This guy made $80M in profit. Here's his next 3 stock picks

the world is still unsure about how this is gonna play out i'm not unsure i'm willing to bet it all i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to upper apartment at all in it like a days off on a less travel never back chris good to see you again hey s how are you doing man i'm good so we should start with a little a little intro sam you weren't here last time chris was on christy you do like the the the simplest explanation of who you are number one and then number two is your kind of unique philosophy and unique strategy that you've used to buy you know buy and sell stocks to invest i mean i'm i'm a regular person for most of my career i've had a regular job i'm not a financial analyst i'm not a technical trader i hate all that stuff i hate technical i hate fundamentals like most regular people right like a normal guy with the normal job that was trying to break out you know try to find a future for myself because i realized that my job was capped like ninety nine point nine percent of people in this world and you know i started investing something i call observational investing or social or investing which is really all it is is trying to detect change in the world whether it's change in technological development or changing in culture change in consumer behavior but you're trying to detect change and you're trying to connect that change connect the dots to companies that would either benefit or be harmed by that change so you're and then you're investing in those companies so it's it's that simple one of many ways that you personally observe is their social media comments yeah i mean like think about it like how do you observe change in the world the quickest what do people do before they change their life they talk about it right before you can see the evidence of it they talk about it if you're a developer and and and you're changing the way that you develop software and you're you're adopting ai in your company you're probably in reddit forms with other developers speaking about it and it's not always tech a lot of it is just consumer behavior right because i remember you had one that was around the sphere which most people i haven't realized the the big the big dome in vegas the sphere yeah it's a publicly traded stock and i think you noticed what was it that wizard of oz or you're like did this wizard of oz show yeah game game game changer right they didn't quite nail product market fit the spear until that wizard of oz came out and they're like oh take an old movie use ai to make it more interesting in terms of visuals to put it on this insane projection screen and then add some four d effects like a tornado and the winds blowing and all of this stuff and all of a sudden you created a unique human experience that would go viral on tiktok which is exactly what happened and now people from around the world from europe are like we're going to vegas to go to the fireplace to see this wizard of oz that we saw one viral on tiktok right and so man what a game changer did you buy it dude yeah so i i heard him talking about it so i started tracking it it's up two hundred twenty percent and when the time we got in which is like a twenty something bucks is up like six x or something chris i gotta give you a little credit because anytime somebody comes on the pod and talks about investing the goal is first to get context on okay before we listen in and really drink the ko aid on all the your philosophy or your strategy we like to understand does it work what what are the what are the results so you could talk a little bit about that but i'll give one little point which was last time you're on the pod i asked you to make three sort of picks three predictions three three stocks to look at you said pal here bloom energy it was at ninety two dollars is now at two hundred forty so it's up a hundred sixty five percent since the last podcast and then nvidia which is up a smaller amount but those are your three picks so i gotta give give you a little bit of credit so here's the thing like i'd actually aggressively disagree with that type of performance analysis because the world's changing every minute of every day so like the day after the show i could have found new information that would have put me on the opposite side of all three of those trades right and so the only way you could ever analyze any investor ever is through long term audits over a long period of time total portfolio i don't care if an investor comes on and gives you five stocks and all them rocket it could have been based on beta could have been based on the like it completely lock right so don't give me any credit for anything from the last show if you don't i you feel free if you want but the all that actually matters is what's like the ten fifteen twenty year total portfolio track record in and out through multiple markets great so what so what is it what are the audited what is it fifteen year results like sixty eight percent over over sixteen fifteen or sixteen years what does that mean in terms of dollars would you start with i've generated about eighty million off of an initial twenty thousand dollar portfolio that i kicked off in two thousand seven wow and then do you reinvest new capital into that the truth is that i took massive of amounts of capital out every year almost all of my profits and so theoretically if i kept it all in and maintain the same returns which would have been harder because the account would have been larger obviously it'd be like it's seven hundred million or something like that but you know the truth is it's meaningfully easier to manage an account that is seven to eight figures than an account that's nine figures for obvious reasons right so you can never really compare apples to apples you can't really compare me to a guy managing five billion and it's unfair to the guy that's managing five billion because he has restrictions he's having to move large amounts of money i'm able to be hyper flexible with what i do but i would say that the sizing of my account is still meaningfully larger than just about any other retail investor in the world what's been the worst downs what year did you do the worst or what's what's the the biggest dip you had i think i have and it wasn't crazy it was like thirty percent down twenty or thirty percent down in the year i think the biggest up years might have been like three hundred percent in a year so but it's been relatively relatively consistent so chris i wanna ask you a question after you came on and you talked about this observational investing and i have to say i i've obviously was i'm a bit skeptical about most financial influencers on youtube i would just say like there's a general stance i have you should be more than skeptical yeah so so but but you know when you what you talked about is didn't it's not like it was some insane idea like you look for changes of where where you see the world going where you think demand is going where there might be supply constraints and those obviously might be interesting companies now the question i have for you because one one example is my kids went crazy about these thing called explain what these things are they're basically just a pilot it's this like a goo ball i don't know what do you wanna explain it it's just it's just a squishy toy it it it a squishy toy that is slightly firmer slightly higher to quality squish have been around for fifteen years but they were able to go viral this last year it became a thing in kind of elementary in middle schools of like finding rare needles that you couldn't find them so you had that sort of like that pokemon card this happens a lot of times with cra right but it's nit a public company yeah so so nit is a very tiny private company that's actually held by another private company that owns i think twenty seven private companies and n the company that owns n is one of those twenty seven companies what's interesting is that this is a holding company that shocked that generally doesn't move because they generate their earnings from interest payments and dividends paid by these small operating companies to my knowledge and the ticker ga a i n to my knowledge they've never owned a company that's is had a hyper viral product like nino before can you imagine that a waffle wall street call to sean like listen sean this is a small company in andover massachusetts that is sitting on breakthrough technology that is just squishy yet firm at the same time that's exactly what it is man that's literally exactly what it is and by the way whenever you invest in a tiny company like this there's all types of unknown risk involved so it's a really dangerous game to play but i did bank the investment it's a bit of a novelty investment in a novelty product so i the thesis is that if the if n can remain on trend through the holiday season and if the parent company is able to fully scale out supply this is actually going to be a needle mover for the parent company to the and and you should see about a thirty to forty percent increase in valuation at the parent company let's break this trade even further there's always cool books on like you know warren buffett first like fifty deals or whatever let's do chris's investment in thin did you say how much did you put into it when did you put into it and like when you're saying there should be a thirty or forty percent what numbers did you look at to make this estimation of what how much juice is on here how how much profit it can could be had you're basically looking at 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 tech dot 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 a build of 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 turn it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money now this is not you know get a 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 wanna download it it's in the description below it's totally free can go get it thanks to the folks at helps hubspot for doing the research making this document and make it available to all you guys alright back to the episode you're basically looking at how many needles you think the company can sell through the holiday season based on demand and how many they're currently selling by the way this is like a little bit of a science and a little bit of an art and and you kind of assess what that will do to that company's bottom line how that will increase dividends and what that increase dividend payment to the parent company will account for relative to the total value valuation to the parent company it it's it's it's kind of a difficult exercise and this is where ai comes in really great because ai can help you do that exercise so we're you know we're not financial analysts and ai does an excellent job going deep into the financials of a company like this and then like okay if they sell this many at this much of a profit margin it could have this big of an impact on the parent company and of earnings come holiday season so again lot lot of estimates that you're making it was enough for me to invest i put like somewhere between half a million and a half and a million dollars into the trade it wasn't crazy i did it more because i loved the product and i loved the trade and i felt the trades going to work and i wanna be part of it so like for me on an equity trade that's not a huge trade for me but i like it and by the way if you look at the past seventeen years i've made about eighty to eighty five high conviction trades over seventeen years so the entirety of my performance is based on those eighty trades and nit was a high conviction i wouldn't call n a high conviction i call probably a medium conviction because the company is so tiny that that there are a lot of variables that could impact a a minuscule company like that but all eighty of those trades were publicly discussed more or less as they were happening so i'm really public with my ideas because i i want my community to kinda provide feedback and poke holes in my thesis you know there aren't that many of us social ar traders observational traders so i've always said that the community at large when we work together on ideas sometimes i service ideas sometimes members of my community service ideas we cross research them we we play devil's advocate with each other we poke calls in the thesis and i always say as as a group we're more powerful than the biggest hedge fund because we have you know tens to hundreds of thousands of people now that are social ar traders and we come from every walk of life so we have people from every industry sector every profession every demographic so we have tons of people that have kids when we do channel checks when we do store checks i'll throw it out of my community and they will they will do store checks in every state so we'll have people aggregating hey i went to this shop in missouri i went to the shop in florida here's what the clerk told me right it it's really really fun guys now let me ask you a question about this the specific question i have is observing the trend if especially if you're parent with with young kids what was actually not that hard it's pretty easy to see holy shit every kid in the school wants it and there's none on the shelves they can't the you know stores can't keep them in stock people are banging on the door so the buy side of that kinda make some sense to me but all these things seem like fad they seem like trends i would never know when to exit a trade like this i no no never know when to sell because i i don't think twenty years from now my kids are gonna care about needles and the kids are necessarily gonna care about needles so can you explain how you think about the the exit or the cell when it's come when it's something like this where it's like a trend or a a wave that may not be enduring well well let let's back up it all it all is dependent upon the conviction level and the underlying thesis that you observed right so you you have a thesis that you come up with that there is some new information that is likely to positively or impact this company or this sector that the market is not aware of yet or that the market appreciates now you have to ask yourself to what extent is as a needle mover for this company right is this going to meaningfully move the revenue needle the profit needle their cost structure or the perception of this company is it meaningful and are there other things that are happening to this company that are more meaningful than this one piece of information that i feel is a needle mover okay and then you have to ask yourself to what extent do other investors institutional or retail already know about this because it's not a binary thing right some people might know but does the market at large fully appreciate that piece of information or do they only partially appreciate it so it's additive and you have to determine am i highly convicted in this trade because this thing that's about to happen or that already happened is going to be massively impactful to this company and there's nothing else that's going to impact this company over the course of the next few weeks so the next couple of months and there are virtually no other investors in such institutional or retail that understand this yet and to answer your question sean the exit window is when other people come to terms with this information right when other people start to appreciate this information that you found that you traded on as soon as that information becomes public like in the case of the sphere when other retail traders when financial press when the company itself an analyst started coming out what reports saying hey they're selling out the arena due to wizard of oz this is gonna be a game changer or we're starting to revise our earnings estimates based on this new template that they found with the wizard of oz and by the way they can replicate this model now with other old movies and it's a highly profitable model and we now feel that they've kinda cracked product market fit at sphere which is a game changing moment when you start to hear about that in the press when you see other investors talking about it on x when the company itself talks about it that's the point of information parody and that's when we exit the trade so you basically initiate an observational social trade at the point of information and balance when you find some information that is impactful that the world doesn't know about yet and you exit that investment as the world starts to appreciate that information and that's not always a binary event either sometimes you exit it over time as more and more investors start to appreciate the information now you try to ignore stock price the assumption is that if that piece of information is meaningfully positive to that company as other people start to to to to surface that information that it will possibly impact the stock but that's out of your control the bottom line is you're trading a thesis your thesis revolves around one piece of information and when that information gets widely dis to other their investors then you no longer have an information advantage therefore you should be exiting that trade whether you made money in the trade or whether you lost money in the trade for some other unknown reason maybe the market maybe something else happened is kind of irrelevant so that's the entire methodology that's everything i've been doing for seventeen years there's a lot more to it because like when you find this narrative right you then need to like check every other piece of information that you can or data source to validate it talking to store clerk right maybe you're pulling web traffic stats maybe you're looking at google search trends depending on the trade there's a million different ways to validate the narrative thesis that you originated using alternative data or other information sources it just it's a case by case basis but this is everything i've been doing for seventeen years and it's very different from being a fundamental trader or being a technical trader has there been a time over the last fifteen or eighteen years that you've been doing this where you've said i'm quitting and i'm i'm not doing this anymore i'm going back to like just index investing or something like has what what was a low point no i love this so much guys this is literally part of my soul this is what i do i i have so much fun doing this like you gotta realize like my methodology entails reading comments on tiktok videos i get to watch the world unfold i get to learn about culture and consumer behavior and trends and what people are buying what they're doing it is the fun research any investor could ever do i'm not studying fundamentals or charts what i do is fun as hell i i then every five years i have this thesis that i go all way on so five years ago it was pokemon and nerd culture and i started this company called collect con and we became the largest pokemon trade show in the world and we sold it to aria emmanuel a few months ago for an insane amount of money but we grew that from the ground up and i kinda take on one of those projects the next project i'm taking on wait can we to tell me about this the that's that's a big deal i'll tell the full story before you tell the you're right oh you wanna know the story this is actually amazing i always tell everyone don't do things for yourself just go out there and do things for other people and it always comes back in your favor don't ask how or why it just generally always does so i'm really dig into phil i have a five zero one foundation i support pediatric charity animal welfare and elder care and back to the pandemic i know nothing about pokemon okay but logan paul bought like a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar pokemon box which is the set the world record and i was like yeah and that looks really fun and i was kinda bored i'm gonna go do the same thing but then i'm gonna break it into like the twenty four packs and auction and off for charity and then just donate it all to the foundation and i'm gonna also throw the world's biggest pokemon party in vegas because i ended up meeting all these pokemon people and they were the coolest nicest people in the world i'm telling i never met people so fun and so i met steve a who's a big pokemon guy i met this guy gary king pokemon who's the number one pokemon guy collector in the world and he was the guy that i think sold logan one of his biggest pokemon cards and i said i wanna do this party guys and they help me put on this party in vegas and we agreed that a third of the proceeds would go to steve brain charity charities like whatever a third would go to gary king ko pokemon autism charities and a third would go to the charities i care about so i bought this box for three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars we broke it up through the world's biggest pokemon party donated hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity the party itself cost me almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to put on i made zero all this was a massive loss and donation to a bunch of charities but what came out of it i met all these really interesting people and about a month later gary king pokemon calls me he goes hey chris i know you believe in pokemon now i know you believe that this is gonna be really big and get bigger every year one of the guys at the party wants to start a pokemon convention and he doesn't have any money can i introduce you maybe you would invest in it yeah sure let's do it i have lunch with this guy he lived in texas i said let's just do it this guy's been working in in my conventions for twenty years he had perfect skills set to do it him and his two cousins were deeply passionate collectors and pokemon collectors i said you guys are the perfect people to run this conference let's do it together i invested i wanna say six hundred thousand dollars into the company i took a minority but massive stake in the company and i helped build this conference starting with one show in a small hotel convention room in f texas and four years later we were throwing twenty shows seven hundred thousand attendees the biggest pokemon trade show in the world massive success and by the way we all worked all the shows like i would travel around the country and be the guy who was ticketing people online at seven in the morning where we'd have three thousand people online because we were trying to operate the show so efficiently because so we didn't have much money business i mean seven hundred thousand tickets are of non figure exit right massive business guys massive you wouldn't believe i i'm under nda i can't tell you the specifics on the sale but massive exit can can can you say generally speaking these businesses what do they sell for not yeah like a like on an eb like what what's the of eb multiple they don't sell for big multiples because you a it's a physical business it's not like a software business but the amount of money we were generating from these shows was enormous it was really profitable very profitable because we care deeply about the shows and we ran great shows we actually i just doing back of the envelope math seven hundred thousand times let's say sixty bucks that's you're getting close to fifty million dollars in revenue let alone vendor can't disclose exact numbers but i'm gonna tell you the numbers were huge and we started from nothing and we built this all up over four years but it wasn't easy guys like we we were so frugal that we had our own rig because you know the most expensive part of throwing a convention is by renting pipe and drape at all the conventions so we bought our own pipe and drape put it in a eighteen wheeler and the founder operator of this business matthew would drive the truck himself from city to city it was crazy okay and and then we would unload the truck with some local help right and we would set up the shows or i mean there were points because i have a bad back where after the first day i was almost i couldn't walk and i there were some shows i'd had to go home on day two because i i i heard my back so bad from just like leaning over ticketing thousands of people at at the show because we would hire contract workers to help us but we needed every hand possible that's pretty good so we rent it like a family business we were deeply passionate about the attendees we would throw a concert every saturday midday we had like vanilla ice would perform or like it was so fun and and meanwhile to this day i've never bought a pokemon card so like i was an observer of this sector but the long story short like i had deep conviction in nerd culture and pokemon specifically and i think wall street doesn't and just business the business community generally doesn't appreciate the fact that there are millions of people that like collecting these cards and no one had provided a fun place for them to physically go to once a year to connect with other people like them and trade these cards like we have sports card shows we've had them forever right with baseball cards and whatnot but no one had never really established a big show for you know tc g for like these table card games right like no one had ever done it before so it just intuitively made sense to me hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually usual you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so so i'm curious if this is something that others have been doing or the people you look up to so for example somebody who you wouldn't think is an observational trader wouldn't call that is warren buffett but there's some great stories of where he did exactly what you're talking about there's a a story of the salad oil crisis with american express i don't know if you guys know that story but it's basically you know i at a given time they're were lending money and they were lending money to this guy who supposed to have salad oil dressing and then they went and they checked the barrels and the barrels were just full of water salt now like sea water and there was no salad oil at all and the stock is plummeting and buffett he figured out what the central question was which is is this a temporary setback or is this actually gonna be damaging to the trust of the brand long term and he believed in brands right that's why he has been on coca cola and geico and these other companies that he feels like i have a brands that have power it's the exact opposite of what chris is it's like what won't change yeah so he well he was but still the the the market research part of this is kinda shared right so he the story is he goes into a store and he just watches the clerk and he watches customers with their credit card and he's basically trying to figure out are people gonna stop taking american express because they no longer have faith in the good standing of american express or is of the american express brand gonna endure this and really the as was the market believed that the that this would damage the future of american express and this the quality of the brand and what he observed in watching people was that the stores and the customers had no problem using american express and that there was no very he did the same thing he is very similar thing with apple where he had stayed away from technology companies for a long time and then he realized like oh when he talked to apple customers he's like not only would they not trade their current device for a cheaper equivalent of device by somebody else you can't pay these people to switch off apple and it it was the it was a more of a social psychological observation not a technical or fundamental analysis of the business that led him to to to invest in those companies so chris it's a long winded way of asking who else has been great at this what are the great stories that inspire you on this or do you feel like you're kind of the first one to popular no it's the concept of information as is not new to investing methodologies the most famous person to adopt it widely would have been peter lynch with the magellan fund in the eighties the difference being a pure observational social of investor is this concept that it shouldn't be part of an investing methodology but it should be the only thing that you take into consideration right so peter lynch kinda of blended this this observational investing approach he would famously walk the malls and kinda look at what stores have the longest lines at the cash register see seems pretty simple right and he would combine that with the massive amounts of fundamental research you have to ask yourself though if the market is relatively efficient and we know the market's never perfectly efficient but it's if it's relatively efficient in terms of taking into account all the fundamentals and all the technical and you have all these investors that are trying to price a company based on all the known things then if you're able to surface something that's unknown that is meaningful you don't need to worry about all the other stuff you don't need to have this robust fundamental technical approach that also happens to apply information as when you come across it you can focus all of your energy and all of your research on just finding new information that the market hasn't discovered yet and making an assumption that the particular company that you're trading is relatively efficient with all the known information and investors haven't fully priced in this new piece of information so all you care about is that one piece of information as it simplifies the way that investors can approach this game because most of us are never going to be technically proficient investors and never going to be able to compete with the absolute best most pe agreed wharton graduated like fundamental investors right that are doing deep deep fundamental analysis and they've come to terms with the fact that this company should trade at a twenty nine t as opposed to the twenty four pe it's trading at today i mean i don't wanna play that game the easiest game to play because you can invest a million different ways so the question is what is the best approach to investing that the largest chunk of ordinary people can actually apply efficiently to markets and regularly do that in a fruitful way and i strongly believe it's pure observational social are investing sean i actually just googled this and it's funny i'm quoted as the source of google for the story so it could be a little bit of rock but in nineteen sixty six a young warren buffett visited a movie theater in forty fifth in broadway in new york to watch mary pop he went with a brief briefcase in the middle of the afternoon later joking that it almost felt like he needed to rent a kid to fit in this trip was his way of researching disney to see if they had lasting brand appeal and later that day he bought five percent of the company at had four million dollars and it was a fifty percent gain over the next year and he says selling it which he did after one year was one of his biggest mistakes that he's ever made and by the way so if if he really believed that that lasting durable brand appeal was there for disney alright did he also believe that the the rest of the world came to that acknowledgment after a year and if he did then he didn't have any alpha after a year and he was probably right to sell disney and disney thirty five when he did that by the way so may i mean you could also say maybe just made a mistake but you have to understand something whether a stock goes up or down after you sell might have nothing to do with you making a mistake because that's not your thesis that's not why you invested you don't have any alpha so it could've gone up for a completely different reason so you you you gotta get out of the heads space of saying because the stock continue to go up after you exited you made the mistake you that could be put completely coincidental it went up for something that you had no knowledge into that you had no take on how do you quantify that though because like for example sean and i or the average show might have like an opinion on one company their sales we think are going up but that doesn't necessarily mean the stock will change okay let let let's take a step back if you are correct that a company is being impacted by something meaningfully and their revenue is going to go up and the rest of the investor class is not aware of that yet if there's nothing else impacting that company during that trade window it is highly likely again there are a lot of factors there's the macro market the market can come down right there but but in a vacuum that piece of information will almost always in a vacuum will almost always result in the stock going up because when a company makes more money than the market anticipates the stock will go up if you're able to surface something that will impact a company sales that the rest of the market is not aware of when the rest of the world comes to terms with that piece of information that will positively impact the stock price assuming that there's nothing else going on with that company or the market at large but i i wouldn't overthink it too many investors overthink this it's not that complicated guys can you give a sense of volume so i think you said something like eighty eighty investment decision seventeen years is that does that mean you're making four ish buy sell trade decisions per year or did i hear that wrong because that my my hunch was that you're a little more active than that seems like in a given year how much how many decisions are how many investment decisions are you making so i'm referring to high conviction trades you know trades where i have a lot of conviction and i'm generally allocating five to thirty percent of my total portfolio to buying that stock or i'm allocating call it two to fifteen percent of my portfolio to buying options in that stock by the way when you say portfolio is this like i have my trading my fun my fund slash fund and then i have my boring safe nest over here entire portfolio entire portfolio yes i think what sean was getting at was like do you have like a safety net no i mean on my my public equity portfolio is my public equity portfolio it's just one portfolio so when i have high conviction and a trade i will allocate between you know like i said i don't know up to a third of my portfolio might be in that single stock for that period of time that i'm in that trade and sean to answer your question in the early years i would average one to two high conviction trades a year now as we have more social media today than we had back thirteen years ago and the world is more digitally connected today and there's it's actually easier than it's ever been to read into the world's conversations as they're happening like as you guys know i spend hours a night reading comments on tiktok videos because that's where most of the world organically shares what they're doing what they're buying you know where they're going like on a daily basis i i've increased the velocity of my high conviction trades so there had been years now where i've had six or seven high conviction trades in a year where it used to be one or two right and by the way the the more change that's happening in the world the more opportunity to surface a high conviction trade so probably the biggest year i ever had was during the pandemic because the year of the pandemic there was a tremendous amount of change happening in the world we all started living at home you know working from home right we we we stopped going out we started buying things that we would ordinarily never buy we stopped spending money on those things and started spending money on these things because we're living inside of our house for a year straight you know we're buying bicycles and cameras for our computers and printers because the kids are doing the homeschooling and all of these things that we're buying peloton because we're not going to the gym and we're working out at our house now so you know we're shopping more on amazon and spotify so like the more change the more opportunity for an observational investor to surface that change and connect the dots to invest opportunities when there's not a lot of change in the world than there's less opportunity for us so why what i've been telling people is in the age of ai we've never experienced this type of global change before other than the pandemic because ai is radically changing the way that we think about work that we think about intelligence every company in the world is going to get hit positively or negatively due to the way that ai and and unlimited intelligence is going to impact their sector over the next few years so this is an amazing time to be an observational social or investor because the world is changing so quickly there's going to be so many winners and losers so the game here is to figure out what's changing and the degree to which that change is good or bad for any given company at any given period of time does this influence you sean this is your second time talking to him are you has your actions changed since december not necessarily because the main thing i do isn't like active investing in in public equities you know if i did maybe it would be a little more but i don't know i find it fascinating and like you said we talked to on one end of the spectrum you know sort of the charlie mon buffett disciples we've had those value investors on we've had you know howard marx he he's dealing in in you know debt and bonds and and you know you have ru you have all these different people i'm more of a right now in a kind of curiosity mode not a oh great let me switch up my style every time i talk to a really successful really interesting investor which for us on this podcast is like every month you but let me ask you a question your audience what what do you think the average follower of this show looks like do you think the average follower of this show is capable of being a top one percent fundamental investor competing against literally i think that the average the average listener of the show couldn't be a top one percent and any type of investing that's not completely untrue that's ridiculous i think i don't think that's ridiculous to say the average can't be able that that is that is patent false patent false where do you think where do you think i graduated in my high school class just just guess percent either what percent or the worst percent i'm not sure where i should guess but no no no genuinely they're like genuinely i yeah i generated eighty million off a twenty thousand dollar portfolio like like i i i i am who i am you you know look at the last fifteen years of stuff and articles like genuinely like objectively like where do you think i would have graduated in my high school class like public this back up we the question was the average person of our show are they a one percent investor i don't think they are nor do i think i'm sorry i didn't mean that i mean do they have the capacity also no okay well i'm at i'm asking you so like let's talk about you we talking about iq like what do you think my iq i had an iq test what do you think my iq was or what do where do you think i graduated in my high school class just just objectively just throw it out there middle sean well you're asking the question which tells me it's gotta be the bottom half of your class it's lower than that it's bottom twenty five percent of my high school class i barely graduated and i'll just tell you this i'm not i don't recall my exact iq but i will tell you this when i was in kindergarten okay i was the only kin the class didn't know what my last name was and they sent me to manhattan to get an iq test and i i still have that piece of paper it was slightly below average in terms of iq nothing crazy they kept me in the class i don't know why didn't know my last name wait i was just saying i did i was the only kid that didn't know my last name i went on to do not a lot better through my senior here of high school obviously i was bottom twenty five percent of my class what about temperament because like you again we've talked to all these amazing people a huge takeaway that i've had talking to a bunch of the investors in particular is that temperament probably matters more than iq and i think the your temperament the way you're were born is likely just the way it is you probably can't change it i think sean talked to man p b and he said something i think it was him sean he said something like i probably can't take anyone and make him great but we could probably improve you a little bit you know i think he didn't say this but it was like the analogy of your born seven feet tall and you could be better asphalt at six foot tall but like you know freaks are freaks and so temperament i actually think is probably more important than iq when it comes to this game okay i would say that being a top one percent observational investor or just a top one percent investor generally is easily doable if you're willing to aggressively adopt being an observational purest investor and the reason i say that is because what i actually do is so simple and so straightforward and i've seen over the past seven or eight years since i've been public about this on youtube and i have you know hundreds of thousands of followers i had people around the world writing me near daily they are dentist they are jan they drive trucks for ups they work in a parking lot checking out cars okay and they will dm me hey chris i've been watching you for five years i started doing this i was early to this company or to this company based on what i observed in the world it's that one investment has changed my entire life and and i tell people if you have one or two home runs over twenty years one or two home runs over twenty years meaning you find something early and you put a meaningful amount of money in it that could put you into the one or two cent range of all investors over over that two decade period and that's all it takes and a perfect example of that is tesla okay i actually wasn't early into tesla but do you know how many terrible investors otherwise i mean these are people that hadn't done anything in their entire life in the investing world and probably haven't done much sense are one percent investors because they were behind the wheel of the tesla in early days and they realized this is a game changer and they put some meaningful not even that meaningful just some reasonable amount of money into tesla stock and that one investment made them a top one percent global and for like a ten or fifteen year period or twenty year period and changed the trajectory of their entire life they're not hyper intelligent they're probably like any regular person they're probably like most of the people that watched this show or any other show and it's all about just understanding that that's all it takes because most people never even try this because i think i can't compete with pe investors from wall street i can't spend six hours a day doing technical trading they don't realize you don't need to you can just go on with your life live your life just keep your mind open to potentially early discovering the next big thing that's it that's literally it like that's all you have to do thanks podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who dis me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic what are the things you have most high conviction in right now my highest conviction trade i'm like a broken record on this it sounds so weird because it's not a small company it's amazon guys like i i have more money in amazon this most concentrated position i've had in a really long time i always say the most concentrated position i've ever taken was nintendo when they came out with the we because i was at the e three conference and actually saw it was like a buffett story right i actually saw the line of people interacting with the nintendo we for the first time i don't know if you remember that game changing platform and nobody on wall street believed it everyone on wall street was so hyper focused on the xbox coming out and the playstation coming out nobody thought the we was gonna be a big deal i was there i saw it in real life i had a hundred percent of my portfolio invested in an nintendo ad r which is a tracking stock that tracks the japanese ticker of nintendo and i had a hundred percent of my portfolio i think for a full year in nintendo until wall street finally realized how big the deal that was but amazon i i i just think it's the company that is best positioned in the world to benefit from the upcoming ai efficiency wave which is once we actually start to see meaningful productivity jumps from the ai age there's no company in the world that's gonna benefit more from that than amazon i also think they are the nucleus of ai infrastructure so so so sorry what's the observation you made here i i like what what the i think is this not from the tiktok comments in this situation is this the the this is this is this is a kind of a global culture patrol shift and it's it's a big observation i've had for three years which is based in part i don't know if you guys ever read not seem to le book black swan mh but black swan theory essentially says that our minds are not capable of fully recognizing and appreciating anomalies in the market or the world that haven't happened before i had this thesis in early days ai that ai wouldn't just be the next internet it's not just gonna be the next mobile phone or smartphone but that it would be meaningfully larger than anything we've experienced in our lifetime and as a result of that we would see the biggest trades of our life happen as a direct result at ai and even when the information was right in front of us the market would not believe it until it actually shows up in the numbers because there's no precedent for what we're seeing in ai there's nothing that has ever happened in our lifetime before ai that we can compare to ai now i might regret saying this in ten years but i don't think so i think the concept of intelligence becoming infinite and free to the world is going to be the biggest change we've ever seen in humanity so the reason why amazon went down and has not really gone up as a company meaningfully over you know recently right is because they have made such an aggressive investment in ai two hundred billion dollar now it's like two hundred and is more than two hundred billion this last year capex investment in ai in a sector that nobody knows if it's going to pay off for them or not does that mean like like for example the did is siri or what's your call alexa did alexa just change where like now she like talks to you like my alexa just changed so now like talks like chat jb like i can ask real questions i would say the biggest example is this it's it's this simple amazon is betting the entire company on ai end of story as is some of the other big tech companies right they are leveraging all other their profits they're leveraging their balance sheet they are building out massive infrastructure unlike they ever had in the history of the company they are making the biggest capex investment of any company in the world by a big margin in ai and the world is still unsure about how this is gonna play out i'm not unsure i'm willing to bet it all they they think that the infrastructure layer of ai which is amazon okay because amazon understand this they are chip company right they're train they're chip alone they're training ai chips are we're generating on fifty billion dollars of revenue this next year they are the one the largest infrastructure data center companies in the entire world and they're aws platform and everything that they've constructed in cloud computing over the past fifteen plus years sits at the center of this architecture infrastructure for ai okay on top of that amazon is the third largest digital advertising company in the world okay so as ai makes advertising meaningfully more efficient and targeted and effective and personal and rich for consumers amazon is at the center of that wave additionally amazon has spent twenty years building out the world's largest logistical infrastructure for the delivery of physical product humans an investment that no other company has even come close to making that investment even moving the margin needle a few points is a game changer for amazon so as we enter this new world of intelligence and automation and robotics okay amazon already has the infrastructure as the world's largest e commerce company the largest logistics company to benefit massively from the increases in productivity and efficiencies that infinite free intelligence and eventually what we're gonna see it it is embodied intelligence right with robotics right this is going to result in productivity and efficiency gains unlike we've ever experienced as humans and amazon is the number one company to benefit from all that sound like you're given a sermon you're bought in and by the way they own like fifteen percent of ant philanthropic too they just and that's just so funny here now if philanthropic ipo between one and two trillion what's who knows i think there's a reasonable chance they will next year amazon will make more money off that ipo than the two hundred billion they spend on capex that everybody so worried about right and so again we are living in an age when the market has more noise than it's ever had the stories are changing every day like it it's impossible as an investor to cut through the noise so that's what's so difficult is is i think most new investors they just give up because they're like i can't keep up of all this stuff you don't have to keep up with any of it just find one company that kinda sits in a place where they stand to benefit meaningfully from something that you're seeing in the world it could be ai with amazon it could be the fact you know one of my big trades recently one of my big trade thesis as recently as flip flops are trending this summer right because last summer there were seven hundred and fifty dollar flip flops made by a company called ro and now every person in the world wants to wear flip flops because they're they're on trend you can go out at night to a club wearing flip flops and so there's a brazilian company that is one of the largest you know makers of flip flops there's so many ways to to kind of like ar change in the world when you you said amazon was your most concentrated bet in a long time what does that mean percentage wise for you amazon right now is about fifty percent of my portfolio value and on top of that did you say five zero or one five five zero on top of that i have options in amazon that account for you know another fifty percent so theoretically i mean yeah if you count the the the amount that those options represent it could be like seventy percent of my portfolio amazon right now that's how confident i am and that trade so after you make a bet like that you know well ed thor has this cool book you know the famous investor one of the early hedge fund guys where he kind of like a funny stories he's like i make my trade and then i just go and hang out for like six months and i just see what happens and there there's like stories of him like playing tennis throughout the day and they're like shouldn't you be at work he's like i made the trade let's see what's gonna happen so are you making that bet and then kind of stepping away for a little while or are you gonna are you active every single day then i love that concept by the way i've been saying for months this is the summer to deep research your trade you make it and then just walk away because ninety nine percent of the noise hitting this market on a day to day basis week to week basis doesn't matter at all and there is not that much happening and changing where you need to be that concerned about the market on a day and day a day day out basis now i'm not completely just going off and playing tennis for the rest of the summer i i'm keeping up with what's happening in the market but i don't think there's going to be anything that's going to happen over the course of the next few weeks a couple months that would meaningfully change my thesis on amazon something might but my thesis on amazon is fairly large and it's it it it's based on something that i believe is going to unravel over the next few years as opposed to unravel over the next few months so it it it's a massive concentration risk that i'm putting on this trade but this this is what i do right like you you can't generate outs size returns without taking outside risk you just can't do it by the way guys i don't think that most people should be doing this across their entire portfolio i always tell people like i'm not a financial advisor obviously but you gotta bucket your assets for different risk categories right so i think everybody should have a big money account i don't care if you start with fifty dollars in that account but everyone should have an account where they're willing to take big risk for big gains and you don't have to take your kids you know college savings to put in that account or your retirement money in that account you could just start making trade offs in your life like i don't know mow own lawn or make your own coffee but every dollar that you save put it in this big money account and then use it to actually take a big risk every once in a while in something that you believe in so that you have a chance of becoming a top one percent investor but do it with trade offs do it with other people's money right like get your haircut every five weeks instead of every four weeks i don't know like delay that big purchase six months so the big screen tv is two hundred dollars less than it was six months earlier take the two hundred dollars you saved put it in your big money investment account if that's how you fund that account then you're not afraid to take a concentrated risk if you're c ming your money altogether it could be really hard to take a big risk on something because it's psychologically difficult for you to throw that much money into a risky investment so you have to bucket your money this is like one of the most important lessons for investors i'm willing to do it right like i'm if amazon is the stock that takes me down as an investor and rin my reputation and let it be what's definitely not gonna take you it won't take you down well i don't know don't know how leverage you are but i mean it's not like it's like a it's not like it's it's not gonna it ain't going away no it well you you never know it it could but here's a pin guys i have been so transparent about everything i've ever done the market i talk about everything i talk about the good the bad the risk factors and when i lose i talk about how much money i lost i i i do not advise anyone to try to mirror my trades i just want people to see how i think i want them to see how i think about risk how i think about concentration how i think about you know observational investing i just share everything with the world and by the way you guys i think know this i'm one of the only i don't i'm i'm sure there's at least a couple others financial content creators i've never sold anything i don't have courses i don't sell a thing what's is your community free dude i don't even take sponsorships do you know that i haven't taken one sponsorship my entire life i won't take one dollar from an advertiser i won't take one dollar from a community member not what the only thing that's ever been sold is we sell some t shirts and hoodies at cost you know what i take that back you know the value i get out of my community is collaboration i i get so many great ideas from our community and they helped vet my own ideas that's probably made me more money than i could have ever have made from courses and selling sponsorships and all that stuff by the way i have a lot a lot of respect for that i think you know hey i trust that my trust goes up like i said i was very skeptical of finance and stock influencers and traders on on youtube but you know the fact that you're not selling courses is not charging for community not taking sponsors and all that that that is i think extremely commendable and extremely rare i i gotta give you props that be to be honest i mean here's the deal like we always say it like if you're so great at something which come on i mean been i've been great the last seventeen years i make an insane amount of money from my portfolio like i don't need to do any of that like like i the amount of money i make is public right so i don't i'm very fortunate to not have to do that and i just don't need to do that so i don't want to do that but i do have an overriding goal here my goal my mission in life is to bring every human on earth into the investor class and that's why i'm on youtube that's why i'm on access that's why i talk that's why i do shows like this i and i truly believe that this style of investing it's something that you could do for fun you could do it on the side you don't to quit your job you just retrain your brain to start thinking about this stuff and you might only get one great investment the next ten years but that one investment if you have a big money account and if and when you find it whether it's the next tesla or the next whatever you're willing to throw a lot of money behind it that could be the thing that changes your entire life and my next big thesis is podcast which sounds insane because there's so many right like you gotta be kidding chris and we have too many podcast let me just say this in the age of ai that we're about to enter into we are going to deeply appreciate humans i think that's my thesis and while we will embrace technology and ai and efficiencies and all the wonderful things that's gonna bring to us i think we will equally appreciate the most human human voices and human personalities and we are going to need that for connectivity to remind us of what's real so what's the bet like what would the product be the bet is that we are just getting started with podcasting and i believe the entirety of the future of the media is new media and podcast will continue to get bigger and bigger i think the most human of human voices will become infinitely valuable the next ten years i think within the podcasting sector i think women are slow to become podcast because we have so many brilliant solo creators that are women on tiktok but women tend to be really intimidated by friction by bridging into podcasting when you need to have camera equipment and editors and clippers and you need to have staff right it's and you need to invest money and capital so i believe the most talented women voices in the world are not yet podcasting so i'm opening up a podcast incubation studio in austin texas where we are going to attempt to develop a very boutique studio but we're going to attempt to identify the most talented women voices in the world that are currently doing content as solo creators and help them bridge into the world of durable repeatable podcasting which we believe is just getting started i think if you move forward five to eight years there will be hundreds of podcasts that are worth a hundred million dollars or more i'm not doing this for the money i'm doing this because i i just i know that this could be really big and i have so much fun working with other creative people i love podcast generally i that's all i do is watch podcasts right and and and and sit it on podcast podcasts but when i look at like women's podcasting you know seventy percent of podcast are met so i think there's this huge opportunity the next few years as podcasting becomes more programmatic to help develop podcast into what they will be because i don't think the future of podcasting is like two people in a studio talking on mike's no offense i i mean my my my shows three guys in the studio talking to mike's i i i think it will become i think it will be that probably for financial podcast and and and business podcast but i think for like general audience podcast especially for women it will become more programmatic when you when you say programmatic what does that mean okay so are you familiar with financial audit caleb hammers show yeah out boston he's he's the third biggest podcast in the world on youtube k his show is program he has an actual program that expresses itself through a podcast format okay so he has guest on the show but he has a very formal program of entertainment right and so that is the future of podcasting so we have to get more creative with podcasting we have to take risk caleb took a big risk with what he did have you seen friends keep secrets no what is that you you gotta check this that you're gonna love this so this is lil dick the rapper benny blanc the producer yeah i'm sorry i have seen it if he didn't know the show ever yes to me that's an example of what you're talking about when i saw that i was like a little bit mind blown and the you know i'm doing podcasting twice a week for six years and what they came in and did i i really feel like the real creative have arrived into podcasting because now you see conan o'brien got a podcast and has been got a podcast like the real comedian at podcast the real creative that podcast and now what they're doing to the format because they come from a different background is they're approaching it differently like they got a house and they staged the cameras and the guest shows up almost like a sitcom you know at the door and then they open the door and then and then they move from the kitchen to the living room and they have these bits that they do and the the way they do their ad reads you're like oh god their ad is more entertaining than my my actual contact jesus i wait i need need to up my game sean you showed you you got it you just you just nailed it now fortunately again like the type of podcasting that we do is kinda like you know like education and business and finance i think we can afford to be very slow to change because it's just different for us like a lot of the people that watch your show that watch my show they primarily are looking to get take something away from that show in terms of education and growth and learning i think the personality entertainment piece is like ten to twenty percent of the show if if we tried to make it fifty percent we might lose right but for the future of podcasting i think it looks very different broad broader based i think it's gonna be exciting and like here's the thing guys like i've been talking about stocks for ten years like i love it but i kinda like i'm bored by it so like yeah i like dieting into these different areas where i get to be a bit more creative with other you know other creative and not just talk about stock and that's why i enjoyed the pokemon thing like i didn't collect pokemon but it was kind of fun being around other people that were passionate about something and like in my mind i'm like how do i make money off this guys like how do i make money off of pokemon that's how i did it i i did it from starting the convention that the pokemon enthusiasts would come to and enjoy right and you got to be the uncle and not the father right somebody else ran it and you got to pitch in where it was helpful and fun but not necessarily the day to day is that is that right didn't i didn't have to do the full day day i got to kinda do the day to day when we would have shows but behind the scenes i wasn't working full time yeah for sure but ma'am was it a lucrative journey and damn was it fun so fun thanks for doing this you're nah i'm like i have always notes it's like always these rabbit holes i'm gonna go down this this the podcast thing the the collect con that's crazy you you got layers well you know what guys like the here's the thing i'm really fortunate that i have this insane network of people that i'm constantly meeting with a lot of them are hyper successful you know billionaires in the back half of their career life and i'm gonna point like okay if you've had success and you can kinda do anything you want like what would it actually be and and i feel it's for so many people in my network it always comes down to having a bigger number and i'm like are you sure that you're making decisions driven by the right motivations because is that bigger number actually going to give you fulfillment in the way that you think it is and over the last couple of years i've come to the conclusion that a bigger number for me is going to make no difference in my level of contentment or fulfillment in life and i like the concept of grinding and creating and building and taking risk but not if it's to like get a bigger number so like if i'm gonna do something the next three to five years wherever my next thing is like i want the journey to be as fun as the outcome so okay my outcome that i want is to land the top twenty global podcast by developing two or three shows over the next few years with people i believe are unbelievably talented i wanna build a great team around them i wanna like i i wanna it's the ship of can i do this there's tens of millions of podcasts how if i landed at a top twenty how wild would that be help but i want the journey and trying to figure out how to win how to get there to be fun and i know i love working with creative people i can't because i've been stuck in podcast world to the last seven years i kinda get it right so like i and i love it so like whether i end up winning or losing and by the way if i win i'm looking at looking at adding to my terrible foundation that's like my number is not for me it's for it's for the foundation but the journey and how we get there will be fun regardless like because i'm gonna be around creative people i'm gonna be in a sector that i love i mean when in history could you take a few million dollars and start a media company which is exactly what i'm doing right now like could you imagine like twenty years ago you couldn't do that you just couldn't do that right now you can you can land a top five show globally if you if you execute in three years two years right quick isn't that wild that like you could do that out of one studio with like ten people ten or fifteen people like how exciting is that that you could play in this game and you could have a top five global global media show in a couple years if you can find the right person and the right team and the right format to me that that journey of just attempting to accomplish that is maybe the funniest thing i will ever do in my life so i'm really looking forward to this next thing that i'm doing hopefully we win but even if we don't win it damn guys i'm at a point i'm gonna have fun i'm gonna have fun to try okay like and but and by the way like i tell this story to a guy i had i had i had lunch with a guy massive exit this i know how much he's worth but it's a lot and and i i talked him about this story and he said you know what chris i'm going to buy this bonsai shop that me and my daughter go to he goes because it's my favorite thing in the world me and her go there and we just hang out there and i'm gonna buy it and like this guy gonna end up spending more time with his daughter he's gonna have fun because he's gonna take this little bonsai eye shop it's been around for thirty five years and try to grow it with her or hey think which is kinda cool he's gonna actually he he's an ai guy right so like he's gonna actually like apply artificial intelligence into the growth strategy for the bonsai shop he's gonna maybe get some content creators and influencers to try to like take it global through e com like there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do here starting with a little bonsai eye store that you and your daughter love i'm like now that's a great way to spend the next five years of your life there's a lot of people that had made it that have enough money that they kinda can do what they want like we're so set on just like bigger number more happy bigger no no no no i actually believe that there is a point when the bigger number has the opposite effect it definitely one hundred percent makes you less fulfilled and less happy well well you you you know why most people think that's like a emo money problems thing but it's it i i think underneath that is you have no excuse left you know for basically for when you don't have a lot you can always tell yourself well it's on the other side of this and then once you get to once you get there there's nothing left to blame for any lack any any internal holes any internal anxieties or feeling of lack or just dissatisfaction and so you can't you can't blame that anymore you've lost the excuse and i think that is a very like tough moment for for people when you don't you no longer can say well it's because i don't have that that's why i feel this way it's like no no i feel that way wait because that's how i am and that i think that's a pretty brutal realization at least that's what i've felt and what i've seen that part of it i think a big part of it is that you become disconnected with other humans and you can't relate anymore and people treat you differently and it gets harder to maintain and develop authentic real relationships you can't do anything about this when you become excessively wealthy to the point where nothing matters anymore you just don't relate to daily things the same way as the rest of your family and friends and colleagues do and they sense that and then also when you meet new people and like you like listen you start going to certain types of vacations and certain types of dinners and you hang out maybe you have a yacht and maybe you fly private and then it's like well this is what i wanna do at my time but i wanna spend time my friends so maybe your friends are now on your yacht and doing five thousand dollar dinners and your friends or maybe you have to bring them on your private jet and like you're paying for them and it makes things really weird because then it's like wait a second are these people they don't even rip on me anymore they don't even treat me the same anymore maybe because they're worried that like they're not gonna be part of this lifestyle that i'm paying for only because they can't be here unless i pay for it and i don't want to i wanna live the lifestyle and i want my friends to be with me there's just so many problems that organically surface when you enter that stratosphere which used to be like this many people but in two thousand twenty six guys there are a lot of people with excessive wealth let's be honest like the number of people that have excessive wealth in two thousand twenty six for a variety of reasons okay it are are enormous the number of people that fly private the number of people to spend three thousand dollars two thousand dollars a night on hotel rooms and resorts the number of people that are going out to dinners at these places where they're spending wild amount of money on a regular basis the wealth class is huge and i think that ultra high net worth wealth class is probably miserable because of all these factors and it's really hard to stay grounded it's exceptionally difficult to like stay connected and you guys know there's nothing more important in life than being deeply connected with other humans nothing and this thing makes it very hard to stay deeply connected so so it's almost like a hack not letting yourself get to that point like i know it sounds crazy there is there is a sweet spot i think there is a sweet spot for wealth and it's different for every person and you can kinda sense when you kinda get out of the range of that sweet spot because you can kinda sense these things starting to happen and there are a lot of ways to knock yourself back down one of them is starting a foundation and just giving money into the foundation like it's not yours anymore it's enough it's not yours you give the foundation it belongs to the foundation and you get to do good things with it also you can take that money and like you can invest it in other things that puts it at risk but again it's not yours when it's invested and ill liquid and wrote it risk so now your access to like liquidity and your access to money that you know is bank becomes more reasonable and like you you don't push yourself into that stratosphere of overs spending on a regular basis i agree with every word you just said every word you just said i i totally agree with so but i think it's a topic that quite honestly not only people don't talk about but i think most people don't even think about because like your brain doesn't my brain for some reason well i could if you don't do it appropriately it sounds kinda douche shit if you talk about this stuff publicly i mean that's like the easy like yeah that doesn't mean it shouldn't it's not an important i mean like it's super helpful it's just helpful to like maybe a small group of people there was a great blog post on this by julie i think zhao was her name she wrote a thing to all the folks who were about to get rich was right before the spacex ipo and she was at facebook right before facebook had its ipo she talked about what she observed and solved the people who you know had been working really hard for a long time and suddenly the sort of shackles of liquidity were were off them and and now they had the money and what what did you do and she talked about how people play that game and chris your your point on disconnection is one that she made a i'll read you a little part of it she's she's like once money can buy you anything you become a bit bit of a character you can eat at fancy restaurants all the time you bring a full zoo and carnival and a chocolate trained to your kids three year old birthday party you know you become so cloaked by these fancy things shiny things that you can you can buy and that sparkling cloak can become so distracting that people can no longer see you you've become harder to connect with and she talks about like the it's the the disconnection can lead to is a is a great source of unhappiness you know i saw this with a i a friend who got very very wealthy through real estate bought a mega mansion eighteen thousand square feet he's literally not only did he move away from his friends and family because we don't afford to live in that place that that neighborhood that neighborhood has acres in between houses but then even in his own house he was disconnected from his own kids were the work you know on the in the west wing and he's on the east wing ten thousand feet apart the money literally i watched it make them less happy because it would created an immense amount of social disconnection on on many many levels and i i remember when i first moved to san francisco i worked for this guy a billionaire we went out to lunch as a group of us five of us and at the end he was like you know he tossed his card in but he he basically was like oh should we all just put our cards in and i was like man this guy what a cheap billionaire this guy didn't even pick up the tab and i realized like actually it wasn't because he's cheap at all he's not a cheap guy at all he's very generous but he didn't want to change the social dynamic between us or became this weird power dynamic or this weird like subs soviet thing and he was actually doing this all a quite a big favor by not doing that so you start to see these little moments of possible disconnection versus disconnection facts i i always wondered like why am i seeing this and none of the other people are very few that are in the same place seem to see it i think it's because i've like retrain my mind to be an observational investor so i'm constantly observing life and culture and like everything i'm just being hyper absurd about and it kinda translated to this and i was hyper observing about this the part the birthday like all the stuff right and i was like damn i cannot fall into that trap i do not want to be miserable like a lot of the people that i see and you know you've seen this right like they fall into the traps and then it's like it never leads to a good place right i will say this also because a lot of people will see shows like this i'm like oh it's so easy for you guys to talk about you know this when you have it i will admittedly the sweet spot is pretty sweet okay so like so i'm just gonna say the sweet spot of wealth is pretty sweet so don't mis what we're talking about gaining financial independence is one of the most amazing things one could ever experience in life what that buys you is actually insane be being in full control over your time how you spend it who you're with where you go and never having to work for someone else again that is magical that actually is as good as you think it is it really is it's actually better bet it's it's better okay it's i remind my i talked to of my friends i'm like hey dude i just feel like a reminder dude we hadn't worked a real job in like fifteen years like pretty freaking nuts oh and my buddies are like yeah do we forget how good we have it i i you know like how many of our friends and colleagues are still getting up every day and going to the job we had fifteen years ago and because we became independent investors and became part of the investor class and aggressively invested money in equity markets and now we're independently financially free were podcast and we're investing and we're working really hard we're starting businesses and backing other businesses we're probably working harder than than we've ever worked in life but it's optional it's optional and we're doing it because we enjoy it and we're financially free to be at every kid soccer game we're financially free to be with our family and our friends whenever we want however we want like i used to have the cubicle job for many many years guys many many many years i had the job in the cubicle doing sales calls right and so i try to never forget how awesome it is to like not be in that position so yeah i i don't mean to rip on getting wealthy because it's pretty damn awesome it just keep it manageable because there is a point of diminishing returns and then there's a point of deeply deeply negative returns on every dollar you spend not every dollar you make but every dollar you spend after after that point you're cool ma'am chris this is fun i like having we like having you on we like talking to you you gotta do a part three now dude you guys are you guys are the best i'll would i'm always up for it i i love it well we appreciate you so much that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break let's talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics this is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast