3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

0:00The 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 the 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 a sort of lore means, you know, the epic backstory or the sort of untold backstory of something.

0:34And 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 in a while, but they are the Billy of the Week. And the Billy of the Week is a person named Amadeo Giannini. Do you know who that is? No, I don't think so. All right. So Amadeo, you are the Billy of the week. Here's the story. So this guy is born in San Jose. He's born to like, you know, Italian immigrant parents. His father is murdered when he's seven years old. So he's raised by his mom. His mom remarries.

1:11So his stepfather is in a business that you're kind of familiar with. He was 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.

1:53They'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 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.

2:27And so he's like, you know, the bank was all about underwriting, you know, sort of the least risky loans it could do. So it was lending to very, very wealthy people with a lot of collateral. But the kind of small business person who needed it was not getting it. He then decides to create his own bank. He's like, you know what? I'm going to make my own bank that's going to serve the little man, the common man. And he calls it the Bank of Italy. So he opens up the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in the North Beach neighborhood. Which is a strange name. That's kind of a weird name. Yeah, Bank of Italy, right?

2:56Haven't heard of it, whatever. But that's his heritage. That's where he's from. So he starts doing this. And this is 1904. Now, in 1906, something happens in San Francisco, which is a devastating earthquake. Devastating earthquake happens. And one of the weird things about the earthquake was that the earthquake happens. 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 is ruined.

3:29And 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, 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 a, basically a wooden plank.

4:08And 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, either 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 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 businesses, wealthy individuals.

4:45But 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 he, you know, I'll tell you this in a second, but as this thing becomes more and more successful, he never pays himself more than$50 ,000 a year in salary. Now you might say, all right, well, he doesn't need salary.

5:15He's going to own the bank. He also doesn't own any equity in this bank. And so he just decides that this should be owned by whoever wants to be, anybody should be able to be a shareholder. I don't want the power concentrated in me. So I don't own any of this. So he creates the Bank of Italy and he starts lending out money and he's lending it often on a handshake, no contract and often with no underwriting. Cause these are people that didn't have a lot of assets to go with, but he believed in the people in his community. Okay, so what happens next? This sounds very similar to his other, like, Italian cousins, Tony Soprano.

5:45I 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 till now, everything so far has been something that every business tycoon would say. But then actually, you know, they're basically greedy pigs. So this guy's the real deal. Pietro's the real deal. And when the fire happens and everybody else ran away, he decides to give loans to people on no collateral, no contract.

6:24And 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. 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 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.

6:55And 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 sync the ledger in the back end, right?

7:25I'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 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.

7:56So he meets this entrepreneur who's got this crazy idea to create a film, even though this guy's never created films, create a film that's completely animated, just drawings. He's going to turn drawings into a movie. And so he says, you know, this fellow Walt Disney, I believe in you. And even though he'd been rejected by everybody else, he funds and finances personally, actually, and this is not even out of the bank, Walt Disney's Snow White, the first, you know, Disney film. No shit. It was the first full-length animated film. Nobody else would do it. There's these crazy guys in San Francisco that say, we want to build this bridge, a big, giant bridge.

8:28And 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 salary. He owns zero stock in Bank of America. His family does not inherit this giant fortune. And he dies in 1949, not owning a single share of the bank that he And his philosophy was that serving the needs of others is the only legitimate business.

9:06What 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 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?

9:49Do 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 like 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.

10:34I mean, that's gotta be number one. All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I wanna see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I wanna see what mistakes did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just wanna avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list, of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025. And I did that. 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.

11:11And 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. 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.

11:42So 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, 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 buying an index fund. John Bogle, and this is off the top of my head, so I could get 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.

12:16And that is now VOO and VTI, 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, you know, simpler. But I mean, I've heard of a lot of people who give it away. I've never heard of anyone who built it and never took anything from day one.

12:55I think that's like, that's pretty remarkable. And you saw this story on Twitter where they're talking about, that was it, the lore? Well, I was on the most interesting man in the world profile. Most interesting man on Twitter. Yeah. Sheil. And he was talking actually about Lloyd's of London. How during the, he was telling a story more about Lloyd's of London, which is about during the, when those fires happened, Lloyd, 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.

13:33And this just restored, 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 of when everybody else 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 really heard this story and I went and started reading about it.

14:05So I think about these moments all the time. These moments where the data says to do one thing and everyone says to do this one thing and you choose to do the opposite and it doesn't make sense and it somehow works. I've had many opportunities in my career to take those chances. And I basically never do. Like, like very, very seldom. Because when you're up against those situations, it's it's you need courage, you need you need to be a little crazy, you need a bunch of you need a bunch of that. And like, for example, I think Jeff Bezos has this story where he where he was like, yeah, the data shows that we can raise prices and we will just make more revenue.

14:46But that's, I mean, nothing will change. People are just going to continue buying. And then a polly was like, why don't you do this? He's like, well, because we said we're going to be the lowest cost, low cost provider. Like we said, you want to like be able to buy everything from us at a low price. So I don't care what, I don't care what the data says. The mission is the mission. And there's all these, I've heard a variety of stories like this that I'm incredibly inspired by. Have you ever had an opportunity to take one of these moments and you actually took it? Or do you typically follow the data?

15:12so i have i have two two mini stories and i can't go into too much detail because i i've never talked about i've never really announced these companies but my e-commerce company when the tariffs hit and uh trump started raising tariffs on all the countries and you know one country goes to 30 and china goes to 150 and which is pretty crazy like imagine you're selling something that typically let's just round numbers so let's just pretend something call 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.

15:48Now this ball no longer costs a dollar. It costs still costs the dollar, but then you have 150 % extra tariff, which means now this ball costs you$2 and 50 cents. So you can no longer charge$3 for this, right? To make the same, you know, margin you, this ball now needs to cost whatever, six,$7. and so everyone in our space started raising prices so one company raised prices the second company raised price and and they all did it like back to back because it's kind of like oh they took the bullet already look now's the time like a friday news dump like let's all raise our prices and we were about to do it the ceo of our company wanted to do it and then i was like what if we just do the exact opposite like what if we just don't raise the price at all like not to cut the price because that would be like suicidal but like let's let's not raise the price and so i wrote out this like long message kind of like this like copywriting sort of thing like hey guys you know blah blah blah almost like a bit like a like a like a prank basically so yeah as you know this is the terror situation you know this is 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 to respect and i'm like oh my god this is amazing pat on the back turns out if you just give away free stuff people love you i got robin hood out here man and then three months later i'm like looking at the p &l our margin has dropped to three percent we have a three percent eboda margin five percent or something like that and you know i want it to be 15 or 20 percent and i'm like how do we fix this and it's like i guess we gotta raise the prices and so i'm like i'm gonna try to figure out how to go back how to go back at this point and raise the prices now because it just doesn't make any sense to run this business at this cost yeah this is the hard part i'm referring to this is what this is this is the hard part so i took the uh short-term like roar of the crowd to be like, God, everybody loves it when I give away dollar bills for 70 cents.

17:52I'm the man. I'm a genius. And now I'm like, oh God, this is fun. 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 was going great. It was actually a slightly different situation, but the principle of trouble is opportunity. So this wasn't a pricing giveaway stuff, but it was like business is going gangbusters. and then adversity hits, something happened. A competitor did something and then all of a sudden changed the dynamics and now we have to figure out what's going on. And as we're figuring it out, like it definitely in the moment feels like absolute, like it feels like trash.

18:32You wake up and 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 are this rollercoaster. even knowing that doesn't quite prepare you for when you go from that peak and then the roller coaster starts to drop and um we just had this moment where we were like okay one mindset here is damage control so minimize the amount of bleeding that happens here but before we go into just like minimize damage mode let me just ask a question like is there a way where we come out the other side of this much better off like is there a lloyds of london moment here where we could do something that on the surface might sound a little crazy, a little unorthodox, but in a time of trouble when everybody else is doing X, what if we just did Y?

19:23Like, 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 like, I think there's a thrive possibility here. if we just nailed X, Y, Z, and we never would have even figured this out had this not happened, right? And everybody else went this, everyone else went left. But if we go right, I think we might end up being like, really have separated ourselves from the pack.

19:52And so we'll see how that one plays out. But 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.

20:25Have you read that book? I've never actually read it, no. I started reading it this weekend because I'm just, I want to learn and he was just on and whatever. And it's only 110 pages. It's very short and it's very easy. And 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.

21:03And you call out that opposite. and when you call it the opposite the thing you you can't insult the the other thing you just have to like objectively say what it is so for example um they talk about 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.

21:41They'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 perception is reality. And so like the truth or the, there is no objective truth as to what products are necessarily better or worse. It's about what we think is better. And so it's, this book is really good. You should reread it because what you're describing is like, it's sort of like when you reread the 48 laws of power and you like see like, oh, this person is committing this, like they are doing this.

22:21Like you could do the same thing. You get the Neo in the matrix moment where you see the code. You're like, ah, okay. Yeah. It's pretty cool. He's like, are you, so you're telling me I'll, I'll be able to, um, dodge bullets. He's like, I'm telling you when you're ready, you won't have to. Right. It's like basically if you understand psychology at a certain level, then you're able to make less, you're able to do less work and have a better result. I used to have, I don't know if you remember this at the office we used to come to at Monkey Inferno. We used to have a giant poster that I made where it was three triangles and then it was a picture of an ugly circle.

22:52And 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. 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.

23:24it'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.

23:56If 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 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.

24:36He's an employee 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, this is what he says.