit for is I will always spend more time trying to understand the other side of my trades than I do my own thesis.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  So I've spent more time this year trying to understand why people are not excited about Amazon and why they might even be short hyperscalers and Amazon than I have with my own thesis. Because in order for you to gain real conviction on a trade, you have to understand the other side of the trade. Because once you understand why people disagree with you, you can now make a proper assessment of whether you think they're right or wrong. But you got, you gotta hear them out, like, and, and that's really meaningful. So you should listen to me because I have, you know, I have really strong takes. I do a tremendous amount of work on my high conviction trades.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  There are very few people right now that will spend 50 to 100 hours researching a single trade. And if you could find those people, I'm going to listen to every one of them that I know do that, right? So like, I'm going to hear them out.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean you should copy my trade. It doesn't even mean, mean you should be influenced by.

• 45:33Graham Stephan?

  So what do you say to the people, though, that just see, oh, Chris bought this, let me go and buy this too? Or let me buy call options on this?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Actually insane. Because if you don't develop your own sense of conviction, then you're not going to be able to make the right decisions around that trade, especially when it goes wrong. Right? Because if you actually have real conviction, because you put in the actual work that you should be doing on these trades, then you're going to be aware of how to frame the trade. You're going to understand that there's a chance that trade one could go wrong. But you're going to have money and conviction to make that trade again the next week. And that, that's actually more often than not, an opportunity. Because like, you know, what I've been saying for months, I hope Amazon goes down. I hope Amazon goes down, right? And it did, it went down.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  That just opens up an opportunity. Truthfully, I got really more killed by Bloom than anything else. Like, and other AI trades. It wasn't like Amazon that like killed me because, guys,

• 46:39Speaker 02

  as Amazon went down, like, I'd just been piling in again the whole way up.

• 46:44Graham Stephan?

  What's the number one trade you've ever done?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Uh, Amazon, Nvidia, Palantir, Robinhood. A lot of the biggest trades I've made in terms of like actual returns, not just percentage, but, but actual dollar returns have mostly come in the last two years.

• 47:02Graham Stephan?

  Because you have more money now?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 47:04Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. And so the figure that's being thrown around is like the 20,000 to 80 million. Is 80 million approximately what you've traded up from this 20,000?

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's approximately what I've generated in returns. Again, you pay taxes on those returns. As you guys know, I've invested in 160 private companies. So essentially, every year for the past 17 years, I paid my taxes. I've then taken money out for living expenses. And then the majority that was left, I would invest in private companies. Which, again, was the biggest mistake of my life because I should have just left all the money in that public.

• 47:43Graham Stephan?

  Do you actually mean that? Because a few of your private.

• 47:45Jack Selby?

  Private company investments seem like they're doing incredibly well.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  No, in aggregate, they've returned like 10 or 12% in aggregate. As opposed to like the 60 to 70% I've been averaging in my public portfolio for 17 years. So, no, financially, it would have been meaningfully better. I'd be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds of millions. I'd be like six or $700 million now if I would have just kept the money in the brokerage account and never invested in a single private company. I wouldn't have met the interesting people I've met over the past 16 years. So like, I don't regret doing it for that because I've met so many amazing people. I'm in so many deals. I've learned so much. And guys, you know this, I have at least one massively large private investment that could end up making me something close to that.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  If it hits in the next few years.

• 48:36Graham Stephan?

  At what point is the risk just not worth it? Because Jack and I were talking last night. How much do you decide to put on each trade? Like, let's say there's a 20% chance you get 100 X, but an 80% chance it goes to zero. How do you know how much to put in that or if that's a deal worth taking?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Again, everyone has to answer that question for themselves because everyone has a different degree of risk tolerance based on what you need to live. Okay. Versus what your account objective is. There are a lot of people that do not have an objective to make hundreds of millions or a billion dollars. They don't even know what they would do with it, right? I'm obviously doing it for noble causes. You guys know me. I have big philanthropic goals in my life. But most people would generate very little additional value beyond 10 or 20 or $30 million. So why would they put everything at risk to become destitute? To make more money that they would probably not make them any more fulfilled in life or content with their life.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  So like, everyone has to make their own decision, but for me, I'll take that bet all day long. Like, if it's a high probability, I'll take it because I have everything I want in life. I don't need anything more in life. I'm set for the rest of my life. And the money that is in my trading account is there to aggressively grow for something big that I'm trying to achieve in life. And that's what I do. So like, it has a very clear objective. And I will never hit that objective if I am not concentrated and levered in my high conviction trades. And so I will continue to do that, knowing that there is a very tiny chance

• 50:20Speaker 02

  that I could make six or seven of these high conviction trades in a row that all go bad. And the account gets wiped out. Like, but that's my risk tolerance. That's for me only and nobody else in this world. So that's the risk tolerance that makes sense for my account objective and no one else. And it's not my fault if some random person sees one line of texts out of hundreds of hours of video content and literally thousands to tens of thousands of tweets and knows nothing about me and is like, this random person just did this, so I'm going to do it too. Like, what sense does that make? That makes no sense. And if you're going to get irritated at me, like, I cannot go over my entire

• 51:05Speaker 02

  account objective every time I say something on Twitter. That wouldn't make sense. What would my tweets look like? I'd have to have like paragraphs and paragraphs of this is who I am. This is what I'm trying to do. I have these other accounts. I have restaurants that cash flow for me. My houses are paid off. Like, I can't do that. It's insane that people expect that.

• 51:25Jack Selby?

  What is the rule that you follow to determine your risk tolerance floor? Like, what is the base amount of quality of life or maximum amount of risk that you are willing to take on?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  I have confidence I'm not going to make six high conviction trades wrong in a row. And I would have to make six in a row to lose all my money. So like, just do the math on that, you know, like, I do it six in a row and I'm dead. So like, I, I, I've never made more than like two bad calls in a row that were high conviction. Could it happen? Could it go to three? Like, really big, really big high conviction calls.

• 52:02Graham Stephan?

  What about for the people who say that you can't consistently beat the market? It seems like you have consistently beat the market.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  There are a ton of people that consistently beat the market.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Tons. I, I, I'm, they're in my community. They've been doing it for 10 years. And they're just regular people that they've been, there are so many people out there that have generated

• 52:27Speaker 02

  15 to 25% returns for 10 to 15 years.

• 52:31Graham Stephan?

  Do you think though, that if you just have enough people, and let's just say everyone threw a dart on a board? With enough people, there would be a small subset of those people who just consistently get it right. And maybe attribute that to skill rather than just a bit of luck too.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Survivorship bias has a portion of those. Everything's black and white, right? It's not like everyone that has consistently beat the market over 10 years has done so because they have a great methodology and a system. And not everyone that's done that over 10 years has done it just purely because of survivorship bias. So I think we have to take a look at each individual and say, okay, what do you do? How do you beat the market? What I do is so transparent and simple. I simply try to uncover change in the world quicker than others and connect dots to companies that would benefit from that change.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  I try to find the ground truth and information asymmetry. When the world is confused about something because they're caught up in noise and misinformation. And I actually did the homework to figure out what's true, knowing that that will eventually surface. And I make my bets. That's what I did with Amazon, right? So like, what I do is not mysterious. I don't have like some black box mysterious trading system. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just freaking makes sense. Like, I don't know how else to say it. Like, I don't know how else to say it, guys. Like, you know my method. I've had like 70 trades, 80 trades over 17 years. And every one of them has a story.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I invested in Amazon early on when I went to Reddit forums and technology forums and saw a lot of technologists talking about migrating to the cloud at their computer, at their company. Well, tons of devs are migrating their company's data to the cloud. This AWS is going to be a big deal. I'm going to invest in Amazon because of AWS. Because I was essentially able to see cloud computing as it was emerging. Does that seem mystical to you or does that just make sense? Right? Like, it's, it's not, it's not like that difficult to understand what I do. And I think that's the problem that most people have with it. They're like, it's not that, it is that easy, but it's also hard.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Because you just, you have, you can't do that and be on Twitter all day, paying attention to all this stupid noise. You know, like, you have, if you want to do that, you have to clear your mind. You actually have to see what's real.

• 55:10Jack Selby?

  What are your overall thoughts then of Leopold as an investor? And what words would you have for him if you were sitting right here, right now?

• 55:17Graham Stephan?

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• 55:36Jack Selby?

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• 55:45Graham Stephan?

  Plus, when they come back, their details are already saved, so it's one click and done.

• 55:49Jack Selby?

  I've personally set up several different Shopify stores because before I was working with Graham, I tried dropshipping. And I actually made some sales, me. Of all people, I was able to do it. Which just shows that Shopify is the easiest way to start an online brand and actually see real sales coming in.

• 56:06Graham Stephan?

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• 56:13Jack Selby?

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• 56:24Graham Stephan?

  Once again, that's Shopify.com/ICH with the link down below in the description.

• 56:28Jack Selby?

  What are your overall thoughts then of Leopold as an investor? And what words would you have for him if you were sitting right here, right now?

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I think Leopold is, has unique insight into the most important.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Subject matter that we've ever seen in our lifetime when it comes to investing, meaning AI, like if AI is the biggest thing that we've ever seen hit our global economy and financial markets, Leopold is directly at the nucleus of the ground truth of what's happening in that world. If you look at his background, you know, where he worked, what he was doing, he obviously has the ability to like assess what's real and connect dots. But he was also in the right places with the right people. I mean, we all know who

• 57:26Speaker 02

  his wife is, right? So like, he is so in the mix of this world and he saw it early. And he's like, listen, this is real. I know it's real because I'm literally seeing it with my own eyes. And unlike everyone else that sees it and just like, let's time pass by. He's like, I see it and I'm going to trade on it. And so he does, you know, him and his team do these really great reports. You might have read them on what he sees. And it's nothing mystical. It's like, he's just explaining what's happening and who's going to benefit from it. Now, is it perfect? No. Like, is his, is his thesis perfect?

• 58:08Speaker 02

  No. Is his timing off? Probably. I think one of the best criticisms of Leopold is that he's a technologist and he's young, but he doesn't have a whole lot of business acumen. So he doesn't really fully understand the moats and the realities of how slow sometimes, you know, technology moves through the business world. So even if you have a superior product, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a superior business and it could take forever, right? For that to play out. So a lot of people are like, you know, we hate Microsoft

• 58:50Speaker 02

  and shouldn't use these Microsoft products. But there's a reason why Microsoft has that stickiness and is able to generate the revenue they've generated forever, right? A lot of people are like Salesforce sucks. Everyone hates Salesforce, but they have this distribution mode that unless you've been in the business world for a long time and have been deeply engaged of what it's like for like systematic change transformation at a large incumbent business, you can't fully appreciate how important those things are. So he's just a young kid and it's like, we're going to AGI, we're going to eat every company in the world. Those companies are going out of business. Maybe Leopold, maybe they will,

• 59:35Speaker 02

  but it might take five to 10 times longer than you think it's going to take. And it might take even longer for people to appreciate what you see. So like, he doesn't have that wisdom, either as a business person or as an investor. So I think that's where Leopold is weak.

• 59:55Jack Selby?

  Have you ever spoken to him?

• 59:57Speaker 02

  No, but I, we have mutual friends and the, our, the mutual friends we have in common have nothing but great things to say about him. I mean, me and Leopold and a group of friends, we all had the same thesis on Bloom. And nobody believed in that thesis early on. Nobody believed in Bloom. Not institutional investors, not retail investors. We've all seen the same short reports come out on Bloom every six to nine months, right? Like, no one did the homework on Bloom. He did it. I did it. I have a very close friend, Jian Xu, who's one of our mutuals, he did it. So like, I have a lot of respect for him. And I think he's going to be back bigger than ever at some point in the future.

• 1:00:43Jack Selby?

  Are you worried with how much leverage there is in the markets? Like, we've seen what happened with Korea. We saw what happened with people taking on a lot of margin, these leveraged ETFs. Is that a concern to you? And is that a concern that maybe that's going to cause the market to skyrocket faster than it should and then drop a lot faster than it should?

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't love it, but it's an opportunity.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com/ai to learn more.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  It's an opportunity on both sides of the trade, right? Because we have this leverage, things tend to move quickly, quickly up, quickly down. Bloom Energy is a great example of that. A big reason why Bloom moved as quickly as it did was because of the leverage, not just applied by Leopold, but applied by South Korea. It was like one of the most actively traded stocks in South Korea. The reason why it blew up as quickly as it did is because of that leverage. So as long as you understand that the leverage exists and you know where it exists in the market, you can, you can adjust for it. But you do have to be careful. I think where it gets dangerous is the combination of leverage

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  plus influence and manipulation. Again, but that's okay, because we know this now, right? So like, I'm not afraid of anything that I know exists. I just have to account for it in my thesis. I have to account for it in my trade strategy. I have to account for it in my risk management, and I do. So there's no reason to be afraid of anything as long as we know it exists. Where things get scary is when things pop up that we didn't know existed until after they blow up.

• 1:02:29Jack Selby?

  What are you paying attention to right now in the stock market?

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  I'm really paying attention more so than ever to the attention trade, meaning like where people have their attention, even if the information's not truthful. I think those will probably be some of the biggest short-term trades the next couple of years.

• 1:02:50Jack Selby?

  Give us an example of that that you're seeing today.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  I know that we are going to enter into another FUD cycle on AI. I've already done some research with AI to try to assess what that's going to look like. What will the narratives be like that people use to try to crash the AI sector in 30 to 90 days, right? We know it's coming. And so I think one of the biggest opportunities is to assess who is influential in this market?

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  And what are those narratives? And to what degree are those narratives starting to accelerate? And to be mentally prepared? I talk about this all this time. Having a prepared mind is extraordinarily important, meaning you have to get ahead of what might happen. So I run scenario analysis, right? This is, this is scenario analysis I'm talking to you guys about. One of my scenarios is that at some point, because I'm still heavily invested and levered in the AI sector right now, is that I want to try to get in front of the next FUD cycle. I want to do a better job than I did this time. I don't want to take as large of a drawdown the next time the FUD cycle hits. So, for example, I knew Kimi

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  was coming. Okay. I knew that Kimi could be a threat, but I did not place enough emphasis on the acceleration of the Kimi narrative as it was happening and the open source narrative. I need to take those things even more seriously next time around. So what am I doing? I'm looking for the next narrative that is going to be used by all the anti-AI guys and everyone that wants to crash the market and all the people that are short all these names. I'm trying to figure out who should I be following that was really influential this last FUD

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  cycle? Because they're likely to be influential the next time. And I'm trying to like build some tools and I'm working with some different people to try to figure out how to measure the acceleration of that narrative. Because if it starts to accelerate quickly, then that is a signal, especially if we get into a levered state again, that we could see a massive correction in AI stocks.

• 1:05:19Jack Selby?

  So what does that look like in terms of practical things that, that the average person can practice? Does that mean that they should have more dry powder set aside to be able to take advantage of the next potential drawdown where the forces at B or the powers that be can, you know, manufacture some sort of drawdown and the people can get involved with that? Does it mean like avoid some leverage at least for the near future? And this is obviously not financial advice. It's just like, how are you reflecting this belief in your portfolio? Also, with that being said, I've always wanted to do this because I thought it'd be cool for you guys. I got these Ray-Ban like meta glasses. And I was thinking how cool it would be if they're super fogged up or whatever, or

• 1:06:01Jack Selby?

  just dirty. If I like filmed and you guys could see what it's actually like to like sit at the table of the Ice Coffee Hour. So I kind of want to like record on this.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  They actually don't look terrible on you.

• 1:06:12Jack Selby?

  Thanks.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  And they usually look terrible on.

• 1:06:14Jack Selby?

  I, I feel like the viewers would think it's kind of cool.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Dude, I think they look reasonably good on you. And am I wrong?

• 1:06:20Jack Selby?

  They do. They do look good. Thanks. They're a little bit bulky.

• 1:06:23Graham Stephan?

  It's a little thick.

• 1:06:24Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Those, those glasses look great on you. It's like interesting because I never seen anyone wear those glasses and like they have the interesting reflector things on the top of the frame. But I thought it'd be cool if you guys just kind of see what it's like to sit at the table of the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Jack Selby?

  So how are you practicing this belief that you have?

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  I won't. I think one of the biggest lies that investors tell themselves is that they're addicted to basically like making money. And I actually don't think that that's true. I think we're addicted to like more of the emotional.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Hit of getting it right. Okay. And those are two very different things. My worst investments are never made after I've lost money. They're always made after a great well researched investment because I'm sitting on a pile of cash. Right. Uh, my confidence levels up, the dopamine is hitting and I find myself chasing like that next emotional hit. As opposed to like being patient and waiting for the next great investment. So I've come up with this like hack and I've been using it the last couple of years. And it's something like, I really want to share this with other investors because they're like, what should you be doing differently?

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Don't lie to yourself. We're all chasing it. Right? We're all over investing. We're investing too often. We're convincing ourselves that we did the work when we didn't do the work. We're convincing ourselves that this investment is well researched when it's actually not. So when you have a low to medium conviction trade, uh, or you find yourself just wanting to do something. Just do it with a much, much smaller amount of money. I noticed that you get like 90 to 95% of the emotional like, like the emotional benefit of, of making that trade, whether you're right or whether you're wrong.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  At like a miniscule amount of the financial risk. And so like traders don't believe this, but it works. They, they don't think that if you make a tiny trade, they're going to get that dopamine hit. You still get the dopamine hit, most of it. And you're not doing something financially irresponsible. And like, I've been doing this now for like a couple of years because I'll make a high conviction trade. I don't have the time to spend another hundred hours on another high conviction trade. But I also don't like sitting on the sidelines. I start to get like anxious, like I gotta do something like, like I want that feeling again. And often I will have like, I will do some research, right? And I'll be semi-confident in a trade.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  I just have trained myself to go in really small and, and I get to go through the entire experience, right?

• 1:09:14Jack Selby?

  What are the smallest positions that you take then?

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Very small. Like I would say like two to 3% of what I would normally trade in a high conviction trade. So like, instead of like chasing the dopamine, it's like, okay, you're not fighting the dopamine. You're just basically you're redirecting it. Okay. Into something that's more financially responsible. And like, again, like you wouldn't believe that it would work. Like I didn't believe that it worked. I've been doing it now for so long. That I just recommend something that everybody try. Because I'm seeing all these people all the time making trades. And I'm just like, there's no way that you did the homework on that. There's no way that you should be that confident in so many different things.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Because you know, like, I'll spend six months on a trade to get that confident to where I'll do what I did on Amazon or, or Bloom Energy, or Palantir before it, or Nvidia, or Robinhood. All of those trades were 50 to 100 hour research trades. And you can't do those every month, obviously. But everyone wants to be part of the culture of this market. Like you're on X, everyone's talking about what they're doing. Like you want to participate. Earnings are coming out. You want to be part of that. You want to be part of the roller coaster excitement. If they, if they hit earnings, you want to make money. So just do it small. Do it really small.

• 1:10:37Jack Selby?

  So this really isn't then for most people, because we were talking about it yesterday, how much free time you have because you don't have a day job. But for a lot of people out there that do have certain things that they need to do on a recurring basis, like a job or like this or like that. They just don't simply have the time to pick out individual stocks. That's probably like 90 to 95% of the people. For those people, you would just recommend passive ETFs, you know, VOO or just sort of like a, even a single ETF portfolio.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  You only need to find one good trade every five to 10 years to be like a top 1% investor over the course of your life. So like, you don't need to be finding new stocks every month or every three months or every six months. But everyone has time to start observing the world and connecting dots, to start to retrain your mind to see things early. The same way I saw AWS, the same way I saw like all these stories when I see shifts happening and change happening. Like that's just living life. You're not doing, you're, you're just literally reading social media.

• 1:11:38Graham Stephan?

  But that assumes that you're good at buying at the right time and then also selling at the right time and knowing when to get out. Cause you could get a great stock on the way up and then just keep holding and it eventually goes back down. And then you sell it like for a loss.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  I, I think you're over, you're overthinking it. Yeah. You could, you, you could perfect the methodology. It's all about information dissemination. You invest when you know something that other people haven't seen and you exit the investment when the rest of the world sees what you saw. Right? Like all the people that made all their money on Tesla back in the day. They simply got in a Tesla and drove one. They're like, this is a game changing moment for the world and they invested in Tesla. And then some number of years later, when the rest of the world was hyped on Tesla, they decide, well, I made all this money. Everyone kind of knows what I know now, so I'm going to sell. Right? It doesn't have to be an all or none decision. Like I always say, if you are unsure about something, buy half, sell half. Like that's the other rule that I live by. It's such a dumb rule, by the way.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  It's like, it's such a dumb rule. It's like every time someone is confused, they call me, they're like, dude, I don't know, man. I'm, I'm just like, I'm at odds. Should I exit? I was like, dude, if you're at odds, just sell half of whatever you were planning on selling. And if it goes your way, be so happy that you pulled the trigger to sell half. If it doesn't go your way, be so happy that you didn't sell at all. You know what I'm saying? Like that, that, dude, it's psychology. This, this psychology part of investing is so important and you have control over it. Dude, I've been doing that forever. It works. It actually works. Glass half full, right? Like it's the greatest thing in the world.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  You don't have to overthink investing. You don't have to nail every trade. Just like live your life. When you see something that's popping, that you connect the dots to a company, it's going to benefit from it. If, if you're, the whole world's not already talking about it, you probably have some edge there.

• 1:13:37Jack Selby?

  So after this last big win, then are you still invested aggressively in Nebius, Bloom and Amazon?

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Mainly Bloom and Amazon. Yes. Uh, I think the, the big picture here is that everyone has the wrong framing for this AI super cycle. People are trying to frame the size of this AI sector by how much money it could potentially make companies or save companies. I think history will reveal that we will only know the value of AI. Once we understand what can be built, once compute becomes fully abundant. Okay? So what I mean by that is our minds can't actually even assess the value of the AI sector today.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Because until compute becomes truly abundant, we won't know what we can do with it as a civilization. Think about movies that rewrite themselves in real time, based on your emotions. Personalized movies. Okay. Think about video games that have no scripted content because they're being generated in real time. Think about having 24/7 scientific discoveries made with tens of millions of agents that are operating on the equivalent of trillions of dollars of compute today. Right?

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  We're extending life. Uh, I think what we'll ultimately find out is that AI will be looked at in the future as something that looks much less like software and much more like the, you know, electricity, basically, like the founding of electricity. So if you think about that, when we discovered electricity, were we able to capably understand what the world would do with that? But just, just think about that. When we discovered electricity, were we able to comprehend how that would change the world? And what economies would be grown from that and industries and sectors? Absolutely not.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  So it's insane that we think we could actually frame the size of the AI world based on the world today. We just don't have enough compute and enough capacity to even assess what we want to do with it yet. Do you like, like, so we need to get out of the current frame and understand that there's a different framework that we're not ready for. That will emerge over the next 10 to 15 years. And that's how I think about it. So if you think about it like that, whoever those leaders are, and they'll, they could change over time. I need to be heavily invested in that. I just, I have to be.

• 1:16:26Graham Stephan?

  So I saw this tweet that says, here's how you retire in five years. Right now, the biggest play is AI infrastructure. Then from 2028 to 2030, it's the AI power grids. And then from 2030 onwards, it's physical AI and robotics. What are your thoughts on that?

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  That could be true, but I have a bit of a different, non-competitive thesis on what I'm focused on. Obviously, in the last show, we talked a lot about the AI efficiency wave and how the next big leg up in technology would be any company that's going to benefit from AI, right? Save money from AI, generate more revenue from AI because you essentially now can grow, you can grow as a company without having to spend infinitely to grow, right? If, if intelligence is free. I think the biggest opportunity going forward when it comes to monetizing AI are those companies that have distribution. So I just got you guys a coffee, an iced coffee.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Got you guys an iced coffee.

• 1:17:30Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  When you guys are setting up.

• 1:17:32Graham Stephan?

  I love that.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  And so when I, when I went in my car, I spilled one from those cups, right? Why can we not make better coffee cups, right? And I was thinking infinite intelligence and AI is going to enable us to make way better plastic coffee cups that are way cheaper. I don't even know what that means right now, but it will. And you could say that for essentially every single product in the world. We're going to figure out how to make better products way cheaper because having access to infinite intelligence is going to teach us how to do that. So who's going to benefit from that? Is it going to be a startup that develops the next best plastic coffee cup?

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  When we have infinite ubiquitous intelligence? Or will it be the company that already has massive distribution and coffee cups? If every company is going to have access to that intelligence at the same time?

• 1:18:28Graham Stephan?

  I just want to say, I have no idea why they've not put gimbals in cars for cups. That you have, you could have a coffee filled all the way to the brim and you make a turn and it just turns in such a way.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  I've seen it. I've seen.

• 1:18:42Graham Stephan?

  I have never seen that. I, I think in a Ferrari or a sports car or a Porsche, a little like just something.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Okay, but do you not remember the infomercial cup from like 12 years ago? That it would, it had that counterbalancing in the cup itself? That was essentially what you're talking about in the.

• 1:18:58Graham Stephan?

  Why do they put that in cars?

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  But they, because no one even buys the cup anymore. I don't know. You might be overthinking it, even though it makes sense. People don't care.

• 1:19:05Graham Stephan?

  I've spilled so much coffee because I filled it up to the top and I just take a turn too much and the thing just spills over.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  But listen, think about what I just said.

• 1:19:12Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  It's not going to be a new company. It's going to be, because once intelligence becomes fully democratized and free.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work and finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  You don't have any inherent advantage by coming up with something better. The company that has the distribution already is the company that's going to get that advantage. Because everyone will have access to the best coffee cup design simultaneously. So the company that already has the distribution of the coffee cups and has the manufacturing facility and has the logistics and has the deployment of billions of coffee cups is going to get to make coffee cups cheaper and better, but mainly cheaper, right? And that company is going to become more profitable. And you could repeat that story for almost every single company in the world

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  that has massive distribution and moats in their industry sector that do not rely on intelligence. That's why I'm so hyped on Amazon, because Amazon is a company that spent 25 years building a global logistics network, distribution around the world, invested tens and tens of billions of dollars doing that, right? But you just need to look at companies that can operate more efficiently once intelligence becomes infinite. And it's all about distribution. Those that have distribution will win. So if I'm an investor right now and I'm thinking the next five years, the next eight years, who are going to be the big winners that no one's talking about today? Cause maybe they're boring companies.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  I'm going to look at companies that have massive distribution moats. Because once the intelligence wave hits, they are going to win in so many ways, every way, right? They'll be making their products cheaper. In fact, I just saw, I just read an earnings report earlier today on a trade I got lucky on. It was booking.com.

• 1:21:25Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  And I was scanning the earnings report and I noticed something in there. And it is that the cost of their customer service at booking.com was meaningfully coming down due to the AI tools that they've been developing and instituting across the organization. Which, we hadn't seen that yet, guys. Like, we had not seen that hit regular end climate. This is what I was talking about, right? The AI efficiency wave? This is just one little piece of information. If we start to see that wording starting to come out more and more in earnings reports, we're lowering our costs to this AI, watch out. Do you are going to see AI blow up unlike we've ever seen it before?

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Cause that is the last leg that everyone's waiting for. Everyone that is anti-AI in terms of not believing in its value keeps raising the bar and raising the bar. At first it was like, hey, the hyperscalers are not seeing any returns on their investments. Okay, well, they're seeing the returns, but they're only seeing returns because all these companies are spending so much money on compute with them. And they're not seeing any returns on their investment. And so eventually it's all going to unwind. As soon as we start to see all the world's companies saying, nope, we're operating at higher efficiency, we are now growing and we're able to make this step growing because we can grow more efficiently.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Like, we would have to spend this much money to enter this space, but now we're doing it for 10 cents on the dollar. And so we're taking that initiative and now we're generating more revenue, more profits. As soon as those reports start hitting the street, that is going to lead to, I think, the biggest mega cycle that we've ever seen in AI yet. Because it's not about 20 companies, guys. It's about every, theoretically, every company in the S and P, right? For the most, not all of them.

• 1:23:20Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Like whichever ones. So last time we talked about companies that would benefit from efficiencies and that still exist. And also from, from, from revenue expansion due to being able to operate and grow more efficiently. So now a use case that didn't make sense for them before now makes sense because the costs are lower, so they can chase that use case. This time we're talking about the companies that benefit most are the ones that have moats and distribution. So that's where I'm looking the next year. I'm trying to decipher who has the biggest distribution modes. Because intelligence is going to bring costs down massively.

• 1:23:58Graham Stephan?

  What do you think about the SpaceX IPO? Because that's now down, I believe, over 40% from its peak. At what price do you buy SpaceX?

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  If, if you look at everything I said about SpaceX, you can tell I was trying to like be really careful with my words because so many retail investors were so hyped on SpaceX. I wanted to kind of warn them, but like, I didn't want to like,

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  I didn't want to be the guy to like poop on the party, right? And SpaceX did so well when it IPO'd. I was really happy for all these people that made money. But the truth is, as I said before, anyone with any amount of money, institutions or high net worth has been pitched SpaceX 100 times in the 12 to 18 months before that IPO. So anyone with real money had the ability to invest in SpaceX at hundreds of billions of dollars. And virtually nothing has changed between them then and now. So I think it's insane seeing SpaceX at a trillion and a half. If you love it at a trillion and a half and you have money to invest, you should have been investing aggressively at three, four, 500 billion.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  So like, I just don't, I don't understand. It makes zero sense.

• 1:25:12Graham Stephan?

  Say that about Tesla? Because a lot of people said the same thing about Tesla that, oh, it's overvalued, it's this and that, but it's still somehow managed to.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  No. No, the numbers are totally different. I just risk reward on large numbers here. I mean, the numbers aren't there. The numbers are only there for SpaceX under like theoreticals that are years out, which is why I said, you know, if you want to invest in SpaceX and the story continues to get better and better, it's possible with a blue sky company like that, that people will continue to value it for what they might build 10 years from now. And if you want to be part of that game, then go ahead and be part of that. It's not something I'm interested in. For me, that's a highly speculative game based on something that might or might never materialize. When I look at SpaceX's actual business, I love it.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  And that's why I invested in it at $30 billion. Okay, I loved what they were doing with satellites. And I was like, the satellite business is going to be worth more than $30 billion. I see it at 1.6 trillion today, even after the move down. You said it was like 1.6 trillion, is that right?

• 1:26:21Graham Stephan?

  1.6 today, after being down 40%.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  I'm like, whatever people are seeing in SpaceX is something more than I'm able to see. So I only invest in companies when I see something that others don't. It's the opposite with SpaceX. With SpaceX, others see something in SpaceX that I don't, which is totally fine. It's just not right for me. So there's no world in which SpaceX becomes an investment in my portfolio unless something radically changes, radically.

• 1:26:50Graham Stephan?

  Even if it does follow your thesis, which is they have distribution and they have a moat, would you agree with that?

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  They have distribution, they have a moat, absolutely.

• 1:27:00Graham Stephan?

  The only difference is that there's no practical use case for exactly that. Like, that is assuming that we can't come up with an alternative solution that, you know, outside of space or like on earth, that can do what SpaceX is trying to do with AI. Is that like the main?

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  People are valuing SpaceX based on the best of all best case scenarios, right? That, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:27:22Graham Stephan?

  So it's just a math number?

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, I just don't.

• 1:27:24Graham Stephan?

  A math problem?

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  It's not even a math problem. It's just like, the people that are invested in SpaceX are invested in it because they believe in these pie in the sky. Goals, which is awesome. I hope they hit them. I just like, I not only, I don't believe in them, right? I haven't seen proof that I think we're highly likely to hit that. And even if we were, it wouldn't matter to me because it's already being valued. Assuming that that happens, right? So I'm going to invest in something where I see something big that is likely to happen, where the rest of the world doesn't see it. And I have conviction it will happen. So it's the polar opposite of how I invest.

• 1:28:02Jack Selby?

  It also seems like right now, some companies could report really good earnings. And then immediately afterwards, the stock still falls 10%.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Expectations, just expectations.

• 1:28:11Jack Selby?

  So people have even higher expectations than good earnings. They want good earnings and something else.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the way, it's short, short term expectations are different, right? From long term expectations. I'm not super concerned with what happens month to month, quarter to quarter in the AI sector. For me, this is like a multi-year trade, right? And as long as nothing happens. By the way, this is another thing that really upsets me about modern day investors. You'll notice one thing about me is like, if I see something that goes against my thesis, I will immediately exit my trade and sometimes take the opposite side of that trade. So if something actually does happen, right?

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Here with AI or compute that really messes with the economics, I will be out of that AI trade in an instant. So I'm constantly looking for that devil's advocate take. And I'm actually very open to saying, well, what I thought was going to happen is not playing out. And I need to completely reverse the way I'm thinking about this sector. Investors don't think like that, guys. If you guys read X, I have never seen a, a time when people are so loyal to their stocks, so loyal to these companies. I just don't understand it. Like, I don't get it at all. The companies don't care about you. The stocks don't care about you.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Why do you have a personal relationship with a stock? It's, it drives me nuts. Because when you start to see evidence to, to, to the contrarian side of, of the person's thesis, they refuse to believe it and they're constantly trying to fight it. I don't fight it, I welcome it. Like, show me where I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I will thank you because you just helped me reverse out of a trade where I was wrong. I, it's maybe the biggest issue facing investors. Like, guys, this is so important to like nail through investors' head. Stop it. Stop having a personal relate. You're not dating your stock. You're not married to your stock. Just be objective and, and be willing to say that the information has changed. You learned something new.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  The world has changed. There's something new that shifted. Something came out of China. I don't know. Like, you gotta reevaluate everything. And even though if you've been talking about this stock as, as the greatest long ever for a year and a half, tomorrow you might need to come out and say, dude, things are different now. I just exited and I might even be shorting that stock. Are you willing to do that? You have to ask yourself, are you actually willing to do that? Run that scenario in your head. Because I guarantee you, most investors would like, they would, they can't get the words out of their mouth. Like, they wouldn't do it.

• 1:31:00Jack Selby?

  What in your life has changed since this past month of trading?

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  I'm having the best time in my life with other investors. I just am having so much fun, guys.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Even though it's been a roller coaster and the last few weeks were rough before this last week. Dude, I feel, I've said this so many times, like, the community keeps getting larger and larger. And people are learning. And like for every one person that has a negative comment, there's like 50 that are like, dude, this is the greatest ever, like, that are having so much fun investing and researching and hot takes and like, the bottom line is, if you're just investing, you're winning. You know what I'm saying? Like, we all know that, right? Like, you might beat the S and P or not beat the S and P. You might spend way too much time doing research to actually not outperform the S and P. It doesn't matter.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Because if that's what actually gets you to get excited about and engage with the world of investing, the mere fact that now you're going to be throwing more of your money into investing instead of like buying stuff, means you're winning. Because what happens generally, there's no absolutes, right? But what happens generally when you have money in capital markets? You make money. It's just, just factual. Like, obviously you can do stupid stuff, you can get levered out. That's no one, people should be doing things responsibly. And we teach a lot of that, right? On, on my channel. You just gotta get in the game of investing, dude. Like, and more people are investing today than ever. And by a lot, and it's growing by the day.

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  And I freaking love it. I love it now that I have to take hours sometimes to go through comments on a single thread to just reply to people. I love that this world is getting that big and that I'm part of making this world bigger every day with my hot takes, whether you love them or hate them.

• 1:32:57Jack Selby?

  What are some of the best ways that you get information asymmetry outside of what the average investor thinks is what they should be studying, like earnings reports or interviews? Like, is there a specific way that you get access to that information?

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  You gotta go to the source. Like, you got, you, forget about, forget about financial media earnings report. I mean, that stuff's all fine. To understand a baseline for what people generally know about the company and what generally people care about. But you have to figure out what the marginal driver of interest and or price action is going to be for a company. And it could be one thing, like in the case of Amazon, it was, are they converting all this capex into actual real returns? That was the one thing, right? So.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  The wheel was brilliant, but the road made it iconic. Electricity was powerful, but the grid brought it to every home. Innovation needs infrastructure. AI is no different, especially in finance, where AI can't run without context. But it can run on Plaid's infrastructure. Built over 13 years to understand why money moves. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  Once you know what that one thing is, from reading the investing reports and the earnings reports and media, you have to go away from finance to find the ground truth. So like, what I mean by that is I've spent so much time the last few months actually like reading technology forums with all the people that are actually working at these companies.

• 1:34:46Jack Selby?

  What is a technology forum?

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Any, they're on Reddit, they're all over the place. So like, there's tons of them. What you want, they're, it's on X. There are people on X who are actually a developer at company XYZ. There's millions of them. So instead of spending your time reading, you know, investors that have good and crappy takes on the same stuff that everyone else is reading and they're just recirculating opinions over and over again and fighting with each other. Spend more time looking for tech. This is what Leopold does, right? He hangs out with these guys. It's his world, right? It doesn't have to be your world because they all live on the internet, right? So if you're not hanging out with people that work at OAI and Anthropic and that work at the end clients

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  that are actually instituting AI into their workflow, they will be the first people to tell you if it's making or saving their company money or not. Okay? Before it ever hits the financial press, before it ever hits an earnings statement, the guys who work at the companies and the women that work at the companies? No. And there's millions of them. They're all over the internet, chat rooms, on X, making videos on YouTube, right? Like, go to the source. If you want to figure out if AI is actually a productive technology that's generating positive ROI for all the world's companies that are now spending all their money on AI.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Because if that's true, the AI sector is going to explode higher. If it's not true, we got a problem. The only way to get that answer is to like, go to the source. So that's where I spend my time. I don't spend my time listening to other investors' opinion on what Michael Burry said this morning. Like, that's not going to do me any good, guys. Like, I want to go to, so I, I basically read right now, though, because I'm really deep in the AI trade, obviously. I just spend a lot of time reading, sometimes obscure people that have virtually no followers, by the way. They don't have to be like influential. A guy who's at a company, like, just name any company, like, American Airlines, I don't know.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  American Airlines probably has hundreds to thousands of developers working on AI and stuff right now, right? Like, they're all over the internet. Some of them are talking about how well it is or isn't working. And that exists for every company in the world right now. And we have to figure out as investors, over the next few months to couple of years, is the AI trade real or not? Is it deserving or not? If you could answer that question, this is the biggest moment in the history of capital markets. If you can correctly answer that question, and you know where to place your bets, and you have risk capital,

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  that you're willing to make concentrated lever bets in an account to where you fully understand that if you're wrong, you're going to get crushed. So again, understand the risk, understand your objectives, but that opportunity is out there for anyone. And I, I just look at other investors and I laugh because I know what they're doing with their day. I can see it. I can, I can read what they're saying on X, and I know how they're spending their day. They are not spending their day following the same people that I follow, like, searching the same keywords and reading these tech forums. Like, they're not doing that. No one's trying to get to ground truth right now. So my alpha is I am willing to do what it takes to get to ground truth.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  And then that will deliver the conviction that I need to place a levered concentrated bet on who I think will benefit.

• 1:38:35Jack Selby?

  If AI is going to make everything higher quality and more abundant, what's the practical use case of building wealth right now as opposed to like, spending it on the things that increase the quality of life?

• 1:38:45Graham Stephan?

  Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this, as well as early access, and a bonus post show posted every single week, feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join, would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now.

• 1:39:09Jack Selby?

  If AI is going to make everything higher quality and more abundant, what's the practical use case of building wealth right now as opposed to like, spending it on the things that increase the quality of life?

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  You're making a wrong assumption that life as it exists is a fixed pie, right? So when you say that everything becomes more abundant, and that everything becomes cheaper, right? That theoretically might be true for our world today, but new worlds will be created. What I mean by that is, there will always, we will always, as humans, we will always come up with newer, greater things that we want to do, right? And those things will become prohibitively expensive and difficult, right? There are levels to life. And so even if life becomes better for everyone today, in today's terms,

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  there will be new things that we're going to discover that we're going to want to do in 20 years, that if you happen to have more resources, more time, uh, you'll be able to chase. So I don't know what they are, man, but like, at no point in history has that not happened, right?

• 1:40:19Jack Selby?

  Interesting that it would demand some sort of resource, but that's also to assume that that resource would be money, because it could be something else, it could be influence, it could be time.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:40:28Jack Selby?

  It could be access, and those things could be way more valuable to, to attain this new goal that, that, that we could have in the future.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  I've said this, so if, if intelligence becomes fully democratized and free, then the type of people and the type of skills that become value, valuable in the future have nothing to do with conventional intelligence. That's why I'm so focused on content creation right now and working with other content creators, working with people I think have really rare human voices that are like, special, because entertainers become super valuable, right? Like, people that are charismatic, people that can make you laugh. These other things in life that aren't maybe directly connected to this intelligence layer that's going to become devalued

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  become way more interesting in the future. So, listen, we've seen this throughout history, right? Like, like, we kind of like, go through cycles where certain types of people, like, there's certain times in history where people that are physically strong have an advantage, right? The last 50 years, it's people that were, you know, smart, right? Developers, coders, you know, the nerd class has blown up the last 25 years during the age of technology, and might still for a little while, right, as we enter this age of AI. I think once we're actually kind of deeper into this age of AI, I think the creatives are going to flourish.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  And I, I say creative loosely, because what creative doesn't necessarily mean just what we think of being creative today. Like, creative can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but people that aren't valued as much in today's world might become unbelievably valued in tomorrow's world.

• 1:42:21Jack Selby?

  Like charisma.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  All of it.

• 1:42:23Jack Selby?

  You know what's interesting is we were speaking to David Adelman on the podcast, and he owns a percentage of the 76ers, or he owns a percentage of a group that owns a few different sports teams and the like of that. And he said that that was his reason for getting involved with sports, is that he thinks that that's something that you can't necessarily correct or improve with AI. And so it's sort of like this untouchable thing that's going to exist forever, that everyone's going to want to enjoy.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  It's an awesome example. I completely agree. I completely agree. And there are so many examples like that, right? So like, what I would be doing if I was a young person right now, like, there's a lot of stuff you should be doing. We talk about this all the time, right? Like, learning AI tools so you can like, be 10 workers in one and just getting a job and making money, but, you know, while we still can, right, the next 10 years. But you should also be thinking about what skillsets become valuable when intelligence becomes commoditized. And you should be working on those skillsets, because we all kind of have them, but we don't, we don't grow them because historically, they haven't been that valuable.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  Like, you might know a little guitar, but you chose to spend your time doing school versus guitar, because the guitar wasn't going to take you any place that would allow you to be successful in life. Where I think if everyone has access to lots of money and access to lots of, uh, intelligence, and you're trying to get into certain groups or certain rooms or certain people, maybe the ability to be musically talented becomes more important in 10 years, 15 years, right? That's just one example. Or sports, right? Or any, or honestly, like, anything.

• 1:44:05Jack Selby?

  Is there a part of art that is threatened by AI? Because I, I have heard a lot of like, AI music, and it's not half bad. And I think a lot of the, like, top performers on the charts right now are AI songs.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I thought a lot about it, and I just don't, I just don't know how that all plays out.

• 1:44:25Jack Selby?

  And even charisma, it's like, eventually, we could have these things planted in our brains that, oh, give us fetus. And then all, all of a sudden, I mean, obviously, that could be five years past the democratization of intelligence, right? Is like, then the democratization of charisma.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  I, I think it's also important, guys, like, again, going back to the birth of electricity. It, it's, it, it's naive to think that we could...

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  Really kind of assess what the world's gonna look like in 20 years when we're going through this big of a quantum leap in technology. So you shouldn't get too ahead of yourself. I, I, I kind of tell people, just focus on the next three to five years. If you start making predictions of what it's gonna be like in 15 years, you're gonna be so wildly off. It's not even really worth your time because it's just gonna change so much. The world's gonna change so radically between now and then. By the way, this is why I feel it's really important to be liquid. This is why I love liquid capital markets and I stopped investing in private markets years ago. So the second that AI started to like really emerge, I was like, I am pulling way back

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  because it's an unknown. I don't know where the barriers to entry are. I don't know where the moats are anymore. I need to have access to my capital. So as the world changes quickly, I can reroute my capital to where it makes sense, which is very difficult to do with illiquid investments.

• 1:45:57Graham Stephan?

  Given probabilities, I see a lot of posts right now comparing today to 2001 and they're showing these charts side by side, showing that they believe we're gonna see another uptick up and then just a brutal crash downwards. What are the chances of a market crash to this degree? And what do you think the likelihood is of that happening?

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  I think it's unlikely, but it could definitely happen. I mean, we're going through a period of crater destructionism where the thing that's happening with AI is so big that we over invest in it and we really don't know what the hell we're doing. So we're like investing in a lot of companies that are gonna go bankrupt, right? And it's moving quicker than any technology we've ever seen before. So there could be a window, this is the thing I always talk about, there could be a window where we make the big investments, but we don't see the fruits of those investments quick enough. That would be my biggest concern. Um, I don't know. I don't know. It's possible.

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  And anytime the world starts to move this quickly, you have to be honest with yourself that we're becoming more fragile as a result of it. And if we're living in a more fragile world, it's going to become more volatile and anything could happen. So you have to be mentally prepared for that, which is why I think it's really important to have access to your capital, to be in public markets where you have a lot of liquidity. And if you need to kind of make some moves, right? You can make them quickly. I, dude, but like, I, I think everyone that tries to correlate things to the past, that's ridiculous. I was around then and trading, okay? Like this is deals nothing like 2000.

• 1:47:41Graham Stephan?

  What did that feel like?

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Nothing like it. I hated it. I was working at a dot com and I thought every single person around me was a fraudster. Every company was a fraud. It was disgusting. Hated it so much. Every company was just be just like doing whatever they could to go public and to float complete false business models that didn't make any sense. The internet was growing really slowly. So like, there was this thing that could be really big. Everyone was chasing money. They weren't chasing real change.

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  Like they weren't like, the internet was evolving too slow, but we over invested in it. And like, you know what I'm talking about? How like, it was almost like the opposite problem. We invested so much capital in this sector, but it was gonna take way, way, way too long for that sector to play out. And so that was the issue back then. Now, things are moving so quickly, right? It's almost like, we don't even know how it's gonna play out.

• 1:48:51Graham Stephan?

  Couldn't you argue that it's moving all too quickly? Maybe we haven't caught up to some of the ways that we're gonna be able to take advantage of it in the future, even though it's going to happen.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  The issue with how quickly it's moving is that it's creating a more fragile world and that we don't, aren't spending the time to protect ourselves against the downside of it, right? The things we really don't want to talk about, right? Someone creating a virus, someone, you know, doing a bad actors leveraging this technology for bad things. Our military becoming less defensible because billions of drones can be operated by third world countries, right? And all of a sudden, our old military isn't as effective against that technology. So it could create an issue for our economy.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  And then our capital market structure falls apart because people feel like we don't have the stability to invest in capital markets because anything could happen at any moment in time. That's what worries me about a fast moving technology. The fact that it's moving fast, though, I think prevents us from having a similar issue to 2000 because we're already starting to see the results, right? We're already starting to see that this technology is changing companies in a positive way, like that, that one I just talked about and more. But like, it's not the same. People always go back to try to make these.

• 1:50:18Speaker 00

  The wheel was brilliant, but the road made it iconic. Electricity was powerful, but the grid brought it to every home. Innovation needs infrastructure. AI is no different, especially in finance where AI can't run without context, but it can run on Plaid's infrastructure. Built over 13 years to understand why money moves. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  Guys, I'm telling you right now, like AI is so, it's on a, it's in another stratosphere compared to the internet that was created back in 99, 2000, when it started getting big.

• 1:51:04Graham Stephan?

  What do you think about Steve Iceman, who recently went all cash? He's from the big short. And his argument was that he believes that AI is binary right now in the market. It either succeeds and the market climbs or it doesn't and there's a big correction. He sees that over half the equities in a 6040 portfolio plus most new bond issuance is AI related, so no one's actually diversified. And he also says the latest Nvidia deal is so convoluted that you don't know if there's any real profitability outside of Nvidia.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  I'm gonna answer that question, not just to Steve Iceman, but I'm gonna answer it to Michael Burry. I'm gonna answer to every single person that has this strong, high conviction take on how this is going to play out. I don't think any of us know exactly how it's gonna play out. And I'm so sick of listening to these old guys that have so much conviction that this is going to happen or this is going to happen. We just don't know. And these guys are so afraid to admit that they don't know. I don't know. Okay, like I, I have like, I kind of feel like I know what's gonna happen the next 30 to 60 days. And I know this is gonna be really big, okay?

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  But I am spending time every day to assess how quickly it's moving and in what direction it's moving in and new risk factors. And the probabilities in my head are shifting every single day. And all the scenarios that I'm running in my head that are good and bad for the AI sector are changing every day. And I think it's really dangerous to follow one of these guys just because they had success at one point in the past, to think that they are the guru and they can see the freaking future. Because history has proven that it's impossible to see how these big game changing things are gonna play out, that when we've never experienced anything that big before, right?

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  If we were just experiencing another big development in software, right? Or another like, kind of just another step up in technology, I think it would be reasonable to say, hey, this is how it's likely to play out. But clearly AI is not that. So I'm gonna say that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. And then I'm not gonna try to make pretend that I do either. Like, the best approach right now is to realize that no one knows what the hell they're talking about when they're trying to confidently say that this is gonna happen. And by the way, if any of those scenarios happens to play out, that's survivorship bias. We've seen it a million times. You predict the market crashed 38 times and it eventually happens or whatever.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  We cannot predict anomalies. Like AI is the biggest anomaly. It's an unknown. It's a new frontier. We haven't having a clue. There are so many factors that are going to play in to how, what the roadmap looks like for AI and how it kind of merges into our economy and our world and changes us over the next few years. I don't think Sam Altman knows. I don't think Elon knows. We can see a few months ahead of us, barely, barely.

• 1:54:17Graham Stephan?

  What do you think's gonna happen the next 30 to 60 days?

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  I think we're coming around to realizing the realness of AI in the next 30, 60 days. We've just come off of a cycle where everyone, again, the last 30 to 60 days, we were in this FUD cycle and we came up with every reason why AI was gonna blow up. We're still, even the last couple of weeks, we're like, oh, AI is gonna blow up. Anthropic's gonna blow up because of open source. I think everyone's gonna chill out a little bit the next 30 to 60 days. And I think we're gonna realize that like, okay, nothing catastrophic is likely to happen here as quickly as we think it is. And hopefully people will take more measured takes on, you know, the AI cycle is at least

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  somewhat more real than people believe. Compute's not going away tomorrow. Like, like, you know, the Kimmy thing came out and it was like, okay, we don't need compute anymore. Like, we've gone through this, guys, so many times. Inference compute is barely changing at all, right? Due to the open source models. We still need massive amounts of inference. And even if someone has a massive breakthrough on compute, where we only need a 10th of it. We're going to come up with new use cases for compute like instantly evolving entertainment that's personalized to you based on your emotions, right? Or like I said, the video games that just make themselves as we're going along. Like, there's going to be a million things that we can do.

• 1:55:49Speaker 02

  Like, let's solve cancer tomorrow. Like, let's just, as soon as compute gets cheaper, we're, as humans, we're going to figure out a way to leverage it in new ways where we'll, you know, it goes down by 10x, we'll figure out we'll need 20x more. I believe that's going to be the cycle. I don't know how quickly that cycle happens, but it's going to like ebb and flow, ebb and flow between open source, China breakthroughs. Is AI still an economic model that we can count on? I think people are going to slowly start to, to educate themselves. Like, right now, no one knows anything. I think every few months, people are going to get a little bit smarter. And they have been, by the way, to some extent, right?

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  If you look at the fears we had nine months ago, they were completely obscene. So I think people get smarter every couple of months, but it doesn't mean that we still won't have these frightening moments when people freak out and they're like, I gotta sell my AI stocks.

• 1:56:49Graham Stephan?

  One thing I'm curious about is that on Twitter, you've been going pretty viral. You've been spending a lot of time answering comments, responding to people. Some of it has been a little divisive. I'm wondering, do you think the additional social media exposure is going to diminish or reduce your critical thinking, putting on some of these traits? Like, do you worry that's going to take away from like your focus and shift it away from looking at these stocks to responding to comments?

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, to some extent, I need to, I need to refocus, right? But I've been responding to comments the last few days because I can't go through these cycles. When I spend 100 plus hours researching a company, I need a break, right? So like, I'm taking time off right now. Like, I'm not doing heavy research right now. I had a big win, I'm taking a break. You know, I'm not 20, I value balance in my life and I really enjoy the community aspect of it. I actually authentically enjoy talking to other investors. It's one of my favorite things in the world. So even if I miss a couple of trades because I'm distracted, hanging out on Twitter and talking

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  to other investors and coaching people through things and I'll get re-engaged with my own community, that's what I need to get revved up for the next big high conviction trade where you don't hear from me for a month because literally I'm not sleeping and I'm up till 4am every night doing deep research and then I just announce what it is. And by the way, like, I'll always make the high conviction trades. And what I, what I, what have I been saying about Amazon all year? I said, if Amazon is a thing that takes me down, so be it. Like, I have an 18-year track record, I have this reputation, I have this community, and it'd be really easy for me to just chill out and not take big risk that could implode

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  my account and like, that's how you'll remember me. But that's, I'm not, I don't care. Like, this isn't like football, guys, like, I don't have to worry about my joints, you know what I'm saying? Like, I can still do this and I'm going to still do this. I'm just going to do it at a pace that makes sense for me. And when I really believe in something, I'm going to talk about it, even if I fall flat on my face. And by the way, you saw what I did last week, I put it out there, everyone knew what I was doing, right? Like, if that trade didn't work out, everyone was going to know that I blew up, okay? Everyone, that's not an easy thing to do.

• 1:59:26Graham Stephan?

  Speaking of that, what did you get wrong about Sweetgreen?

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, the big Sweetgreen move down has to do with the stomach virus and lettuce. You're probably aware of that, right? So like, if you're trading one piece of information, in the case of Sweetgreen, I was trading the new rap. Then we had this cyclo virus, what is it called? Like, you know the...

• 1:59:50Graham Stephan?

  It's called the, the Jack Selby virus?

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  That, that quickly became the driver for not just Sweetgreen, but for, you know, Taco Bell and all any... So listen, Sweetgreen, their entire business is lettuce and no one's eating lettuce for the last, what? Five or six weeks? So I always talk about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Like, that wasn't on my radar. Uh, but even before that, I start, I ate a Sweetgreen a few times and I loved the rap, but then I went to Kava and I had, because I had never been to Kava, actually. And Kava was, you know, doing really well, again, before this whole lettuce thing.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  And what I noticed at Kava, because I'm eating really like, uh, clean right now. And I love Sweetgreen because Sweetgreen was clean. Like, you can tell, like, there was no sauces on that stuff. I went to Kava and I tried to order something really clean and I couldn't. Like, the chicken, like, the protein was like mixed with sauce and stuff, but it had a lot more taste than Sweetgreen. And then I started researching a lot of the comment analysis and I realized that was a little bit of a theme. Kava is more positioned for the masses, where Sweetgreen is more positioned for the clean eating demo. Okay?

• 2:01:16Speaker 02

  And I think Kava is making for a really tough competitor against Sweetgreen. So that's kind of like a little bit of a headwind for that company. But again, you gotta remember something, I placed a very tiny bet on Sweetgreen because it was, I had only partially done my research, right? Remember that? So I was like, this is speculative, I think there's a potential here for this to be a big hit for Sweetgreen, but we'll just have to see how it plays out. Now, I ended up getting pulled into some other bigger trades, you know, all this stuff. And I've been telling people since then, I'm like, they asked, I'm like, I don't have time for Sweetgreen, guys. Like, the trade was tiny, like, I really don't care. Like, I have bigger trades I'm focused on. I think Sweetgreen earnings like this week, people can ask me, I'm like, not only do I not have time for Sweetgreen,

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  but my little rap thesis has become irrelevant with this virus, completely irrelevant. So there's no reason for me to be even looking at Sweetgreen because the only Sweetgreen trade right now is to what extent will this virus destroy their sales? More or less than the market thinks it will? That's all that matters for Sweetgreen. My thesis on the rap has become irrelevant until this virus passes.

• 2:02:30Graham Stephan?

  Got it. Is there anything else you're buying outside of stocks right now? Like, are you getting into collectibles, other alternative assets, anything else that you are bullish on?

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  I don't invest in anything outside of public equities and I don't, I don't think I will for a very long time. I have my cash flow businesses, but those are more for joy, right? The thing I care about right now, like, I'm having fun, is, uh, content, doing more content. I'm enjoying doing content myself, I'm opening up a podcast studio in Austin, will be doing a show for someone else, not me there. And I'm having fun kind of applying a lot of the stuff I've been doing and with investing the last 20 years to the content game. So I think content creators are going to be the next big thing because of AI.

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  And we talked about this, like, people need that sense of connection, they need that humanity. So like, the humans that are most interesting, that remind us how great we are as humans and how special we are, that have a voice that truly is differentiated from what we're about to get with all the AI stuff that's coming. Like, there might not be that many of them, but the ones that exist, I think, become, one, super valuable, and two, super fun to be around. So like, I'll spend the next few years of my life spending more time with those people and also trying to improve my own content, right? Because I think like, there's never been a bigger moment for the world to come into the investor class.

• 2:04:05Speaker 02

  And you know, they're not doing it because they study investing in college, they're doing it because they see a YouTube show or podcasts and they get excited, they open up a brokerage account and five years later, it changes their life. So I think, did I tell you the story, that guy that, uh, I'm going to take you to see this, uh, project that I'm building out at Love Field? And my contractor's, uh, worker, one of his workers was crying and made me come up there because he found out I owned the place. And he was about to commit, but twice, uh, because his business partner basically took all this stuff and after 20 some odd years, he lost his business and was destitute, basically lives on a farm.

• 2:04:47Speaker 02

  And he randomly saw one of my shows talking about how you can start from nothing and build up by just investing in things that you see. And it like made him think that he could do it. And like, he, he literally, I went up there and he started crying in front of me, he said, you saved my life. I'm like, that's how important content is, right? Like, I'm just a financial YouTuber, like, I didn't think I had that impact on people. But people are deeply need connection with other humans right now. Because there's not a lot of it, as you guys know, these days. So this is just one way for those con... And listen, I love being a content creator that I'm fortunate not to have to make money from my content

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  so I could just focus on trying to be hyper authentic and intimate with the people that care to follow me. And like, that's really fun for me. Like, I could just, I could just focus on that.

• 2:05:42Graham Stephan?

  That's what I really think that in-person communities over the next 10 years are going to do insanely well. Like, I'm seeing all of these like masterminds now popping up in person that are just exploding in popularity. Like, in-person communities where people could sit face to face and meet each other. Because I think that's missing online.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  Is missing online and...

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  Then the online becomes more impactful. You know what I'm saying? Like if you have any in-person connection at all, all of a sudden, the parasocial relationship online becomes that more authentic and real. So like, I agree. I think it's a hybrid.

• 2:06:23Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  Kind of like companies that, you know, sell their products to retailers and then sell direct hybrid. You gotta do both. It's not an easy thing to pull off, by the way, either. Cause as soon as you go offline, it's coordination, it's a big commitment.

• 2:06:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, well, we have it with the index that you're in.

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  But it's not like, that's not like crazy scalable though, like.

• 2:06:48Graham Stephan?

  It's no, it's, it's, it's the least, we keep joking, it's the least scalable business we could do because it's kind of capped. We've got like thirty people in it.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Graham Stephan?

  You can't really scale beyond that.

• 2:06:58Jack Selby?

  You know, it's interesting is that pickleball groups are so lucrative. Like if you can transform industrial space into pickleball courts and then there's like memberships involved. I have a friend that actually started, or acquaintance that started one in Vegas and they are making absurd amounts of money.

• 2:07:16Graham Stephan?

  Talking about like a Soho House of like.

• 2:07:19Jack Selby?

  No, it's, it's like, it's like a gym that hosts events and people go. Or even my recreational soccer team, I'm on a rec soccer team in Vegas and these things are super popular. Pickleball specifically because it's like most ages can participate in it. But people are opening up pickleball places in Vegas, charging membership dues, doing some sort of event once a week, once every other week. And it is packed and they charge, like I paid a hundred dollars for an hour and a half.

• 2:07:48Graham Stephan?

  I believe it because it.

• 2:07:49Jack Selby?

  And there's no overhead. It's a court. It's a pickleball court.

• 2:07:52Graham Stephan?

  You need a filter. The thing is, if you just meet like randos, you need a filter to filter out who you're going to get along with without you having to do all like the work. And that, that is a good filter of the type of person who do that, you'd probably get along with each other.

• 2:08:05Speaker 02

  Okay, like in Austin, the run clubs are insane.

• 2:08:08Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  Like the number of run clubs, you go down there and you, they're.

• 2:08:11Jack Selby?

  That's hard to charge for.

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  Everywhere. Well, I'm not thinking of as a business. Again, I'm thinking of it, there is a thirst for in-person connection around any shared experience. It could be pickleball, it could be run clubs. People are not drinking anymore. They're not going out late at night. It's wild, dude. Like it's, they're looking to do anything but go out late and drink.

• 2:08:34Jack Selby?

  You know, it's interesting. I went to a park to like walk around with my friend. As we were walking, I saw a horde of people, probably a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty people all walking somewhere. I was like, what are these people doing here? And I walk up and they're all like on their phones and walking around. And then I go up to him like, what, what is this? And everyone's kind of like all staying together in a small group. I thought it was some summer camp or something, but it was like old people, young people, people of a bunch of different backgrounds. And they're like, we're here because of Pokemon Go. And apparently that has turned into this thing where like, like literally hundreds of people will all meet up at one place because there's a legendary Pokemon that you can meet. And, and I think, and they all battle together and like, it's like a group activity.

• 2:09:19Jack Selby?

  But even that, like I was blown away that had that, that was such a big thing.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  So there are a lot of people playing cards at my restaurants now and games. Like I, I've never seen this before. Like I walk into my restaurants and there are tables of just like women, young girls. They're either playing cards or some like board game or something. I'm like, they just bring it to a restaurant and start playing it. Just cool, whatever. Like we're more of a neighborhood place.

• 2:09:50Speaker 02

  I just think it's all becoming a thing. People are trying to, they want ways to connect. They want to, because they're not drinking, guys. Like people just used to go out and drink. Now they're just coming up with different things to do.

• 2:10:03Graham Stephan?

  I think is over the next ten years, that is going to be the future. Big business is going to be these in-person communities, no phone. It's not anything digital because I think so many people are missing that.

• 2:10:15Speaker 02

  I think it's not big business. I think it becomes like maybe the next small business. And I don't think people need to make a ton of money. You know, it's just like, you just find something where you can cash flow. Anything where you can cash flow.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  I, dude, everything is just shifting so hard. Like I'm having these college conversations with my kids and it's absolutely killing me because you know how I feel about this. I'm like, dude.

• 2:10:43Graham Stephan?

  They want to go to college?

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  They want to go to college, which is fine.

• 2:10:48Graham Stephan?

  You don't seem happy with it.

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  No, no, no, it's.

• 2:10:50Graham Stephan?

  Wouldn't you rather just give them the money that would be in tuition and say, here's an account. Let's grow, let's five X this and we do it together. And we talk about each trade, we go through why you believe this trade is going to be the next thing. Show me your research on it and we'll trade together.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  No, I want them to go to, I'm cool with them going to college for a year. I would love for them to go travel and meet people and network and have real conversations with people around the world. And develop a deep network as a twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three year old. And then take six months off and learn AI and then go back to those people. Maybe they met, maybe they met thirty or forty alumni at college because they're connecting with friends, with their friends' parents and with alumni at school. Then maybe they go to Europe and they meet people all over the place, right? And they come back with a network of like fifty to seventy adults that are business professionals, business owners.

• 2:11:51Speaker 02

  They self-train themselves in AI and then they go back to that network and they say, hey, I want to work for you for free for three months, for six months. And I want to work for you because I have trained myself on AI. And I am one of the most proficient professionals in AI. I can do the work of ten people. And I'm going to come in and help any area of your business because I'll be one of the most proficient AI guys at your company and I want to work for free. Meaning I don't have to pay for college education that year, so I'll pay for them to live and stuff. And they do that three or four times with three or four different people, at three or four different companies. Now they have a resume, they've had three or four different internships. They met way more people in the world, the professional world.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  They've been working in a corporate environment and they have corporate friends now. That's how you get your job, find your career, right? Like get in the real world quicker. I want to get them in the real world quicker. And by the way, like I still respect going to college for a year. Like going to football games, do a fraternity, do the stuff so you can relate. How about also going to Europe for six months? And just like do that. It's all about people. Okay. The one, I think the biggest thing that is non-displacable by AI is relationships. Relationships count more than anything else in an AI age. I don't think anything is more S tier in an AI world than relationships.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  So when I think about my kids and I think about college, all I'm thinking of, what path allows them to build the deepest relationships with the most interesting, most important people. And whatever that path is, is the path I want them to take. Because I'm confident they could learn what they want to learn with some AI tool in a tenth the time that conventional college will teach it to them. So I really just want them focused on relationship building. That's it. Like that's my number one goal for my kids.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  Because that's, AI is not going to do anything for you when it comes to relationships, right? Like, yeah, that's, that's valuable. Like it's the most AI resistant skill set in the world.

• 2:14:03Graham Stephan?

  I love the Husk videos. Have you seen it? Hey, I'm with Saul right now. What do I say to him? And chat GPT will walk him through the conversation of what to say. It's all, have you seen these videos? They're hilarious. I'm going to show them to you.

• 2:14:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:14:17Graham Stephan?

  They're, they're the best. I'm addicted to them.

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  Wait, does it teach you how to like?

• 2:14:21Graham Stephan?

  No, no, it's a joke because of how bad it is. You're saying that it's not able to replace these relationships and when it walks you through what to say to another person, it's awful.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  But even it's not like the app, having a relationship where you build value, not business value. You make them laugh, like you're a friend to them, like you're just like there for them, right? Like you connect with each other, you've been through real stuff together. Like that is so valuable, dude. Like that is so valuable. Like, I don't know why people aren't talking about that right now. Like I even hear these like college experts on TikTok that like coach families on what you should be doing to get into college or like how valuable is college in an AI age?

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  I never hear them really going deep into like, what should you be doing to identify pathways? And skill sets to build meaningful relationships with the right people, whether you're in college or out of college. Cause that actually matters more than anything else. For me, like almost every single thing in my life has come from a relationship that's been good. Like every business success, every opportunity, collect a con, like all the stuff. Like everything I've done, by the way, most of my biggest trades the last ten years, I'll say most, probably sixty percent

• 2:15:48Speaker 02

  have, were initiated. The idea came from someone in my network. Someone who follows me, sending me a DM, sending me a text, someone in a comment on one of my videos. Now that just starts off a process for me, right? But like someone starts it and I'm like, I write it down and then I put it on my list and I start doing work on it. Dude, if I didn't build all these parasocial relationships with people over the last eight years through YouTube and X, I would not, that person would not have pinged me with that idea that ultimately became a huge trade for me. And like even a lot of the due diligence I do, it's like people are like, hey, did you know this?

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  And like, oh shoot, you just poked a hole in my thesis, man. Thank you. Cause like that saved me.

• 2:16:37Speaker 02

  Three hundred thousand dollars, right? So, or whatever it is. It's all relationship based. And like, no one's talking about that, but that's the thing. Like, that is the big thing. In an AI age, relationships. How do you build them? Where do you go to get them? How do you like model your next steps with career with? Like, that should be a conversation.

• 2:16:58Graham Stephan?

  So that'll be the cliffhanger of this episode. If you want to see what happens to this, we'd love to have you back on in the future. It seems like every few months, we hit something where we gotta have you back on to talk about it.

• 2:17:12Speaker 02

  The Amazon trade's not over. I'll just be very clear about that.

• 2:17:14Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:15Speaker 02

  Amazon trade is not over. In many ways, it's just beginning. So, um, yeah, you're gonna hear a lot more about Amazon from me. Now, I'm not like hyper leveraged short term in Amazon right at this very moment, but Amazon is a trade that has a lot more ahead of it. It's just a matter of timing, right? Uh, I think everyone thinks you have to like five X a trade or eight X a trade these days because everyone's so greedy. No, if you have high conviction that a trade will two X over a period of time and you're able to figure out when those jumps are likely to be,

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  you can five to eight X that trade on a company that's just two X's over the same multi-year period. So I, I'm still going to focus a lot of my attention and research on Amazon.

• 2:18:06Graham Stephan?

  Cool. Sounds good. And by the way, for the members, we're gonna have an extended cut where we're gonna ask you about the favorite stocks overall in the market right now to get your quick take on it. So for all the channel members who want an additional episode, by the time you see it, that episode's now live. Your thoughts on it?

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. I just can't get excited about it. I want to be excited about it because I love the company. I love so much. As much as I love it, I will turn my back on that company in a second if the narrative changes.

• 2:18:40Jack Selby?

  What about Nvidia?

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  Man, I...

• 2:18:48Graham Stephan?

  So, really appreciate it. And by the way, the channel members also get access to early episodes, the uncensored takes, all the uncut bits that we have to trim out for the main episodes. So if you want to see that, feel free to join.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  Wait, can I, can I promote your index? Because there's something really cool that's gonna happen.

• 2:19:05Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  I don't know if you guys know about what they guys, these guys do at the index quarterly trip?

• 2:19:10Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:10Speaker 02

  Right? Uh, I am, I think, hosting your trip in Q1 of 27.

• 2:19:18Graham Stephan?

  That's right, in Austin.

• 2:19:20Speaker 02

  And it's going to be epic, okay? So like, I'll just say, we are going to visit a, we're gonna have an insider's visit with a robot company I'm affiliated with down there. And, um, dude, by the time that trip is here, we are gonna see some crazy stuff in the robot world. You guys are gonna have an insights, you're gonna have like, they, we're gonna get to see stuff that almost no one gets to see at that robot company. So, um, that'll be, that'll be a fun one.

• 2:19:48Graham Stephan?

  Well, if you're interested, the link is down below in the description. Chris, all of your information is also in the description. Highly recommend to follow your Twitter, by the way.

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Oh, you know what?

• 2:19:57Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:57Speaker 02

  I got on Instagram two months ago for the first time. Like, I have a clips account there, dude. And it's going crazy.

• 2:20:03Jack Selby?

  I've seen that, actually. That's funny.

• 2:20:05Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I wasn't sure if that was you or not.

• 2:20:07Speaker 02

  Daily Chris Camillo on Instagram and TikTok. Daily, daily Chris Camillo. It's two clips a day because who wants to listen to me talk for an hour? But, but two clips a day, I'm somewhat digestible. They cut me down. They cut me, they do a really good job, cut me down really quick so you can actually tolerate me.

• 2:20:24Graham Stephan?

  Sounds good.

• 2:20:25Jack Selby?

  Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you guys so much for watching.

• 2:20:28Graham Stephan?

  Till next time.

• 2:20:28Speaker 00

  There is a lot more to a good life than a higher income and more wealth. A good life is subjective, but there is lots of research on what does and does not tend to contribute to good lives for most people.

• 2:20:39Jack Selby?

  You do manage around eight billion dollars worth of assets. What would you say is a widely accepted belief that's actually going to make you poor?

• 2:20:47Graham Stephan?

  Picking stocks, and I think that's probably on average detrimental.

• 2:20:54Graham Stephan?

  Who should buy individual stocks? I honestly don't think anybody.

• 2:21:00Graham Stephan?

  Leopold made the same mistake investors in South Korea made. Too much leverage. I would probably stop checking my portfolio five times a day. So I would stop dabbling in individual stocks and covered calls. The costs of trading options are exorbitant. Is it possible, though, that we can continue to see these 10 to 15% returns every single year?

• 2:21:22Speaker 05

  We are very close to recession, and I'm worried about something worse than a recession.

• 2:21:28Graham Stephan?

  So what's the downside of saving too much money? Uh, well...

• 2:21:52Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.