Transcript: In 5 Years, Robots Will Start Replacing Jobs! 3 Skills You’ll Need to Survive! – Chris Camillo

Let’s talk about what’s at. What is actually. Okay, this is a good one.

LEWIS HOWES: I’d love to see what you’ve been noticing or comments you’ve seen on TikTok where you’d say, “Okay, what publicly traded companies would be impacted by this?”

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, so one example, because again.

LEWIS HOWES: I want to simplify this for people because I think it’s still scary for them to understand.

Heat Wave Investment Strategy

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, I do this every day. It’s what. This is my entire life. Okay. This is my entire life, seeing something and then being like, “Who would benefit or not?” So one of them might be, you know, a heat wave. Right. So the last few. And I thought of this because I was like, “It’s really cold in the studio.” I’m like, you know, we’ve had some really wild.

LEWIS HOWES: This has been gnarly.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Some wild heat waves, right? So one of them it might be. You could just ask chat. I’ll ask ChatGPT. Yeah, right now I’ll be like, I’m going to say, “Hey, this is interesting. Okay. We are experiencing the biggest heat wave in history in the United States. What publicly traded companies would benefit and which publicly traded companies would be harmed by this heat wave?”

LEWIS HOWES: That’s interesting.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Let’s see what it says. I’m going to put that in and let’s just see what it says. And this is not going to be an end all, but it’s a starting point. Starting point.

So it lists out, obviously it lists out all the HVAC manufacturers. Carrier train Lennox. And it says HVAC manufacturers experiencing increased demand for cooling. Home Depot and Lowe’s. Higher sales of fans. AC related products. Generac. Generac manufacturing benefits from increased power outages due to heat stress on the grid. That’s been one of my biggest heat wave trades, actually. So it’s cool that it got it.

Edgewell Personal care, producer of sun protection products like Banana Boat. Hawaiian Tropic Rendering heat waves. Companies that would be harmed. Walt Disney and Six Flags. Interesting. Theme park operators facing reduced attendance due to extreme heat. Insurance companies facing extreme claims from heat related damages. Utility and energy companies struggling with grid reliability. Agriculture experiencing crop stress and reduced yields due to prolonged heat.

So I literally go, this is what I do every day. And what’s really interesting is. So once you find the companies, that’s just the first part. Okay. You have to really determine is this information actually likely to move the needle for them.

The Saratoga Water Example

And so if a company is, you know it, for example, you might find a snack that’s trending. Okay? This happens all the time. There’s a really hot snack or a hot cookie or something’s happening and you’re like, “Oh, this is going to crush it.” In fact, this just happened recently with that water. That water company that went viral. Did you see this?

LEWIS HOWES: Oh, yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: The water.

LEWIS HOWES: The blue water bottles. The blue water bottles. Okay, Saratoga.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I think it is Saratoga. So I just did this with Saratoga. I was like, I was like, ashton.

LEWIS HOWES: Hall, I think his name is the viral creator who’s like, yeah, every video is just crushing.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Saratoga went nuts. Well, Saratoga is manufactured by a publicly traded company, but that publicly traded company manufactures a bunch of really big bottled water companies that are 100 times the size of Saratoga. Interesting. So the truth is, I think Saratoga was 1% of their sales. So even if they double sales of Saratoga doesn’t matter. It’s not going to make a real difference.

LEWIS HOWES: Interesting.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And so you have to do the research to figure that out.

LEWIS HOWES: Now, if that was a publicly traded company on its own, it would be more interesting to invest in.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Huge. That would be huge. Okay, so that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Is it going to. And by the way, there’s a little bit of a science, a little bit of an art. You do some research, right? This is where you learn. You get better over time.

But by the way, you don’t have to do it alone. You have friends in your life that you can, you can ask other people, “Hey, can you help me with this?” By the way, we have a community. Dumb money TV, right? We have a discord. We literally help each other with this stuff all the time.

Building a Community for Research

LEWIS HOWES: Are you in your discord? Just telling people, “I’m doing this trade today” or “I’m getting in, I’m getting out?”

CHRIS CAMILLO: No, no, we don’t really discuss trades. What we discuss or is change trends. Yeah. So we’re like, “Hey, just saw this. I think it might positively impact this company. What do you guys think?” And then we just help each other, right? And so you’re not saying this is.

LEWIS HOWES: What I’m doing today or tomorrow.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Then once we all do our own research and we all collaborate and a lot of times we go out, we interview stores. If it’s a product in a store, we’ll take videos, we’ll take. We just aggregate research and we help each other because it’s us versus Wall street, right? So we’re like a big hedge fund of just regular people. We have UPS drivers, We have all kinds of people in our network.

And if you don’t want to be in our community, just do it with your friends. Right? But once you find something that is going to. And then we go off and make our own trades.

LEWIS HOWES: But you don’t just.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Now we don’t discuss this because everyone has their own risk tolerance.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Everyone makes their own decisions. The last thing I want to do is people copying my trades, and I don’t want to copy other people’s trades because then you don’t get smarter. And also my risk tolerance is really, really high. So you don’t want to copy me. Your risk tolerance probably isn’t as high as mine.

The Complete Investment Methodology

So. But once find the change in the world, connect the dots to companies that would benefit or sectors that would benefit from it or be harmed, Find out if it’s going to actually move the needle. Then you have to determine if there’s something else happening to that company during that window of time you think it’s going to impact them that is more important to that company than this thing that you found.

Okay, so there might be a company going through that’s being prosecuted by the government, and that prosecution is all that investors care about right now. So the fact they have a trending product, it’s going to increase their sales by 3 or 4% is not going to move the needle relative to the fact that, you know, the FTC is about to bury them. So you just got to go through the motions of figuring out what’s important.

The way that you do that is you read earnings reports and you kind of read news stories on the company and you’re like, “What’s going on?” Then you need to figure out, does the rest of the world know about what I just found out? Are they connecting the dots yet? Do they know about this crazy heat? When we had the big freeze in Texas a few years ago? Remember that crazy freeze?

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: All the pipes broke.

LEWIS HOWES: Okay.

The Texas Freeze Case Study

CHRIS CAMILLO: All the swimming pool equipment broke, and everyone had to buy new swimming pool equipment. And the pool companies went nuts. Right. And so I was like, “Did people know about that yet?” Because I’m in Texas. I live in Texas. I knew about it immediately. I had a pool. Pool equipment’s gone. All my friends all have to get new pool equipment. “How long is it going to take you to get new pool equipment?” “Six months. Because we can’t. They’re literally sold out of pool equipment.”

Well, who makes pool equipment? I’m investing in them. Right. And which is what we did. And. But has the rest of the world caught onto this yet? Has Wall Street? Right. And so you have to figure out if they’re seeing it yet. So you’re like, “Are there news articles about this yet? Are they talking about in the Wall Street Journal? If I go look under all the article, are they talking about it in the earnings report? Are about they talking. Is there chatter on X Twitter or stock twits, right? Or are investors that are retail investors talking about this yet?”

And if no one else is talking about it, there’s a decent chance that you might have discovered something and connected the dots quicker than everybody else. And that’s what you want, right? And so once you kind of go through. And again, if you want to go deep into my methodology, Jack Schwager did a great job talking about in his book.

But that’s when you trade and then when do you. When you sell? That’s what you’re asking me. Okay, so you’re trading at the point of information imbalance, when you identified some really big piece of information that is going to impact a company in a really big way that most other people don’t know about yet. That’s when you trade, that’s when you buy the company, right?

You sell at the point of information parity, when that information that you discovered is now widely known by other investors. Okay. Often that will be an earnings report when the company comes out. Remember that story I told you earlier about Elf Cosmetics? The company came out and said, “Guess what? Our sales are through the roof because this guy on YouTube did a video” and then the stock shot up.

And now the information that you had that made you invest in that company, everyone else has it. So you no longer have an inherent advantage, right, over anyone else. So at that moment, if you’re going to be a pure social arb investor or kind of investing in conversational data, right, an observational investor, then you sell because you have no advantage anymore.

LEWIS HOWES: What if the stock keeps going up?

The Future of AI and Robotics Investment

CHRIS CAMILLO: Well, it might, but it’s going up for other reasons, right? So like now this is not always black and white. So let’s say that you think, you know what, yes, the stock went up, but I think that this is the beginning of something bigger that they’re not appreciating yet. Then you might end up staying in that stock for years.

Which is exactly what I did with Amazon, right? Which is exactly what I did with Apple. You know, some of these companies back in the day, just Wall Street just refused to believe how big of the changes. I feel that way right now with artificial intelligence, really, you know, and I could be wrong, but I made a huge bet on Nvidia that like literally the week that ChatGPT came out a couple years ago, and that’s a big part of why my portfolio is up so much the last couple years, because I actually went off and I did like a bunch of meditation for like a week.

It was crazy. I was like this. I started using ChatGPT and I was like, “This might be the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life.” And the only other thing that ever set me off like that is when I held one of these in my hand for the first time. And this became one of the biggest investments I ever made.

People was like, “Oh, do you. You can only do this with small companies because Wall Street’s kind of on to big companies.” Nope. I wrote an entire chapter in my book about this trade, and it was because Wall Street didn’t believe in the iPhone when it first came out. Mainly because they were biased because they weren’t using an iPhone. They didn’t get to really hold it. They’re using BlackBerries, because that’s what people in the corporate world and Wall Street use.

But also, the iPhone was only available on AT&T the first year it came out.

LEWIS HOWES: And what is 2006, 7, 8.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yes, but AT&T at the time in Manhattan, the type of data infrastructure that it used could not send data through buildings hardly at all. So almost nobody in Manhattan used AT&T back then. So it was almost impossible if you lived in Manhattan or worked in Manhattan to have an iPhone at that time, because everybody was on Verizon who lived in Manhattan.

So that was like an interesting little thing that made it even harder for people on Wall Street to see what was happening, to experience it, because it wasn’t even about them using it. It was about people in their network talking about it 24 hours a day because it was so damn revolutionary.

Similar to Tesla when they first came out. If you didn’t drive one or if you didn’t have someone in your network that made you drive one, you didn’t know how crazy special the technology was, right? So, you know, like, I almost forgot the question you asked me now.

LEWIS HOWES: When to sell. I mean, you talked about this trade with, you know, this is the biggest thing Chat AI.

The Nvidia Investment Strategy

CHRIS CAMILLO: Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. ChatGPT. So I used it, and I used it a lot that first week. And I was like, “Dude, this is big. This is nuts.” I was like, “Who’s going to benefit from this?” And I figured out that Nvidia was the obvious beneficiary, the picks and shovels, right, of this whole industry.

And now Nvidia is like so expensive, it’s like trillions of dollars. So now it might feel too expensive. Unless you think that the industry of artificial intelligence is just getting started and you think it’s going to be infinitely bigger than anything else we’ve ever seen in our lifetime, which is what I think.

LEWIS HOWES: So you haven’t sold.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I might. No. Well, I have sold it since and then I’ve re, you know, I’ve, so I’ve been levered in it, I’ve sold it and now I’m getting back into it again now that it’s dropped.

So I believe that the human mind is not able to fully grasp things that haven’t happened before. So this is a little bit of what they call black swan theory. Nassim Taleb wrote that book back in like 2005, 2006. And it was all about the fact that like especially capital markets, like financial markets never really assess value to things that are anomalies that don’t have a history that they can associate with a correlation in the past.

LEWIS HOWES: It’s unknown.

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s so unknown that they just don’t have a way to frame how to value it. We never would have thought we’d have multiple trillion dollar companies right now that we do, right? Ten years ago, I don’t think we could wrap our head around having 10 or 20 trillion dollar companies.

I think we’re going to get there and I think there will be a multitude of companies related to the industry of intelligence and the industry of robotics that will be 10, 15, maybe even 20 trillion dollars over the next few decades.

CHRIS CAMILLO: So I’m happy to still be in companies like Nvidia. And then, you know, I’m making huge bets on robot companies right now because of that. So that’s become half of my life is investing in robots.

LEWIS HOWES: How long will it take though, for some of these companies that are maybe, you know, haven’t really launched their products at the highest level yet. How long will you stay invested until you start to see the gains?

The Coming Robot Revolution

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s really hard to time sometimes, like the robot companies. I’m investing mostly private. I think we’ll have a robot revolution in about five years. So I think you will be consumed by nothing but robot media starting in about 18 months.

LEWIS HOWES: Really? What type of media are we talking about? What do you mean? Just people talking about it more or.

CHRIS CAMILLO: People like we’re about to enter the Jetsons age? Like we are going to have humanoid robots walking around. Not initially, because the value of these robots is so high in industry for commercial and industrial use. Almost all the allocation of those robots is going to go towards industry. So also to have them walking around in public, there’s a safety element. They won’t be there, I don’t believe for 10 years.

LEWIS HOWES: You’re talking about, you know, car manufacturing, you know, restaurant manufacturing, you know, things like that.

CHRIS CAMILLO: They’ll be warehouses, logistics. We have a job shortage, a human job shortage of like 200 or 300 million physical laborers that we need to employ by 2030 that we just don’t have humans for. And this will help kind of solve that problem.

Probably a bigger problem is like 10 years out when it comes to elder care. When we have a massive shortage of people to take care of older people as the boomers are aging. It cost 175,000 to upwards of 200,000 dollars a year to have 24/7 care in your home, to have home aides. And we just simply do not have enough humans to do that.

And this is something that is exceptionally important. 100 million people around the world spend the bulk of their prime years taking care of a parent or grandparent. And they don’t have careers because of it. Some of them never have families. We don’t have it that as much in the US but it does happen and it’s going to happen a lot more the next 20 years as our parents are getting older. And we need to solve that problem. Robots will solve it. They’re going to solve it.

So we have demand for billions of humanoid robots around the world. Simply to take care of the elderly. So that will become a big use case. That’s probably the number one use case. But it won’t start for about 10 years now.

Advanced Robot Capabilities

CHRIS CAMILLO: I’ve been up close with a lot of these robots. I’m telling you, it’s coming quick. Like the robots are walking, they’re functioning, they’re articulating. I’ve seen them move sheet metal. I’ve seen them do pretty articulate stuff. Autonomously, by the way, not programmed autonomously like using an AI brain.

LEWIS HOWES: Like, “Oh, I see this thing over there, I need to move it over here and then I see another one over there that I need to move.”

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yes.

LEWIS HOWES: Not just rinse and repeat in the same spot.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Correct. One of the robot companies I work most closely with, Apptronik in Austin, is partnered with DeepMind at Google. And Google is developing an AI brain for these bots that would melt your mind. Like it’s, they’re accelerating the technology so quickly.

Right now I believe we’re probably two, maybe three years away from having generalized autonomous robots with full AI brains that can do just about any physical job on earth. So now can they do that, you know, durably, you know, can they do it repetitively with the uptime that we need?

LEWIS HOWES: Quality control?

CHRIS CAMILLO: That could take a few years to work out. And then the generalized part, when you’re going to have them in your home doing literally everything. I’m talking about doing your laundry, doing your dishes, cleaning up around the house, literally doing almost everything in your home.

I mean, imagine saying, “Hey, you know, whether it’s you or your wife, can you just redo the closet for spring and it gets, goes out all the spring clothes and just do them in the same exact order that you did last spring by color and this and that.” It’s all done and it knows exactly where to put the clothes up from the door.

I know this sounds insane to you, but I’m telling you, they will be able to do that in 10 years. 100% be able to do that within 10 years. And the cost of these robots to manufacture by then will be sub 50,000 dollars and they’ll have like a four to five year lifespan. So if you think about it like the use cases from it, it’s almost ridiculously cheap when you start thinking about all the things you don’t need to do.

Investment Timeline and Labor Shortage

LEWIS HOWES: Now is something like that that will be used 10 years away, is it worth investing in now, even if it’s not going to be maybe successful in 5, 7, 10 years.

CHRIS CAMILLO: For me it is, I think it’s the biggest industry. Like physical labor is a third of global GDP. It’s the biggest industry in the world. So listen, I, like I said, I own restaurants. I cannot get employees. Like it’s almost impossible for us to find employees.

LEWIS HOWES: Why is it so hard?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Because two things, people. Listen, our unemployment rate is actually pretty low. It’s like 4%, 4 1/2% right now. People in this country want to do certain types of jobs, not other types of jobs. And I’m not saying that that’s good or bad. It’s just the reality.

So you know, I joke like, you know, my kids are 15 and they don’t want to work for 40 years in a manufacturing job. And I don’t want them to because I don’t want them to have the bad back that I have right now. Like, no, I mean these, this is real. Like you work in one of these jobs for 40 years and you’re messed up by the time you hit your age 60. So they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to work in a repetitive physical labor job for their life. And I hate to say like almost no young kids in this country do.

LEWIS HOWES: They won’t have to in 10 years with robots taking over all that.

CHRIS CAMILLO: They won’t have to. And like the one knock that this whole robot revolution people have with it is it will displace human labor. I’m an optimist, so I’m a little biased, but at no point in human history has technology, a human displacing technology ultimately created more and better, not created more and better jobs for humans over the long term.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

The Future of Work and AI Integration

CHRIS CAMILLO: And I don’t see why it would be any different this time. And if you look specifically about what AI and robots will do for the world, labor is the number one bottleneck for industry. And having access to more reliable, cheaper, scalable labor will enable all the world’s industries to expand much larger than they are today.

And it will enable us to have more of that and it will allow us to create new industries we can’t even think of today. So what that means is with more comes more demand for humans. It might not be the same job as today. It’s probably going to be a job that requires a higher degree of creativity, of sophistication, of engagement at the human mind level.

So each company will have less humans. Or each entity will have less humans. But there will be way more entities that need you, hopefully doing better work that’s more interesting, that hopefully pays more too. So hopefully we all win as humans long term from this.

LEWIS HOWES: If people working in careers right now or entrepreneurs don’t start learning AI or don’t start learning how to use AI tools to create better processes, advance their platforms or their businesses, what will happen to those career individuals or entrepreneurs over the next few years?

CHRIS CAMILLO: I think they’re going to be in a lot of trouble.

LEWIS HOWES: Really?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah.

LEWIS HOWES: How big is AI right now?

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s everything. Everything.

LEWIS HOWES: And if an employee or an employer is not using it, you think they’re going to be far behind?

CHRIS CAMILLO: I think they’re done.

LEWIS HOWES: Really?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, I think it’s everything the same way that the Internet was everything relative to what came before it. And if you recall back in ’98, ’99, 2000 and you could research this, there were a lot of doubters that said “this is all BS.” A lot. “This is all BS.” Now the Internet took a long time to play out, but almost every single promise that it made has actually come true.

LEWIS HOWES: And then some.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And then some. Yeah, almost every single promise. And then some. And then some and then some.

AI as the Great Democratizer

LEWIS HOWES: So how big then is AI and what do you predict over the next three to five years that it will do for individuals?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Oh, I think it will be a complete game changer for individuals because it helps democratize intelligence. And let’s be fair, human intelligence is not fair. We don’t all have the same access, we don’t all have the same ability to learn the same way. My kids have tutors. Most kids don’t have one on one learning.

I saw a study where the number one differentiator for accelerating your level of knowledge and your success in life is one on one learning. You know how expensive that is?

LEWIS HOWES: Very expensive.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I would love every child on earth to have one on one learning. And they can in the very near term with AI. They can. I think eventually every single kid in the world is going to have the ability to get one on one learning with AI.

LEWIS HOWES: And it doesn’t matter where you live, if you have access to it.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Doesn’t matter where you live, doesn’t matter how much money you have. Everyone is going to have access to best in class education in the very near term future.

LEWIS HOWES: If they’re willing to apply themselves to learn it and to be consistent.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You can get it if you want it.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, exactly.

CHRIS CAMILLO: So again it’s more a matter of convincing people that they should do it.

LEWIS HOWES: It’s leveling the playing field too.

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s leveling the playing field, it’s democratizing intelligence and access to intelligence. And so those people that already went through the cycle and maybe didn’t get the best education, maybe they were having to work all through school, maybe they didn’t get to go to college, maybe they now think they have an unfair disadvantage trying to get to that next thing that they want to get to in life.

They could utilize AI to craft a better resume, to communicate better. They could communicate as well as I can communicate now leveraging AI. So it’s democratizing all of these things for humans, which quite honestly is the biggest game changer.

The Three Essential Skills for the AI Era

LEWIS HOWES: What do you think will be the three biggest skills that we all need to learn over the next three to five years to master using the tools of AI, but also to stand out while everyone’s going to be able to use the same tools and be different and get ahead of everyone else?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, I just think you have to be super resourceful. For me I hated college because I self taught myself everything that I felt I needed to know. I was like, I like to read a lot so I was just like “why am I here wasting four years?” And this was pre Internet and all I was thinking in college was “I could find a book to teach me this. Read it and be done with this class.”

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, you don’t need a whole semester.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I’m just sitting through and all the stuff just, I’ll just read the book, man. And then when the Internet came out, I’ve always been so anti college. I’ve always, the Internet came out. It’s like it’s insane that people are still going to college for most things now in an AI world I’m just like, “are we still doing this?” And it serves a different purpose. It serves a purpose of networking.

LEWIS HOWES: It’s a societal experience. I mean, well I guess if you got to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that, you’ve got to go to certain specialized training and skills to develop there. You can’t just AI yourself from being a doctor to some extent. You need hands on training.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Well, hands on, sure, yeah, that part. But there’s a lot of other stuff that you can. AI is going to get you there quicker too.

Staying Current in a Rapidly Changing World

CHRIS CAMILLO: So you have to be resourceful. You just can’t be afraid. You just can’t be afraid of this stuff. There’s a guy I follow on TikTok and I don’t even know his name offhand, but I’ll give it to you. So you could put him in the description. And I tell everybody I know he does a TikTok every day. And it’s 30 to 60 seconds.

And this guy spends, I think, 10 to 14 hours a day deeply researching all the new AI stuff that came out that day. And he’s like the Mr. Rogers of AI. He’ll just tell you what you need to know in 60 seconds. If you’re not following this guy, you’re insane.

But this is a time just to learn. It’s just a time to learn. And learning has never been easier because learning could literally be just watching TikTok videos. I mean, are you kidding? This is what you have to do to be successful in life, is watch a few TikTok videos every day of people that are going to do all the hard work and then just tell you what you need to know to be successful.

You don’t even need to figure out. Just find the people that will help you figure it out over time.

LEWIS HOWES: Yes.

CHRIS CAMILLO: So you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. You could find the intermediaries who are doing the hard work for you and then just tell you “don’t waste 14 hours today. Here, here’s what I learned in 30 seconds. Here’s what you need.” This guy’s like, “here’s how you have to use a prompt on ChatGPT and I spent a week figuring out all the prompts.”

LEWIS HOWES: Here’s the 10 best prompts.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Here they are, man, just do it.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, you get the best response.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Just learn how to be resourceful.

The Unpredictable Nature of Technological Evolution

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, that’s interesting.

CHRIS CAMILLO: The people that are resourceful are going to win. Because what I can’t tell you is how the next five years are going to unfold. And I won’t even try because looking back through history, we haven’t come even remotely close at predicting how things like this are going to play out.

I mean, if I go back to 2000. We thought E Commerce was going to be this company mall.com and if you went to mall.com it was actually a diagram on the Internet of a mall and it would have a square with Macy’s and you click into Macy’s and it would show you some products from Macy’s and then you click out and if you want to go to a different store you would click on Foot Locker. But it did it through the visual, the UI of a mall. We thought that there was a. I think they raised a ton of money by the way.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: This is bleeding edge technologist of the time. Probably a bunch of Wharton grads and consultants that were VC backed company and that’s the best they can come up with how they were going to bring E Commerce to the masses.

So I won’t even try to pretend to know how this is going to play out over the next five or ten years. All I know is you just got to stay current. You’ve got to stay current because it’s changing quickly. And if you could just be one of those kids or adults who are just willing to stay up with the times and just stay up with what’s happening every day that’s going to put you in the top 1%. 99% of people are just intimidated by it and they’re just like, they’ll wait for it to come out in the Today show.

LEWIS HOWES: Right.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You know what I’m saying? If you’re going to wait.

LEWIS HOWES: Then you’re too late.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You’re too late.

LEWIS HOWES: If you’re going to wait, you’re too late.

The Power of No-Code AI Development

CHRIS CAMILLO: You don’t have to be a technologist. They have this whole thing, vibe coding right now. Which is with all these. Vibe coding is people are using AI that know nothing about coding. Like me and you.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And they’re creating apps and they’re creating software by just talking to it.

LEWIS HOWES: Basically “make me this.”

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, literally they’re just doing that and they’re making stuff and it’s almost like disposable software. It might do something awesome for six months and then they just kind of throw it away because now the native AI itself does that same exact thing.

So what I’m saying is that what you can achieve right now is limitless. And it doesn’t matter who you are. A perfect example. You were one of the very earliest podcasters. And I’m going to assume when you got started in 2012-ish.

LEWIS HOWES: Yep.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You had some AV background. You had to have. Or you were working with people that did, but the. You were working with people that did and they had to have. It was complicated.

LEWIS HOWES: I did it all on my iPhone. I did it all on my iPhone and then eventually just had two mics and it was just audio. So I kept it as simple as possible. Then I got into video and hired someone with the equipment. And a couple of years later, when I decided to do video before anyone was doing video, because I said, “oh, YouTube’s going to be a thing in the future.”

CHRIS CAMILLO: Okay. But you were editing, I would imagine.

LEWIS HOWES: I sent it off to an editor because I didn’t know what I was doing.

CHRIS CAMILLO: That’s a lot.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah. I didn’t know how to do it. No clue.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Pre TikTok. That’s what you had to do.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Okay. You are probably pretty ambitious. You figured it out.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You put the stuff together.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah, exactly.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Then TikTok came out. Now anyone with any phone could do whatever they want and raw video footage just became the thing.

LEWIS HOWES: Yep.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And that completely democratized creativity globally. So all of a sudden now, when it comes to creativity, that has been the biggest boom to entertainment in my lifetime. Some of the funniest people, some of the smartest people, the most interesting people on earth, I would not have access to. And they would not really exist except for their family and their buddies if not for TikTok.

But TikTok democratized it and it created this bridge to where if you were funny or if you know how to sing or play an instrument, if you do anything that’s cool or interesting.

LEWIS HOWES: I mean, look at all these comedians. Now the comedian world in general has blown up with TikTok of them just putting up their standup in front of 10 people, struggling for years, and then, boom, it’s just taken off for a lot of these comedians that now have massive Netflix specials and selling out arenas and it’s just blowing them up.

CHRIS CAMILLO: But TikTok was limited to people that were either comics or dancers or singers. There’s just entertainers. There’s just a small handful of things that TikTok democratized.

So now imagine this AI is going to do that for everyone else. And I mean everyone else. So I don’t care what your talent is, what your ambition is, what you want to do in this world, AI is going to enable you to do that.

LEWIS HOWES: Wow.

CHRIS CAMILLO: With very little money, with very little access to anyone or anything. It’s going to enable every human on Earth to reach their maximum potential. It’s going to democratize humanity.

LEWIS HOWES: It’s amazing.

CHRIS CAMILLO: It is. It actually is way more amazing than anyone is talking about right now. I firmly don’t just believe that. I know that that is going to happen and I knew that about TikTok with the things that it was doing. And here we are today.

The Importance of Being Resourceful in the AI Era

LEWIS HOWES: So what is the… I mean, you’re talking about being resourceful, and I think that’s what people are going to need to do over the next few years is really research and be resourceful in their learning and spotting the trends and being able to know when to take action.

Because a lot of people also see so much information on TikTok and this guy or whatever, all these people saying, “here’s the newest app today and the newest thing and the newest tool,” what to look out for. And they’re all coming and it’s so much that’s happening at once also that it can feel overwhelming. And you guys in your Discord group are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. What is that group and how can people join or where do they go?

CHRIS CAMILLO: Our Discord’s DumbMoney TV has all of our socials, including the Discord.

LEWIS HOWES: Is that…

CHRIS CAMILLO: Yeah, I might be the only financial YouTuber that doesn’t make any money off of anything that I do. We even sell our merch at our cost. We don’t make any… If anyone ever asks you for money related to me, you know it’s fake because we don’t charge a dime for anything. We don’t even do sponsorship.

LEWIS HOWES: DumbMoney TV.

CHRIS CAMILLO: DumbMoney TV has all the socials.

LEWIS HOWES: Okay, cool. And in the Discord group, are you guys just sharing “here’s the latest stuff, here’s what we’re finding” and everyone’s sharing ideas. But you’re not saying “we’re buying this today.”

CHRIS CAMILLO: The easiest way to start, honestly, Dumb Money Live on YouTube, we literally talk about this every week. We talk about the highlights of what we’re finding. But yes, our Discord, there’s only one channel in the Discord. It’s the Research Idea Channel, Trade channel. That’s the one I hang out in.

And we’re literally just having this conversation. But there’s a lot of us. It’s “dude, there’s a hurricane over here. Who’s going to be impacted by it?” Or “this new political thing is going to impact this sector or this company.”

LEWIS HOWES: The tariffs or whatever it is.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Or it could be there’s a new clothing trend or a new makeup trend, and we just talk about who’s going to benefit, who’s going to be harmed, how we’re going about it, and we just help each other. That’s it.

But this thing that’s happening right now is so big. But the trap is people are not going to do anything because they’re just going to be so consumed by so much noise. Yes, there’ll be a tremendous amount of noise and honestly, a tremendous amount of cool stuff.

So if you think about TikTok, TikTok itself created so much amazing entertainment that it’s really easy for us just to be consumed by the app as consumers. And if you’re really talented, you have to also create on the app. So it’s really easy to fall in the trap of, “wow, look at this new shiny thing. This is amazing. I can just live my whole life looking at all these talented people.” Meanwhile, you got a talent, too. Why don’t you do both?

LEWIS HOWES: You got to take action.

The Need to Create and Participate

CHRIS CAMILLO: You have to take action. You just have to do something. So AI is the same way. AI is going to… You know, I always say if there’s this thing called fan fiction, you know what that is? It’s this really cool world where this has been going on forever, where a series ends, but then people just continue to write scripts and stories and stuff. I think it’s just so cool.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Now I don’t engage in that world. I’m too lazy to read all this stuff, but God, I have so many TV shows, so many movies, so many things from the past that are nostalgic to me. I envision at some point AI is going to be able to just continue on with those stories, maybe throw me in there as an actor. I don’t know.

What I’m saying is the world is about to get nuts in a very… I’m an optimist… in a very good way. There’ll be some bad stuff, too. But the world is about to open up and anything is about to be possible.

So it will get really easy just to get consumed by all this amazing creativity and this amazing stuff that’s about to happen in the world because of AI. And I think that is the trap of not realizing that you could actually be part of that. So you have to force yourself to create.

LEWIS HOWES: You’ve got something that’s the hardest thing.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And by the way, I think you have to be forced to create something even if no one’s watching. And it doesn’t even matter. You just got to get… It’s kind of like you just… It’s like working out. You just got to do it. After you do it for five weeks, then you’re just doing it all the time.

So you might create junk every day or every week. And eventually you’re going to figure out what your niche is that you are really passionate about. And it might be something in your career or your job that you can kind of bring to your supervisor and be like, “I know how to do this, and this is going to solve a problem for us.”

You have to be part of this ecosystem. You have to learn how to utilize these tools first. You got to learn what the tools are. You got to learn how to use them and just not be intimidated.

LEWIS HOWES: Wow. Wow, Chris, this is fascinating. I feel like we’re just getting started, but I want to wrap things up.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I feel like everyone is so down and out because of everything that’s going on in the world. Politics, everyone’s fighting. We’re on our phones too much. We’re glued to social media. Well, can’t really do much about a lot of that stuff. Okay.

But this new thing that’s about to happen is going to open up opportunities for every one of us, and you can’t just let that go by. There are good things happening here with AI, with robotics that are going to make our lives way better in a lot of ways, if you’re open to them.

The Best Time to Start Investing

LEWIS HOWES: Would you say now is one of the best times to start investing if you’ve never invested before?

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s always the best time to start investing, quite honestly. There’s never a bad time. There’s an old saying which is time is the most important piece of investing. It’s more important to be early than to be great at investing, because the compounding effect of your money is… And it’s never been easier to invest. All these apps and platforms, it’s so easy to invest.

My book, and I think I make 17 cents when my publisher would sell a book or something. But it’s an old book that’s “Laughing at Wall Street.” It’s like a fourth grader can read it. But it’s the story of my life and how I started investing. And it’s like you could be a fourth grader and figure it out. I explain it in a manner that’s great for those that want to go really deep. Jack Schwager’s book “Unknown Market Wizards.” The chapter he wrote on my methodology is really cool.

LEWIS HOWES: What’s your guys YouTube channel again?

CHRIS CAMILLO: It’s Dumb Money Live and I’m really active on X on @ChrisCamillo. And this is my entire life is attempting to bridge every human on earth into the investor class. Because it’s the only way we’re ever going to solve the wealth gap. And I think it’s actually solvable. It takes time, but you just have to start someplace.

And you could start with a $10 account, legitimately start with a $10 account. You just have to start and it’s not taking money away from your family or your retirement fund. It’s just find money that you wouldn’t ordinarily have in your life. Think of it as 100x and then clip coupons. Do whatever, do whatever it takes to take, do an odd job once a month.

LEWIS HOWES: And this is separate than your retirement.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Absolutely.

LEWIS HOWES: Investments. This is automate those, optimize those.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I call it the big money account. Everybody should have a big money account. Wealthy people do, but everyone should have an account where they’re willing to invest in risk assets and make it big over a 10, 20, 30 year period.

LEWIS HOWES: But also having accounts that are long term investments, say for 5 to 10% of whatever it is.

CHRIS CAMILLO: You can’t have too many investment accounts. You just can’t. This is everything. Family first and then invest. There’s nothing more important in your life that’s easy to do. This is not something that’s hard to do. You don’t have to read any books. You don’t have to… just literally just putting money in an account. I don’t even care if you pick the worst investments, you’re going to kill it over the long term.

You just have to start and do it and have to believe that you can do it. And by the way, I’m actually kind of an idiot. The fact that I’ve accomplished what I have accomplished with my money should show… if you’re in my friend network and you’ve been my friend for 30 years, you know, I’m just basically a big idiot.

I’m on TikTok… if you could make it. I’m reading TikTok comments to figure out what the world is buying and what they’re doing. I’m connecting the dots to companies. I’m buying them, and that’s literally all I’m doing.

LEWIS HOWES: That’s great, man. Chris, I want people to go follow your stuff. Chris Camillo on X, Dumb Money Live.

CHRIS CAMILLO: On YouTube and then Dumb Money TV is all the stuff. Because for a lot of people, they don’t want to sit through an hour YouTube, we do cuts and we throw them on TikTok, we throw them on Instagram. Whatever place you’re hanging out at, just subscribe and we’ll throw you the highlight clips from all the little things we talk about.

Setting Proper Expectations for Investing

LEWIS HOWES: That’s it. I love it. Chris, I got one final question for you before I ask. Thank you for sharing all this information because I think people are overwhelmed with trying to navigate again the economy, the news, the stock market, the terrorists. I think people are just overwhelmed and living more in fear, emotional fear, and also just kind of mentally blocked of not knowing how to take action.

There’s so much information, so much noise, too many opportunities, not enough opportunities, and people just don’t act. And so I appreciate you simplifying and showing us and showing us the possibility of the future by acting now, we will gain in the future as long as we continue to have resourcefulness, as long as we continue to know that when you invest $100, it could go down to $30 at any moment and be aware and be able to navigate the emotional range of that.

Because I think that’s the biggest thing for a lot of people feel stuck and not taking action is they don’t want to work hard to make put $100 away and then see it go down to 30.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Well, listen, some of the most important things in life are setting proper expectations. Yes, for relationships, for jobs, for everything in life. It’s no different here. You have to have appropriate expectations for the ups and downs of what investing is.

But ultimately for what, throughout all of the last hundred years, what it has resulted in, which is kind of like we’ve never. You’ve never been able to lose in our lifetime as an investor. Long term, over the long term, maybe that changes. But again, if that changes, we have way bigger problems to worry about.

LEWIS HOWES: Exactly.

CHRIS CAMILLO: The last thing you’re going to be worried about is your investment account, I promise you.

LEWIS HOWES: Right, exactly. Chris, final question for you. What is your definition of greatness?

Defining Greatness and Living Without Regrets

CHRIS CAMILLO: I don’t know. I guess greatness is just, I mean, I don’t know, having a goal, knowing what you want and then going for it. Right. That’s just no regrets.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: I think just, you know, for me, I get so much fulfillment because I know what I want and I’m going for it. Right. And I don’t even care. I don’t care how it ends up. Right. But you just have to. As long as you’re living your life doing what you want to do, ultimately do right with no regrets.

I always say, I have everything that I want. I don’t want anything more except that that’s personal for me. Everything I do for me is for my foundation, which benefits pediatric care. So I’m focused on leukemia, cancer, autism and animal welfare. And I think I’m going to add elder care, my foundation.

But everything I’m doing is for that. So that’s my objective in my. And that’s why I’m still trading as aggressively as I am, because I’m trying to build that to a billion dollar foundation. So no matter how it ends up, I know that I know what I want out of life and I’m treading towards it. Right. That’s cool.

LEWIS HOWES: No regrets.

CHRIS CAMILLO: And without being afraid, without. Because we’re all gone soon anyway. Right? So just have a mission. Figure out what your mission is. And as long as you figure what that mission is and if you start moving towards it, you’re pretty fulfilled, I think.

LEWIS HOWES: Yeah.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Because you don’t have the regrets. Regrets are what kill us, right?

LEWIS HOWES: That’s it. Yeah. Chris, thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

CHRIS CAMILLO: Thank you.

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