3 Wild Stories to Get You Hyped This Week

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The first story made me inspired. The second story made me double inspired. And the third story just pissed me off.
All right, so I have a theme here for this episode. Have you seen this meme that's going around on Twitter where it's like a stick figure, and he's like this, and he's at his computer, and it says, share a bit of lore about yourself. So share some lore. And the lore means the epic backstory or the untold backstory of something. And so I have three pretty insane lore stories that I want to tell you. I think you might know about this first person. It was new to me. And I'm going to call them, we haven't done this segment a while, but they are the Billy of the Week. And the Billy of the Week is a person named Amadeo Giannini. Do you know who that is?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:54)
No, I don't think so.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:56)
All right, so Amadeo, you are the Billy of the Week. Here's the story. So this guy is born in San Jose. He's born to Italian immigrant parents. His father is murdered when he's seven years old. So he's raised by his mom. His mom remarries. So his stepfather is in a business that you're kind of familiar with. His stepfather was a fruit stand wholesaler, which is I think kind of what your parents do. They're wholesale adjacent for fruit, something like that. Your dad's like a fruit broker.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:25)
They are produce and fruit brokers, yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:28)
So that's exactly what his family did. And at age 14, Amadeo drops out of school, decides to come work in the family business because he needs to help the family make money. And this guy's an incredibly sharp business operator. And so he joins the business. He ends up just really taking over the business and really revamping it to the point where by the time he's in his mid-20s, the business has done so well, they're selling fruit all throughout California now. And he's able to sell his share of the business for $100,000. That doesn't sound like much. This is the equivalent of a few million dollars, maybe $2 million back then. This is like in 1900 So he does that and he's thinking about what's next. And he decides, I wanna give back to my community a little bit. He volunteers to be on a board of a bank. And when he's at the bank, he notices something he doesn't like. And he notices that the bank would basically lend money to the people who didn't need it and deny money to the people who needed it. And so he's like, the bank was all about underwriting sort of the least risky loans it could do. So it was lending to very, very wealthy people with a lot of collateral. But the kind of small business person who needed it was not getting it. He then decides to create his own bank. He's like, you know what, I'm gonna make my own bank that's going to serve the little man, the common man. And he calls it the Bank of Italy. So he opens up the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in the North Beach neighborhood.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
Which is a strange name. That's kind of a weird name.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:55)
Bank of Italy, right? Haven't heard of it, whatever.
But that's his heritage, that's where he's from. So he starts doing this. And this is 1904 Now in 1906, something happens in San Francisco, which is a devastating earthquake. Devastating earthquake happens. And one of the weird things about the earthquake was that the earthquake happens, and a lot of people didn't have earthquake insurance, but they had fire insurance. And so what people were doing was, earthquake hits. They would then light their building on fire because they wanted to get a payout from the insurance companies that way. So San Francisco is ruined. And the narrative is basically like, that's the end of that city. But while most banks basically just shut their doors, literally seal their vaults, some of them melted shut, Amadeo goes in. As soon as the earthquake is happening, the fires are happening, and he basically takes all the money out of the vault. He doesn't want looters to come and take the money that his customers have stored there, and he puts it in a fruit wagon. He puts it under a box of oranges, and he gets it out of there. Two days later, or a week later, basically when all the banks are shut and San Francisco is in ruin, he pops open his bank again by the wharf on a table with a wooden plank, and he's got his box of cash basically. He says, we're back, we're open for business. If you need a loan, just come to me.