3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/0e04503179b091e9

The first story made me inspired.
The second story made me double inspired, and the third story just pissed me off.
I feel like I can root
Well I know I can be what I want to
Uh
Alright, let's uh 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, share some lore.
And the lore is a sort of lore means, you know, the the epic backstory or the the sort of untold backstory.
of something. And so I have three
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 seven 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 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 fourteen, Amadeo
drops out of school, decides to come work in the family business,'cause 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.

By the time he's in his mid twenties
Um 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 um
A hundred thousand dollars. That doesn't sound like much. This is the equivalent of a few million dollars.
Uh maybe two million dollars back then. This is like in like nineteen hundred.
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
W you know, the bank was all about underwriting, you know, to 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 gonna 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 uh North Beach neighborhood.
Which is a strange name.
That's that's kind of a weird name. Bank of Italy, right? Haven't heard of it. Whatever. Uh yeah, but but
That's that's his heritage, that's where he's from. So he starts doing this, and this is um nineteen oh four.
Now in nineteen oh six, something happens in San Francisco, which is uh a devastating earthquake. Um
Devastating earthquake happens. And one of the weird things about the earthquake was that
The earthquake happens at the 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 of them are melted shut. Amadeo goes in as soon as the earthquake is happening, the fires are happening.
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 two 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 a 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 five hundred thousand dollars, the equivalent of about five million dollars today 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 eight percent interest or something like that depending on their uh the 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? Um, 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 gonna 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 uh, you know, I'll I'll tell you this in a second, but as this thing becomes more and more successful, he never pays himself more than fifty thousand dollars a year in salary.
You might say, All right.
Well.
He doesn't need salary, he's gonna own the bank.
He also doesn't own any equity in this bank.
And so he d he just decides that
This should be owned by whoever wants to be a 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.'Cause these are people that didn't have a lot of assets.
to go with, but he believed in the people in his community. Okay. Sounds very similar to his uh other uh like Italian con uh cousins, Tony Soprano. I think they would lend money on a handshake. So but this guy are you saying with an iron fist. Yeah. Also to the everyday man who just needed a little something something like run away. Uh
So you're saying was he actually benevolent?
Yes, he's actually benevolent. So th which is the why this is kinda like
Lore, right? That is actually a kind of a cray. Because ever up till now, everything so far has been something that every business tycoon would say.
But then actually, you know.
They're basically.
Greedy pig. So this guy's the real deal. Pietro's the real deal. And when the when the fire happens and everybody wants and 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 f after the earthquakes and the fire happened, and he's the only guy lending money out. And 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 two days after the earthquake, not a single lone default.
And he d then d 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 would 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 that
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's like it sucks to have different banks
In every place'cause 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 back end.
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 it he expands all throughout California.
So it becomes very, very successful. He's basically pioneering interstate banking.
Um, 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 the stuff, the food distributors, like those are the people he knew. Uh he meets this entrepreneur. And again, he's trying to serve he's trying to bank the people who
are not qualified. So he meets this entrepreneur who's got this crazy idea.
Two
Create a film.
Even though this guy's never created films, create a film that's completely animated.
Just drawings. He's gonna 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.
Uh, Walt Disney Snow White, the first uh you know, Disney film. No shit. It was the first animate full length animated film. Nobody else would do it.
Uh, 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 the 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 fifty thousand dollars a year salary. He owns zero stock in Bank of America. His family
does not um you know inherit this giant fortune and he dies in nineteen forty nine not owing 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. Um that's absolutely insane. So it wasn't like a Sam Altman like, Oh, I don't own any shares type of thing. 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 uh 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 got. I I remember seeing like um a famous l well a famous logo of um or like they've used this logo before of a guy like pulling stuff.
Um an 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 f uh
the nineteen oh six earthquake, I think also helped their business thrive.
Um
This is cool. That's cool.
Uh I 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 three hundred billion?
That did not do it for personal profit.
And took no share in it.
Took no took no wealth out of it.
I that's gotta 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 wanna see
What mistakes w uh did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had, and I just want to avoid that.
And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five. And I did that. And so I list it out
Seven 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 list it 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 seven 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 seven 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'cause 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 uh 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 all the top of my head, uh, so I could be getting some of this wrong, but John Bogle founded that. So he created this thing called the Van uh Vanguard group.
which created one of the first V uh index funds and that is now uh VO.
And V T V T I, which are the two largest.
And it's something like a trillion dollars 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 fifty or a hundred million dollars.
uh 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
Kinda had a Robin Hood type of vibe. Well, y you did one on Chuck Feeney, who gave it away.
Which I think is is you know, simpler, but
I mean I 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.
W and you saw the story on Twitter where they're talking about f uh the l that was it, the lore?
Well, I was on the most interesting man in the world profile.
Twitter. Yeah. Sheel.
And he was talking actually about
uh Lloyds of London, how the during the he was he was telling a story more about Lloyds of London, which is about uh during the f when those fires happened, Lloyd at the time people were a little bit distrustful of like an overseas insurer.
And Lloyds of London said
Um
pay he they they they instructed their their team pay all claims
In full, regardless of what coverage they had.
And this just r this restored an and uh they put an incredible amount of trust in Lloyds of London. It gave them an incredible reputation. And so in times of trouble
uh you know, trouble is opportunity and they they sort of saw the opportunity to step in and be the most trusted part when everybody else was trying to deny as many of the claims as possible, even ones that they really should have paid out.
Lloyds went the uh exact other way and that helped build their reputation. And then at 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 very very seldom because
Uh when you're up against those situations it's it's
You you need c 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 um
story where he uh
Where he was like, Yeah, the data shows that we can raise prices and we will just make more revenue, but
that that's I mean, nothing will change. People are just gonna continue buying.
And an employee was like, Why don't you do this? He's like, Well because we said we're gonna be the lowest cost low cost provider. Like we said you wanna like go to buy everything from us at at a low price. So I don't care what the I don't care what the data says. The mission is the mission.
And there's all these I I've heard of 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?

Two mini stories. I and I can't go into too much detail'cause I I've never
Talked about.
I've never really announced these companies, but
My e commerce company.
When the tariffs hit.
And uh Trump started raising tariffs on all the countries. And you know, one country goes to thirty percent and China goes to a hundred fifty percent. And
Which is pretty crazy. I can imagine
You're selling something.

Round number. So let's just pretend something call this ball. Let's pretend this ball cost
You know.
A dollar to to make.
And you sell it for three dollars.
Okay, but then all of a sudden
You wait, these in China.
Now this ball no longer costs a dollar. It cost still costs the dollar, but then you have a hundred and fifty percent extra tariff.
Which means now this ball costs you two dollars and fifty cents.
So you can no longer charge three dollars for this, right? To make the same
uh you know, margin.
You this ball now needs to cost whatever, six, seven dollars.
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, like a 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'cause that would be like suicidal, but like let's
Let's not raise the price.
And so I wrote out this like long message, kinda like this like copywriting sort of thing, like
Hey guys, you know, blah blah blah. Almost like a bit like a
Like a f like a prank, basically. So I was like, as you know, this is
the terror situation, you know, the reality of the situation is this.
Just wanna let you guys know like
We're not raising prices. And I was and ever and literally the crowd roared on social media
thousands and thousands of like people sharing this in other communities and other groups being like
This is the type of company you 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 meetup, people love you.
I get Robin Hood out here, man. And then
Three months later.
I'm like looking at the peanut, our margin has dropped to three percent. We have a three percent eBita margin or five percent or something like that. And you know, I want it to be fifteen or twenty percent, and I'm like
Uh, how do we fix this? And it's like I guess we gotta raise the prices. And so I'm like trying 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 this cost. Yeah, it is. 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 uh short term
Like Roar of the Crowd.
Uh to be like, God, everybody loves it when I give away dollar bills for seventy cents. This is
I'm the man.
I'm a genius. And now I'm like, Oh God, this is the thing. 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's actually a l slightly different situation, but
Yeah.
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 ca y 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 Lloyds 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 I 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 gonna not just be stronger because we we survived.
But like I think there's a thrive possibility here if we just nailed
X Y Z, and we never would have even figured this out.
had this not happened. Right. And everybody else went this 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 th we'll see how that one plays out. But you know, I 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 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
Or have your eyes open during the trouble to figure out where is the opportunity. So we had Tim Ferris on uh the other day. Have you one of the most suggested books that he has or that he recommends to others is The Twenty Two Immutable Laws of Marketing. Have you ever read that book?
I've never actually read it. No. I started reading it this weekend because I'm just I I wanna learn and he was just on and uh whatever. And uh it's only a hundred and ten pages. It's very short.
And it's very easy.
And one uh 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 twenty two laws not to break.
And one of the laws refers to uh
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 you can't insult.
the the other thing. You just have to like objectively say what it is. So for example
Um
They talk about uh 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 gonna 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
Our 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's 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 the forty eight 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 with the new 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 I'll I'll be able to um 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 m 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 at Monkey Inferno.
We used to have a giant poster that I made.
Where it was th three triangles.
And then it was a picture of an ugly circle.
And it just said, different is better than better.
For sure.
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 i it's really hard to be better than something that's
been out, has more funding, more people working there, has been out for twenty m 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 d significantly different product that will be way better for a certain set of customers.
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Alright, back to the show.
Alright.
So the second one.
All right. The second one is modern day.
So we went
Yeah, whatever.
Thirty 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 the do you know who Preston Thorpe is?
Preston Thorpe?
I don't think so. You may have seen this story'cause 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. He's an engineer.
Except the
Weird thing is that he's incarcerated right now.
He's an
He's an employee and a 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 seventeen 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 were
on our computers in when we were teenagers.
Not me, of course, for anyone listening, but you know, others.
And uh you know, somewhere along the way he um he this is what he says. He goes
I get kicked out of my
house by my parents for being a stupid seventeen year old like kids are, but instead of being broken 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 head first into the d into the dark web
Uh where Silk Road you know, pre Silk Silk Road
of internet wholesale drugs. And he's like there was a place where you could buy chemicals from s 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 a uh you know, by the age of eighteen, nineteen years old selling drugs that I'm buying wholesale. So he's uh you know, he's buying buy
Like MDMA weed.
All right. He was buying that and he was selling it.
That's
So age twenty, 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 zero dollars in my pockets because lawyers and commissary are expensive and nobody pays you.
Uh nobody pays what they owe you when you uh when you go to jail.
Um
And so then I'm l I'm 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. Um, I can continue to live here and walk every day to a temp agency
hoping to get a ten dollar 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.
Uh, go see some old associates and come back home after a week with ten or twenty thousand dollars in my pocket.
And I could spend my time living in a comfy comfy luxury hotel.
Um 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 fourteen months after
Uh after a short fourteen of addiction and misery.
Where's he writing this? On his blog?
On his blog.
It's called my story.
And he says, I'm incarcerated now with this sentence. Um
Since twenty seventeen.
And he says the following He goes, I came in with a terrible attitude, a terrible outlook on life.
uh outlook on life and no hope for my future. I've spent
I have spent he spent three of the ten years that he's been there.
Um, in solitary confinement. So twenty two, twenty three hours a day.
Um he's and he writes parentheses ten percent 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 twenty.
They would ask, is this your first bid?
And he 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 c in 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 to better yourself.
But very few have the internet access. So he gets on
He immediately blows past the he gets hooked on programming.
And it blows past the college coursework, starts doing s starts becoming self taught and just sort of um
It's absolutely 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 ten percent 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 that was this was kind of an amazing
uh example of, you know, doing what you want. Yeah, uh of of making the most out of a uh otherwise pretty bleak situation.
He said the following quote. Well when you want to Google them, his LinkedIn came up first. And he is he's employed at at Torso, is that right?
Turstile, 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 the new serial for me. Um so so I thought this was pretty inspiring. I do have one more.
And this one is a a 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 Turso, I don't know what that company is. Is that a big reputable company?
I had never heard of him before this. So you know, they've gotten a lot of pub from this, but they're they're basically trying to rewrite SQL light is what I've 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 let me tell you something. Not only is he allowed.
Hm.
restricts himself to one 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'em on here. So if anybody can make that happen or knows them or can get us connected, please do.
Well Preston, if you see this comment on the YouTube, uh in the YouTube comment section, that'll be fine and we'll we'll actually pin it and we'll see if we can get you on.
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The Bank of America guy.
The generous Titan.
The the guy who builds the the biggest bank in the history of planet Earth.
takes no equity and essentially no salary in the in the process and doesn't yeah.
Some of these sort of uh
bank moguls who
S says all the right things, but then actually did all the right things. Yeah, it was 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 Stephan 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
Stephen.
In two thousand eleven.
He he's like a programmer, I think. In two thousand eleven he gets paid
to make a video about Bitcoin.
And uh again, two thousand eleven. So you know, Bitcoin, I think the white paper was like a
Oh nine thing. I think Bitcoin started in twenty ten. So this is one year into Bitcoin.
And he makes an educational video about Bitcoin, he gets paid seven thousand bitcoin to do it.
And seven thousand bitcoin at the time is like ten grand basically. It's a couple it's like a dollar or two per Bitcoin.
Who paid'em? Like who if you're a year in, he was it like
Satoshi? I mean was it like a
I don't think so. Um I think there was like, you know, some early companies that were, you know, interested in or you know, making educational content about this.
Um
So that same seven thousand bitcoin is today worth four hundred million bitcoin.
But of course that assumes you held. Now the crazy thing about Stephen is he held. He held the whole way.
Now you've probably wondering how this guy had 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 hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.
Well the answer is
He couldn't sell.
He lost the password to his Bitcoin because what he did was when he got the Bitcoin, he stored it. He did a best practice, he stored it on a hardware wallet.
The iron key. At the time the most
Secure way to hold Bitcoin.
And he writes the password down to his iron key 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, seven, ten K
Cool, I'm gonna hold this so we'll see what happens.
Life happens and he loses the piece of paper.
Is Iron Key a brand or is that like a protocol? So it's a company.
Wow. It's the name of the device, let's say.
Great a great product.
It works. Yeah, exactly.
Uh also great marketing for his product in a way.
I actually no, I take the back. It's pretty terrible working. This is my fear with hardware wallets in general, is you lose
You y you are the secur security vulnerability. You lose the password.
So he loses the password and he goes and he tries to guess
Guess what it was?
Guess is once.
Yes, it's twice.
Problem is Iron Key has a limit. You only get ten gets. Oh
So he has a four hundred million dollar treasure.
Sitting on a device that's in his house, just sitting on his desk.
And he can 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 eight of his ten password guesses. Oh left as of as of right now. Now
That alone is already just like oh d what a it's like a party story.
It's like it's weird. Dude, have you seen the the old TV show Twilight? Have you ever seen that? Like there's a famous episode thing?
No, no, no. This is from the fifties. 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 him.
And it's like one of these like be careful what you wish for type of thing.
And uh this is ex 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 this is that story. That sucks. It's almost worse. It's like he had he found the genie and lost the lamp. Actually what kind of what happened here. Um and so he
He's got this genie, he's got this lamp, he's got this four hundred million dollar 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
mm diamonds or gold or things like that. This guy's just got one in his house. It's crazy.
So now he's got two guesses left.
And this was as of twenty twenty one.
And
There's this team of basically like
cryptographers slash
Treasure hunters.
Who heard about this story.
And we're like
We're gonna try to break the iron key.
So they start working on all these methods. Now th the what they're what they're gonna do, they weren't able to figure out how to actually like
Just qu pick the lock.
To open it without knowing the password.
But they took a different approach. They're like, can we get rid of this 10 password limit?
Right. If we can get rid of the ten get ten 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, three or three or four years ago. Now here's the problem.
Stephan doesn't want to work with them.
Why?
He goes, I made a handshake deal with two other groups to try to crack this and I wanna honor that.
And they're like, what?
And so the the quote from these guys is we've cracked the iron key.
We just haven't cracked Stefan yet.
Oh, 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 is a narrative.
Wait, so it's seven thousand?
It's seven thousand.
Oh well so that's seven hundred million dollars.
Uh yeah, now it is, yeah.
So th there's a there should be enough to go around, right? Where you could have like three 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 fifty million.
Today.
And you guys go ahead. If you crack it, you there's I think it's eight hundred.
Million total or whatever.
Eight hundred million is is uh you know minus fifty. You can keep seven fifty 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.
Um isn't this just weird?
This is weird. Is he complete nonsense nonsense.
What's his uh 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 uh inspired.
The second story made me double inspired and the third story just pissed me off.
Is Stefan uh rich or 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 the skeptic called coil that
was like trying to do something interesting in crypto failed.
He now is the curator of Intraledger, which is like a
Kind of like a open payments protocol he's trying to make.
Um
Yeah, it's kinda weird. I mean, he's not eight hundred million dollars rich. Like the you know, the I think this would be the the greatest thing he's ever done.
Do you have any friends that have like like for example my roommate
James, uh 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.
Uh and he like, you know, spent a thousand bitcoin on whatever
Do you have any friends who have done crazy things like that?
I have a friend that lost two hundred bitcoin. I know that I know
Personally just which today, like you know, any every year it just sort of updates how bad that loss is.
So now it's a twenty three million dollar loss. He was kinda kicking himself when that was like a
You know.
Two hundred thousand dollar loss uh or whatever at the time. But he's like mind.
He's like I mined two hundred bitcoin it's on a like a a 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.
And
There's another guy that's got this story where he um
His
USB or hi hi his hard drive, his Bitcoin hard drive was in a landfill.
I heard he was trying to search for it. They wouldn't they wouldn't let him he's like, I will buy the whole landfill.
They tried to purchase the landfill, they turned them down.
And this guy's just like trying to get access to this to this landfill to go search for for his hardware.
So that's it. That's what I got for you. Three stories. Um that's just my gift to you this week, Sam.
Alright, that's awesome.
That's great. That's it. That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On a road less travel never looking back
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