The Investing Expert: Why Investing Is the BIGGEST Life Hack & Everyone Should Start Today!

This is the biggest life hack. Nothing comes close. Literally nothing comes remotely close to this life hack. Forget about everything else in life and just start investing. Period. Chris Camillo made millions spotting trends before Wall Street even noticed them.

Author of Laughing at Wall Street. Famous investor who's made tens of millions of dollars by investing in things that he discovers in his everyday life.

Chris Camillo. The wealth gap. That's a solvable problem. That is 100% a solvable problem.

How do we solve it?

Getting the entire world to invest. We should be investing always, I would say especially now.

Even when it's scary or uncertain or it's fluctuating so much.

Yeah. When it gets scary and it starts to fluctuate, this is when you make all your money, right?

Why does it seem so scary though for people to invest, especially when they hear stories like early in your career you invested a lot of money and 70% of it you lost, you know, pretty quickly with a crash happening. How do you get over that mental and emotional loss?

That's a great question. And here's what I tell people.

Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have Chris Camillo in the house. Good to see you, man. Appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me out.

You just shared something right before we got on here where you said it's your mission to get every human in the world to be an investor.

Yeah, investor class.

Investor class.

Every human. Every human.

I just saw this stat on CNBC that said just this week, the Dow Jones experienced its 11th 1000 point drop in the Dow's history and four of them happening in just the last month. And also I saw on Twitter this week that the Great Depression has been trending. And for that, should people with all of the fear or the anxiety or the stress around the stock market, tariffs, the economy, another depression, whatever might be happening, should people be investing now or should they be waiting until later when it feels more safe?

Well, that's all noise. It's always all noise, okay? Until it's not. And when it becomes something other than noise, we have way bigger problems. That's the way to think of it. Should you even investing now? you should be investing always, I would say, especially now.

So even when it's scary or uncertain or it's fluctuating so much.

Yeah. When it gets scary and it starts to fluctuate and you start to hear, see people googling the Great Depression, these, this is when you make all your money, right? So this is a gift. I've been around a long time. I still feel like a kid investing, yet I can talk about the '87 crash and how I felt during the '87 crash. I was young then, but I remember it vividly. I'll never forget how quickly we came back from it. And, you know, same thing with, I was like, deep. deep in the dot com bubble crash. Like that was when I was coming out of college, in the workforce, investing for myself aggressively. And I was, it was like my entire world. And that really was scary. That was like super scary.

Cause you probably didn't have a lot of money then. So the things you were investing in, if you're losing it, you're like, what am I doing? I can't afford to lose this.

Well, we, most of us, that were young and investing during that time, we lost like 70% of our portfolio. Okay, like 70, 80% some of us. A lot of the companies we were invested in just went to zero. Okay. So that was unbelievably scary. Yet those of us that stuck around and kept doing it, I mean, it didn't take long for the market to come whipping back, right? And you look back and you go, gosh, I wish I would have went in even heavier at the time. Same thing in 2008. That was scary, remember? Well, you remember that. Came back quicker than anyone would have imagined. And we didn't, dude, nothing fazes me anymore. People, you think about the stock market. Well, what is the stock market? The stock market is nothing more than a reflection of all of our work globally. That's it. Our human endeavors. It's the product of our human work. So as long as humanity continues to get smarter and more productive and more efficient, whether it's us or the robots or artificial intelligence that we're creating, doesn't matter how we do it, As long as we continue to create more and create better, the product of that will become more valuable. And our way to participate in that is called the stock market. It's not this crazy complex thing. Everyone overthinks it. Wall Street has spent 70, 80 years trying to convince us that it's this big mysterious thing that only they can understand. That we have to go through them. That we need to be talking to them through these periods, right? It's all complete BS. I don't think there's anything more important in life other than maybe taking care of your family than learning how to invest. It's actually so insane to me. I think it's the most important thing we should be starting with from kindergarten every year for your entire life. A good chunk of it should be focused on reminding you and teaching you how important it is for you to be part of this investor class. and it's just disgusting that it's not.

If you were to simplify for someone in their 20s or 30s who's never invested before on how to invest and what to invest in, what would you share with them? As if you were teaching someone that had no understanding of what investing or the stock market or trading meant, and you could simplify that, what would that look like?

Well, so I think A better way to think about it is there's something that we all can relate to is the idea of starting a company, right? We all want to be entrepreneurs. Not all, most of us in the back of our head, it would be cool to, you know, own your own company, whatever that company is, right? It never used to be like that, but over the last 20 years, now we all kind of think like that. I don't care if you're a celebrity, if you're a homemaker, there's a company out there that you would like to start and own or the idea of being an entrepreneur. Well, that's half of my life, right? I'm an entrepreneur. I've been in startups my entire career. I've started a multitude of companies, have sold them. I've had a few big success. successes in that world. And I've had an insane number of failures in that world, both as an operator and as an investor in private companies. That is exceptionally hard. That is exceptionally risky. You could try to do that and chances are you will go your entire life and do nothing but fail. Okay.

How many companies have you invested in?

I'm invested in about 150 Private companies, not public. Private companies.

150 right now.

Private, yes. Meaning each of those companies, I probably have met the founder, have done a massive amount of due diligence on the space and the sector. It's been a huge part of my life, quite honestly.

And how many of those will fail or have failed?

Almost all of them. Probably like 75% maybe.

Wow. So you do a lot of the research, the analytics, you've got a data company that analyzes all these things and the and helps predict certain things. And even with all that work, 75% of your investments are probably going to fail.

Yeah, because you're investing in an early stage company that has a tremendous amount of, you're investing in an idea and the person.

Okay, and I hope that in five to 10 years it'll make money.

Yeah. So that's where it gets risky. That's where you could make a case that, maybe you should do that and maybe you should just never do that. Right. I would say for most people, it's insane to go out and start your own company ever. And I've done it. I've done it multiple times.

Why is it insane to start your own company?

Because you're almost definitely going to fail. Like when I said 75%, that's 75% of my portfolio that were deeply vetted and I'm pretty good at doing what I do. Almost all companies will just fail. If you go to start a company, it's almost definitely you're going to fail.

Even the ones that succeed maybe aren't making a lot of money. It's just getting by, it's breaking even, it's like 5%, it's not making a ton where you're getting rich.

There are a near infinite number of ways for a founder to fail. Okay, now put that aside. Okay. Being an investor, just generally being an investor, investing in stocks, investing in the market. This is what's so wild. You could actually go out and invest in the smartest people in the world. You could just be like, by the way, complete psychopaths. People that will be like, they're going to destroy their family, and or not have a family, they will have basically no friends. They will work 80 hours a week. They're a genius, they're a psychopath. They're gonna do whatever it takes. They'll steamroll relationships to make their company a success. You can invest in Steve Jobs back in the day, right? You can invest in Jeff Bezos. You can invest, you might hate Zuckerberg, but you can invest in Mark Zuckerberg, if you want, right? Sam Altman, Elon Musk, right? Like, whoever it is, like, you don't have to try to be them. You could just literally just throw some money and just ride their life, right? Just like anything they create, any value that they create in this world, you could just get paid for all the stuff that they're doing. Like, we don't ever think like that, but you could do that. We already know who these people are. There are a lot of them out there. Do you think that you are that ambitious? Do you think that you're that smart? Are you willing to throw your whole life away just to achieve what they achieve? For almost everyone, that's probably not a smart or a healthy decision, honestly. But you don't have to. They're doing it for you. This is the one thing that I wish someone would have sat me aside 30 years ago and said, Chris, you're going to spend most of your life torturing yourself as a founder, which is what happened to me, okay? Starting companies, growing companies, you're going to have success this much of the time and almost all the rest, you're going to fail. Because I've started so many companies, almost all of them have failed.

And it's exhausting.

It's exhausting. You learn a lot.

You're a smart guy and you're talented and you've got the skills and the resources and you know managing people and understanding the markets and what should work.

I have had so many privileges and so many advantages. And it's still so many. Like, My parents were so amazing to have moved us into a neighborhood with the most successful people in the country. And I would start businesses in middle school and high school, car detailing, this, that, just deeply engaging with these people all the time. And so yeah, I've had access to some of the smartest, most ambitious people in the world that have helped me all along the way. and still it's almost impossible. It's almost impossible. And like now looking back, I joke around that I'm like, yes, I'm invested in 150 private companies and I probably have tried to start that many over the course of my lifetime myself. And if I would have just not done any of that and just focused on investing in other great people, and not that there aren't great people starting companies, but it's really difficult to kind of decipher who is, like what their weaknesses are when they're just starting off in life.

Yeah, and everyone looks great in the beginning of pitching an idea. And we've got this amazing idea and it's revolutionary and it's the newest this and it's gonna compete against all these other people. And here's our projections in the next three to seven years. It's only gonna go up. It's like everything looks good. But it's really hard to make money over five, seven, ten years. in a business and to take on the adversities, the challenges, whether it's tariffs or whatever it is, like just people problems. It's hard to navigate every adversity every day that comes your way running a business and sustain it over years.

Correct.

It's really challenging.

Meanwhile, you can just pick from the best companies in the world.

And let them do the work.

Let them do the work. And as soon as they do something that's sus, you just you can sell it and get into a different company, right? There's fully liquid market.

Yeah.

These days stocks trade pretty much 24 24 hours a day, right? They're Robinhood and stuff. So it's like, it is such a magical time to be an investor. Like it, this is the best time in my life to be an investor, and especially quite honestly, to be investing in public markets. Like I used to say it was really difficult to identify information asymmetry, which is like my style of investing, like to identify information that other people don't see or don't appreciate. It's never been easier as a retail investor to to do that and to beat Wall Street. Wall Street is weaker than they've ever been. They've had so many layoffs over the past decade. They're operating off of just a small amount of resources compared to what they used to have. The advantage has swung back to us retail investors. There's just never been a better time. Plus, there's just a lot more publicly traded companies now. They can't keep up with all the information flow. We live in a digital world. We live in a social world. What does that mean? It means that we're able to detect change. When I say we, I mean like normal people, like that are just surfing in.