3 Stories Of People Making Millions In Weird Ways

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, Shaan, there's a documentary that Arie and I were texting about. Did you see it? It was called Martha. It was on Netflix. It was about Martha Stewart.

**Shaan Puri** (0:09)
I haven't seen it. I actually don't know really anything about her.

**Sam Parr** (0:12)
Great. This is so great because Martha Stewart was a beast.

**Shaan Puri** (0:25)
I really couldn't tell you five things about Martha Stewart.
Was she the first influencer, a celebrity influencer who then started launching products? What's the story?

**Sam Parr** (0:35)
Martha Stewart was a killer. She was a total shark. She was way sharkier. If you only know her as her put-together image of this housewife who cooks, everything I'm going to say is going to blow your mind because she was a total shark. I'm going to give you a little bit of her background. Basically, she's born and raised up in the East Coast.
She goes to Columbia University. While she's going to school, she becomes a model because she was a cute woman when she was young.

**Shaan Puri** (1:03)
Yeah. Wow. She was fantastic.

**Sam Parr** (1:06)
Yeah.
Very pretty woman. Yeah. Go Martha. She gets married at a young age, like 19 or 20 years old, but graduates Columbia and her father-in-law helps her get a job as a stockbroker. By the way, she studied architectural history or something like that at Columbia. Nothing to do with stocks. And so at the age of like 24, 25, she gets this job and you're probably wondering how on earth did Martha Stewart become a stockbroker? Well, I am wondering. When her father-in-law first met her, he was like, you have this like it factor. Like you are so charming. You are so put together because she had this vibe at a very young age in her 20s. Like she dressed it fantastically. She was very charismatic. She was clearly driven and hardworking. And this small like 10-person operation, that was a stockbroker, this brokerage, they needed a saleswoman, a salesperson. And it was all men at the time. I think this was in the 60s. It was all dudes. It was a very male dominated industry, but she comes into this interview and eventually works there. And they comment on how she's dressed like perfectly. Like so perfectly that you're sort of intimidated when you first meet her because she's like perfectly put together, but then she's like really charming and warm. And you're like, oh, I like you. And so she starts like as a salesperson basically at the stock company, basically working at with clients and getting them to like trust them and things like that. And she kills it. And so listen to this at the age of 26, according to this documentary, she said she was making $135,000 a year, which equivalent today is a million dollars a year at the age of 26 as a stockbroker. Pretty crazy that she went from being a model to a stockbroker in that short amount of time. And she kills it. And she does it for like six or seven years. It's like a legitimate career for her. And she suggests that one of her clients buy this stock that was like a dollar, and it went to like 10 bucks. So it killed it. Then they bought a little bit more and it goes something huge like to 50 It was like this massive stock and it made these clients all this money. But then the $50 stock goes right back down to like eight or ten bucks. And so technically her client had still made a bunch of money, but that roller coaster ride of like making a little bit of money, then making a ton of money, then losing a ton of money, it like left her kind of distraught. And so she bailed because of that like journey. And so she quit. And so when she's like 30 years old or late 20s, she moves out to actually where I'm living now, Westport, Connecticut. She was like, you know, I want to have a kid. I want to like try this housewife life, whatever, and do this thing. And she moves out here and she sits around for a very short amount of time. And she's like, all right, I got to do something like I can't just sit here. And so they buy this like kind of shitty house. And she like totally turns around and re-does the whole thing all by herself. She paints it. She builds this beautiful garden. She learns how to raise goats and chickens and like plant her own garden and like creates this amazing like estate out in Westport, Connecticut, which now it's fancy. Back then it wasn't particularly fancy. And so eventually she gets really into this and she's like, you know, I kind of like this housewife life. What if I start hosting some dinner parties? And she creates these lavish, amazing dinner parties. And eventually all these rich guys who come are like, hey, do you want to like cater my party? And so that's what she starts doing. And so she builds a business as a caterer that she said made her a millionaire.