In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss various business models, including Amazon liquidation, fake data companies, and the investment strategies of Harold Alfond. They also explore the concept of “venture services” and share personal anecdotes about their experiences with charitable giving and business regrets.
Topics: Amazon liquidation, fake data, Harold Alfond, venture services, charitable giving, business regrets, venture capital, startup strategies
Amazon Liquidation and Fake Data [00:59]
Sam Parr: We talk about the Amazon liquidation business. I’m actually going to record myself buying from one of these websites. It’s a fascinating business where they sell you a bunch of returned stuff, but it’s packed in a mystery package. We talk about fake data. There’s this new company called Tonic that’s selling fake data that help you test your stuff. Crazy fascinating business.
Harold Alfond: The Billionaire of the Week [01:16]
Sam Parr: And then my favorite topic is this guy called Harold Alfond. He’s the Billy of the week. This amazing billionaire that started a shoe company and eventually gave away most of his money, but incredibly fascinating. We talk about a few other stuff like how Tiger Global is making all this money in the future of VC. That’s pretty fascinating. But my favorite part was the Billy of the week. Check it out.
Reading Habits and Audiobooks [03:14]
Shaan Puri: How much time do you spend reading? I feel like every time you get on the pod, you’re reading a different book. Are you reading like four hours a day? What’s happening?
Sam Parr: I it’s when I say reading, it’s audiobooks. And I could do at least one a week. So like, yeah, like I if I exercise, if I go for a walk, I’ll listen to it. So, and I listen to it at like 1.2 speed. So like a 10-hour book ends up becoming like eight hours and so I could do that in a week easy.
Narrators and Audiobooks [03:39]
Shaan Puri: Is this a problem for you? When I listen to an audiobook and it’s read by like a professional narrator, I just hate it and I can’t get into it. But when it’s the author reading it, I’m like, okay, I’m kind of down with that. Is that a problem just for me? Because it seems like most are professional narrator, professional voiceover actors or whatever they call them.
Sam Parr: It actually is a huge problem for me. So I do two things. The first, if I find a narrator that I like, I go, oh, oh, was that mine? You find their other books that they’ve read.
Venture Services and Business Strategy [08:24]
Shaan Puri: We have a lot to go through. Uh, this is going to be interesting. I what do you want to start? You want to start with Harold?
Sam Parr: Uh, no, let’s save him for a little bit later. Uh, let’s do some cool ideas. I have a couple, you have a couple, I think. Um, you want to go first? You want me to go?
Shaan Puri: I want you to.
Sam Parr: Okay. Which, uh, let’s start with this one. Okay. I think I think this one is is one of the more interesting ideas. It’s kind of random. So I’ll I’ll start with that. It’s it’s pretty fucking random. But, um, it’s this thing called Tonic fake data. And so, uh, I’m trying to chase this guy down because I really want to invest in this company now after I heard about it. So my so I have a cousin, I have a couple cousins that are in tech. I got a three, I think three or four cousins that are in tech. Uh, one of them, my cousin Samir, he tweeted this and I think his tweet literally has two likes, which is just a shame because like, this is actually like an amazing Twitter thread. I’ll I’ll retweet it right now so people can go see it. It’s on my Twitter feed now. Um, but he’s like, you’ve heard about big data, but what about fake data? Have you ever heard of fake data? I had never heard of this. So he’s like, check out this company called Tonic fake data. And, uh, they grew about 600% this last year. And, uh, and he starts to like tie some things together. So he’s like, you remember when HBO had that thing where the intern accidentally sent an email to every subscriber? And, um, it’s because, you know, they were doing a test of a of of a like a some software system, the email system or whatever it is. But when a developer is doing a test, they have to input some dummy data, right? Some information. Um, and and so typically, like, you know, a developer will just kind of like make it up. It’ll be like first comma last name, you know, like they they they’re just trying to get through the task quickly. So they’re just like inputting fake data, you know, just from their head. And, um, and so, you know, if you think about this at kind of like a bigger level, let’s say you’re testing, um, you know, you’re Uber and you’re you you have a new feature in your app. And so he gives this example. Basically, like, let’s say you’re Uber and you are releasing this new thing about notifications. Um, and so you there’s like this process of quality control testing, right? So they’ll they’ll have they’ll try to like, okay, sign up as a new user and try it. Okay, let’s say you’re you’re already a user, log out, log back in. Pretend you got a new phone. Right? There’s all these like, if you have a product that has hundreds of millions of users that are living normal, weird lives, there’s all these random different paths a user can take and you kind of need to test your product through each. And so, um, and so there was a guy, this this is kind of the famous thing is there was a guy who he had logged out of his account on his wife’s phone, but even when he logged out, she kept getting the notifications because of just this like the developer didn’t test the feature properly of this use case. You go to a new phone, you log in, you accept notifications, then you log out, you’re still getting notifications somehow.
Shaan Puri: Like which we did all the time. I would walk around and be like, hey, who here at the office has an Android? Let me see it real quick.
Sam Parr: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who’s got an Android? Okay, I think we tested all of Android. It’s like, dude, there’s like 200 models of this thing. There’s like 2,000 models. You think you just tested Android because, you know, the one guy who’s an Android bro like, you know, used it for a second. So, what happened with this Uber guy is, uh, his wife got a notification that he was going somewhere or like you’re you you know, your ride is ready or whatever. And she’s like, wait, he’s supposed to be at some other place. And she found out he was cheating. He ends up suing Uber $47 million because, you know, wife found out about this left and blah, blah, blah. The cheater sued Uber, which is hilarious. And so, uh, he’s giving all these little examples.
Unclaimed Baggage and Business Models [25:35]
Sam Parr: So, I don’t know if you want or not. It’s not in the thread. I haven’t haven’t done more than thread. So, so he gives another example. Let’s say, um, here’s the last example. It’s 2008, um, the financial system was crashing, banks are failing, and banks owned at that time, if you remember, like the subprime mortgage crisis. They had basically on their books a whole bunch of mortgages that they needed to get rid of. And so they needed to sell them super fast because they were like, they were at risk of going bankrupt. And so they they set up a call center that any real estate investor or buyer could call in and make an offer on one of the mortgages they had because like an auction, like, you know, closing it, you know, final sale, everything must go, was the was the idea. And so they hire Palantir, the big data company that Peter Thiel started, and they say, hey, come up with a recommendation engine that will figure out what offer we should accept because we we don’t have time to like vet each offer as they come in. It needs to be quick, like a garage sale type of decisions of like, hey, I’ll give you $2 for it. Will you take it? Yeah, go go go ahead, take it. Uh, everything must go. And so, um, so the developers were like, okay, we need to like test our recommendation engine for like, should we or should we not accept the offer. But they couldn’t use the data because the data had like all this personal sensitive information, right? It’s a person’s name, credit score, their income, their address, like there was too much information. The bank couldn’t just give it to Palantir and say, hey, use this real data to figure out what offers we should and shouldn’t accept. And so what they did was the developers went to the bank’s office, they go inside the building, and they looked at the data and they said, okay, we understand we can’t take this data and use it for our models, but we can replicate this. So like the way a mannequin is a replication replica of a human body or whatever, they did that to the to the real bank data system of all these mortgages. And so they created a replica that that would have the same like, let’s say, distribution and and outliers and whatnot, but it was all dummy data. It was all fake data. And so they used this, they go back, they create this thing, uh, they create the model, it’s all successful, it all works. So what happened is, I think the guy from Palantir took the like, I think he’s for ex-Palantir, he spun out and was like, I’m going to create this, yeah, Ian Co, I’m going to create this for any business because business businesses need to be able to generate fake data sets to test all their scenarios from, like the Uber example. Show me all the things that users do, all the all the different like they do this step, then this step, then this step, then this step. Cool, I need to be able to simulate those steps, um, uh, accurately. And so what they do is they basically say, all right, people are pretty sensitive about privacy and data nowadays. You got GDPR. So companies can’t be using using their data for these things or giving giving data to other groups for it. So Tonic fake data can basically analyze your data, create fake dummy data, and then let your developers or other developers use that data those fake data that fake data that mirrors the real data. And so I thought this is like such a niche problem that you would only understand if you’d ever been through this. But then once you’ve been through it, you’re like, shit, this solves a big problem that they have no other way to solve. And I love this. This is the opposite of guy who can code makes a to-do list app or makes a a music streaming, you know, like a playlist generator based on the music you like, right? Those are the ideas everyone has that everyone can do. This is an idea no one has that pretty much no one could do. And so I’m like, but dude, I’m like super bullish on this idea and I love this, um, I love this and especially now with machine learning, with machine learning, you need a lot of input data to make recommendation engines better. Well, how do you do that? How do you get more data? Well, you can simulate or or create fake data that mirrors a small sample of real data. So I just think it’s awesome. It goes on two big mega trends, privacy and machine learning, and I just love that I never even thought about this.
The “Unclaimed Baggage” Business [28:03]
Sam Parr: So, I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people, unemployed people, everybody. So I had said, oh, I heard this interesting idea and I forgot that it was Chamath who had said this that I heard it from, uh, of of a birth dividend instead, which is basically giving somebody some money at birth. If you if you’re a citizen, the government gives you X dollars at birth. And the beauty of it is it’s going to compound over 18 years. So by the time you’re 18, they only had to give you a thousand, it was invested in the economy and then it grows over time to this larger amount. By the time you’re 18, you want to go to college, you have something there. So, two things happened. A bunch of people on Twitter were tagging me saying, dude, I actually did this for my kid, uh, and look at this. And so some guy was sharing screenshots of like, I put in, I think it was a put in $1,000 or something like that. And then he’s like, and then I added, um, I think it was $50 or $100 a month and he showed that the balance was now $93,000 that was in this. And he’s like, this is How much How much have they invested? It’s crazy that it grew. I don’t know, I don’t know all the details, but he was basically saying like, yeah, I did this for my kid and it’s, you know, it was a great idea for me. And so I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And so then I saw that somebody somebody goes, yeah, it’s like Harold Alfond in Maine. I said, okay, I I don’t even know what any of those words mean. What what are you talking about? So I Google it. And basically, there’s this guy, Harold Alfond, he was kind of like a shoe mogul, basically. He he uh he started off as a shoe boy working in a shoe store. I don’t even know what the job title is, but he went from like shoe boy to manager. Then he left and him and his dad buy a factory. They buy a factory, a shoe factory and they flip it in three years to a larger company. And then he goes and he buys another factory called the Dexter either like the place is called Dexter or something like that, but it’s like the Dexter shoe factory, something like that. And he becomes he becomes a uh a private labeler. So he’s making the shoes that are being sold in JC Penney, in Sears, and a bunch of other like uh department stores nationwide. And so that that grew pretty fast as he became their shoe their shoe provider. And uh and then he says, all right, it’s I’m so worried I like if JC Penney cuts me off or they’re always putting price pressure on me because they know I’m they’re they’re my big customer, like screw it, I’m going direct. So this guy hires a sales force, creates a public facing brand called Dexter Shoes or whatever, and takes it like kind of nationwide himself, starts to be successful. But the thing that’s interesting is, or there’s two things. So his business story gets interesting because he actually ended up inventing the outlet store, which is similar to what we were talking about with the liquidation thing. So in any factory, he knew this because he owned factories, in any factory, not 100% of the shoes are like up to snuff, up to standard, right? So what do you do with the like non first grade shoes that were made? Uh, he’s like, you would either throw them away, like you mentioned, or you would sell it to a what he called like a jobber. I don’t know what that means, but you’d sell it to a jobber for a dollar, he would go market up and sell it for $5 somewhere. He’s like, hey, that’s a pretty good like 5X. Uh, why don’t I just do that myself? A jobber is is is typically it’s just a company that distributes. So it’s a they have shelf space at Kmart and they just need stuff to fill it. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, exactly. So so what he did was he’s like, I’ll create my own and so he creates this this kind of signature look, this log cabin looking store. And he’s like, this is where you can go get the stuff for cheap because these are the the kind of like refurbished or not quite not like kind of odd size, slightly imperfect. And so he creates an outlet store. He’s so he creates the concept of outlet stores. It gets really popular. Other brands start to see that, oh wow, this guy’s like, he’s turning his waste into revenue, uh his cost into into profits. Like, okay, we want to do the same. So they start opening up stores right next to his off the highway. And so that’s how you started to get these like fact uh so what whatever you call like outlet malls where you would get a bunch of different stores all putting their outlet stuff together here. And so that was kind of like one of his inventions. Anyways, he ends up selling the company to Berkshire Hathaway. So he sells it to Warren Buffett uh for $433 million in an all stock deal of Berkshire. And I think you added some notes here, but all I know is that later on, um, Warren Buffett apparently said like, you know, this was one of the worst investments I ever made. So why did he say that? What I added there was basically, when he bought it, I think he bought it in the 80s. When he bought it, he said, it’s this business is amazing. He and he wrote, Dexter, I can assure you, needs no fixing. It’s one of the best managed companies Charlie I’ve Charlie and I have ever seen in our business lifetimes. Right. Um, he says, the business jewel. He goes, when I go to work, I sing. There’s no business like the shoe business. He thinks it’s excellent. Um, but what the issue that happened around that time is basically uh cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming into coming into America and he said something like, he goes, well, cheap imported shoes from low-wage countries started coming, um, but someone forgot to tell the Dexter’s managers and their workers about that and they just forgot to address it. And so over time, he he predicted that it was going to make about $100, $120, $150 million a year in profit. After a handful of years, it ends up losing tons of money. He merges it with Burlington Coat Factory or at least tries to and eventually it goes it it goes it’s done and the a big problem with was that Harold started the company in a small town in Maine where basically 2,000 people worked and at this point they they were mostly older people and and Buffett was like, well, we just lost all this money. It was a horrible, he goes, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records, it goes down as the worst deal ever. But the worst part is now all these people are all out of work and they pretty much are too old to learn a new trade and we and and they’re screwed. And so he calls it one of the worst deals of all time. The quote was, we lost our entire investment, which we could afford, but many workers lost a livelihood that they cannot replace. Uh, okay, good good good guy Warren Buffett. All right, so so okay, this is where okay, Harold Harold uh Alfond now has a bunch of money, a bunch of Berkshire stock. Berkshire stock continues to appreciate over time. So he he sold it in 1993. Berkshire has just continued to grow and grow and grow uh over the years. I think I think he owned over 1% of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Wow. That’s kind of incredible because I don’t I don’t know what Berkshire’s market cap is now. Dan, check check Berkshire’s market cap now, but he sold it in an all stock deal. So whatever that $433 million was worth, if he held, it ended up being worth a hell of a lot more. So, what’s interesting is, the like you said, the guys in Maine, and what did he decided to create? He starts giving away, so he starts giving, right? He’s like, okay, I’m going to uh live, you need a new library? I’ll fund it. The the University of Maine, you need a football field? I’ll I’ll uh I’ll fund it. Uh Berkshire Hathaway, 640 654 billion. Uh and by the way, Dan, check what it was in 1993 when he sold. I want to see how much it’s grown. So, so he starts giving away. One thing he decides to do, he says, he says, you know, education is the most important thing. I didn’t get to go to college just because of my what my opportunities were. I want to make sure everybody has that opportunity. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities you can have. So he creates a a pledge where he says, I will give $500 to every baby born in Maine on their kind of like birthday, well, you know, when they’re born, that in a 529 account, right? So in this like special kind of like tax advantage savings account. If you open up your account, I’ll put $500 in and by the time they’re 18, that will have grown uh over time, it will have appreciated. Um and so he starts doing this. And at the beginning, he does it for like, you know, whatever, a few hundred people, then a few thousand people. So now, life so let me just break down some of the numbers here. So $60 million has been given away to babies in Maine for their college tuition. Uh that’s 117,000 babies that have taken him up on his offer for free money, uh statewide. So it’s a it’s the largest statewide college savings program is sponsored by this one dude and his like a family trust, I suppose. Um, families the families because they open up the account, they can kind of like he he was big on matching. So everywhere he gave, he wanted the recipient to match in some way, whether it’s money or effort, or you have to do something rather than just give. So, in this, you had to open the account, which was a bunch of people weren’t doing that before this. And the second thing was, you can then match the $500 that goes in because you realize it’s a good idea. And so, here’s the the basic math. If you had just if you just took the $500, by the time you’re 18, it’s about $2,000, right? So it’s gone up about 4X in the 18 years. But if you contribute $50 a month, it’s $25,000 by the time you’re 18. And that that $25,000 or sorry, the $50 a month, that’s like achievable for many, many families and then you have $25,000 that like can pay for for, you know, state college tuition and and and whatnot, give you an education. And so I kind of love this. I thought this was a baller move to like build up your hometown and he’s given away $500 million just in Maine across various programs. I thought that was pretty remarkable. The foundation has a billion in assets. So they give away about five, oh sorry, 6 to 8% a year of their total assets. And I think his son is like a senator in Maine, right? I think like That’s right. A grandson. Uh so the family is I mean, I guess they’re legends in Maine. That’s pretty baller. This makes me want to like get wealthy just for that reason. You’re going to go back to St. Louis and do a little something or what? I don’t know. I’ve been out for so long. But did you You can make a big donation to uh Belmont. Your Belmont’s finest alumni. Uh for that. Did you um I’ll put you on the spot. Did you donate anything to the Haiti thing or the Afghanistan or any other cause this year? Uh we did the a bunch of stuff for the wildfires, which I don’t know if that was this year or not. Uh or and then the other one was uh charity water we tried to support. I don’t know if we did it this year or not. Um and then the last one, uh so yeah, if she sees anything that’s like for like animals or like it’s like she’s a vegan. So if she sees that animals are like distressed somewhere, she really wants to give and so we’ll give a little bit there. But we’re not big givers. I actually we were talking about this the other day. It’s like we have this idea, like my wife really wants to open up an orphanage in India. This has been her dream since we were dating. She’s been talking about this. Like she wants to have like if you go to India, you see these like tiny, tiny kids on the street begging. It’s like heartbreaking. So she wants to open up an orphanage where, you know, they can kind of have a place and not be on the street. And uh and I told her, I was like, you know, like, I feel like we made it. And she’s like, no, like when we really make it. And I was like, you know that time will never come. We should just start giving now proportionally, whatever we can give now. And then like when the time comes that we can open up a full orphanage, great. We’ll already have been like doing the thing and taking some suffering away for some people. And so we were literally just talking about this. So I don’t really give either. I we gave, um, low digit thousands to the Haiti and Afghan stuff and that was like a a big that was the biggest donation I’ve ever made. Right. Um, and it maybe it was the second conference, but I think I bought like $10,000 worth of stuff from Costco, ranging from tables to tablecloths to like two grand worth of soda. And we didn’t end up using a lot of it and I was like, let’s just return it. And I returned like $3 to $4,000 worth of stuff and I was like, yeah, I’m so I’m so cool. I’m like getting money back so people see I’m saving. And one of it I like to this day, I still lose sleep over this because I found out there the cashiers were like giving me a hard time. They were like, uh, looking at me funny and uh, they and the reason why, and I kind of overheard them say it, they threw all of it away. Oh, really? They just they just threw it right away. It was like, but I was like, but this is like a case of soda that’s like still in the wrapper, like there’s nothing wrong and they’re like, our rule is we just throw it all away. And I was devastated. That was one of the biggest regrets that I’ve ever had is returning $4,000 worth of stuff that was like consumables that they ended up just throwing away. Like it it breaks my heart that I did that. And uh, so Well, at least you have an answer to the question of like, what’s your biggest regret in life? You got your answer. I actually, this should be a thing people do. There’s all these questions of like, oh, you know, what’s the best, what’s your favorite movie? What’s the biggest regret you ever had? You know, what’s the what’s been a turning point in your life? Whatever. This is random questions that you only get so often, but it’s very fucking hard to think of a good answer on the spot. And so we should all just do ourselves a favor and like one day just be like, all right, I’m going to I’m going to write down my answers to all these questions and then you have them. I’ve got two of them. Because if you have a great answer in that moment, you’re like a star because nobody else can think of anything. That’s one of them. That’s one of them. The second one was when I was in college, I went to uh tip a guy like a I was staying at a hotel and the shuttle was driving me around and I gave the guy like $20 and he goes, oh, well, thank you. And I said, oh no, you need it. And I meant to say like, you earned it or something like that. And I say, oh no, you need it. And I was devastated. I was like so angry that I behaved that way. I’m haunted by that. I said, you need it. And I was like, oh my god, that was the worst thing I could have said. I meant to just to say you deserve it or you earned it. It’s stupid already. I don’t know why I want to say that. Right. Already bad. Yeah. Oh, it’s like that those two things I think about all the time. I’m like, what was I thinking? Right. Yeah, that’ll hit you once a week and you just have a wave of sadness. Like that’s like the bad version of you know, the flight attendant you check in at the front desk or whatever for your for the at the airport and they’re like hand you the boarding pass like have a good flight and you’re like, you too. And you walk away and you’re like Yeah, and you’re like, well, By the way, bleep that out if people are listening in the car with their kids. All right, you can bleep that one out. So, okay, so I’ll tell you by the way, I have a theory on this stuff, which is it’s my Halloween costume rule. All right, so so what is this? There’s an art to these stories. So the way you just did it was perfect, which was you tell the story, it does the job like you you did something regrettable, but it’s not like you said like, you know, uh, you know, I hit my girlfriend back in the day. It’s like, whoa, bro. Like, you know, you’re not actually supposed to like put some dark shit out there or something really bad that makes you look bad. Like these are things that are kind of endearing. Like it’s endearing like it’s it’s funny that you did it. You made an honest mistake and then you recognize and it still haunts you to this day. Ah, what a good guy. And we all had a laugh and I feel like I got to know you and you’re an interesting guy. It’s so this happens with Halloween costume. One time I went on a I was in Australia and it was Halloween and they had a booze cruise and so we went on and I always remember there was this there was, you know, the Halloween thing, most guys dress up as whatever, but most most females, there’s like the it’s like okay to be kind of slutty on Halloween, right? It’s okay to dress a certain way to like kind of like you can spice it up. But you don’t want to have your Halloween costume be accurate and inconvenient. So I saw this one girl, she came on the on the booze cruise and she was dressed up as a bushel of grapes. And so she just had balloons all over her body, like green balloons. And so she looked like like, you know, like a like grapes on a like she was this the vine or whatever and there was grapes all over her. But she couldn’t like she couldn’t have fun on the cruise. Like she was bumping into everybody. Everybody hated her. She couldn’t dance, she could barely breathe. It was like so hot in there and like she paid the price for having this creative and accurate looking costume. And in my head, when I saw this bushel of grapes girl just struggling the whole cruise, she couldn’t even get off this boat. She was just stuck there in her costume. I was like, oh, the Halloween principle, which is like there you don’t want to be you don’t want to answer all questions accurately if it’s going to make you look bad. So there’s a way to answer something. There’s a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process. I can’t believe you’re making frameworks up when you’re like 18. Yeah, I was drunk on this booze cruise. That’s what I was thinking about. I like made a mental note, never make this mistake as I saw her. Because I would do this. I would come up with a clever idea and then it’d be like, I’d have like the most inconvenient night. So I I I it resonated with me. What Ramit actually said something amazing that I that I it was just one line and he said, when I think of copywriting, it’s uh he goes, uh effective, not cute. Remember when he he said something like that? Yeah, yeah. He’s like effective, not cute, not clever, something like that. Yeah, and and that and I I think that’s always the best. I’m like, whenever I see websites that are I’m like, that’s not effective. It’s cute, not effective. Be effective, don’t be charming or whatever he said. Yeah, exactly. You want to do one more or you want to talk about I I’m eager to talk about Harold, but we can do one more if you want. Well, let’s do Harold because it’s actually it actually relates to the liquidation, Amazon liquidation thing. I’ll tell you why. So, okay, so where did this come from? This is the cue the music, Billy of the week is this guy Harold Alfond. I had never heard of this guy. Did you know did you know this name before I wrote this here? No, and I added a bunch of stuff though for you. Okay, great. So let me give you kind of like the brief story and then you fill in the gaps of what you found interesting. So, here’s the brief story. I or I’ll go backwards, Tarantino style. Last time we were on here or two podcasts ago, something like that, we talked about universal basic income, which is this idea of like every year you would just get like a $10,000 check. And like, oh, why? Like, oh, so you know, everybody, it’s like social well social service or whatever, social security for everybody. Um, and including non-retired people