My First Million - 3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Want Sam's top 7 books for entrepreneurs (& his reading strategy)? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/ndf Episode 736: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) tell 3 wild stories of business lore. — Show Notes: (0:00) Amadeo Giannini (23:31) Preston Thorpe (30:45) Stefan Thomas — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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 rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On a road, let's travel. 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 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. It was new to me. And I'm going to 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 remarried.

So his stepfather is in a business that you're kind of familiar with. He was a stepfather was a fruit stand wholesaler, 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 out of school, decides to come work in the family business

because 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, the business has done so well. 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 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, 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. It'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 that 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 insurance companies that way. So San Francisco's ruined and the narrative is basically like that's the end of that city. But 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, two days later or a week later, basically when all the banks are shut and San Francisco's in ruin, he pops open his bank again 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 $500,000, the equivalent of about $5 million today, from kind of friends, family, people who we had met during his time, as a businessman and 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 situation. His motto, or what he wanted was basically all the other banks are serving the elite, the big business is, 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, forget it. And so he's basically like, if nobody else is going to bank these people, I will. and 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 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 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 what happens next?

This sounds very similar to his other, like, Italian 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. also to the everyday man who just needed a little something, something to like run away. So you're saying, was he actually benevolent?

Yes, he's actually benevolent. So which is why this is kind of like lore, right? That's actually kind of a crazy story. Because up until now, everything so far has been something that every business tycoon would say. But then actually, you know, they're basically greeny pinks. So this guy'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 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, 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 he does that two 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 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, 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 because I can't expand. So he becomes the first guy to do the bank branch model. So he's like, we're going to have local branches in every place. I'm going to figure out how to sink the ledger in the back end, right?

I'm going to figure out how to make sure all the balances are kept up to date. I'm going to make sure that we sort of have a local model, but a central headquarters that's able to do this expansion. And 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 bank the people who are not qualified. So he meets this entrepreneur. He'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 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 $50,000 a year or 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.

Right. 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, I just do this. Yeah. I just love it. But 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 he started it in the North Beach of San Francisco, the famous Italian neighborhood of San Francisco. This is really cool. 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. Do they? I don't know about that. I remember seeing like a famous logo of, 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 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 founded something and actually did not benefit financially from it 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 wealth out of it? I mean, that's got to be, it's got to 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 did they all make, where 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 2025. And I did that. So I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life. And I explained what the difference is 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 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 it. 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 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 all 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 V-O-O and 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 $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 Robin Hood type of vibe.

Well, you did one on Chuck Feeney who gave it away, which I think is 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 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.

Sheel. And he was talking actually about Lloyds of London. He was telling a story more about Lloyds of London, which is about when those fires happened. At the time, people were a little bit distrustful of like an overseas insurer. And Lloyds of London said, they instructed their team, pay all claims in full,

regardless of what coverage they had. And this just restored it. And they put an incredible amount of trust in Lloyds 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 part, and 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 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, um,

story 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 then a pollie 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 the data says. The mission is the mission. And there's all these, 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? So I have two mini stories. And I can't go to 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%, which is pretty crazy. I can imagine you're selling something that typically, let's just round numbers.

So let's just pretend something caught this ball. Let's pretend this ball cost, you know, a dollar 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 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, you know, margin, 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 price.

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 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'm like hey as you know this is the terror situation you know this the reality of the situation is this i 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 like people sharing this in other communities and other groups being like this is the

type of company to you know 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. I get Robin Hood out here, man. And then three months later, I'm like looking at the P&L, our margin has dropped to 3%. We have a 3% EBITA margin, 5% or something like that. And you know, I wanted 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 trying to figure out 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. This is the hard part I'm referring to. This is what I'm referring to. 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 the second time. The second was a little bit different, which was one of my other company. we had a situation where the business is going great. It's 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, change 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, You wake up and you're just like, oh, my God, like my business that was so great yesterday, now I was so hopeful and now I'm absolutely hopeless. Like, we all know startups of 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 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 survived, but 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 happen. Right? And everybody else went to, 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 now. 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 it's written by these two guys that are marketing consultants, whatever, and they have a lot of wonderful clients. You kind of 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 framework, is to be the opposite. And 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're 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 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 that until recently, until I started reading this, and how perceptions reality. And so, like, the truth or there is no objective truth as to what products are necessarily better or worse. It's about what we think is better.

And so 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, 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 telling 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 three triangles and then it was a picture of an ugly circle. And it just said, different is better than better. For sure.

And 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 everybody's trying to be better and 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, right? Maybe you want the mouthwash that's really clinical. Maybe you want the mouthwash that tastes good, right? Like, what do you want? Well, our job is just to highlight the difference. 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 better product when actually you just have, to be a significantly different product that will be way better for a certain set of customers. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Tumblr needed to move fast. They were trying to produce trending content, but their marketing

department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. But now, they use HubSpot's customer platform to email real-time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. And the result was huge, three times more engagement and double the content creation. If you want to move faster like Tumblr, visit HubSpot.com. All right, back to the show. 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. You may have seen this story because 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 employees, and 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's, you know, sort of always like he's torrenting music and movies. He's doing what a lot of people were doing. You know, a lot of us who were on our computers when we were teenagers. Not me, of course, for anyone listening, but, you know, others. And, you know, somewhere along the way he, 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 broken homeless on couches, I come back. I'm apologetic. And I beg mom and dad to let me back in. that I'm sure was their plan and it worked. The problem was I stumbled head first into the dark web where Silk Road, pre-Silk Road of internet wholesale drugs. And he's like, there was a place where you could buy chemicals for pennies from sketchy companies in India, China, and Canada and Holland, and they would sell them in bulk.

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 age of 18, 19 years old, selling drugs that I'm buying wholesale. So he's a retail. He was buying. Like MDMA, weed, stuff like that. Okay.

All right, he was buying that and he was selling it. That's understood. 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 are expensive and nobody pays you, nobody pays what they owe you when you go to jail. And so then 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 the 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. 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 luxury hotel until I 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 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 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, he spent three 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 them limited internet access. So 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 course where it starts becoming self-taught and just sort of 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 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 owes or has to pay back. And then the rest, you know, he keeps it. He's like,

become this kind of inspiring figure. And I thought this is kind of an amazing example of, you know, doing what you want, you know, of making the most out of a otherwise pretty bleak situation. He said this following quote. Well, when you want to Google them, his link didn't came up first and he's employed at torso. Is that right? Tursso, yeah. Wow. Okay. 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 new serial for me. 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 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 basically trying to rewrite SQL light is what I picked up. 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 see him comment. Let me tell you something. Not only is he allowed, he 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. 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. They'll be fun. And we'll actually pin it and we'll see if we can get you on. Running my company, Hampton, it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses. And I'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets, emails, and clunky tools that do not talk to each other. It's like watching someone build a house with duct tape. So here's my take. Custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient. It's a competitive advantage to transform the way you do business. And that's why you need to know about a no-code platform called Bubble. With Bubble, you can build powerful web and mobile apps

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takes no equity and essentially no salary in the process. And doesn't, yeah, one of these sort of bank moguls who says all the right things, but then actually did all the right things. Yeah, he's about it. He's about that life. All right. So then we have Preston, inspiring guy,

rising up from, you know, his circumstances and doesn't let the past dictate the present. Okay, now the last one is a guy named Stefan Thomas. And this one is a different sort of lawyer. 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's like a programmer, I think. In 2011, he gets paid to make a video about Bitcoin.

And again, 2011, so, you know, Bitcoin, I think the white paper was like a 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, or, 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're by wondering, how does this guy have this incredible, you know, a 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 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 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 Iron Key a brand or is that like a protocol? So it's the company. Wow. It's the name of the device, let's say. Great product. It works. Yeah, exactly.

Also, great marketing for his product in a way. 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 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, guess is once,

guess is twice. The problem is Iron Key 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 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 10 password guesses. Oh, man. He has two left as of right now. Now, that alone is already just like, oh, dude, what a, it's like a party story. It'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. The 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 him.

And it's like, one of these like, be careful what you wish for type of thing. And this is it. This is 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 found the genie and lost the lamp. is actually what kind of what happened here.

And so he's got this genie. He's got this $400 million treasure sitting on his desk, which would be one of the biggest, like, found treasures. 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 two 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 going to try to break the iron key. So they start working on all these methods. Now, what they're going to 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're 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, three or three or four years ago. Oh, here's the problem. Stefan 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 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 proceeds. But there's enough to go around. Wait, so it's $7,000. It's $7,000? Oh, so that's $700 million. Yeah, now it is. Yeah. So 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 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, 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 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 creator of Intra Ledger, 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 a thousand 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. That was like a, you know, $200,000 loss or whatever at the time. But he's like, yeah, I mean, he's like, I mined 200 Bitcoin is on a like a hard drive somewhere. 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, his USB or his hard drive, his Bitcoin hard drive was in the 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 landfill to go search for his hardware. So that's it. That's what I got for you. Three stories.

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. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On a road. Let's travel. Never looking back. My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals.

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