How to get rich with stocks (without math, charts or models)

*Get Shaan's 4 money rules that took him from broke to $25M by 30:* https://clickhubspot.com/wrg Episode 777: Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) talks to Chris Camillo ( https://x.com/ChrisCamillo ) about how he turned $20K into $60M using social arbitrage investing. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:00) Turning $20K to $60M (5:30) Garage sale arbitrage (12:36) Observational investing (14:33) Bet: Beacon Roof (19:03) Bet: E.l.f (22:04) Trending on Twitter (29:00) Ticker Tags (31:55) Bet: Sphere in Las Vegas (36:48) Chris's first million (40:34) My biggest mistake (43:42) Bet: Palantir (46:58) Drawing down 40% of my net worth (51:49) $30M in one year (57:39) 2026 picks: Bloom Energy, Palantir, NVIDIA (1:02:06) Should regular people do this? (1:13:45) Bet: Private airfaire — Links: • Dumb Money Live - https://www.youtube.com/@DumbMoneyLive • Unknown Market Wizards - https://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-traders-youve-never/dp/0857198696 • Bloom - https://www.bloomenergy.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano //

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You really only need one great trade to be a top 1% investor. The most inherently ground true thing of investing, the most important thing, the thing that matters more than anything else is, I don't look at valuation, I don't look at PE. All I look about is there is new information. I've been reading TikTok comments. That's where I get most of my alpha from.

• 0:22Shaan Puri?

  You have Buffett or Munger who are like reading the Moody's manual, cover to cover, just company financials. And you're like, I scroll the TikTok comments.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  That year I made like 30 million in one year and it was a wild ride.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  You will try to beat the market, you'll trade with leverage, you're moving in and out of positions, you're not a buy and hold forever kind of guy.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Just before the pandemic, I had made the worst trade of my life. I lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let's break it down.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Internet, this is where the biggest mistake I ever was.

• 1:03Shaan Puri?

  You break all the rules of investing. You know, what I normally hear is you should just index, don't try to beat the market, don't take any leverage.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  And so you do the exact opposite, right? You will try to beat the market, you'll trade with leverage, you're moving in and out of positions, you're not a buy and hold forever kind of guy. According to the internet, you've done pretty well. So I've seen some different numbers that have floated around. Can you set the record straight? What is the actual story?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I started with 20,000 in 2007 to try this new methodology, which is the way I was investing when I was way, way younger that worked for me. I call it social arb investing today. But what it essentially is, is observational investing. You're looking for any change that's happening in the world, whether it's, you know, change in consumer behavior, change in culture, change in technology, change in the weather, politics, anything that has the potential to be meaningfully impactful to one or more publicly traded companies in either a positive or negative way.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  So if you can surface that change early and connect the dots back to a company that would benefit or be harmed by that change. That's essentially the entire methodology. It doesn't really incorporate much fundamental analysis. It definitely doesn't incorporate any technical analyses. In its purest form, you really don't even need to know what the stock is trading at when you open up a position or what it's trading at when you exit. So ideally, you'd be completely blind to stock price, completely blind to everything

• 2:54Speaker 00

  other than the extent to which other investors were aware of that one thing that you surfaced, that you feel would ultimately be impactful to that company. And you enter your position at the point of information asymmetry, right? When you know that thing and very few others do. And you exit the position at the point of information parity when other investors start to learn about that thing that you uncovered first. And it sounds so simple, and it really is, but there are nuances to it. And like everything else, to be great at it, it takes time and a little effort

• 3:37Speaker 00

  and some regimented processes that you have to go through. Like, is the information that you found actually meaningful? Is it a needle mover for that sector or for that company? You know, is the information you found really off radar? Or do institutional and retail investors, are they already accounting for it? And are there any other things that are happening at that moment of time or within the window of that trade that are equal to more important than that piece of information that you're trading? Right? So there is a process there.

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  Of course, yes. And I want to go through a bunch of examples of it. So you take this idea of observational investing, of arbitraging information, without being, you know, a guy who grew up on, you know, you weren't working on Wall Street. You didn't have an MBA. You didn't have the, what would be like, you know, some 20 year, 20 years of experience doing this. The story is you take 20 grand, you start doing this type of investing and you run it up. It's, it's, it works pretty well for you. It's successful. I don't know the exact numbers, but I've seen something like 60 million, 70 million, 80 million is how you've grown that portfolio, starting at 20,000. Is that right? By the way, cause I mean, that sounds in some sense, too good to be true.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it certainly is. It does sound too good to be true. It is accurate. It's, I don't know the exact number, 70 or 80 million dollars of returns from the 20K. But I've been audited over the past 17 years. I'll be re-audited at the end of this year and I'll fall somewhere around 75% annualized returns total portfolio over the 17 or I think it might be 18 year period now since 2007.

• 5:34Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break because the team at HubSpot has put together something pretty cool. You know, in this episode, Chris is talking about the way he knows how to make money, identifying these trends, scouting the TikTok comments, making these big leverage bets. That's great for him. It is amazing. Some people will like that. I personally don't know how to make money that way. I wouldn't do it. But I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, give it to quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode.

• 6:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So let's break it down. So you, you said, I started doing this as a kid. You guys, I felt I went to the type of investing I was doing as a kid. I, I had read your book, Laughing at Wall Street. And you talk about like, basically kind of like, starting with like, you know, garage sailing and very simple stuff when you were a kid, noticing things, talking to your brother, talking to your dad, hey, could this mean this? And, and taking, you know, getting learning lessons with a very small bankroll, you know, a hundred bucks type of deal. So can you just take us like, early days? What was the, where did you kind of have this sort of aha moment that? This style of investing can work.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I was an entrepreneurial kid. I was really interested in making money before that was a cool thing to do. You know, the new generation now, all these, all these kids are traders. They're trading crypto. I mean, it's all, it's like every kid now is like I was back in the, you know, eighties.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, that makes sense now because if you're a kid, you're on YouTube, you're on TikTok, you'll, you'll see things. But why, why did you have that itch? What, what made you want to, to get on that hustle? What, who did you see?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't know what made me so laser focused on grinding at age 12, 13, but, but I will, but the way that I was going about it was not investing. It was arbitrage and garage sale and estate sale merchandise. I would take, you know, buses around the city on Thursday and Friday mornings and Saturday mornings. Before I could drive, sometimes I'd take three or four buses before school to the one estate sale that I had seen in the paper the night before. That based on my analyses, I thought was most likely to have mispriced merchandise.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  And, and the thesis there is that most of these estate sales at the time were run by older women. Who really had a great knack for pricing silver and pricing other, you know, types of things that they knew about and cared about. But they were really, really bad at identifying value in male oriented items, like whether it was old trains, old watches. A- a- any, anything that tended to be male oriented.

• 8:47Shaan Puri?

  Pre eBay, right? So you can't just go look up every item quickly and know the, know the current like live market price for it.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pre eBay. Exactly. So I, I would show up at 5:30, 6:00 in the morning. And the goal is if you pick the right sale and you're first in line and you know exactly what you're looking for.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  You know, you got a good shot at buying something that is mispriced. And I, I would, I did that for years. Um, I just happened to go to the same 7-Eleven every morning and get a bottle of Snapple, a lemon flavored iced tea. Which was like the hot company at the time. It was the hot drink at the time.

• 9:27Shaan Puri?

  Yes, Snapple used to be huge.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and one morning I went to the 7-Eleven and they had like one quarter of the door space dedicated to Snapple. They had brought in a couple other brands of iced tea. I don't even recall what it was. Maybe it was Arizona iced tea and a couple others. The clerk told me that that's the way it was going to be from that point forward due to this new competition coming in. And sure enough, I talked to my older brother. I shared the observation with him. He was a stockbroker. I asked, can I make money off of this? This has got to be bad for Snapple, right? I mean, it's such a hot company. Sure enough, a few weeks later,

• 10:10Speaker 00

  they had announced earnings. He taught me how to short Snapple with put options. I did it through his account. I was too young to have a brokerage account. I think I gave him $300, which was most of the money I had at the time from garage selling. And he tripled the money in the course of about a month because Snapple, for the first time in its history, had reported, you know, bad earnings due to inventory building up due to retailers like 7-Eleven, giving them less door space. So it was just something that I had noticed as a kid. And you have to ask yourself, like, that's crazy, because, you know, professionals

• 10:51Speaker 00

  on Wall Street, they could have easily have seen the same thing that I saw. But they were so distracted by so many other things, macroeconomics, noise, government, their jobs, just herd mentality, that they didn't see something very simple that was right in front of their face. So now, if I did that as a, you know, young teenager, that really means something. Now, of course, I didn't realize what I did at the time, how special it was, because you would never believe that you, as a kid, are better than, you know, all of Wall Street. So I got really into stocks and investing after that. But I did it in the conventional sense. I read all the books, and I mean, all the books, technical

• 11:35Speaker 00

  trading, fundamental, and I just tried every type of investing method. And of course, basically, nothing worked. So I was just like everybody else. But later on in my life, when I was in my twenties and I had a job and I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to make, or I felt that I needed to make to have the life that I wanted, I got back into investing and that was really most aggressively in 2007. And I said, you know, why don't I try this kind of observational approach that I did a little bit of as a kid? And I recalled that one approach and at the time it was similar.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  What I did as a kid was reflective of what Peter Lynch was doing. Though Peter Lynch, you know, utilized observational investing as just part of his methodology. He also did a lot of fundamental analysis.

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  So let's break it down. So there's major schools of thought around investing, right? Number one, passive investing, you know, don't try to beat the market, just be in the index or even worse, mutual fund. And, you know, you go as the American economy goes. All right, that's one school of thought. Then there's, oh, I think I could do better than indexing. And there's technical analysis, which is, you know, some cross between, I don't know, horoscopes and, you know, fantasy football or something. And so there's a lot of people who believe that they can see patterns and, and, you know, signs and math in the charts and that the charts will tell you, the technical analysis will tell you where the, where the price is going.

• 13:19Shaan Puri?

  And so there's a lot of people who try to do that. I've never met anyone smart who's good at that, but it's possible that that is a thing.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  There are some people, there are some people who do that really well.

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, so there's, there's technical trading. There's fundamental analysis, the sort of Buffett style of investing where you're trying to understand the intrinsic value of the business, trying to understand the, you know, the durability and the quantity of the cash flows and you're trying to use that to just try to understand what the business is worth relative to what the market's pricing. A lot of people try to do that, that's sort of seeing this like kind of gold standard. What you do is this other school of thought. So, you know, here comes door number three. And door number three, you kind of described it a second ago, but I would. My short summary of that is you're looking for significant behavioral change. So the way that either consumers or businesses are changing in some way, whether that's COVID is going to make it where people are not traveling,

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  or it's teenagers are now doing this thing. You gave this example of women who were changing their bra preference from wired push-up bras and Victoria's Secret is on top, to you started noticing a lot of people talking about the word bralettes. And now they're wearing bra, and you know, there's two guys talking about bras. There's now women are wearing bras without a wire or a no bra movement. And hey, that's probably going to affect the number one bra player, Victoria's Secret, who's not even carrying bralettes at the time. So you're looking for some behavioral change somewhere.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Let's not, let's not restrict it to behavioral change. Let's say any change. It could be a hailstorm, okay, that impacts a, positively impacts a publicly traded roofing company. It could be in anything that's happening in the world that is change oriented, that is not well, well discovered or known by the investing.

• 15:15Shaan Puri?

  Correct. So not sort of consensus, not quote unquote priced in. And so let's go through a couple of examples. So what are your favorite examples of these that you found in your life? Take me through a couple of your greatest hits.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's like, there's maybe north of 80, 80 to 90 now, over the past 18 years. You know, there have been a handful that didn't work out. We could talk about those too, but for the most part, almost every one of them has worked out. I know that's really hard to believe. I know it's like exceptionally difficult to believe. The one I just mentioned that popped in my head is actually one of my favorites. I would track. Every spring, I would simply go and track the number of people that were searching for the words of roof damage or roof repair. It's a free data source. Anyone could leverage Google Trends.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  And what's fascinating about this is when there is a hailstorm, people will immediately start Googling roof repair the day after that hailstorm hits. Now, at the time, there was a publicly traded company called Beacon Roofing, and they're one of the largest roofing companies in North America. And if the hail season was particularly damaging, that would meaningfully impact their bottom line as a roofing company. So what's fascinating about that is that the Wall Street generally would utilize insurance sector reports that would report on the damage from the hail season as a data point to analyze

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Beacon Roofing, you know, prior to earnings. But those reports take a very long time. They're really delayed. They're delayed by like, I don't know, five, six weeks after the actual hailstorms happen. So I had discovered this real-time data source that would tell me in real time the volume of people searching for roof repair, because even if you knew there was a terrible hailstorm and you see it on the news, if that hailstorm just happened to be over a super populated area as opposed to two miles down the road that isn't populated, that's what makes the difference. And the only, nobody really knows how many people are impacted by hail, how many roofs are, until they get reflected in the insurance reports.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Or a great measure of that, that's maybe slightly less precise, but way more real time, is the volume of people that are searching for roof repair. Now, what's so great about a platform like Google Trends is you have, you know, 15 years of historical data. So you can look at every single spring and you could see where the peaks are in the search volumes. So there was one hail season in particular that the peaks were nearly triple.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Anything I had ever seen before, years passed. So I, I went in on a very large, very levered call long position on beacon roofing. And yeah, I mean, that would be considered like a greatest hit.

• 18:25Shaan Puri?

  My, my understanding is you, the same thing you did in the garage sales where you said, look, most of these garage and estate sales were run by older women. They knew the price of jewelry really well. You're not going to get too much of a deal there, but they may not know what their kind of husband or their son's baseball card collection is worth. Specifically this one 1996 Tops rookie card, Kobe Bryant, you know, whatever. So you, you find the value there. My understanding is you, you applied the same principle to Wall Street. You said, well, most of the guys who are on Wall Street, we got people who work in finance are guys, white guys, live in New York, who are of a certain age. And then you started saying, well, instead of, I'll use

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  the garage sale principle again, if they know a lot about certain types of things, where are their blind spots? Is that right? Is that how you, how you thought about it?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  So that, that's how you identify like the lowest hanging fruit or the highest probability of finding the most opportunity, especially early on, I would say, the vast majority of my big wins were around, you know, changes in consumer behavior and culture that were primarily female oriented or youth oriented or to some demographic that wasn't older, white, northeastern, you know, uh, you know, geographically located, uh, in investors. So, you know, it, it could be

• 19:55Speaker 00

  something like I talk a lot about the, uh, the moment that Jeffrey Star, who was a beauty influencer, uh, you know, made a single video about this drugstore cosmetics product made by Elf Cosmetics that was just as good as a $60 product. It was called the Elf Primer Putty. That was an old trade now, but that Was back when Elf was trading at like $7 a share before it blew up to $170 a share. Right? But but just be seeing a you single YouTube video. And then realizing that wow, it has 10 million views and this is a company that nobody cares about. And all of a sudden, the most influential.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  You know, content creator in the world for beauty is saying that it's just as good as one of the best products in the world. I I went down to, I think it was CVS or actually I think it was Walgreens by my apartment. And just stood there all day and and and watched moms coming in with their kids. Uh, and buying out all the Elf products because all of a sudden, instantaneously. This drugstore brand that was just like at a price point of like eight bucks for any piece of makeup, right? Became a cool brand because this one individual said it was and and and so that was a game changing moment that I witnessed. Via watching a YouTube video and I actually called one of the analyst on Wall Street.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Who is covering Elf cosmetics because part of my methodology is not just to discover things early. But you have to assess the degree to which other investors might already be aware of that information. In order to gain conviction. Uh, that you that you truly found some information asymmetry in the market. So I called this analyst and I said, you know, what do you, what do you think about the Jeffrey Star? Uh, video on on Elf, uh, you know, has that impacted? The way that you're analyzing Elf this quarter? And the analyst said, who's Jeffrey Star?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  And and and at that moment, I knew everything I needed to know about that trade, right? And and listen, it makes sense. These guys are not watching, you know, YouTube videos of beauty influencers, right? Uh, but that's all that I do. I I spend, people don't believe me, but I spend. On average, three to four hours a night, late night, uh, basically reading through these days, the last six, seven years, uh, uh, TikTok comments, right? So like, that's where I get most of my alpha from recently is people's, cause, cause that's just happens to be the place, uh, where people express themselves most freely, uh, across the,

• 22:51Speaker 00

  uh, largest number of topics.

• 22:54Shaan Puri?

  And that'll get you laughed out of the room with, with, you know, quote unquote, serious investors, right? Like, you know, you have, you have Buffett or Munger and these guys who are like, reading the Moody's manual, you know, cover to cover, just company financials. And that's where they're looking for an opportunity. And you're like, I scrolled the TikTok comments and that's why I'm compounding 75% a year.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's what you have to determine as an investor, because we, we can't all be, you know, warm about this, right? So like, like, who do you want to compete with? I always say it's really not important for you to be smart, but it's important for you to figure out how to be smart in a totally different way than others. So do you want to go and compete with the top mathematicians in the world as a, as a technical trader? Do you want to compete with just droves and droves of, you know, Wharton and Harvard grads who are doing financial analysis? Can you do that analysis a little bit better than them? Yeah, maybe, maybe you can, maybe you're that type of a person.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  But let's be honest, uh, most of us, I'll, I'll even say 99% of us, probably don't fit into one of those two camps. So how could the rest of us get an edge on Wall Street? How could the 99% figure out a way to outperform others in the market? Like, what could we do that others aren't doing? And you have to think differently. So you have to look for edge, uh, in a place where your competition, and your competition being conventional institutional and retail investors.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Are not willing to go. And you know, the one thing about institutional Wall Street is they like correlated data. They like certainty. They like proof in historic correlations. So the data that I am trading is conversational data. Because Wall Street primarily uses transactional data. So they'll use credit card receipts that they spend millions of dollars for. And then they synthesize all this transaction data so that they can kind of figure out what's happening at that company before earnings.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  So a lot of times when we see stocks move a week or two before earnings and we're like, who's doing that? Like, how do they know? Right? Like, it's transactional data. Wall Street's been utilizing it for 15 years, more so today than they ever have. So like, how do we gain an edge on a hedge fund that's spending millions, tens of millions of dollars and has fleets of people analyzing credit card receipts? Well, what do you do before you buy something? You talk about buying it. So you, there's a billion people out there that are talking about their interest and

• 25:59Speaker 00

  what they want and what they did and what they plan to do tomorrow, every single day. If they see a video about a particular, you know, piece of apparel, you'll have 30,000 women commenting whether they plan to also buy that piece of apparel that they just saw a video on, right? And, and so you could actually measure the depth of interest in an infinite number of things. Even before that's provable through sales, right? And, and so it, in my opinion, it's a superior

• 26:42Speaker 00

  way to, to discover alpha, a change in the world, although it's imperfect because you have to do a lot of your own interpretation of what you're reading and what that actually means. Because it's speech and, and, and it's a lot of times the speech is nuanced. And the way that we speak about things is constantly evolving. So, you know, if you're just a regular person that spends a lot of time in the real world and, and on social media, believe it or not, you're probably well qualified to make that assessment.

• 27:27Shaan Puri?

  Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com. There's a great story. I don't know if you know the story of the trending tab on Twitter is actually kind of, it's, it's an interesting story. So that I met the guy who, who did it. He's, he's running a company. His name is Abder. So my friend Abder was basically at the time had, you know, a group of basically data nerds, machine learning and data nerds.

• 28:12Shaan Puri?

  And they were trying to figure out, they were trying to do something very meaningful for the world. They're like, we would love to be able to do sentiment analysis. So trying to figure out how people feel about things. So do they feel positive about something or negative about something? And so he's like, oh, Twitter is this huge source of text traffic. So let me just try to use Twitter to understand sentiment about things. And he was trying to do it. It wasn't really working very well. And one day he's on a train and he's working on something and he just sees that like, his program he's writing is not spitting out sentiment analysis about things, but it's just spitting out like city names. And he's like, why are there like these city names or the, or sorry, country names? Why are these country names just popping up out of the, the, why is it being surfaced as signal?

• 28:55Shaan Puri?

  And what he realized was that the Olympics was going on and they were basically like, you know, the opening parade was happening and each country that was, you know, being shown was getting mentioned a lot. And what he realized was that like, oh, if I just paid attention to the Delta, so like, if nobody's ever talking about, you know, whatever Zimbabwe, and suddenly it's not that a lot of people are talking about it, but way more than usual are talking about it, that's gotta mean something. And so he created a standalone product that was basically just tell you, what are people talking about in a abnormal way on Twitter? And then Twitter ended up buying that and making it the trending product, which was actually like really, really important for Twitter to succeed because they were able

• 29:37Shaan Puri?

  to differentiate from Facebook and others by being about like real time, what's going on in the world? How do you figure out what's interesting and new and fresh that's going on in the world? Well, you needed something like that, that was reading all the social signals. It sounds like you were kind of manually doing a similar thing when you're like, oh, I noticed a lot of people are, I've heard you talk about the example of slime. Hey, the slime trend is getting really big. Well, how do you make slime? Right? If everyone's doing, if all the kids are doing slime, well, how do you make slime? You need Elmer's glue. And then you go and you figure out that, wow, people haven't really priced in that Elmer's, Elmer's is about to have like, you know, a huge quarter or a huge, huge earnings call.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  So me and my business partner, we actually created a platform called ticker tags in the mid 2010 teens with Twitter. And we had access to the Twitter deck hose, which is a 10% randomized sample of every tweet in real time. And we hand curated about 1.5 million word combinations that represented how people were speaking about every product, brand, basically anything that was connected to any publicly traded company or meaningful to any publicly traded company in any way, we had organized into a taxonomy. So every company had like, you know, 300 to 1,000 combinations of words.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  Like what would be an example? What do you, what do you mean by that? So like if I'm Nike, what do I care about?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  So, okay. So you just mentioned slime. So which is one of my big trades. Newell Brands makes Elmer's glue. All right. So Elmer's glue would be a tag for Newell Brands. DIY slime, which is a product that utilizes white Elmer's glue. When you're kids playing with slime, that would be a tag. Because to the extent that DIY slime gets more popular, that's something that someone who's invested in Newell Brands might want to know. So we were actually monitoring in real time, the frequency of mentions of those 1.5 million words and benchmarking them against historical norms, including seasonality. And so since it was organized in a taxonomy,

• 31:49Speaker 00

  when there was any type of anomaly in speech patterns happening across Twitter that were impacting a subject matter that we had curated to be impactful, potentially impactful to a publicly traded company, our system would flag that. So that, that's a platform that we developed and sold to hedge funds and sell-side banks. And so what that was, was basically me taking my methodology of what I had done manually and institutionalizing it for Wall Street. And at the time, people expressed their opinions on Twitter about everything that they were doing in life, the way that people currently no longer do on Twitter,

• 32:32Speaker 00

  but do on, you know, in places like TikTok. Now, you know, Twitter is mostly news oriented or finance or tech oriented, right? Political oriented, but people are not generally talking about the movie that they watched last night on Twitter, right? They're doing that on other platforms. But, but we sold that company to Jeffrey's Bank years later.

• 32:55Shaan Puri?

  Was that like a successful company? You know, obviously, you know, it's not that it was unsuccessful, but I guess, you know, it's all relative. So for example, you know, you're selling that data to hedge funds. Are they really receptive to this? Do they believe what you believe? Were they willing to pay?

• 33:10Speaker 00

  That's the coolest part of the story. I spent years flying to New York nearly weekly, training the top sell-side banks and the, I would say, you know, probably five or six of the top 10 hedge funds in the world on how to interpret this observational conversational data and how to attempt to correlate it. And they just had very little interest. They had interest in the results, but they couldn't figure out how to build teams around it because hedge funds generally have individuals that are like mathematicians, right?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  That they were hiring from the West Coast to develop, you know, algorithms for trading, like quant traders. And then they have very traditional fundamental analysts who are basically finance heads that would, you know, would crunch numbers and kind of do fundamental analysis. They didn't really have, you know, 20 something year old females on staff who were really savvy interpreting, you know, conversational data, you know, coming off it. And like, yes, this is a trend. This is not a trend. This is meaningful. It's not meaningful.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  So it was a whole, you know, Wall Street, they do things kind of in the same way that they've always done things, right? And it's really difficult for them to stick their neck out and say, hey, you know, we believe this thing matters when there's no historical correlation between the speech pattern of that subject matter and the stock price or the earnings of that company. Because like I said, speech patterns evolve and that thing that they're talking about could be a new thing that was never meaningful before at that company. Sure. That is unfortunate for Wall Street, but it's fortunate for retail investors, right?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Because we we now know, I guess I'm telling you right now, that this is still a data set that they're scared of. This is still a methodology that they have a hard time wrapping their head around because they can't really document the degree to which it's it's meaningful for a thesis. If you were to have someone come out and say, hey, I I I've been reading TikTok comments, and I I believe I believe that this new show at the Sphere in Vegas, Wizard of Oz, people are super hyped on it. And I like read 180 comments of people flying in from Europe

• 35:59Speaker 00

  next month to see it. And I think this just might be the like, the one thing that Sphere has done right. And it's going to be a game changing moment for the company, finding product market fit.

• 36:09Shaan Puri?

  Sounds oddly specific. Is that actually a trade trade you're you're in right now? Or no?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  It was. Yeah. So so that was so Sphere, the Wizard of Oz, Sphere was actually one of my largest wins of 2025. And it came from reading comments of Wizard of Oz, the first 48 hours that it was out, and essentially making a monstrously big levered debt.

• 36:36Shaan Puri?

  Sphere up 114% this year.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Well, it was a levered options trade. So it was a lot more than that. A lot of what I do when I have high conviction around a particular thesis that has especially when they have a very defined window of time, when I believe others will will start to acknowledge that that ground truth. In the case of Sphere, it was people counting seats, sales of seats. So you're actually able to go in and see how many seats are available for a show that's a week and a half or two weeks out. And that's exactly what happened. So over the course of a few weeks, other and it was cool. Because it was like retail analysts. It wasn't even like Wall Street, but the other people that were trading spear.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Were like, hey, like we're seeing a, there's a lot of seat. We'd never seen seats sell out like this before for a show. So what I had interpreted from early user, early reviews ultimately came out in seat sales that other retail investors started trading and then Wall Street eventually picked up on it when the company came out and said that they're adding new shows. Because they're selling out all their shows. They're increasing their, you know, profit guidance. And yeah, you would, the stock is, you know, more than doubled here over the last few months. Uh, exclusively almost because of Wizard of Oz.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  Do you remember when, so the show's called My First Million. Do you remember when you made your first million and? You know, what, what got you there and how did it feel?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, I 100% do. I was, uh, working at a company called Eve Rewards in Dallas, Texas. Uh, with one of my best friends, uh, Patrick. It was like not far past when I started this in 2007 with the $20,000 that I had grown to a few hundred thousand dollars. And I said, this is just absolutely crazy. I said, I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to hit a million dollars here, like within the next, I don't know, next year or so. And it was a few months later, I hit a million dollars and I'll never forget walking into his cubicle and saying, I did it. I cannot believe my account. Just hit a million dollars. It absolutely melted my mind. Uh, if that happened.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  And you know, I wrote my book, I don't know, two years, three years later, laughing at Wall Street because there was this tracking service called Covester at the time and Covester was like the first portfolio tracking service. I think they had 40,000 accounts in it, including mine. And it would monitor, you know, how well you're doing month to month total portfolio and it would rank you publicly. And there was a while, a moment in time when I was the number one ranked investor on Covester, uh, which is just absolutely wild. And it was during that three year period. And that's when I, I, I was on a few different business shows like Fox Business talking about it.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  And then I got a book deal to write that book, Laughing at Wall Street. And when I wrote Laughing at Wall Street, it was 20,000 to $2 million. It was a hundred times your money in three years. And at the time, there was a small piece of me that thought, you know, is, am I just like part of the long tail statistical anomaly?

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. You flip a coin, flip a coin a hundred times, somebody, if you get enough people to do it, somebody will land on heads. You know, nine times and they'll, you'll think they're, they're a genius.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Or no, no, a hundred percent. I doubted myself more. And now I had a really defined methodology and I knew the narrative behind every one of my trades. It, it was very sensible, right? Like it wasn't like this mystery where I came up with some random formula. And it was just trading stocks on its own and maybe the formula just happened to get lucky. I felt strongly that the nature of observational investing about simply uncovering some piece of meaningful information that others weren't aware of intuitively just makes sense, right? Like, it's not like this mystical thing that you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Of course it makes sense.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  You're just uncovering important information a little bit quicker than other people. And you're connecting dots a little bit quicker than other people. So in my head, I knew the methodology at its core was really valuable. But I still didn't believe that three years was enough. So in my head, I was like, if I can get to five years and keep this track record up, that would be insane. I got to five and I was like, okay. Let's see if I can push it to 10. And then I got to 10 years. And now here I am, I'm at eight, like I said, I think I'm going on 18 years of average 70, you know, mid seventies of total portfolio returns.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  And I truly believe I can hit 20. So like 20 is now the new number in my head. I want to go for 20 years and all I have to do at this point is not mess it up, right? But, but at the same time, it's very hard generating, you know, returns that are that high.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  Hey, quick message here because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now. And let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom. Deal closed. Cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bank services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Callman A and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC.

• 42:38Shaan Puri?

  So let me ask you a couple of mechanical questions. Do you take profits every year? Do you reinvest everything? What are you actually doing with sort of annual? Because, you know, you compounded that rate for a long enough time. The number is actually much bigger than 70 million.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's almost a billion dollars. So it, so what's in, this is where the biggest mistake I ever made was, that I'm now resolving for the most part. So just about, I've been, half of my life is trading public equities through observational investing, social or conversational data, everything we're talking about. The other half of my life has been an entrepreneur. And, you know, I've had some success as an entrepreneur and like a lot of entrepreneurs that have success, you start investing in other entrepreneurs. So I've been an early stage venture investor for 20 years. I'm actually invested in 160 early

• 43:33Speaker 00

  stage companies. And my performance investing in early stage companies is pretty much average. You know, I'm on sync with just about any other average VC. I want to say maybe 10, 11, 12% annualized returns.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  So I have pulled out almost all of my gains every single year for the past 18 years and have taken that money and invested it in the private market. And that has been really unfortunate for obvious reasons. It's unfortunate because the opportunity cost of my capital is so high, but I never even believed in myself that much on the public side that I could continue to do that. So I was never like, oh, I'm just gonna keep doing 70 some odd percent average returns. That never really seemed feasible.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  I felt like I needed to make my home runs in the early-stage VC world. And I finally came to terms a few years ago with the fact that that was a really bad decision. And it's taken me about four years to pull myself out of early-stage because when you're an early-stage investor and that big of an early-stage investor, I mean, I was taking hundreds of meetings with founders annually and it takes a long time to unwind yourself from that ecosystem.

• 45:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I don't know who it was, maybe Peter Lynch, he had like a, don't, don't cut your flowers to water your weeds, right? Like he basically, he talked about with, with stock, individual stocks, right? Don't sell your winners to diversify back into like losers. But in a way, what you were doing was at an overall level, if you were performing at 70% in one asset, one strategy and 10 or 11% in the other, but you were taking the profits out, you know, that's a, that's a water, that's a water your weeds sort of scenario.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and by the way, I love Peter Lynch, maybe more than any other investor, but you know, I don't believe in any preset rule of investing like that. Like, my methodology is very clean, you know, I, you invest when you discover something that other people haven't discovered yet that will be meaningful to a trade and you exit as soon as other people have figured that out. And that's it. That, that's literally the only thing. And, and if that stock goes up 100X or 200X, you don't sell it because it's up 200X. You know, you, you sell it when other people find out the information that you're trading. So.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  One of my most controversial trades over a year ago was Palantir. And I went all in unbelievably levered in Palantir at $30 a share. And I was very public about it. You know, I have a YouTube channel, Dumb Money Live. And we did a multitude of episodes on Palantir and this really strong thesis that we felt there was this kind of 12-month window where the whole world was going to discover these things about Palantir that were really misunderstood. And I had never gotten so much heat, a lot of it from Palantir investors going, "You're an idiot. We've been in this thing since $6.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  You're gonna do this at $30 a share? Like, what are you talking about?" I'm like, "Well, I'm not trading the information you are trading at $6."

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  What was the sort of two-line reason you were so bullish on Palantir at that stage?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Well, because people didn't even understand what they did, right? They didn't understand where they would actually sit in the stratosphere of the AI wave that was coming as a beneficiary of it. And Palantir was just starting to scrape the surface of this new product that they had with clients. And it was unstoppable, right? Like, there was just going... We knew there would be this 12-month window when everything that Palantir had been working on for years, they finally had the case studies done with their first set of clients.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  And now they were just gonna start to steamroll and add to clients. So they were just scratching the surface of their TAM. And the market didn't realize that. So what was interesting about Palantir is that they were so overvalued at the time based on fundamentals, that people were like, "There's no way you could be going in levered on Palantir at $30 a share with its valuation already so out of whack." And my response to that was, "The valuation is irrelevant to me." I don't look at valuation. I don't look at PE. I don't look at anything like that. All I look about is... There is new information that's about to come online for Palantir

• 48:37Speaker 00

  that will bring in a whole new group of investors. And once people see this information, however, they're valuing Palantir today based on the information that exists. This is new information that will be settled into the stock price. And that's exactly what happened. And Palantir went from, you know, 30 to 160, right? Or whatever it went to.

• 49:00Shaan Puri?

  So mechanical question. You say, you know, I went really big into this. I made a huge bet on this. What is that? And you're taking leverage, which could cut both ways, right? Obviously leverage will increase your gains, but it'll quickly sink your your portfolio if done incorrectly. How much are you actually? Let's say you have, I think you said something like $70 million portfolio. Let's say you have $70 million and you get a lot of conviction about something. What are you actually betting at a high conviction bet at this stage? Are you, is it, are you putting 1%, 10%, 30%? Like, what are you putting out there? And then you're levering up? And then how do you manage that risk of that going south?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, just to be transparent, it's 70 million ish of returns, right? Of gains over that time. And, you know, those gains were taken and put into other things like private companies. Right? So I'm not managing, that's not my public.

• 49:57Shaan Puri?

  So 70, let's say that's gains, you got to pay taxes. A lot of your stuff sounds like it might be short term because it's.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Of course, almost exclusively.

• 50:05Shaan Puri?

  And then you're reinvesting that into your addiction in startups. And so that's, there's a lot of it's going that way.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  But percentage wise, percentage wise, when you have a high, what I call just a high conviction idea, I'm usually investing between 5 and 10% of my entire liquid portfolio into that idea via options. So if you're wrong, you just lose 5 to 10% of the portfolio. And in a good example of where I did that and was, you know, wrong, like, I think two or three, maybe three weeks in a row, maybe four weeks in a row. And I lost like 30, 40% of my portfolio was during COVID, during the pandemic, when I was kind of tracking the virus coming out of China. I was.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  You know, using Google Translate on a lot of medical reports coming out of China to assess how big of a deal that virus was and it became very clear to me that it was going to be a global pandemic and you know, global pandemics only do one thing to financial markets, right? So I was essentially taking, I think 10% of my portfolio and putting it into puts in the S and P casino stocks, Vegas casino stocks and airlines every week and the market wasn't moving down, like the market just wasn't accepting COVID for what it was.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  And I got to a point where I was like 30 to 40% of my portfolio was gone. And I did it again the week after and that week after was the first week the market cracked and it went down 2%. And then the next week is where it really hit and that was one of the biggest trades of my life. And over the course, I think that year was like a 370% annualized return total portfolio, something like that. And it was partially because I had shorted the pandemic early on, even though it was a little too early and paid off. And then two days after it bottomed, I had a selection of, I think, 14 or 15 companies

• 52:22Speaker 00

  that should have never gone down at all. They should have only gone up as soon as we realized it was going to be a global pandemic and everybody would be stuck living in their house for, you know, working in their house for a year. So, you know, companies ranging from Hewlett Packard, where everybody would want to go buy printers for their house, to Peloton, because you can't go to the gym, you gotta work out at your house now, Shopify, because you know, you're shopping online, Amazon, obviously, you know, Campers World, because one of the things you can do, you can still go camping, boat stocks, you know, I bought a company out of Canada that nobody even had ever traded before that owned Schwinn bicycles, because you know, Schwinn had a run of the biggest bicycle sales in the history of the company.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I think that company went up eight X, eight or nine X over the course of nine months. So, you know, I had these 14, 15 companies. So I was like, these companies should be doubling right now and instead they were all down like 30, 40, 50% just because.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  The whole market traded down. So I always knew that I was gonna go levered long in these 15 companies, but I didn't want to do it until the market became less erratic and irrational. So, once the markets finally started to, you know, normalize and come back up, I took all the gains from shorting the travel stocks and the market at large and just put them into levered positions in these 15 companies, which is obviously the trade of a lifetime. So, so that was a

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  Dollar amount, was that the biggest dollar gains you've ever had? I, I, I don't know. By the way, I, I don't watch enough of your content to know how much you talk like, do you, like, do you disclose like how much you make on these things? Do you say like, I got a 10 million active portfolio? Like, what, what do you actually say? I don't know. I don't know what

• 54:08Speaker 00

  We're very open and transparent. I think that year I made 30 million in the market. So that was like 30 million in one year and it was, it was a wild ride, didn't it? I think the most interesting part of that narrative was just before the pandemic, I had made the worst trade of my life and it was actually a trade that was psychologically damaging to me. Like, I lost a third of my portfolio on a single trade just months before the pandemic started. And the, probably the thing I'm most proud of myself of is I was

• 54:51Speaker 00

  so down and out about that trade that I still found a way when I, when I, you know, had come out with all that conviction on COVID, to actually still go all in on my thesis on COVID, even though my account was so brutally damaged at the point that if I got another one wrong? I mean, so it was like, I could have gotten, that would really have wiped me out. I mean, not wiped me out, but it would have been an unbelievable, unbelievable damaging implosion for me to have two monster trades in a row go wrong. The one that went wrong months earlier was a company, QSR, they own Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons and

• 55:37Speaker 00

  I was so convicted that the company would have the best earnings quarter in its entire history because two of the three companies they owned both had anomalies on the positive side Burger King had the impossible Whopper, uh, which was unlike anything the company had ever done before, uh, in terms of sales traction and Popeyes had the, uh, crispy chicken sandwich, which is during the, the, this is the chicken wars, if you remember.

• 56:10Shaan Puri?

  Chick-fil-A, yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, at, at the time and that chick, crispy chicken sandwich that Popeyes had, it would literally sell out in like two hours every day. Uh, Popeyes, no one had ever talked about Popeyes ever in the history of the company, uh, until this crispy chicken sandwich. And I was monitoring both those trends and I was like, they're, they're both going to report the best quarter in the history of their quarters at Burger King and Popeyes. And then you have this third piece, which was unfortunately the biggest piece of the company, Tim Hortons. And Tim Hortons is just, you know, they're, they're a Canadian

• 56:51Speaker 00

  coffee and donut shop. Okay. And the company had basically been around forever. It had not been doing awesome, but it was kind of flatlining. They would have to have had a really bad quarter to screw up my trade. And it was just happened to be a really difficult company for me to, to extract information on through the methods that I use because it was Canadian and people just didn't talk about it that much. Right? There was nothing happening there. So it was like, I saw zero reason why they should have this anomaly of a bad quarter, which is exactly what happened. They just happened to have like randomly

• 57:35Speaker 00

  one of the worst quarters ever, which statistically the chance of that happening were so low and it crushed my trade. I, I lost all of my money on that trade and it was like a third, a full third of my portfolio. And the wildest piece about that.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  And this is where there's a lot of self-reflection. Cause I take a lot of pride in, in going in deep and doing really intense, comprehensive due diligence. Where sometimes if I, if I have a high conviction trade, I will put, you know, 60 plus hours of due diligence into the trade. Where I like to joke that I'll uncover every piece of contextualized information on the company globally through every social media. Anyone who's speaking about any of their products, uh, I will visit, I will sometimes travel if they, they're a retailer and visit stores and talk to store owners and clerks. But because there were three things I was having to deal with Burger King, Popeyes, and then Tim Hortons. I just assumed Tim Hortons, how bad is it gonna be?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Well, they had the Tim Hortons annual meeting a few weeks before earnings in Florida that I didn't realize that they had this meeting. But if I did realize that and I had done my homework, I would have been at that in Orlando for that annual meeting. Not because I would have gotten in, but I would have hung out at the bar. And I would have talked to all the franchisee owners because from what I understand, there was a revolt. At that, at that meeting by franchisee owners because the company was doing so many things wrong. Their sales were just getting slaughtered due to recent decisions that corporate was pushing on the franchisee owners. And it would, they were very public about it at that meeting.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  It was really harsh. And if I was just in, in the building, right at the bar, I would have been well aware of that. So going back, uh, I learned that, you know, you really have to be comprehensive in your research. If you're gonna take a levered bet on a thesis that you have and you, you can't, you can't be lazy.

• 59:43Shaan Puri?

  What are the bets you're looking at now? Because a lot of these examples are from the past 17 years. Where are you now?

• 59:49Speaker 00

  On the AI side, you know, two of my favorite AI picks, you know, right now. One is Bloom Energy, you know, the energy trade is a big one. And it's one that's really, really, really misunderstood, I think, by most investors. So Bloom Energy is a company that just has a really different approach to powering data centers. Right? They're not using big gas turbines.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  You know, they have a technology that they've worked on for, you know, 20 years. That is actual, you know, DC technology where instead of combusting gas, it's actually a chemical change that creates the energy. And they have a really quick timeline to energy for a data center. So if you have a data center and you could actually get energy through Bloom and get your data center up and running six to 12 months quicker than getting on a waitlist for gas turbines and going through all the various approvals. That's, that's a really big deal. And that's why Bloom Energy has, I think they're up like five or six X, right?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Over the past eight or nine months as people are starting to realize this. But there's still a lot of controversy around the company. So again, it's somewhat unproven. They only have a couple of big hyperscaler deals, you know, ones with Oracle. I think there will be others that will be announced in the near future. But it's a new technology. So people are still somewhat skeptical of it. And then you have, you know, news events that, that happened like this last week where now we're building data centers, you know, in, in space, right? You know, now that, you know, SpaceX is preparing to IPO, all of a sudden we have this narrative pop out of nowhere where, oh, didn't everybody realize

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  that we're just going to be doing, you know, compute data centers in space now? Like that's, oh, that's like right on the horizon, like a couple of years, two, three years. Yeah, we're just doing data centers in space like. This is the noise in the market right now, right? So like, oh, we're doing data centers in space and do we don't even need any down here? Like, oh, well, if you're powering those with solar, you know, why would we want to value an energy company, you know, here in the U.S. if you're just going to do them in space with solar? So the market is so A D D that it's changing week to week, month to month, based on whatever the hype story is that will, you know, either positively or negatively impact companies in the space.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  But for me, I, I think, uh, I think Bloom Energy is definitely one of my favorite A I plays right now because they will be the company that will enable data centers to get up and running, I think, meaningfully quicker over the next three to five years. And I think that's a company that's just going to see its earnings double, basically, year over year for the next three to four years. And I think they're still very much misunderstood. They're actually going to be the topic of my next dumb money live episode. I'm going to go in deep on Bloom Energy. We, we spent like a couple of months doing some, doing deep analysis on.

• 1:03:14Shaan Puri?

  Do you publish all your, like, do you publish your portfolio somewhere? Do you publish your trades somewhere?

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  We don't, I won't ever publish trades. I, I sometimes speak about trades on a really high level. The last thing we ever want is other investors trying to mirror our trades because that's not, not what we do, right? We don't think it's a healthy behavior. I always tell investors to steal my ideas and run with them. So take the idea, then poke holes in the idea. Do all of your own research, right? And then come back to me and tell me where I was wrong. But ultimately then go off and make your own trade based on your own, you know, risk reward, because we all have different degrees of risk tolerance. And we should all have a different take on an idea.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  So I love sharing ideas. I don't really. Trades.

• 1:04:09Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I'll be honest with you because this is not my world of expertise. I'm a founder first. And my investing is very sort of simple. You know, I basically own a couple of, you know, own some indexes and I own stocks that I understand. I've owned them for a long time, you know, tech companies, basically, because I grew up in the tech industries ever since college. And then I, my investing outside of that is private angel investing, again, tech. And lastly would be, you know, my own private equity where it's businesses that like individual businesses that I can own and I can affect with, with things that I know how to do operationally or promotionally with this podcast. And so you're interesting to me because on one hand, I, I think,

• 1:04:52Shaan Puri?

  well, first of all, you're interesting because the story is great. Like I turned $20,000 into, you know, I've made 70 million in gains or something like that's an incredible story. I think it's interesting because your approach, like just the way you describe observational investing actually lines up with a lot of the great investors do and say, which is that they don't sort of spreadsheet themselves as that they try to understand, like surface out the signal from the noise. What is the actual important thing I need to know about this company that I can believe before it is obvious, true and proven and, you know, the market sort of response to certainty. And if you can handle uncertainty, you could do quite well. At the same

• 1:05:32Shaan Puri?

  time, you know, sometimes you say things like, you know, 99% of the other 99% of us can go do this and we have sort of the, I think I've heard you say, you know, the game is rigged, Wall Street is rigged, but it's rigged in our favor. And, you know, that part I think seems untrue. Like if, if what you've done is true, it's in many ways because you have a very unique skillset and upbringing and background.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  No, no, that's the, I.

• 1:05:58Shaan Puri?

  Let me just sort of explain that because I think it's important. I think the last thing I would want is people to listen to this and be like, oh, okay, cool. I can just go and trade levered up off of observations and I too will turn $20,000 to $70 million. There's a reason that's not common. That's not a common result. There's a reason you get a book deal. There's a reason people will follow you because it's not a common. And result, everybody, everybody does. And I think one of the reasons it's uncommon is not because it can't work. That's not what I mean. A lot of it is interpretability, right? So interpreting, interpreting the signals, trying to figure out what is actually important. Is it already priced in? What does this mean? Who does it? Who benefits from that? The second order effects of that? That's not like, you know, something incredibly, you know, simple that, that everybody is going to do.

• 1:06:41Shaan Puri?

  So there's a big difference between anybody can, yes, everybody can is different. And so like, I view it very similar to startups where, you know, an entrepreneur can come on here and they'll say, look, it's not rocket science. I'm not any smarter than you guys. I just did this, this, this, this. And it's true that any, that was in the capacity for anybody to do, but definitely everybody won't. And, and definitely everybody should not try because they don't have, you know, either the nature, the disposition, the, the risk tolerance to be able to go do it. So I just think you're interesting because you're this sort of like puzzle. Normally, if I hear a story like this, it's too good to be true. It violates a lot of this sort of like fundamental wisdom that people have about investing, where you want to buy, you know, buy a share in a great company and hold it for a long time.

• 1:07:22Shaan Puri?

  They are things that I have sort of accepted from, you know, a certain school of thought around this. So I think you're very interesting because you violate some of those. And I think that, that works and it works for you. And I think it's very cool, but I hesitate. I hesitate because I think that this is not something that a lot of people could or should do.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  So, so I couldn't disagree more. I did, I agree with some of what you're saying in terms of yes, I mean, over a long period of time, you know, doing, you know, generating almost a hundred million dollars from a, you know, $20,000 or yeah, that it's, that's not easy to do, obviously. But I will say this, I think, I think the biggest issue is simply bucketing money and having a risk capital. So I think the, the number one issue preventing someone from doing this is thinking that they have this one bucket of capital for their life savings, for their future kids' college, for their retirement.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  And they think about that money all as one. And this is something that's a little foreign, the concept of being a regular person and observing something and saying, connecting the dots and saying, you know what? I'm gonna put a levered bet on that because I just found, you know, I just discovered this. You're not going to do that unless you have your money properly bucketed. And the one thing I teach people is you have to have risk capital. I don't care if it's $50 or $50 million. You don't, you shouldn't be waiting until you're part of the, you know, ultra wealth class to, to, to, to think that you have risk capital to take risk with. You need to have risk capital, starting with day one. So everybody should have a big money account.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  I talk about this in Laughing at Wall Street. Everyone should have a big money account. And the big money account is the account that, that yes, you get wealthy quickly with. And you do that by taking big swings on things that you really believe in. And the only way that you're going to psychologically do that is if you fund that big account with money that is not being stolen from other areas of your life. So I, I call it, you know, there's this whole concept of like frugality or trade offs where, okay, maybe you mow your own lawn, maybe you make your own coffee. Maybe you clip coupons, like people don't want to clip coupons to save a dollar.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  But if you think about every dollar in your life as, as potentially being a hundred dollars, a hundred X, which is a hundred percent feasible over a long period of time. If you invest aggressively with leverage and get a few wins, then you'll clip a dollar coupon because that dollar coupon is clipping a hundred dollar coupon. Okay, you're gonna make your own coffee because instead of saving $5, you're saving $500 a day. Right? So all of a sudden you discover all of this money, newfound money in your life by making little trade offs in things all over your life. The difference is every time you make one of those trade offs and you save $5 for making your own coffee,

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  you take that $5 and you put it into your, uh, Your risk capital bucket. Yeah, account bucket, right? By the way, this is not financial advice, right? It's just like, this is how I did, I'm just saying like, I hope I'm inspiring people because I just understand something. I graduated in the bottom 25% of my high school class. The bottom 20 today, the way colleges, I could not even had. I would not have gotten into any university in the United States. Okay. Pretty much today in 2025 with with my grades.

• 1:11:13Shaan Puri?

  This is why I love doing the podcast because you can get people who make their money in all different ways. We just had John Morgan, who's like the guy on the billboards, personal injury law. And he's a guy, you know, he's the biggest personal injury lawyer in the world, $2 billion a year. And then he started, uh, he started his career working at Disney World as Pluto. Like he would be in the costume. And then he started because of that formative experience. He took the money from the law firm and started building little like attractions, like a fairs and and places you go and buy tickets. Like the the museum of crime and history, things like that. And he's made a killing doing that. So if that guy comes on, tells about how you make money that way. Another guy says how you do it this way.

• 1:11:54Shaan Puri?

  So what I love about the podcast is I get to hear these people who come on with completely different blueprints and playbooks that they 100% believe in. And I get to listen and I get to decide, I get to decide for myself. Does that sound like something that's interesting or would suit me? And I hope the listener does the same because I don't agree with a lot of what you said, but I found it all very interesting. And, you know, there's some things you said, if like, I'll be, I'll be totally honest. If you saw, if you have like a paid course somewhere, I would be like, I can't run this episode because I feel like this guy is selling this dream to people that, hey, yeah, you just gotta, just go, go get in the TikTok comments. Find an observation, lever up, baby, make a trade, one trade will change your life. And it's like, that is a scary principle.

• 1:12:37Shaan Puri?

  I think that is a heretical idea to a lot of people. It's why it's very interesting to me to hear it, to talk about it. Why is it important to you that people really, that the average person who's listening, they believe this and they go take action on this? Because like I said, it's not that you're running a fund, right? So you're not soliciting investors, you're not selling a course saying, "I'll teach you how to do this. Trust me, it works." You're not doing any of those things, which is usually why people really kind of pound the table and say, "You could do this. Just believe. Just go for it."

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  My overriding purpose is to inspire every human on earth to enter the investing class, right? Because I think it's the only way we'll ever solve the wealth gap. So like, there's no way to solve the income gap. The income gap is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve. The wealth gap is a problem that's solvable by bridging more humans into the investor class. And so everything that I do on X, everything that I do on YouTube, every podcast that I do, has a single mission to inspire other people to start investing on their own. And by all means, if that means just throwing money in the S and P in an ETF,

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  awesome. But there's no reason to stop there, right? Like, I know that people love the concept of actually hope and having an opportunity to do something truly great in their life, because so many people, when it comes to income, are stuck. Their job is not going anywhere. Okay, like, and by the way, I am not a proponent of people quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs and taking all this massive personal risk to start businesses. I think there are very few people that are capable of doing that. And I think that this roadmap is way more achievable for people. Start making trade-offs, come up with a big

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  money account, do it through making trade-offs in your life in frugality, learn how to use leverage, learn how to take big risk with other people's money, because I call it other people's money, because it's all comes through trade-offs, in things that you believe in, because you can do this. And by the way, there is nothing cooler than when you're just a regular person and you... You just make a grand slam in the market, right? And you've 30x your money. All of a sudden, you have financial independence in life. So I don't know many things that are more important because it just, it helps solve so many other issues. And so many humans are just depressed because they look at their life and they're like,

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  this is my job, these are my expenses, this is inflation. Holy crap, I'm screwed. I will never be the person I want to be for me or my family. And I want to inspire people that it doesn't have to be that way. And you also don't need to be taking big risks with your retirement money or any of that stuff. That's why I'm like, I'm very clear. If you're gonna do this, do it with money that's bucketed, right? For risk. You know, this isn't just about investing.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  The same methodology of being able to identify change in the world and tailwinds and trends should apply to career. It should also, you know, like, it should apply to entrepreneurs as well. Because like, I'm an entrepreneur, like, I'm about to start another business. And that business is directly tied to the analysis that I'm doing, discovering change in the world, right? So like, you know, we're about to embark on this journey of, of abundance. And it's not gonna be like, we just hit the age of abundance in five years and we're not working.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Like, no, the age of abundance is gonna like slowly happen. It's already happening. It's gonna, it's gonna like happen over the course of decades. And it's just, it's just lots of tailwinds and trends. It's like, people will be working a little less. People will have a little more free time. People will have more flexibility to dive into the things that they care about, right? Wealth signaling will, I think, become even bigger in the future than it is today. I think there's just so many changes that are massive that are happening in the world that if you're an entrepreneur trying to figure out like, where do I spend my time? Or if you're just someone that is figuring out, where's your next career path? Or where, if you're a young person, where's my career path?

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  Like, you need to be doing more analysis on where the opportunity is because...

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  These are some of the biggest decisions of your life. It's not just about trading a stock.

• 1:17:26Shaan Puri?

  Especially in Silicon Valley, you see this all the time. People will take a job and it's like you realize you're investing all of your life force. You're, you know, you're creative energy and you're getting these stock options, but you never thought about this like an investor. Like you're just happy you got the job versus you should be looking at the job market the way an investor looks at these companies. And even if you're not investing capital, you're investing your time, right? So that applies, you know, totally there. You said you're launching any business, what is it?

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  It is related to the jet industry, private jet industry, which I believe will be one of numerous beneficiaries of us kind of entering into this age of abundance with people having, you know, more. In fact, I'll just quickly state that if you want a glimpse into the future, you need to simply look back into our past from the pandemic. Because that one year of the pandemic, when we actually had an abnormal amount of time as humans, we had never experienced anything like that throughout our lifetime. When we had excess time to actually do what we wanted to do.

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  And we also just happened to have excess money because of this wild stimulus that happened during the pandemic. So if you want an example of what the age of abundance is going to look like in terms of the winners and the losers, just look back to that one period of time. What did we do when we had more time and more money? We dug into our hobbies. We dug into our interest. We, you know, we kind of did things that now that we're back to this world, right? Like we do a little bit less of. But if we truly get, you know, the industry of intelligence and automation

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  and robotics to help us do the vast majority of work, the repetitive work at least that we do today. I think the entire world has an opportunity to become more creative, spend more time with their families, with their friends, doing things that are meaningful. Travel certainly, I think, is something that we can all count on in the future as becoming a larger industry, not a smaller industry. I am ultra-long on the private jet sector, even though myself, I carry too much guilt to fly private. So like, you'll never see me on a private jet, but I'm very bullish on the sector.

• 1:19:59Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Chris, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you. And people can go find you. You got your show, Dumb Money Live. It's on YouTube. That's where I watch it, at least, when I tune in.

• 1:20:11Shaan Puri?

  So thanks for coming on.

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  And by the way, the only place I am personally is X, so at Chris Camillo at X. But dumbmoney.tv has all the socials, so thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

• 1:20:22Shaan Puri?

  Very cool. Well, that's it. That's the pod.

• 1:20:36Sam Parr?

  All right, everyone. If you're listening to MFM, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist, and it's hosted by Donald Kelly. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to succeed in sales. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to the top. If you're someone looking to raise your income level, check out The Sales Evangelist. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.