3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

The first story made me inspired. The second story made me double inspired. And the third story just pissed me off. All right, so I have a theme here for this episode. Have you seen this meme that's going around on Twitter where it's like a stick figure and he's like this and he's at his computer and it says, share a bit of lore about yourself. So share some lore. And the lore is sort of— lore means, you know, the epic backstory or the the sort of untold backstory of something. And so I have 3 pretty insane lore stories that I want to tell you. I think you might know about this first person. I— it's— it was new to me, and I'm gonna call them— we haven't done this segment a while, but they are the Billy of the Week. And the Billy of the Week is a person named Amadeo Giannini. Do you know who that is?

No, I don't think so.

All right, so Amadeo you are the Billy of the Week. Here's the story. So this guy is born in San Jose. He's born to, like, you know, Italian immigrant parents. His father is murdered when he's 7 years old, so he's raised by his mom. His mom remarries, so his stepfather is in a business that you're kind of familiar with. He was— stepfather was a fruit stand wholesaler, uh, which is, I think, kind of what your parents do. They're wholesale adjacent for fruit, something like that. Your dad's like a fruit broker.

They are Produce and fruit brokers. Yes.

So that's exactly what his family did. And at age 14, Amadeo drops outta school, decides to come work in the family business cuz he needs to help the family make money. And this guy's an incredibly sharp business operator. And so he joins the business. He ends up just really taking over the business and really revamping it to the point where by the time he's in his mid-20s, uh, the business has done so well. They're, they're selling fruit all throughout California now. And he's able to sell his share of the business for, $100,000. That doesn't sound like much. This is the equivalent of a few million dollars, maybe $2 million back then. This is like in like 1900. So he does that and he's, he's thinking about what's next and he decides, you know, I want to give back to my community a little bit. He volunteers to be on a board of a bank, and when he's at the bank, he notices something he doesn't like. And he notices that the bank would basically lend money to the people who didn't need it. And deny money to the people who needed it. And so he's like, you know, the bank was all about underwriting, you know, sort of the least risky loans it could do. So it was lending to very, very wealthy people with a lot of collateral, but the kind of small business person who needed it was not getting it. He then decides to create his own bank. He's like, you know what, I'm going to make my own bank that's going to serve the little man, the common man. And he calls it the Bank of Italy. So he opens up the Bank of Italy in San Francisco, in the North Beach neighborhood.

Which is a strange name. That's kind of a weird name.

Yeah, Bank of Italy, right? Haven't heard of it, whatever. But that's his heritage. That's where he's from. So he starts doing this, and this is 1904. Now, in 1906, something happens in San Francisco, which is a devastating earthquake. Devastating earthquake happens. And one of the weird things about the earthquake was that the earthquake happens, and a lot of people didn't have earthquake insurance, but they had fire insurance. So what people were doing was earthquake hits, They would then light their building on fire because they wanted to get a payout from the, the, from the insurance companies that way. So San Francisco's ruined, and the, the narrative is basically like, that's the end of that city. But, uh, while most banks basically just shut their doors, literally seal their vaults, some are melted shut, Amadeo goes in as soon as the earthquake is happening, the fires are happening, and he basically takes all the money out of the vault. He doesn't want looters to come and take the money that his customers have stored there, and he puts it in a, like a fruit wagon. He puts it under like a box of oranges and he gets it out of there. And like 2 days later or a week later, basically when all the, all the banks are shut and San Francisco's in ruin, he pops open his bank again, um, by the wharf on a table with just basically a wooden plank. And he's got his box of cash basically. And he says, we're back. We're open for business. If you need a loan, just come to me.

Where did the original money come from, by the way?

So he had sold his fruit stand business and then he raised, uh, $500,000, the equivalent of about $5 million today, even from kind of friends, family, people who he had met during his time as a businessman in the fruit business.

And the business was, I will lend out money to qualified or certain people and they will pay me 8% interest or something like that, depending on their, uh, their, the situation.

His motto, or what he wanted, was basically, um, all the other banks are serving the elite, the big businesses, the wealthy individuals. But what if you were like me? What if you were a fruit peddler? What if you're a dock worker? You're a seamstress, you know, forget it. And so he's basically like, if nobody else is going to bank these people, I will. And he's— his job is to serve the everyday man and the everyday woman. Now, this all sounds like good marketing speak, but there's something kind of interesting about the way this guy has done this, which is that he, you know, I'll tell you this in a second, but as this thing becomes more and more successful, he never pays himself more than $50,000 a year in salary. Now you might say, all right, well, he doesn't need salary. He's going to own the bank. He also doesn't own any equity in this bank. And so he just decides that this should be owned by whoever wants to be— anybody should be able to be a shareholder. I don't want the power concentrated in me, so I don't own any of this. So he creates the Bank of Italy and he starts lending out money, and he's lending it often on a handshake, no contract, and often with no underwriting, because these are people that didn't have a lot of assets to go with, but he believed in the people in his community.

Okay, so this sounds very similar to his, uh, other, uh, like Italian and, uh, cousins, Tony Soprano. I think they would lend money on a handshake. So, but this guy, are you saying that with an iron fist? Yeah. I was like, also to the everyday man who just needed a little something something to like run away. Uh, so you're saying, was he actually benevolent?

Yes, he's actually benevolent. So, which is the why this is kind of like lore, right? That's actually kind of a crazy story. 'Cause up till now, everything so far has been something that every business tycoon would say. But then actually, you know, they're basically greedy pigs.

So this guy's the real deal. Pietro's the real deal.

And when the fire happens and everybody wants— and everybody else ran away, he decides to give loans to people on no collateral, no contract. And the crazy thing about this is during that period, that one year when the— after the earthquakes and the fire happened, and he's the only guy lending money out, he's doing it with no underwriting, no nothing, no contracts even. He ends up getting paid back Every single loan, every penny of every loan gets it, ended up getting paid back. So he did not lose money on a single loan, which is kind of a crazy sort of act of good faith in humanity, which is kind of crazy. So, wow. He does that 2 days after the earthquake, not a single loan defaults. And he then starts to get innovative again. Remember, he's a good operator. And so he realizes, look, at that time, the bank business was a local business. You'd open up a bank, you would serve the people that are in your geographic radius, and that was sort of it. He realizes that, you know, the, uh, because of the way he did his fruit business in California, he was selling fruit all up and down the coast of California. And he is like, it sucks to have different banks in every place cuz I can't expand. So he becomes the first guy to do the, uh, bank branch model. So he's like, we're gonna have local branches in every place. I'm gonna figure out how to sync the, the ledger in the backend, right? I'm gonna figure out how to make sure all the balances are, are kept up to date. I'm gonna make sure that we sort of have a local model but a central headquarters that's able to do this expansion. And he keeps— he expands all throughout California. So it becomes very, very successful. He's basically pioneering interstate banking. He helps fund a bunch of interesting things. So the California, like, agricultural boom. So he's providing credit to all the farmers, the vineyards, all this stuff, the food distributors. Like, those are the people he knew. He meets this entrepreneur again. He's trying to— he's trying to bank the people who are not qualified. So he meets this entrepreneur who's got this crazy idea. To create a film, even though this guy's never created films, create a film that's completely animated, just drawings. He's going to turn drawings into a movie. And so he says, you know, this fellow Walt Disney, I believe in you. And even though he'd been rejected by everybody else, he funds and finances personally, actually, and this is not even out of the bank, Walt Disney's Snow White, the first, you know, Disney film.

No shit.

It was the first full-length animated film. Nobody else would do it. There's these crazy guys in San Francisco that say, we want to build this bridge, a big giant bridge. And he says, you know what, even though all the other banks have deemed this too risky, he funds the Golden Gate Bridge. And over time, he ends up merging with another bank called the Bank of America and rebrands Bank of Italy to Bank of America and creates Bank of America, which becomes the biggest bank on earth. And even while it does that, he still never takes more than $50,000 a year salary. He owns zero stock in Bank of America. His family does not, you know, inherit this giant fortune. And he dies in 1949. Not owning a single share of the bank that he founded. And his philosophy was that serving the needs of others is the only legitimate business.

What a badass story. That was really good. Good job. That's—

that's what a baller.

That's absolutely insane. So it wasn't like a Sam Altman, like, oh, I don't own any shares type of thing.

Yeah, you just do this. Yeah, I just— I just love it.

It was— but it was that— that was real.

So, yeah, Walt Disney said about him, he says, He goes, Amadeo, that man, that man gave us oxygen when we needed to breathe. So crazy.

He started it in the North Beach of San Francisco, uh, the famous Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. This is really cool. Uh, I, and I think if I remember correctly, is this still the case? Doesn't Bank of America, they use the logo of him pulling fruit or something like that? Uh, which I've seen. Do they?

I don't know about that.

I remember seeing like a famous, a famous logo of, um, or like they've used this logo before. Of a guy like pulling stuff. And another one, interestingly, is Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo was started in San Francisco as well, and they started as a— I think they— I think that the 1906 earthquake, I think, also helped their business thrive. This is cool. That's cool. I wonder if there's another example of someone who truly, like, founded something and actually did not benefit financially from it in this, like, in this scale.

I mean, what are the odds that there's a founder of a company that's worth more than $300 billion that did not do it for personal profit and took no share in it, took no, took no wealth out of it? That's, I mean, that's gotta be, it's gotta be number one. All right.

I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see What mistakes, uh, did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just wanna avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025, and I did that. And so I listed out 7 books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's 7 books that had a huge impact on my life, and you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it, or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the 7 books that had a massive change in my life this year so far, and then also how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below. Have you heard of John Bogle?

Yeah. Vanguard.

So John Bogle, there's this thing called— I originally learned about him because there's this thing called Bogleheads. It's like a— have you ever been to Bogleheads.com? It's a forum where people discuss financial advice or investing. And the general thesis of Bogleheads is exactly what I buy into, which is just super boring. Just buy an index fund. John Bogle— and this is off the top of my head, so I could be getting some of this wrong— but John Bogle founded that. So he created this thing called the Vanguard Group, which created one of the first index funds, and that is now VOO and VTI, which are the two largest. And it's something like $1 trillion in assets or something insane like that. And John Bogle owned a portion of it, but I think when he died, I think his net worth was like $50 or $100 million compared to the trillion dollars in AUM that the company has. And so not the same as this Bank of America guy, but a little bit of a similar, like kind of had a Robinhood type of vibe.

Well, you did one on Chuck Feeney who gave it away, which I think is, is, you know, simpler. But I mean, I've heard of a lot of people who give it away. I've never heard of anyone who built it and never took anything from, from day one. I think that's like, that's pretty remarkable.

And you saw this story on Twitter where they're talking about the— that was it, the lore.

Well, I was on the Most Interesting Man in the World's profile. Most interesting man on Twitter.

Yeah.

Shiel. And he was talking actually about, uh, Lloyd's of London, how during the— he was, he was telling a story more about Lloyd's of London, which is about, uh, during the— when those fires happened, Lloyd's— at the time, people were a little bit distrustful of like an overseas insurer. And Lloyd's of London said, um, pay— they, they instructed their, their team pay all claims in full regardless of what coverage they had. And this just, this restored and they put an incredible amount of trust in Lloyd's of London and gave them an incredible reputation. And so in times of trouble, you know, trouble is opportunity. And they sort of saw the opportunity to step in and be the most trusted partner when everybody else was trying to deny as many of the claims as possible, even ones that they really should have paid out. Lloyd's went the exact other way, and that helped build their reputation. And then he had a footnote at the bottom. That this is similar to how Bank of America started. And I thought, that's interesting. I never, never really heard this story. And I went and started reading about it.

So I think about these moments all the time, these moments where the data says to do one thing and everyone says to do this one thing and you choose to do the opposite and it doesn't make sense and it somehow works. I've had many opportunities in my career to take those chances and I basically never do. Like, like very, very seldom because when you're up against those situations, it's, it's— you need courage. You need, you need to be a little crazy. You need a bunch of, you need a bunch of that. And like, for example, I think Jeff Bezos has this story where he, where he was like, yeah, the data shows that we can raise prices and we will just make more revenue. But that's— I mean, nothing will change. People are just going to continue buying. And an employee was like, why don't you do this? He's like, well, because we said we're going to be the low-cost provider. Like we said, you want to like be able to buy everything from us at a low price. So I don't care what— I don't care what the data this as the mission is the mission. And there's all these— I've heard a variety of stories like this that I'm incredibly inspired by. Have you ever had an opportunity to take one of these moments and you actually took it, or do you typically follow the data?

So I have, I have two, two mini stories. I can't go into too much detail because I've never talked about— I've never really announced these companies, but my e-commerce company, when the tariffs hit and Trump started raising tariffs on all the countries and, you know, one country goes to 30% and China goes to 150%, and which is pretty crazy. Like, imagine you're selling something that typically— let's just round numbers. So let's just pretend something called this ball. Let's pretend this ball cost, you know, a dollar to, to make, and you sell it for $3. Okay, but then all of a sudden you make these in China. Now this ball no longer costs a dollar. It costs— still costs the dollar, but then you have 150% extra tariff, which means now this ball costs you $2.50. So you can no longer charge $3 for this, right? To make the same, uh, you know, margin, you— this ball now needs to cost whatever, $6, $7. And so everyone in our space started raising prices. So one company raised prices, the second company raised prices, and they all did it like back to back because it's kind of like, oh, they took the bullet already. Now's the time. Nike Friday news dump. Like, let's all raise our prices. And we were about to do it. The CEO of our company wanted to do it. And then I was like, what if we just do the exact opposite? Like, what if we just don't raise the price at all? Like not to cut the price because that would be like suicidal, but like, let's, let's not raise the price. And so I wrote out this like long message, kind of like this, like copywriting sort of thing. Like, hey guys, you know, blah, blah, blah. Almost like a bit like a, like a, like a prank basically. So I was like, hey, as you know, this is the tariff situation. You know, this is the reality of the situation is this. Just want to let you guys know, like, we're not raising prices. And I was, and literally the crowd roared on social media. Thousands and thousands of likes, people sharing this in other communities and other groups being like, this is the type of company to, you know, to respect. And I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. Pat on the back.

Turns out if you just give away free stuff, people love you.

Fucking Robinhood out here, man. And then 3 months later, I'm like looking at the P&L. Our margin has dropped to 3%. We have a 3% EBITDA margin or 5% or something like that. And, you know, I want it to be 15 or 20%. And I'm like, how do we fix this? And it's like, I guess we got to raise the prices. And so I'm like, I'm going to try to figure out how to go back, how to go back at this point and raise the prices now because it just doesn't make any sense to run this business at these costs.

Yeah. And so this is the hard part I'm referring to. This is what it— this is, this is the hard part.

So I took the short-term, like, roar of the crowd to be like, God, everybody loves it when I give away dollar bills for 70 cents. This is, I'm the man. I'm a genius. And now I'm like, oh God, this is bad.

What's the second time?

Uh, the second was a little bit different, which was, um, uh, one of my other companies, we had a situation where the business is going great. It is actually a slightly different situation, but the principle of trouble is opportunity. So this wasn't a pricing giveaway stuff, but it was like, business is going gangbusters, and then adversity hits. Something happened, a competitor did something, and then all of a sudden changed the dynamics. And now we have to figure out what's going on. And as we're figuring it out, like, it definitely in the moment feels like absolute— like, it feels like trash. You wake up and you wake up and you're just like, oh my God, like, my business that was so great yesterday, now, like, I was so hopeful and now I'm absolutely hopeless. Like, We all know startups are this roller coaster. Even knowing that doesn't quite prepare you for when you go from that peak and then the roller coaster starts to drop. And, um, we just had this moment where we were like, okay, one mindset here is damage control. So minimize the amount of bleeding that happens here. But before we go into just like minimize damage mode, let me just ask a question. Like, is there a way where we come out the other side of this much better off? Like, is there a Lloyd's of London moment here where we could do something that on the surface might sound a little crazy, a little unorthodox, but in a time of trouble when everybody else is doing X, what if we just did Y? Like, would that work? Is there a possibility for that? And so again, I can't like go into too much of the detail here, but I think it led to a slightly different mindset of like, actually, you know what, I think when we come out the other side of this, we're going to not just be stronger because we, we survived, But like, I think there's a thrive possibility here if we just nailed XYZ. And we never would have even figured this out had this not happened. Right. And everybody else went this way. Everyone else went left. But if we go right, I think we might end up being like, really have separated ourselves from the pack. And so we'll see how that one plays out. But, you know, I just sort of always remind myself, which is like, within every disadvantage baked is a small potential advantage if you could figure it out. Right. And that trouble is opportunity. So the natural reaction in trouble is that trouble is problems. Trouble is pain. And yeah, there might be some challenges, there might be some pain, but trouble is also opportunity if you have your eyes open during the trouble to figure out where is the opportunity.

So we had Tim Ferriss on the other day. Have you— one of the most suggested books that he has or that he recommends to others is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Have you read that book?

I've never actually read it.

No, I started reading it this weekend because I'm just— I want to learn. And he was just on and whatever. And it's only 110 pages. It's very short. and it's very easy. And one, and it's written by these two guys that are marketing consultants, whatever. And they have a lot of wonderful clients. You gotta trust them, but they give you 22 laws not to break. And one of the laws refers to, basically the idea of when everyone is going one way, it's significantly better and easier for you to not try to be better than them, but to be different. And one frame, one framework is to be the opposite. And you call, you call out that opposite. And when you call it the opposite, the thing you, you can't insult the other thing. You just have to like objectively say what it is. So for example, they talk about two different mouthwashes. One was Listerine. I forget the other one, but the other one was the second place player. And they were like, well, instead of going after Listerine and like mocking it, we're just going to say Listerine makes you smell like you just left the doctor because it's like of clinical use and whatever. We are the opposite. This is the one that actually tastes good. And so they're not exactly saying one's better or one's, uh, worse. They're just saying this is what this is. And then we are the exact opposite. And it gives you all of these laws to follow. It's an amazing book, but I'm rereading it. And what I'm learning is that what you're describing is a marketing problem and how most problems in business are marketing issues. And I didn't really think about— I didn't really think about that until recently, until I started reading this and how perception is reality. And so like the truth or the— there is no objective truth as to what products are necessarily better or worse. It's about what we think is better. And so it's— this book is really good. You should reread it because what you're describing is like, it's sort of like when you reread The 48 Laws of Power and you like, see like, oh, this person is committing this, like they are doing this. Like you could do the same thing.

You get the Neo in The Matrix moment where you see the code, you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, it's pretty cool. He's like, are you— so you're telling me me, I'll be able to dodge bullets. He's like, I'm telling you, when you're ready, you won't have to. Right? It's like, basically, if you understand psychology at a certain level, then you're able to make less— you're able to do less work and have a better result. I used to have— I don't know if you remember this— at the office we used to come to, Monkey Inferno, we used to have a giant poster that I made where it was 3 triangles, and then it was a picture of an ugly circle, and it just said, different is better than better, for sure. I, I made this for our team because like we're always just trying to say how we're better than everybody, and everybody says they're better and everyone's trying to be better. We're all trying to one-up themselves. The only thing we have to focus on is say how we're different. The public can decide if that's better for them, um, right? Maybe you want the mouthwash that's really clinical. Maybe you want the mouthwash that tastes good, right? Right. Like, what do you want? Well, our job is just to highlight the difference. And, uh, and it's really hard to be better than something that's been out, has more funding, more people working there, has been out for 20 extra years. Like, it's really hard to topple the incumbent with a, with a better product when actually you just have to be a significantly different product that will be way better for a certain set of customers.

All right. So the second one.

All right. The second one is modern day. So we went, you know, whatever, 130 years ago. Now we have a today situation that kind of inspired me. I think it'll inspire a lot of other people too. So do you know who, do you know who Preston Thorpe is?

Preston Thorpe?

I don't think so. Yeah, you may have seen this story cuz it was going viral recently, but here's the story. So I see this headline that there's this guy who's a software developer and he's an engineer, except the weird thing is that he's incarcerated right now. He's an, he's an employee. He's an, he's a, he's a software engineer for them. But he's incarcerated in a prison in Maine, and he has been for a while. And so I was like, how did this happen? What is the story here? And so the story is pretty crazy. Basically, this guy grows up, he's 17 years old, he's a computer geek. He, he's, you know, sort of always like, he's torrenting music and movies. He's doing what a lot of people were doing, uh, you know, a lot of us who were on our computers and when we were teenagers. Not me, of course, for anyone listening, but, you know, others. And, you know, somewhere along the way, he, um, this is what he says. He goes, I get kicked out of my house by my parents for being a stupid 17-year-old like kids are. But instead of being broke and homeless on couches, I come back, I'm apologetic, um, and I beg mom and dad to let me back in. Um, that I'm sure was their plan, and it worked. The problem was I stumbled headfirst into the, into the dark web, uh, where Silk Road, you know, pre-Silk Road, of internet wholesale drugs. And he's like, uh, there was a place where you could buy chemicals from, you know, for pennies from sketchy companies in India and China and Canada and Holland, and they would sell them in bulk. Um, so instead of just being totally apologetic and reformed, I ended up going off the deep end, and suddenly I'm making tens of thousands of dollars a week by the, uh, you know, by the age of 18, 19 years old, selling drugs that I'm buying wholesale. So he's, uh, you know, so what was he buying? He was buying Like MDMA, weed, stuff like that.

Okay. All right. He was buying that and he was selling it. That's so—

age 20, he gets arrested for the first time. They catch MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver. They catch some weed coming from California. And because of the weed, he ends up going to prison. And so he goes to prison, goes for a couple of years, and he gets out. And here's what he says. He goes, a few years later, I leave prison with $0 in my pockets because lawyers and commissary expensive and nobody pays you. Nobody pays what they owe you when you go to jail. And so then I get out and I'm living in a halfway house. It smells like crack smoke. It's filled with parole officers and junkies. And I'm left with a difficult choice. I can continue to live here and walk every day to a temp agency hoping to get a $10 an hour manual labor job. But I don't have an ID or a Social Security card at this point. Or I could go to New York, go see some old associates, and come back home after a week with $10,000 or $20,000 in my pocket. And I could spend my time living in a comfy, comfy luxury hotel until I get my— get back on my feet and rent an apartment. I chose the latter. And obviously I was back in prison a short 14 months after, after a short 14 months of addiction and misery.

Where is he writing this? On his blog?

On his blog. It's called My Story. And he says, I've been incarcerated now with this sentence since 2017. And he says the following. He goes, I came in with a terrible attitude, a terrible outlook on life. Outlook on life and no hope for my future. I've spent— I've spent— he spent 3 of the 10 years that he's been there in solitary confinement. So 22, 23 hours a day. And he writes, parentheses, 10% of my life, question mark. And at some point, I truly became one of the people that people looked at me and saw when I first came into prison at 20. They would ask, is this your first bid? And you would say, first, I'm not coming back here. And they would always laugh. The older heads would always laugh. Everyone says that, but everyone comes back. And sure enough, I did. And so he talks about how he's there. And during the pandemic, he just— he got lucky that he happened to be at this prison in Maine that has this program where you can both enroll in a college coursework while you're in prison, but you can also— they also gave him limited internet access. So some, some prisons have this college kind of coursework that you could do to try to learn and better yourself, but very few have the internet access. So he gets on. He immediately blows past the— he gets hooked on programming and he blows past the college coursework, starts doing— starts becoming self-taught and just sort of, um, gets absolutely obsessed. 14, 15 hours a day he spends learning how to code, learning about ultimately like databases. He becomes a huge open source contributor to projects. And people don't know because they just see his open source code. They don't know his backstory. So they, they reach out with a job offer and then they find out about him. Well, one company who did that was willing to actually employ him. And so for the past few years, he's working a full-time job from prison, and he pays 10% of his wages to, I guess, like, whatever he has, whatever he owes or has to pay back. And then the rest, you know, he keeps. And he's like become this kind of inspiring figure. And I just thought this was kind of an amazing example of, you know, doing what you want, you know, of making the most out of an otherwise pretty bleak situation. He said the following quote.

Well, when you— when I Googled him, his LinkedIn came up first and he is— he's employed at Torso. Is that right?

Torso? Yeah.

Wow. Okay. And so what do you say?

See, he had this one quote that I really like. So he goes, there was one day after spending a few years where I had an epiphany. I started questioning everything about my life. I no longer knew why I had accepted the former identity and situation. None of it made sense to me anymore. And I decided I was no longer okay being where I was or who I had become.

This is fantastic. This is a great find. It says on his LinkedIn he gets out this year.

I know. I'm excited for him. I'm rooting for him. This is the, this is the new serial for me. So, so I thought this was pretty inspiring. I do have one more, and this one is a different lore story.

I hope this, by the way, if you know, if you're connected to this guy, he works at, is it Terso? I don't know what that company is. Is that a big reputable company?

I had never heard of them before this. So, you know, they've gotten a lot of pub from this, but they're, they're basically trying to rewrite SQLite is what I picked up.

If you're, if you're somehow can get connected with this guy, I'm not sure if he's allowed to watch YouTube or whatever. I would love to like see him comment, uh, in our—

let me tell you something. Not only is he allowed, he restricts himself to 1 hour a day of YouTube entertainment and the rest he spends coding. He's got more self-control than you or me.

They're just like us. Yeah.

Yeah, he did a podcast recently, so I saw him on a podcast from prison and I really want to get him on here. So if anybody can make that happen or knows him or can get us connected, please do.

Well, Preston, if you see this comment on the YouTube, in the YouTube comment section, that'll be fun. And we'll actually pin it and we'll see if we can get you on.

All right. So I gave you one, the Bank of America guy, the generous titan, the guy who builds the biggest bank in the history of planet Earth, takes no equity. And essentially no salary in the process. And does, yeah, some, one of these sort of, uh, bank moguls who says all the right things but then actually did all the right things.

Yeah, he's about it.

Kind of amazing. He's about that life. All right. So then, uh, we have Preston, inspiring guy rising up from, uh, from, you know, his circumstances and doesn't let the past dictate the present. Um, okay. Now the last one is a guy named Stephen Thomas, and this one is a different, different sort of lore story that just kind of also captured my imagination and sort of broke my brain a little bit. All right. So this guy Stefan, in 2011, he, he's like a programmer, I think. In 2011, he gets paid to make a video about Bitcoin. And, uh, again, 2011. So, you know, Bitcoin, I think the white paper was like an '09 thing. I think Bitcoin started in 2010. So this is one year into Bitcoin and he makes an educational video about Bitcoin. He gets paid 7,000 Bitcoin to do it. And 7,000 Bitcoin at the time is like $10 grand, basically. It's a couple, it's like a dollar or two per Bitcoin.

Who paid him? Like, who, if you're a year in, was it like Satoshi? I mean, was it like a—

I don't think so. I think there was like, you know, some early companies that were, you know, interested in, you know, making educational content about this. So that same 7,000 Bitcoin is today worth 400 million Bitcoin. But of course, that assumes you held. Now, the crazy thing about Stefan is he held. He held the whole way. Now you might be wondering, how does this guy have this incredible, you know, belief, this conviction, this foresight? Is he an investing genius? Does he have the self-discipline of a Navy SEAL? Like, how did he get himself to hold all the way up to, you know, Bitcoin today, $118,000? Well, the answer is he couldn't sell. He lost the password to his Bitcoin because what he did was when he got to Bitcoin, he stored it. He did a best practice. He stored it on a hardware wallet, the IronKey, at the time the most secure way to hold Bitcoin. And he writes the password down to his IronKey on a piece of paper, folds it up, puts it somewhere safe. Problem is he forgets about it because at the time it was a little bit of a smaller thing. It was, you know, $7, $10K.

Cool.

I'm going to hold this. So we'll see what happens. Life happens and he loses the piece of paper.

Is IronKey a brand or is that like a protocol? So it's a company.

Wow. It's a company that, that makes the, it's the name of the device, let's say.

Great, great product. It works.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, also great marketing for his product in a way. I actually, you know, I take the back. It's pretty terrible marketing. This is my fear with hardware wallets in general is you lose, you, you are the security vulnerability. You lose the password. So he loses the password and he goes and he tries to guess, guess what it was. Guesses once, guesses twice. The problem is IronKey has a limit. You only get 10 guesses. So he has a $400 million treasure. Sitting on a device that's in his house, just sitting on his desk, and he can't unlock it. And he tries everything. He tries to remember. He tries looking everywhere for it. He tries to remember it. He has hypnosis done to him to try to see if the hypnosis can bring it back out of his subconscious mind. Nothing's working. He has now tried 8 of his 10 password guesses. Oh man. He has 2 left as of right now. Now that alone is already just like, oh dude, what a— it's like a party story. Here's where it gets weird, dude.

Have you seen the old TV show Twilight? Have you ever seen that? Like, there's a famous episode. Vampire thing? No, no, no. This is from the '50s. There's a— and there's a very famous episode where this guy's like, all I want to do is read all day. And there's a doom apocalypse. The world, like, ends and everyone dies and he's all by himself and he's like, finally I get to read all day. And then he's walking to go grab his favorite book and his glasses fall off and he mistakenly steps on them. And it's like one of these, like, be careful what you wish for type of thing. And this is, this is it. This is like, it's like when you ask the genie for something, but you weren't specific enough. And it like, is this is that story that sucks.

It's almost worse. It's like he had, he found the genie and lost the lamp is actually what kind of what happened here. And so he, he's got this genie, he's got this lamp, he's got this $400 million treasure sitting on his desk, which would be one of the biggest like found treasures, sunken, you know, think about sunken treasures all around the world, or discoveries of, you know, diamonds or gold or things like that. This guy's just got one in his house. It's crazy. So now he's got 2 guesses left, and this was as of 2021, and there's this team of basically like cryptographers slash treasure hunters who heard about this story and were like, We're gonna try to break the IronKey. So they start working on all these methods. Now, what they're, what they're gonna do, they weren't able to figure out how to actually like just pick the lock to open it without knowing the password, but they took a different approach. They were like, can we get rid of this 10 password limit, right? If we can get rid of the 10 guess limit, we can guess an infinite number of times. So what they do is they figure out how to use a laser to cut open the USB without triggering the anti-tampering devices. Then they use nitric acid that they put on the thing to like get rid of another defense. And these guys actually have done it. They figured out how to turn the iron key into an infinite guess situation.

No way. When did this happen? Like recently?

This happened a few years ago. 3 or 4 years ago. Now here's the problem. Stefan doesn't want to work with them.

Why?

He, he goes, I made a handshake deal with 2 other groups to try to crack this, and I want to honor that. And they're like, what? And so the quote from these guys is, we've cracked the iron key. We just haven't cracked Stefan yet. Oh my God. They have the solution and he won't use it because he made a handshake agreement with two other groups promising them a portion of the, uh, of, of the proceeds.

But there's enough to go around. Wait, so it's 7,000? It's 7,000? Oh, so that's $700 million.

Uh, yeah, now it is. Yeah.

So there should be enough to go around, right? Where you could have like 3 parties to work on this.

There should be more than enough. In fact, there's also other things that he could do. He could just sell it today for a guaranteed payout to any of these groups, right? Like you could be like, I'll take $50 million today and you guys go ahead. If you crack it, you, there's, I think it's $800 million total or whatever. $800 million is, is, uh, you know, minus $50, you can keep $750 if you can crack it. But if you don't, the risk is on you. So he has like all these options. And it's so bizarre to me that he is not taking any of the fantastic options that are in front of him. Isn't this just weird?

This is weird. Is he wealthy?

Complete nonsense.

What's his— like, I'm looking him up. It looks like he—

it made me mad, to be honest with you. The first one, the first story made me inspired. The second story made me double inspired. And the third story just pissed me off.

Is Stefan rich or anything like that? Like, is he a big deal?

I don't know if he's— I mean, I think he's done well. He has done other stuff in the realm of crypto. So he started this company called Coil that was like trying to do something interesting in crypto. It failed. He now is the curator of Interledger, which is like a kind of like an open payments protocol he's trying to make. Yeah, it's kind of weird. I mean, he's not $800 million rich. Like, you know, I think this would be the greatest thing he's ever done.

Do you have any friends that have like, like, for example, my roommate James was, was like a hacker early on and he was hardcore in the space and he was doing the typical stuff like he was buying things like as soon as Bitcoin was accepted in this weird experimental way, he was like, hell yeah, let's do it. And he like, you know, spent 1,000 Bitcoin on whatever. Do you have any friends who have done crazy things like that?

I have a friend that lost 200 Bitcoin. I know that, I know personally just which today, like, you know, every year it just sort of updates how bad that loss is. So now it's a $23 million loss. He was kind of kicking himself when that was like a, you know, $200,000 loss or whatever at the time. But he's like, I mined, he's like, I mined 200 Bitcoin. It's on a, like a hard drive somewhere. I think I, I think I threw out the hard drive. I think I threw out the laptop, like it's gone.

Insane.

There's another guy that's got this story where he, um, his USB or his hard drive, his Bitcoin hard drive was in a landfill. I heard that. And he was trying to search for it. They wouldn't let him. He's like, I will buy the whole landfill. And he tried to purchase the landfill and they turned him down. And this guy's just like trying to get access to this, to this landfill to go search for his hardware. So that's it. That's what I got for you. 3 stories. Um, that's just my gift to you this week, Sam.

All right. That's awesome. That's great. That's it. That's the pod.