3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

the first story made me inspired the second story maybe be double inspired and the third sword just pissed me off i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less trap alright 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 he was like this at his computer and it says share a bit of lore about yourself so sir share some lore and the lore is as 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 wanna 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 in a while but they are the billy of the week and the billy of the week is a person named i'm dale gia do you know who that is no i don't think so alright so ama you are the ability that we 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 rem remarried so his step father is in a business that you're kinda familiar with a he was step father was a fruit stand wholesaler which is i think kind of what your parents do they're their wholesale adjacent for fruit something like that that's like fruit broker they are produce and fruit brokers yes so that's exactly what his family did and at age fourteen ama mad drops out of school decides to come work in the family business because he needs to help the family make money and this guy an incredibly sharp business operator and so he joins the business he ends up just really taking over the business and really revamp it to the point where by the time he's in his mid twenties 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 hundred thousand dollars that doesn't sound like much this is the equivalent of a few million dollars 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 wanna get 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 got a 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 north beach neighborhood which is a strange name that's that's kind of a weird yeah bank of italy right haven't heard of it whatever yeah know but but that's that's his heritage be from so he starts doing this and this is nineteen o four now in nineteen o six something that 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 the 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 like they're building on fire because they wanted to get a payout from the the from the insurance companies that way so san francisco is ruined and the the narrative is basically like that's the end of that city but while most banks basically just shut their doors literally seal their vault some melted shut ama 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 loot 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 a week later basically when all the all the banks are shut in san francisco in ruin he pops open his bank again 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 five hundred thousand dollars equivalent about five million dollars today he from kind of friends family people who we had met during his time as a businessman in the fruit business and the business was i will lend out money to qualify or certain people and they will pay me eight percent interest or something like that depending on their the their the situation his motto or what do you want it was basically all the other banks are serving the elite the big business wealthy individuals but what if you were like me what if you were a fruit peddle what if you're a dock worker you're a seams you know forget 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 kinda 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 because that's what he never pays himself more than fifty thousand dollars a year in salary now you might say alright 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 he just decides that this should be owned by whoever wants to be anybody should be able to be shareholder i don't want the power concentrated in me so i don't own any of this so he creates bank of italy and he starts lending up 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 it sounds similar to his other like italian con cousins tony sop i think they would lend money on a handshake so but this guy are you saying it's an iron fist yeah i was like are also to the everyday bad who just needed a little something that's something like right away so you're saying was he actually ben malevolent yes he's actually ben evelyn so which is the why this is kinda like lore right that's actually a kind of a crazy door because ever till now everything so far has been something that every business ty could would say but then actually you know they're basically creamy pink so this guy the real deal pietro is the real 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 after the earthquakes of 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 get get 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 kinda crazy so wow he does that two days after the earthquake not a single loan defaults and he'd then starts get innovative again remember he's good operator and so he realized 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 the 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 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 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 the stuff the food distributors like those are the people he knew he meets this entrepreneur again he's trying to serve he's trying to bank the people who are not qualified so he meets this entrepreneur got this a 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 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 else he funds and finances personally actually and this not even out the bank walt disney's snow white the first you know disney film no shit is the first full length animated film nobody else would do it there's these crazy guys in san francisco that say we wanna 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 re brands the bank of italy elite 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 you know inherit this giant fortune and he dies in nineteen forty nine not owning a single share why 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 alt like oh i don't own any shares type of thing yeah 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 it him and he says he goes ama old that man that man gave us oxygen when we needed to breathe so crazy he started it in the north beach of san francisco the famous italian neighborhood of san francisco this is really cool i and i think if i remember correctly is this still the case doesn't bank of america they used the logo of him pulling fruit or something like that which i do i i don't know about i i remember seeing like a a famous a famous logo of or like they've used this logo before of a guy like pulling stuff and 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 nineteen o six earthquake i think also helped their business thrive this is cool that's cool 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 the 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 and it took no took no wealth out of it that's i mean that's gotta be it's gotta be number one alright 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 wanna see what works for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes were did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna avoid that and so how does hubspot ask 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 listed 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 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 wanna read it or there's a link guys know to there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guy 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 a john bog yeah vanguard so john bo there's this thing called i originally learned about them because there's this thing called bog heads it's like a have you ever been a bog heads dot com it's a forum where people discuss financial advice or yeah investing and the general thesis of bog heads is exactly what i buy into which is just super boring just buy an index fund john bog and missed all the top of my head so i could get some of this wrong but john bog founded that so he created the thing called the van vanguard group which created one of the first v index funds and that is now v o and v v t which are the two largest and it's something like a trillion dollars in assets or something insane like that and john bog owned a portion of it but i think when he died i think his net worth was like fifty or a hundred million dollars compared to the trillion dollars in au 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 robinhood hood type of eye well you you did one on chuck fee who gave it away which i think is is you know simpler but i mean i've heard of a lot of people who gave 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 the that was it the lore well i was on the most interesting man in the world's profile twitter yeah shield and he was talking actually about lloyd of london how during the he was he telling a story more about lloyd of london which is about during the when those fires happen lloyd at the time people were a little bit dis of like an overseas insurer and lloyd of london said pay they they they instructed their their team pay all claims in full regardless of what coverage they had and this just this restored and and they put an incredible amount trust in lloyd of london and give them an incredible reputation and so in times of trouble you know trouble as opportunity and they they sort of saw the opportunity to step in and be the most trusted part of when everybody else was trying to deny as many of the claims as possible even ones that they really should have paid out lloyd went the 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 the story i wouldn't 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 them 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 that's i mean nothing will change should people are just gonna continue buying and then employee was like why don't you do this he's like well because we said we're gonna be the low low cost provider like we said you wanna like be able to buy everything from us at at a low price so i don't care with i don't care what the data says the mission is the mission and there's all these i i've heard a a variety of stories like this that i'm right incredibly inspired by have you ever had an opportunity to take one of these moments and you actually took it or do you typically file the data so i've i have two too many stories i and i can't go to super much because i i've never talked about but never really announced these companies but by e commerce company and when the tariffs hit and trump started raising tariffs on all the countries and you know one country goes to thirty percent in china goes to a hundred fifty percent and which is pretty crazy like imagine you're selling something that typically let's just round number 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 three dollars okay but then all of a sudden you weigh these in china now this ball no longer cost a dollar it cost still cost the dollar but that you have a hundred and fifty percent extra tariff which means now this ball cost you two dollars and fifty cents so you can no longer charge three dollars for this right to make the same 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 price is the second company raised raise price and and they all did it like back to back because it's kinda like oh they took the bullet already let now now's is the time na of friday news dump like let's all raise our prices and we were about to do it at 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 a 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 kinda like this like copy sort of thing like hey guys you know blah blah almost like a bit like like a like a prank basically something hey as you know this is the tariff situation you know this was a reality of the situation is this i just wanna let you guys know like we're not raising prices and i was in never and literally the crowd roar 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 amazing pat on the back turns if you just give away look me people love you i get rob it put out here man and then three months later i'm like looking at p and our margin has dropped to three percent we have a three percent eb margin five percent or something like that and you know i wanted it to be fifteen or twenty percent and i'm like how do we fix this and it's was like i guess we gotta to raise the prices and like let my 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 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 short term like roar of the crowd to be like god everybody loves it when i give away dollar bills for seventy cents this is i'm the man i'm genius and now i'm like god this what's the second time the second was a little bit different which was one of my other companies we had a situation where the business is going great it it's actually 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 gang and then adversity hits something happened a competitor did something and then all of a sudden changed the dynamic 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 can 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 to 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've just at this moment where we're 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 of london moment here where we could do something that on the surface might sound a little crazy or a little unorthodox but in a time of trouble when everybody else is doing x what if we just did why 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 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 happen right and everybody else went to 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 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 that might be some pain but trouble is also opportunity if you are have your eyes open during the trouble to figure out where is the opportunity so we had tim ferris on 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 read that book i've never actually read it now i started reading it this weekend because i'm just i i wanna learn and he was just on and whatever and it's only a hundred and ten 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 so you kinda trust them but they give you twenty two 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 you can't insult the the other thing you just have to like objectively say what it is so for example they talk about a two different mouth washes one was list arena i forget the other one but the other one was the second place player and they're were like well instead of going after list and like mocking it we're just gonna say list makes you smell like you just left the doctor because it's like of clinical use and whatever we are the opposite this has 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 reread 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 perceptions 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 doing this like you could do the same thing we can new in the matrix moment you see the code you're like oh okay yeah it's pretty cool he's like are you still you telling me i'll i'll be able to dodge bullets it's like i'm telling you when you're ready you don'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 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 a 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 trying to one up themselves the only thing we to focus on is say how we're different the public can decide if that's better for them right maybe you want the mouth watched that's really clinical maybe you want the mouth of us that taste good right like what do you want well our job is just to highlight the difference and and it's really hard to be better than something that's been out has more funding more people working theirs been out for twenty 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 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 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 wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show alright so the second one alright the second one is modern day so we went you know whatever hundred 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 do you know who preston thor is preston thor 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 a 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 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 torrent music and movies he's doing what a lot of people were doing you know a lot of us who were on our computers in when we were teenagers not me of course for anyone listening but you know others and you know somewhere along the way he he this what he says he goes i get kicked out of my house by my parents for being a stupid seventeen year old the kids are but instead of being broken homeless on couches i come back i'm ap 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 into the dark web where silk road you you know pre silk silk road of internet wholesale drugs and he's like there's a place where you could buy chemicals from you know for pennies from sketchy companies in india and china and canada in holland and they would sell them in bulk so instead of just being totally ap and reformed i ended up going off to deep in and suddenly i'm making tens of thousands of dollars a week by the eight you know by the age of eighteen nineteen years old selling drugs that i'm buying wholesale so he's a you know so buying you're buying like md a we stuff like that okay is alright he was buying that and he was selling it that's so twenty he gets arrested for the first time they catch md mma 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 he goes a few later i leave prison was zero dollars in my pockets because lawyers and comm expensive and nobody pays you nobody pays what they owe you when when you go to jail and so then i'm i'm get out and i'm living in a halfway house it smells like crack smoke filled with parole officers and junkie 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 ten dollar an hour manual labor job but i don't have an idea 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 ten or twenty thousand dollars 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 rented an apartment i chose the latter and obviously i was back in prison a short fourteen months after after a short fourteen months of addiction and misery where's 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 twenty seventeen 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 have spent he spent three of the ten years that he's been there in solitary confinement so twenty two twenty three hours a day he and he writes parenthesis 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 his program where you can both enroll in a in college coursework work while you're in prison but you can also they also gave him limited internet access so some some prisons have this college kinda 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 he blows past the college course where it starts doing starts becoming self taught and just sort of gets absolutely fourteen fifteen 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 stories 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 is kind of an amazing example of you know doing what you want you of of making the most out of a otherwise pretty bleak situation he's said following quote well when you wanna google them his linkedin came up first and he he's employed that at cor is that right tu yeah wow okay and so what what'd you say so 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 sign it says on his linkedin he gets out this year i know i'm excited for i'm rooting for him this is the this is the the new serial for me 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 guy he works at is it tu i don't know what that company 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 sequel light is was what i picked up if you're if you're somehow can connected with this guy i'm not sure if he's allowed to watch youtube or whatever i would love like see him comment in front bumper let me tell you something not only is he allowed he restricts himself to one hour a day of youtube entertainment and the rusty he spence cody he's got more self control than you were re they're just like us yeah yeah he did a podcast recently so i saw him on a podcast from prison and i really wanna get him on here so if anybody can make that happen or knows him or can get us connected please do we'll press and 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 should 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 by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of the screen no coding required by the way i use bubble on a ton of different apps including hampton and if you want help building something complex on bubble you have to bring in zero code they're the top bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plug creator for the platform they can build anything custom portals saas products and they do it about ten times faster and cheaper than traditional development zero code is also all about ai business automation transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones so stop cobb together different tools and solutions and head to zero code dot com that's zero code as in the word zero and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that sam sent it alright so i gave you one 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 does yeah some one of these sort of bank mo who says all the right things but then actually did all the right he's about kind of amazing he's about that life alright so then we a preston inspiring guy rising up from 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 different sort of lore story that just kind of also captured my imagination and sort of broke my brain a little bit alright so this guy stefan in two thousand eleven he he's like a program i think in two thousand eleven he gets paid to make a video about bitcoin and again in two thousand eleven so you know bitcoin i think the white paper was like a o nine thing i think bitcoin started in twenty ten so this 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 him like who if you're a year in he 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 or you know making educational content about this so that same seven thousand bitcoin is today worth four hundred million bitcoin but of course that assumes you held now the crazy name about stefan is he held he held the whole way now you by wondering how does 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 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 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 he was a little bit of a smaller thing you 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 yeah protocol so it's a cloud brand wow company that that makes the it's the name of the device what let's say great a great product it worked yeah exactly also great marketing for his product in a way i actually that i take the back it's pretty terrible market this is my fear with hardware while it's in general is you lose you you are the soc 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 he only get ten guest 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 h done to him to try to see if the h can bring it back out of his somebody his mind nothing's working he has now tried eight of his ten password guess oh me two left as a as of right now now that alone is already just like oh dude what a it's like a party story gets weird dude have you seen them the old tv show twilight if you're seeing that like there's a famous episode thing or no no no this is from the fifties there's a and there's a very famous episode where this guy is like all i wanna 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 this is it this is like it's like when you asked the genie for something but you weren't specific enough and it like is this is that story if 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 got four hundred million dollar treasure sitting on his desk which would be what are the biggest like found treasures sunken you know thinking about sunken treasures all around the world or discoveries of you know diamonds or gold or things like that this guy just got one in his house it's crazy so now he's that two guesses left and this was as of twenty twenty one and there's this team of basically like crypto cinematographer 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 that 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're like can we get rid of this ten password limit right if we can give rid of the ten get ten guests 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 oh way when did this happen like recently this happened a few years ago three or three four years ago here's the problem stefan doesn't wanna work with them why he 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 if 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 of of the proceeds but there's a never go around wait so it's seven thousand it's seven thousand oh what so that's seven hundred million dollars yeah now it is yeah so that there's 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 this it's eight hundred million total or whatever eight hundred million is is 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 isn't that this just weird this is weird is he well complete non 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 maybe be double inspired and the third story just pissed me off is stefan 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 this skeptical called coil that was like trying to do something interesting in crypto failed he now is a creator of inter ledger which is like a kind of like a open payments protocol he's trying to make yeah it's kinda i mean he's not eight hundred million dollars rich like the you know 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 was was like a hacker early on and he was hardcore in the space and he doing the typical stuff like he was buying things like as soon as bitcoin was accepted in this weird would experimental away 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 we have done crazy things like that i have a friend that lost two hundred bitcoin i know that i don't know personally just which today like you know and 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 of kicking himself when that was like a you know two hundred thousand dollar loss or whatever at the time but he's like like he's like i mine two hundred bitcoin it's on a like a a a a a hard drive somewhere i think i i think i threw out the hard drive i think threw throughout the laptop like it's gone and insane there's another guy that's got the story where he his usb are he his hard drive his bitcoin hard drive was in the landfill the her he was trying to search for it they wouldn't they wouldn't let him he's like i will buy the whole landfill it tried to purchase the landfill and they turned them down and this guy just like trying to get access to to this landfill to go search for various hardware so that's it that's what i got for you three stories that's just my gift to you this week sam alright that's awesome that's great that's it the pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put it all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna 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 billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn founders and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure fear your courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode