3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

- August 18, 2025 (7 months ago) • 39:19

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	The first story made me inspired. The second story made me double inspired. The third story just pissed me off. Alright, so I have a theme here for this episode. Have you seen this meme that's going around on Twitter? It's a stick figure at his computer and it says, "Share a bit of lore about yourself." By "lore" I mean the epic backstory or the untold backstory of something. 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 in a while, but they are the Billy of the Week. The Billy of the Week is a person named Amadeo Giannini. Do you know who that is?
00:51	Sam Parr	No, I don't think so.
00:53	Shaan Puri	Alright, so Amadeo, you are the "Billy of the week". Here's the story. This guy is born in San Jose to Italian immigrant parents. His father is murdered when he's seven years old, so he's raised by his mom. His mom remarries. His stepfather is in a business you're kind of familiar with: his stepfather was a fruit stand wholesaler, which I think is kind of what your parents do. They're wholesale-adjacent for fruit—something like that; it's like a fruit broker.
01:22	Sam Parr	They are produce and fruit brokers, yes.
01:26	Shaan Puri	So that's exactly what his family did. At age 14, Amadeo dropped out of school and decided to come work in the family business because he needed to help the family make money. He's an incredibly sharp business operator. He joined the business, ended up really taking it over and revamping it. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, the business had done so well they were selling fruit all throughout California. He was 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 $2,000,000 back then [around 1900]. He was thinking about what's next and decided he wanted to give back to his community a little bit. He volunteered to be on the board of a bank. While at the bank he noticed something he didn't like: the bank would basically lend money to the people who didn't need it and deny money to the people who needed it. The bank was all about underwriting the least risky loans it could do, lending to very wealthy people with a lot of collateral, while the small business person who needed it was not getting it. He then decided to create his own bank. He said, "You know what? I'm gonna make my own bank that's going to serve the little man, the common man." He called it the Bank of Italy and opened it in San Francisco in the North Beach neighborhood.
02:50	Sam Parr	Which is a strange name. That's... that's kind of a...
02:52	Shaan Puri	Weird name: Bank of Italy, right? Haven't heard of it—whatever. But that's his heritage; that's where he's from. So he starts doing this. This is 1904. In 1906, something happens in San Francisco: a devastating earthquake. One of the strange things about the quake was that many people didn't have earthquake insurance but did have fire insurance. So people would let their buildings burn after the earthquake because they wanted a payout from the insurance companies. San Francisco was ruined, and the narrative was basically that the city was finished. While most banks shut their doors—literally sealing their vaults; some even melted shut—Amadeo went in as the earthquake and fires were happening. He took all the money out of the vault because he didn't want looters to take the money his customers had stored there. He put the cash in a fruit wagon, under a box of oranges, and got it out of there. Two days later—or a week later—when most banks were still closed and San Francisco was in ruins, he reopened his bank by the wharf. On a table—basically a wooden plank—he had his box of cash and announced, "We're back. We're open for business. If you need a loan, just come to me."
04:12	Sam Parr	Where did the original money come from, by the way?
04:14	Shaan Puri	So, he had sold his fruit stand business and then raised $500,000—the equivalent of about $5,000,000 today—from friends, family, and people he had met during his time in the fruit business.
04:25	Sam Parr	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."
04:35	Shaan Puri	His motto, or what he wanted, was basically: all the other banks are serving the elite — the big businesses, wealthy individuals. But what if you were like me? What if you were a fruit peddler, a dock worker, a seamstress? Forget it. So he was basically like, if nobody else is going to bank these people, I will. 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 did it. As this thing became more and more successful, he never paid himself more than $50,000 a year in salary. You might say, "All right, well he doesn't need a salary — he's going to own the bank." He also didn't own any equity in the bank. He decided this should be owned by whoever wanted to — anybody should be able to be a shareholder. He didn't want the power concentrated in him. So he creates the Bank of Italy and starts lending out money, often on a handshake, with no contract and often with no underwriting, because these were people who didn't have a lot of assets. He believed in the people in his community.
05:37	Sam Parr	So, this sounds very similar to his other, like, Italian cousins — Tony Soprano. I think they would lend money on a handshake. But this guy... are you saying? </FormattedResponse>
05:46	Shaan Puri	With an iron fist.
05:47	Sam Parr	Yeah, also to the everyday man who just needed a little something-something right away. So you're saying, "Was he actually benevolent?"
05:57	Shaan Puri	Yes, he's actually benevolent, which is why this is kind of like lore, right? That's actually a crazy story, because up till now everything has been what every business tycoon would say. But then, actually, you know, they're basically greedy "pinks" [unclear: possibly "pricks"].
06:11	Sam Parr	So, this guy's the real deal. Pedro's the real deal.
06:13	Shaan Puri	And when the fire happens — and everybody else ran away — he decides to give loans to people with no collateral, no contract. The crazy thing about this is that during that one year after the earthquakes and the fire, he’s the only guy lending money out. He does it with no underwriting, no contracts, and yet every single loan gets paid back. Every penny of every loan gets repaid, so he did not lose money on a single loan. That’s a remarkable act of good faith in humanity. Two days after the earthquake, not a single loan defaults. After that, he starts to get innovative again. Remember, he’s a good operator. At that time, the bank business was local: you’d open a bank and serve people within your geographic radius, and that was it. Because of the way he ran his fruit business in California — selling fruit up and down the coast — he realized it was a problem to have different banks everywhere. He couldn’t expand. So he became the first to adopt the bank branch model: local branches in multiple places with a central headquarters syncing the ledger on the back end. He figured out how to keep all the balances up to date and to scale that local-plus-central model. He expanded all throughout California, and it became very, very successful. He was basically pioneering interstate banking. He helped fund the California agricultural boom, providing credit to farmers, vineyards, and food distributors — the people he already knew. He also met an entrepreneur with a crazy idea: to create a completely animated film, turning drawings into a movie, even though the fellow had never made films before. That fellow was Walt Disney. He believed in him and personally financed him — not even out of the bank. That financed Walt Disney’s Snow White, the first Disney feature film.
08:16	Sam Parr	No shit.
08:16	Shaan Puri	It was the first full-length animated film. Nobody else would do it. There were these crazy guys in San Francisco who said, "We want to build this bridge — a big, giant bridge." He said, you know what: even though all the other banks had deemed this too risky, he funded the Golden Gate Bridge. Over time he ended up merging with another bank called the Bank of Italy and rebranded Bank of Italy to Bank of America, creating Bank of America, which became the biggest bank on earth. Even while it did that, he still never took more than $50,000 a year in salary. He owned zero stock in Bank of America; his family did not inherit this giant fortune. He died in 1949 not owning a single share of the bank that he founded. His philosophy was that "serving the needs of others is the only legitimate business."
09:03	Sam Parr	What a badass story. That was really good—good job. That's... that's what a baller is. That's absolutely insane. So it wasn't like a Sam Altman, like, "Oh, I don't own any shares" type of thing.
09:13	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I'll just do this. Yeah... I just—I just love it.
09:17	Sam Parr	It was, but that—that was real.</FormattedResponse>
09:19	Shaan Puri	So, yeah — Walt Disney said about him: "Amadeo — that man, that man gave us oxygen when we needed to breathe." That's crazy.
09:29	Sam Parr	He started it in North Beach in San Francisco — the famous Italian neighborhood. This is really cool. And I think, if I remember correctly... is this still the case? Doesn't Bank of America use a logo of him pulling fruit or something like that, which I've really...
09:47	Shaan Puri	"I don't know about that."
09:48	Sam Parr	I remember seeing a famous logo—one they've used before—of a guy pulling stuff. Another one, interestingly, is Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo was started in San Francisco as well. I think they started as a... I think the 1906 earthquake 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 on this scale. </FormattedResponse>
10:20	Shaan Puri	I mean, what are the odds that there's a founder of a company worth more than 300 billion who did not do it for personal profit, took no share in it, and took no wealth out of it? I mean, that's gotta be... it's gotta be number one.
10:36	Sam Parr	Alright. I read a ton—I would say almost a book a week. The reason I read so much is because my philosophy toward reading is that I want to see what works for the winners I admire and what strategies they use. I also want to see what mistakes they all made, what common flaws they had, and then avoid those. HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025, and I did. I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained the differences they had on me and the actions I took because of each book. I also listed my very particular ways of reading, because I'm pretty strategic about how I read, how I read so much, and how I remember what I read. I put this together in a very simple guide: it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and my reading approach. You can scan the QR code below if you want to read it, or there's a link in the description—just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide I made. So, check it out below. Have you heard of John Bogle? </FormattedResponse>
11:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah, Vanguard.</FormattedResponse>
11:44	Sam Parr	So, John Bogle. There's this thing called—I originally learned about him because there's this thing called Bogleheads. Have you ever been to bogleheads.com? It's a forum where people discuss financial advice or, yeah, investing. The general thesis of Bogleheads is exactly what I buy into, which is just super boring: just buy an index fund. John Bogle... and this is off the top of my head so I could be getting some of this wrong, but John Bogle founded that. He created the Vanguard Group, which created one of the first index funds, and that is now VOO and VTI, which are the two largest. It's something like a trillion dollars in assets or something insane like that. John Bogle owned a portion of it, but I think when he died his net worth was like $50 or $100 million compared to the trillion dollars in AUM [assets under management] that the company has. So not the same as this Bank of America guy, but a little bit of a similar—kind of had a Robin Hood type of vibe.
12:40	Shaan Puri	Well, you did one on Chuck Feeney, who gave it away, which I think is, you know, similar. 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 pretty remarkable.
12:54	Sam Parr	"And you saw this story on Twitter where they're talking about that... was it the lore?"</FormattedResponse>
13:00	Shaan Puri	Well, I was on the Most Interesting Man in the World's profile.
13:03	Sam Parr	"Most interesting man on Twitter."
13:05	Shaan Puri	Yeah, Shiel — he was talking about Lloyd's of London. He was telling a story about when those fires happened. At the time, people were a little distrustful of an overseas insurer, and Lloyd's of London instructed their team to "pay all claims in full regardless of what coverage they had." This restored an incredible amount of trust in Lloyd's of London and gave them an outstanding reputation. So, in times of trouble — trouble is opportunity — they saw the chance to step in and be the most trusted partner. While everybody else was trying to deny as many claims as possible, even ones they really should have paid out, Lloyd's went the exact opposite way, and that helped build their reputation. He had a footnote at the bottom that this is similar to how Bank of America started. I thought that was interesting; I had never really heard this story before, so I went and started reading about it.
14:02	Sam Parr	So I think about these moments all the time—these moments where the data says to do one thing and everyone says to do that one thing, and you choose to do the opposite. It doesn't make sense, and somehow it works. I've had many opportunities in my career to take those chances, and I essentially never do—very, very seldom. When you're up against those situations, you need courage; you need to be a little crazy; you need a bunch of that. For example, I think Jeff Bezos has this story where the data showed they could raise prices and just make more revenue. The data suggested nothing would change—people would continue buying. An employee asked, "Why don't you do this?" Bezos replied, "Because we said we're going to be the lowest-cost provider. We want people to 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." I've heard a variety of stories like this that I'm incredibly inspired by. Have you ever had an opportunity to take one of these moments and actually taken it, or do you typically follow the data?
15:09	Shaan Puri	So I have two mini-stories. I can't go into too much detail because I've never really announced these companies, but my e-commerce company... When the tariffs hit and Trump started raising tariffs on various countries — one went to 30% and China went to 150% — things got pretty crazy. Imagine you're selling something; let's round the numbers. Pretend this ball cost $1 to make and you sell it for $3. Then suddenly, because you made these in China, the ball still costs $1 to make, but you now have a 150% tariff. That tariff adds $1.50, so the unit cost becomes $2.50. You can no longer charge $3 and keep the same margin, so the product would need to be priced much higher to maintain profitability. Everyone in our space started raising prices. One company raised prices, the next company raised prices, and they all did it back-to-back. It was like, "They took the bullet already — now's the time." Like a Friday news dump: "Let's all raise our prices." We were about to do it. The CEO wanted to raise prices. I said, what if we do the exact opposite? What if we simply don't raise the price at all? Not cut it — that would be suicidal — but just don't raise it. I wrote a long message, kind of copywriting-style, almost like a prank. It said something like: "Hey guys. As you know, this is the tariff situation... This is the reality of the situation; we just want to let you know we're not raising prices." Literally, the crowd roared on social media. Thousands and thousands of people shared it in other communities and groups, saying, "This is the type of company to respect." I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." Pat on the back.
17:03	Sam Parr	Turns out, if you just give away free stuff, people love you.
17:07	Shaan Puri	Fucking Robinhood out here, man. Then, three months later I'm looking at the P&L — our margin has dropped to 3%. We have a 3% EBITDA margin, 5% or something like that. You know, I want it to be 15% or 20%, and I'm like, how do we fix this? It's like, I guess we gotta raise the prices. So I'm gonna try to figure out how to go back at this and raise the prices now, because it just doesn't make any sense to run this business at this cost. Yeah... and this
17:36	Sam Parr	"Is the hard part referring to this? Is this what it... this is the hard part."
17:40	Shaan Puri	So I took the short-term "roar of the crowd" to be, like, "God — everybody loves it when I give away dollar bills for 70¢. This is... I'm the man. I'm a genius." And now I'm like, "Oh God... this..."
17:54	Sam Parr	Is... what's the second time?
17:56	Shaan Puri	The second was a little bit different, which was one of my other companies. We had a situation where the business was going great — actually a slightly different situation. The principle: trouble is opportunity. This wasn't a pricing giveaway or anything like that. It was business going gangbusters, and then adversity hit. Something happened: a competitor did something and all of a sudden it changed the dynamics. Now we had to figure out what was going on. In the moment it definitely feels like trash. You wake up and you can't — you wake up and you're just like, "Oh my God, my business that was so great yesterday..." You go from being so hopeful to absolutely hopeless. We all know startups are this roller coaster; even knowing that doesn't quite prepare you for when you go from a peak and then the roller coaster starts to drop. We had a moment where one mindset was "damage control" — minimize the amount of bleeding that happens here. But before we go into just "minimize damage" mode, let me ask a question: is there a way for us to come out the other side of this much better off? Is there a Lloyd's of London moment here where we could do something that, on the surface, might sound a little crazy or unorthodox, but in a time of trouble when everybody else is doing X, what if we just did Y? Would that work? Is there a possibility for that? I can't go into too much detail here, but I think it led to a slightly different mindset: actually, you know what — when we come out the other side of this we're not just going to be stronger because we survived, I think there's a thrive possibility here if we just nailed X, Y, Z. We never would have even figured this out had this not happened. Everybody else went left; if we go right, I think we might end up really separating ourselves from the pack. We'll see how that one plays out. I always remind myself that within every disadvantage is a small potential advantage, if you can figure it out. Trouble is opportunity. The natural reaction in trouble is to see problems and pain — yes, there will be challenges and pain — but trouble is also opportunity if you have your eyes open during the trouble to figure out where the opportunity is.
20:13	Sam Parr	So, we had Tim Ferriss on the other day. One of the most suggested books that he recommends to others is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Have you read that book?
20:24	Shaan Puri	"I've never actually read it."
20:25	Sam Parr	No — I started reading it this weekend because I want to learn. He was just on and whatever, and it's only 110 pages. It's very short and very easy. It's written by two guys who are marketing consultants; they have a lot of wonderful clients, so you have to trust them. They give you 22 laws not to break. One of the laws refers to the idea that when everyone is going one way, it's significantly better and easier for you not to try to be better than them, but to be different. One framework is to be the opposite and to call out that opposite. When you call it the opposite, you can't insult the other thing — you just objectively state what it is. For example, they talk about two different mouthwashes. One was Listerine; I forget the other one, but the other was the second-place player. Instead of going after Listerine and mocking it, they said, "Listerine makes you smell like you just left the doctor," because it's clinical. We are the opposite: this is the one that actually tastes good. They're not exactly saying one's better or worse; they're just saying, "This is what this is," and then, "We are the exact opposite." The book gives you all of these laws to follow. It's an amazing book, and I'm rereading it. What I'm learning is that what you're describing is a marketing problem — and that most problems in business are marketing issues. I didn't really think about that until recently, until I started reading this and saw how perception is reality. There is no objective truth as to what products are necessarily better or worse; it's about what we think is better. This book is really good; you should reread it. What you're describing is sort of like when you reread "The 48 Laws of Power" and you see, "Oh, this person is committing this; they are doing this." You could do the same thing with you.
22:19	Shaan Puri	Could do a Neo in The Matrix moment, where you see the code and you're like, "Ah—okay."
22:22	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's.
22:23	Shaan Puri	"Pretty cool," he's like. "So you're 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 basically that 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: it had three triangles and then a picture of an ugly circle, and it just said "Different is better than better."
22:52	Sam Parr	For sure.
22:52	Shaan Puri	I made this for our team because we're always trying to say how we're better than everybody. Everybody says they're better and everyone's trying to one-up each other. The only thing we have to focus on is saying how we're different. The public can decide if that's better for them. Maybe you want the mouthwash that's really clinical. Maybe you want the mouthwash that tastes good. What do you want? Our job is just to highlight the difference. It's really hard to be "better" than something that's been out longer, has more funding, and has more people working there — something that's been out for 20 extra years. It's really hard to topple the incumbent with a better product. Actually, you just have to be a significantly different product that will be way better for a certain set of customers.
23:31	Sam Parr	Alright, so the second one.
23:33	Shaan Puri	Alright. The second one is modern day. So, we went—whatever—130 years ago. Now we have a situation today that kind of inspired me. I think it'll inspire a lot of other people, too. Do you know who Preston Thorpe is? </FormattedResponse>
23:49	Sam Parr	Preston Thorpe. "I don't."
23:51	Shaan Puri	You may have seen this story because it was going viral recently. Here's the story. I saw a headline about a guy who's a software developer — an engineer — except the weird thing is that he's incarcerated right now. He's an employee and a software engineer for them, but he's serving time in a prison in Maine. He has been there for a while, so I wondered: how did this happen? What is the story here? The story is pretty crazy. Basically, this guy grows up and, at 17 years old, he's a computer geek. He was torrenting music and movies and doing what a lot of people did on their computers as teenagers. Somewhere along the way he says: > "I get kicked out of my house by my parents for being a stupid 17 year old, like kids are. Instead of being broken and homeless on couches, I come back apologetic and beg mom and dad to let me back in. That was their plan and it worked. The problem was I stumbled headfirst into the dark web — pre-Silk Road internet wholesale drugs. There was a place where you could buy chemicals for pennies from sketchy companies in India, China, Canada and Holland, and they would sell them in bulk. 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, selling drugs that I'm buying wholesale." So — what was he buying?
25:28	Sam Parr	He was buying.</FormattedResponse>
25:30	Shaan Puri	Like MDMA, weed—stuff like that.
25:33	Sam Parr	Okay, alright. He was buying that and he was selling it. That's under age 20.
25:38	Shaan Puri	He gets arrested for the first time. They catch MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver and some weed coming from California. Because of the weed, he ends up going to prison. He goes to prison for a couple of years and then gets out. Here's what he says 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. I get out and I'm living in a halfway house. It smells like crack smoke; it's filled with parole officers and junkies. I'm left with a difficult choice. I can continue to live here and walk every day to a temp agency hoping to get a $10 an hour manual labor job, but I don't have an ID or a Social Security card. 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. 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 fourteen months after—fourteen months of addiction and misery."
26:42	Sam Parr	Where is he writing this—on his blog?
26:44	Shaan Puri	On his blog, it's called My Story, and he says, "I've been incarcerated now with this sentence since 2017." He then writes the following: > "I came in with a terrible attitude, a terrible outlook on life, and no hope for my future. I've spent — I've spent three of the ten years that I've been here in solitary confinement, so 22, 23 hours a day. (10% of my life?) 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 I would say, 'First — I'm not coming back here.' They would always laugh. The older heads would always laugh. Everyone says that, but everyone comes back, and sure enough I did." He goes on to explain that during the pandemic he got lucky: he happened to be at a prison in Maine that has a program where you can enroll in college coursework while you're in prison, and they also gave him limited internet access. Some prisons have college coursework to help you better yourself, but very few have internet access. He got on the internet, immediately got hooked on programming, and blew past the college coursework. He started to become self-taught and spent absolute hours — 14, 15 hours a day — learning how to code and learning about databases. He became a huge open-source contributor to projects. People saw his open-source code but didn't know his backstory, so they reached out with job offers and then found out about him. One company was willing to actually employ him. For the past few years he's been working a full-time job from prison. He pays 10% of his wages to [whatever he owes or is required to pay], and he keeps the rest. He's become this kind of inspiring figure. I just thought this was an amazing example of doing what you want — of making the most out of an otherwise pretty bleak situation. He said the following quote: "Well, when you when..." [transcription cuts off]
28:43	Sam Parr	I Googled him. His LinkedIn came up first, and he's employed at Torso. Is that right? Torso? Yeah. Wow. Okay. And so, what did he say? </FormattedResponse>
28:51	Shaan Puri	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."
29:10	Sam Parr	This is fantastic. This is a great find. It says on his LinkedIn that he gets out this year.
29:14	Shaan Puri	I know I'm excited for him. I'm rooting for him. This is the—this is the new cereal for me. I thought this was pretty inspiring. I do have one more, and this one is a different lore story.
29:26	Sam Parr	I hope this, by the way. If you know—if you're connected to this guy, he works at Terso. I don't know what that company is. Is that a big, reputable company? </FormattedResponse>
29:32	Shaan Puri	I had never heard of him before this. They've gotten a lot of publicity from it, but they're basically trying to rewrite SQLite, is what I picked up. </FormattedResponse>
29:38	Sam Parr	If you can somehow get connected with this guy, I'm not sure if he's allowed to watch YouTube or whatever...
29:57	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, yeah — he did a podcast recently. I saw him on a podcast from prison, and I really want to get him on here. If anybody can make that happen, or knows him or can get us connected, please do."
30:08	Sam Parr	Well, Preston—if you see this comment in the YouTube comments section, that'll be fun. We'll actually pin it and see if we can get you on.
30:15	Shaan Puri	Alright. So I gave you one: the Bank of America guy — the generous titan. The guy who built the biggest bank in the history of planet Earth who took no equity and essentially no salary in the process. He’s one of those bank moguls who says all the right things and then actually did all the right things.
30:35	Sam Parr	Yeah, he's about it.
30:36	Shaan Puri	It's kind of amazing—he's about that life. Alright, so then we have Preston, an inspiring guy rising up from his circumstances and who 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 lore story that captured my imagination and sort of broke my brain a little bit. Alright, so this guy Stefan—in 2011 he's like a programmer. In 2011 he gets paid to make a video about Bitcoin. And again, 2011—so no Bitcoin [meaning it was very early]. I think the white paper was like '09; I think Bitcoin started in 2010, so it's one year into Bitcoin and he makes an educational video about Bitcoin. He gets paid 7,000 to do it. And 7,000 bitcoin at the time is like $10. Basically it's a couple—it's like a dollar or two per bitcoin.
31:23	Sam Parr	Who paid him? Like, who? If you're a year in, was it like Satoshi? I mean, was it like a...</FormattedResponse>
31:28	Shaan Puri	I don't think so. I think there were some early companies that were interested in, or making, educational content about this. So that same 7,000 Bitcoin is today worth $400,000,000. But of course that assumes you held onto it. The crazy thing about Stefan is he held the whole way. Now you might be wondering: how does this guy have this incredible belief, this conviction, this foresight? Is he an investing genius? Does he have the self-discipline of a Navy SEAL? How did he get himself to hold all the way up to Bitcoin today at $118,000? The answer is: he couldn't sell — he lost the password to his Bitcoin. What he did was, when he got the Bitcoin, he stored it using best practice: on a hardware wallet, the IronKey at the time — the most secure way to hold Bitcoin. He wrote the password for his IronKey on a piece of paper, folded it up, and put it somewhere safe. The problem is he forgot about it. At the time Bitcoin was a smaller thing — it was, you know, around $7,000–$10,000 — and he thought, "Cool, I'm going to hold this, we'll see what happens." Life happens, and he loses the piece of paper.
32:32	Sam Parr	"Is IronKey a brand, or is that like a... protocol? So it's a company?" </FormattedResponse>
32:37	Shaan Puri	It's a company that makes the... it's the name of the device, let's say.
32:40	Sam Parr	"Great product. It works."
32:41	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. Also great marketing for his product—no, I take that back; it's pretty terrible marketing. This is my fear with hardware wallets in general: you are the security vulnerability. You lose the password. He loses the password and he goes and tries to guess what it was—guesses once, guesses twice. The problem is IronKey has a limit: you only get 10 guesses. So he has a $400,000,000 treasure sitting on a device that's in his house, just sitting on his desk, and he can't unlock it. He tries everything. He tries to remember. He looks everywhere. He even has hypnosis done to him to try to 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. Here's where it gets weird.
33:37	Sam Parr	Dude, have you seen the old TV show Twilight? Have you ever seen that? Like, there's a famous episode... the
33:42	Shaan Puri	"Vampire thing or no?"
33:43	Sam Parr	This is from the fifties. There's a very famous episode where a guy says, "All I wanna do is read all day." Then there's a doom apocalypse: the world ends and everyone dies. He's all by himself and thinks, "Finally — I get to read all day." As he's walking to grab his favorite book, his glasses fall off and he mistakenly steps on them. It's one of those "be careful what you wish for" stories. It's like when you ask a genie for something but you weren't specific enough — it's that kind of story. That sucks; it's almost worse.
34:16	Shaan Puri	It's like he had found the genie and lost the lamp. It's actually—what happened here? So he's got this genie, he's got this lamp, he's got this $400,000,000 treasure sitting on his desk, which would be one of the biggest found treasures. Think about sunken treasures all around the world, or discoveries of diamonds, gold, or things like that—this guy's just got one in his house. It's crazy. Now he's got two guesses left, and this was as of 2021. There's a team of basically cryptographers/treasure hunters who heard about the story and decided, "We're going to try to break the Iron Key." They started working on all these methods. They weren't able to figure out how to pick the lock to open it without knowing the password, but they took a different approach. They asked: can we get rid of this ten-password limit? If we can remove the ten-guess limit, we can guess an infinite number of times. What they did was figure out how to use a laser to cut open the USB without triggering the anti-tampering devices. Then they used nitric acid on it to defeat another defense. These guys actually did it—they figured out how to turn the Iron Key into an infinite-guess situation.
35:35	Sam Parr	No way. When did this happen—recently?
35:38	Shaan Puri	This happened a few years ago—three or four years ago. Here's the problem: Stefan doesn't want to work with them. Why? He says, "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?" The quote from these guys is: > "We've cracked the iron key; we just haven't cracked Stefan yet." Oh, and 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.
36:08	Sam Parr	"But there's an area to go around... wait. So it's 7,000? It's 7,000? Oh, what—so that's $700,000,000."
36:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, now it is. Yeah.
36:17	Sam Parr	So, there should be enough to go around, right? You could have three parties work on this.
36:23	Shaan Puri	There should be more than enough. In fact, there are other things that he could do. He could just sell it today for a guaranteed payout to any of these groups, right? For example, he could say, "I'll take $50,000,000 today and you guys go ahead if you crack it." There's, I think, $800,000,000 total, or whatever. $800,000,000 is, you know—[unclear phrase in original: "50 you can keep $7.50"]—you can keep $7.50 if you can crack it, but if you don't, the risk is on you. So he has 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?
36:54	Sam Parr	This is weird. Is he wealthy? Complete nonsense. What's this — I'm looking him up. It looks like he...
36:59	Shaan Puri	It made me mad, to be honest with you. The first story made me inspired. The second story made me doubly inspired. The third story just pissed me off.
37:08	Sam Parr	Is Stefan rich or anything like that? Is he a big deal?
37:14	Shaan Puri	"I don't know if he is... I mean, I think he's done well. He has done other stuff in the realm of crypto. He started this company called Coil that was trying to do something interesting in crypto, but it failed. He now is the creator of Interledger, which is a kind of open payments protocol he's trying to build. Yeah, it's kinda weird. I mean, he's not $800 million rich, you know. I think this would be the greatest thing he's ever done."
37:38	Sam Parr	Do you have any friends who have—? For example, my roommate James was a hacker early on. He was hardcore in the space and was doing the typical stuff. He was buying things as soon as Bitcoin was accepted in this weird, experimental way. He was like, "Hell yeah, let's do it," and he spent 1,000 bitcoins on whatever. Do you have any friends who have done crazy things like that?
38:01	Shaan Puri	"I have a friend that lost 200 bitcoin. I know that—I know personally. Just... today, like, now every year it just sort of updates how bad that loss is. So now it's a $23,000,000 loss. He was kinda kicking himself when that was, like, you know, a $200,000 loss or whatever at the time. But he's like, "I mined 200 bitcoin. It's on, like, a hard drive somewhere. I think I—I think I threw out the hard drive. I think I threw out the laptop. Like, it's gone." It's insane. There's another guy that's got this story where his USB or his hard drive—his bitcoin hard drive—was in the landfill."
38:41	Sam Parr	I
38:41	Shaan Puri	He heard and was trying to search for it, but they wouldn't let him. He's like, "I will buy the whole landfill," and he tried to purchase the landfill, but they turned him down. This guy's just trying to get access to the 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.
39:00	Sam Parr	Alright, that's awesome. That's great. That's it — that's the pod.

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3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

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