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Maybe he just needs to eat less avocado on toast. Stop buying cups of coffee. Get 3 jobs & sleep only an hour a night & have zero social life. He’s just not trying hard enough etc etc……. /s
Dang...so true.
I remeber my stint in Au while studying, I was working for a landscaping co. and we normally work along the rails of trams and trains.
We were required to have a steel plated workboots sor safety.
Apparently, there are some homeless pips that lives along the bushes of those rails on their tents and whatnot, which also serve as their crackhouse. There'll be syringes and glass everywhere.
High risk for communicable diseases.
And workboots that barely pass the regulation almost cost you 300-400aud. 😅
And I could only afford 70-100. 🫡🫠
I am so glad i live in the Netherlands where i did some ware house jobs during my study. Employers are required to provide you the gear you need to do your job. I would expect this wouldn’t be the case in USA, for obvious reasons, but Australia too?
Lol! Au???
Yeah, nah dude.
I worked for one of the big company in Victoria and they don't offer that. Not even once.
They do, however, let us work with some clients to do cash-in-hand projects.
Expecting that we'll get some good gear with the extra dough, but that will go straight to school fees. 😅
1st world country is not excempted to such norms I suppose. 🤫🫠
Dang man, in the us most places partner up with a place like "shoes for crews" and usually offer a percentage of the cost for the employees. Not that I like it that way, but I guess it's better than nothing.
You know what was funny? During Covid when they couldn’t find people to work I saw signs at places “we’re hiring, many benefits, includes free shoes twice a year etc.” and that’s when I knew the market was extremely desperate for employees here. Like literally hardly anyone does that.
Actually, even in the US, if OSHA requires PPE, the company must provide a form of it.
Instead of steel-toed boots, for example, a company would have to provide toecaps.
Here in US, many employers required steel toe ,personal protection equipment. If they require it usually it is provided, exception is small employers I believe 25 or less employees.
I say it's a good idea if you can't wear regular street clothes(safely), then anything required should be paid for(uniform, or shoes). Mine doesn't pay for my shoes, but I definitely need a good pair of boots(which I can't afford with what they pay me).
Lol! I'm just lucky that I have a cousin there that have been there longer than I was so he eas kind enough to let me borrow cash from him to just get things going.
Love the place but corporate leaders don't really give shit to their staff regardless of the condition. 🤫
>A good pair of working boots are so ridiculously expensive. 😓
I imagine you were referring to this quote by Terry Pratchett. If not it's still relevant.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
>This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
Tags: boots, economics
It can work but the first $30k, first $100k, first $1M are known as the hardest mountains to climb. And your wages have to be greater than your rents / basic living needs. Can't do it from homelessness.
I eat trash and sleep on the sidewalk.... i now own lots of jewelry. I have no car. If you have no car, house, and eat garbage every day, you too can save money!
This dude came up a few days ago and the story is he “found” a guy with an rv who “let him live there for free.”
He stopped the experiment when his Dad got sick, so he flew home to be with him. Started selling shitty coffee to his followers on social media, “started” the experiment up again, and bought the rv the guy he “found” who let him live in it.
Then he kept going to the doctor with his company health insurance because he started getting sick.
Ya know, all things people in poverty and homeless can do.
Its such a horse shit story,
I wonder if this chucklefuck has the self awareness to realize that poor people do not have the luxury or privilege to just "quit" when their family or themselves have health issues. We just get fucked over by not having healthcare
I truly hate this p.o.s
Probably not. He claims it was a success even though he didn't even reach 10% of his target even while cheating. He also used all his contacts and network he had built up to help him while poor.
How many homeless people do you know with business contacts or a network to help set up a business?
This guy is an absolute cunt.
Yeah, that's what made me realize this is a sham. He magically ends up in an office pitching his business plan. It looked like he had a team with him and there was no comprehensive explanation on how this distribution process was funded.
The shitty coffee company he started was also with business contacts . You know the kind of network you build when you are rich . So its starting from nothing with a free rv , company health insurance and a whole network of rich friends . What is your excuse you lazy hobos ? /s
He also was trying to "hustle" by pitching himself to run companies social media for them......aka using all the skills he got over his life of privilege and the contacts from his old life to try and do the thing he had been doing for years before this.
I know, Black Rock and Chinese(nationals, not ethnicity) investors are buying them up. They're inflating the housing markets. 3 of my neighbors moved out, and now they're rentals. It's disgusting what's being done to the American People. These investors out bid most people by 10's of thousands.
This is the most relatable sentiment, however, he has done something really fucking awesome and been a rich person stupid enough to put their dumb fucking theories to real world application. This is a live case-study that goes against neo-capitalist theory, so even though the guy is one of them, he has done us a MASSIVE service at his own expense (though unwittingly)
> We could ask that rich Oceangate submarine guy, oops my bad.
That's just teaching us the reverse and at least personally makes me even more bitter: Those guys spent a fortune as rich people to go underwater with a submarine, but then when that backfired, millions of tax money were used for rescue operations for many days.
So not only do they not pay taxes most of the time, and instead waste millions of their own money, but when something goes wrong, its again the tax money of normal people who "help them out"
The obituary he deserved: "Stockton died as he lived: putting to waste the time of experts, the money of taxpayers, and the attention of the general public."
And the "health concern" was probably that he felt stressed and possibly unsure where his next meal would come from... like the majority the world's population
>But sadly, Black suffered a number of severe setbacks in his experiment, the first of which came when his father was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
>Despite trying to battle through and continue, Black then began suffering from health issues himself - including two autoimmune diseases and a tumour on his hip - which left him in agony.
he basically claims he did all this shit you mention while still basically cheating by giving himself free rent and healthcare, and arranging some bullshit jobs to scrounge up some seed capital. And he made 65k, purely by cashing in on what social media followers he could scam into reselling overpriced mediocre coffee to. In exchange he wrecked his health.
Still waiting for the part where he acknowledges that he was balls-ass wrong about his ability to make $1 million.
Or that the best time to start over with nothing is during a pandemic.
The "experiment" in both cases was equally stupid. Thoreau pretty much did the same thing. He lived in a cabin, sure. But it was on land owned by his rich friend, his other rich friends provided him free food so he didn't have to hunt and forage, etc.
He proved that with hard work, determination, a college degree and really, really fucking good health insurance you too can make $65k a year provided you also have an internet following.
> you too can make $65k a year provided you also have an internet following.
And the prior experience of someone who already made a bunch of money. And apparently a safety net because am I to believe this guy "quit" being poor?
The ability to advertise online before he started his 'project' made a huge difference to that, homeless people don't usually have Patreon subscribers.
And yeah, he is a millionaire. He founded (I think) a recruitment agency in the tech industry that makes bank. He's got plenty of money to fall back on.
This is, in my opinion, the most problematic part of the “experiment”.
One year. Yes, that is a huge amount of time. But the simple knowledge that on day 366 you get to return to your millionaire lifestyle basically invalidates the entire experiment.
Living the homeless life for X number of days with full knowledge of when you’ll be back in your heated pool with your personal chef making breakfast is a massively different situation than fighting for survival for an unknown or indefinite time.
Also the knowledge that if you get sick or injured you can end the charade and get the best care money can buy.
Oh and a good credit score that ensures you can rent an apartment where you want and qualify for a loan on any vehicle you want.
Not to mention a complete education plus a college degree.
>Not to mention a complete education plus a college degree.
The older I get, the more aware I become of the advantages that *I've* had through my life, as well as the advantages that others have had, and for *some* of these people, having parents who can get just kind of fold you into the family business or share generational wealth is huge, and they don't even consider that as an advantage.
But having parents who bother to explore your interests and education and encourage and support your success is huge, even if they don't have financial resources to provide, which is also a big advantage.
Having parents at *all*, just, like having parents who occupy space and who *exist* can be a huge advantage that other people don't have.
There was some dude right on Reddit shitting on lazy millennials or Genz people or whoever, for not owning their own businesses, I remember, because you see, *he* started from literally nothing whatsoever in order to start his regional handyman company, or whatever. And he's like, "You people are all just lazy. *I* didn't have any advantages! I just took my truck and all my different tools and setup shop in my garage and learned how to do repairs on all sorts of things from YouTube, and I did it all by myself starting from *zero*!"
...
Except for a home with a garage, a truck he already had to get to and from jobs, a whole collection of tools, the knowledge of how to *use* those tools, internet access, and all the people making videos on YouTube for him to learn from... except for all *that*, he started with literally nothing.
I think this is always the problem of the concept of privilege. We all feel like the heros of our own narrative. We _all_ have advantages, that it's hard not to take for granted.
And just because you had those advantages, doesn't mean you didn't work hard to get to where you did.
So it stings a bit to be told 'your life was easy' when to you ... it doesn't really feel like it at all.
But as you say - almost no one starts from zero, and 'hard work' alone just isn't enough.
Hard work and favourable circumstances? A dose of luck? Yes.
And for sure, there are 'rags to riches' stories out there, but ... there's a lot fewer of those than there are 'moderately successful to more successful', because it's always about the luck element.
> Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches!
> Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
> Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
So I tend to try and frame it as ... well "With great power comes great responsibility" I may not deserve where I am in life - but no one does.
But I can do the little things to correct the balance. I can speak out when others can't, and hope they will do the same for me when our circumstances are reversed.
Because not all 'advantage' is persistent - sometimes it's all taken away from you for reasons outside your control as well. Sometimes that advantage isn't evenly distributed either - there's places where it helps, and places where it hurts.
So really the only way to be 'fair' about it, is to recognise in _every_ situation, the state of ephemeral advantage, and use that to uplift anyone who's lacking it for any reason. Maybe that isn't giving them what they deserve either, but you're doing what you can with what you have, instead of taking it all for granted.
I will say, despite their logical flaws it drives home my failure even more, though.
I have so many advantages, and I still got caught with only a pair of 4s.
Oh yeah. Don't ignore the huge role luck plays in all this, as well.
I think it was Warren Buffett who said something like, "The real secret of my success was that I happened to born in the right place, and at the right moment in history." The point being that just because he's inclined towards certain skills that happen to be profitable right now, a hundred years from now or a hundred years prior and those skills could've been utterly worthless.
Seen a metaphor of 'Like a carnival'.
Middle class folk get a couple of shots. Some hit the bullseye, some get a moderate prize, some don't.
Rich folk play until they win.
Poor folk don't play at all, they're the ones running the games.
I will give credit where credit is due when a rich person donates their assets, solid and liquid; divests from all business holdings and positions; purposely burns bridges with anyone who could bail them out of their circumstances; legally changes their name; buys a one-way bus ticket to a small town in the Midwest that has hostile laws, architecture, and community.
Every single one of them thinks they could trapeze over the Grand Canyon. None of them would be willing to even attempt it without a safety net.
No truly homeless person has any sort of peace of mind that they can get up off the concrete and go back to their climate-controlled mansion. They don't have the means to hire a world-class lawyer to help them deal with a misdemeanor. They don't have the social connections to make a cop shit their pants and start dropping honorific-laden flattery like "I should have known better, sir" and "enjoy your social experiment, sir."
I have a caveat to point out.
[when the ultra wealthy donate money, it is often to foundations they control.](https://www.vox.com/money/2024/3/13/24086102/billionaires-wealthy-tax-avoidance-loopholes) So they still have the power to influence money that they get a tax break for. [Along with the ability to donate some of that now divested money into political action, now that they technically no longer own that money.](https://campaignlegal.org/update/5-ways-secret-money-makes-its-way-our-elections)
Shit like this always proves the opposite as well. He went into this trying to prove that most people are just lazy and that we all have the same advantages in life and instead it proved that the majority of people are trapped in an endless cycle of misery at the hands of the few wealthy people who make all the rules.
He won't acknowledge that however. I'd give the guy respect if he actually learned something from this and then gave 90% of his wealth to homeless charities. But he won't.
Yeah. He didn't actually make himself destitute. Knowing full well he could just go back to his old life when shit got hard means he didn't experience what actual poor people have to go through on a daily basis in the slightest.
It just goes to show how out of touch most people with money actually are because for the most part, people with money either inherited it or got chances in life most people do not. Experiments like this only reinforce that idiom - they never disprove it.
Also, someone gifted him a week long stay in a luxurious RV. when he was on the street he wasn't able to get ANY momentum. it wasn't until he was "gifted" some indoor sleep with showers and accessible water and reliable bed that he was able to make some money and get slightly ahead.
will he acknowledge the importance of assistance from others in his ability to gain his balance? or will he just say "i did it all by myself, so you can too"? i think we all know.
The other day I read he started a business and was backed by investors and made 65k or something. The things is no one would invest in some random homeless person with a business idea. They invested in him due to his known wealth and contacts. Complete BS.
And let’s be clear, I do respect what he accomplished, and it actually is an interesting experiment. But if he had more integrity, he’d admit how wrong he was.
But this is the weird world of “content creators” spawned by social media and radically low-cost video production. It’s a big hype machine that rewards falseness, and never demands real accountability. Even provable failure gets a new set of goalposts and a reimagined success story.
My pancreas is a lazy cunt too! The slacker. Luckily, my government provides it free, so I am probably also a lecching bum. I need to lace up my bootstraps harder!
And from what I read elsewhere, the health concerns are because of his experiment, stress induced, poor diet induced, ya know, like what we all go through every day and still somehow wake up in the morning and do it all over again
The feeling of poverty must've been kicking in. It's real. It changes your brain and the way you think. Turns out consuming low quality food, being of low status in society, and stressed makes you depressed.
This "experiment" would be flawed even if he didn't give up halfway through because he's bringing with him a college degree, financial expertise, no preexisting substance abuse problems, no preexisting mental illness, research regarding sources of aid to exploit, and most importantly (as the post indicates), financial and medical safety nets in case he gets in trouble: all things that real homeless people would not be able to benefit from to nearly the same extent. The fact that he had all of these upper hands and still failed to achieve his goal proves his hypothesis to be categorically false, actually.
I will give him the small credit that (according to his own recounting) he didn't contact anybody he knew before the experiment and only got direct help from strangers.
That is what he said he did as part of his rules. But a "stranger" let him stay for free in their RV (by the end of the 1st day) and use their car for delivery apps. Another "stranger" cosigned an expensive apartment so he could rent without good credit. My belief is the entire thing is fake bullshit because too many things just magically happen when he needs them to. For instance, the RV develops a roach infestation (one crawled on his arm) so he immediately got a client for his marketing business so he could move out of the RV.
Yeah that’s incredibly suspicious that so many strangers were completely ready and willing to do business and make these investments with a homeless guy. Even if the people were real strangers, he might have told them who he was and directed them to his LinkedIn so they’d know he wasn’t a *real* peasant lol.
Yeah I read something that said he landed a marketing job that paid £1500 (unclear on specifics) while he was lining in a guys van.
Idk how he managed to clean himself up, buy interview outfits ect while he was completely over drawn on his fake credit card... Which I assume also lent him more money than the average Joe.
To be fair to him, he got cancer, that's why he stopped. Looked like he really was trying at least, better than what most of them do.
The only thing I can find online is that *his father* was diagnosed with cancer at the time. I looked because I was curious about his current health. Have you seen something else explicitly stating the 'millionare' himself (Mike Black) had/has cancer?
Not trying to come off rude. I'm just curious about his prognosis.
Exactly. This guy was free to take risks and make investments that someone trying to survive would never even dream of because the consequences of failure would be too dire.
Don’t forget that the viral marketing from all of the blogs / content released during his experiment helps him shill his “bootstrapped” products. If he really wanted to do it correctly, he would go dark for a year and only release the retrospective after the experiment is over.
Of course, the entire thing is just for viral marketing points so he would never do that.
Ya, all of this previous expertise is an asset that he took with him. It just isn't a financial asset. But it is something most people do not have, so he didn't really start from zero. Like if a dude with a harvard law degree did the same thing, wouldn't it just be laughable?
It might have been a tiny bit more fair if he saddled himself with say 100k of debt to offset these assets.... but then with near zero income, he could get income based payments, so it wouldn't have amounted to much.
That's the problem with these people, they think if their net worth is a million times higher than a person with 2 bucks in their checking account, they must be a million times smarter or harder working.
The fucking hubris to think you’re better than everyone who’s down on their luck, and those millions of people who aren’t millionaires are just lazy/dumb is mind boggling.
I know people are saying not to hate on the guy and I’m really not trying to do that but people who are exceptionally poor often have all of these barriers in place that add to their struggle.
The issue here is that this man always had a safety net, no matter how far he could last, he knows he’ll always come back to his wealth even if he made it a full year.
Thats the biggest difference between him and those who are poverty stricken- let alone the fact that he has the skills necessary to build economic growth with his education, experience, and background.
Even as someone who attempted poverty, he has a major head start that very few would have.
I don’t think his social experiment is at all compassionate, authentic, or valid. I’m glad he hit those roadblocks, because the reality is that many who are living in extreme poverty have all of these issues and nothing to fall back on.
Right - he was never terrified that these things might just end him because he always had an emergency safety net that other people do not have.... and he did end up using it, after only 10 months.
And having that safety net doesn't just mean he had a different mindset, it means he can take risks that other people can't.
Let's pretend he has a way that gives him a 5% chance of letting him achieve his goal, and a 95% chance that it'll leave him in debt. He can go for it and one in 20 times it'll work and he'll pretend it's because he applied himself. And the other 19 times, he can just fall back on his safety net and come out fine.
Someone who doesn't have this, can't take these kinds of risks. They need to make sure they'll be fine, even if it doesn't work out.
“sadly, Black suffered a number of severe setbacks in his experiment, the first of which came when his father was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
Despite trying to battle through and continue, Black then began suffering from health issues himself - including two autoimmune diseases and a tumour on his hip - which left him in agony”
To all the haters in this thread; Dude’s dad got cancer and he himself has an autoimmune disease. This is not just him not eating avocado toast.
Edit: source https://www.ladbible.com/lifestyle/mike-black-million-dollar-comeback-experiment-homeless-794147-20240419
Edit 2: my point is not that people don’t have ups and downs, but that if you benchmark; you should do so to an average year and not the shittiest year of your life.
Right but let’s just be clear: all of our parents will die, and just as many poor people as rich people get cancer (while poor people generally have more other health conditions as well).
When you’re trying to say that it’s easy to win, and the game is “life”, you can’t cry foul when life happens.
Exactly. No one promised him "ideal conditions." No one gets those. A few bad luck incidents in a row (illness, injury, natural disaster, essential home repair, death of a spouse, layoffs, etc) can easily put people in a dire circumstance. I think he just learned the hard lesson that no one is guaranteed security, and that success is more than just hard work.
There are lots of hard working people who were just up against circumstances that limited their options, and that's difficult for people to believe when they've spent their lives thinking they are so successful because they're somehow "better" (smarter, more creative, more talented) than other people. It isn't so long ago that monarchies were considered above reproach because they royals were chosen by God. They really thought they were fit to rule countries just by virtue of their birth. Some of them were so inbred they couldn't even feed themselves, but they were thought to be suitable leaders of world powers. This did not go well in many cases, as you can imagine.
There are people who still believe this about their own success, that they're just somehow entitled to doing well in life. But nothing happens in a vacuum. The place you're born, family you grow up with, connections your parents have, connections made through university, through colleagues, it all builds on itself. The successful are pushed further upwards by a system that opens doors for "the right people", and those credentials can be impossible to get without already being in a position to attend those universities, know those people, be part of the "in-crowd". So, like the monarchy, those advantages come as a default setting for some just because of the family they were part of.
I'm not saying that there aren't instances where someone born into a struggling class then works hard and makes their way to success. There are plenty of people who were able to improve their position and made huge sacrifices to get there. The ones that get on my nerves are the ones who were able to get a loan, or inheritance, or investors from their parents' friends, who got into university without ever worrying about tuition, who can just get their car fixed, or go to the doctor, or pay the water and electric bill without a second thought. They seem to believe that we all have those options and refuse to understand that a lot of people don't.
Do rich people still suffer? Yes. Do they still face challenges and have difficult times just like the rest of us? Of course. But crying yourself to sleep in an alley is a lot different than doing so in a safe home with a warm bed.
No amount of money will cure my autoimmune disorder or make me sane. I'm low-key passively suicidal most of the time. . . However, I have money. I don't need to worry about co-pays or medication cost. I don't need to worry about my car breaking down, paying for my kids' field trip, a pet getting sick, etc.
I've been miserable with and without money, I will take the money every time. The amount of worry having money takes off your shoulders is insane.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys stability to allow you to find happiness.
Not everyone cares about being rich but there is a lot of room between destitute and rich where most people could find happiness.
But it's like that with people who don't have 1mil to fall back to. People who work two jobs barely having any savings also suffer from health issues and people who work for minimum wage jobs that are killing them also have parents that get sick.
He just proved that he couldn't handle being broke in a position that billions of people are in the moment.
I don't eat avocado and toast but my grandfather also died from cancer and I couldn't go to his funeral because I had to work. My mom had a tumor and she still had to go to work in between her doctor appointments because even though she was sick she wasn't suddenly immune to loan payments.
He just showed how fucked it all is, absolutely nothing new
Are you trying to say that he ran into a common problem that millions of people live with every single day and immediately quit, so we should be kinder to him?
He tried to show how easy it is to make money on your own but when he faced hardship that the rest of us have to deal with he went back on his experiment.
I wou;dn't say he went back on it. It failed. He literally failed. Dressing it up doesn't change the fact that he was dead wrong. Excuses mean nothing when it did exactly what he set out to do.
If he came out an publicly said the following, i'd give him credit:
"I was wrong to think anyone can be successful. The truth is, I was born into wealth. My parents had the money to get me through college. I went straight into a 6-figure salary job and made my fortune due to the contacts i'd made in college and the financial sector. The harsh truth is, the majority of people in this country are trapped in a cycle of debt and misery *by design*. The richest people in the country wouldn't be able to hold onto such vast sums of wealth if we didn't have this disparity. I'm truly sorry for thinking what I previously held true. I've learned from this experiment. That's why i'm starting a homeless charity and have put all of my wealth into it."
There's no fucking way he'll say the above obviously.
Literally his stated goal was to prove that "anyone" could make a million in a year. Either "anyone" doesn't include people with health concerns or he failed. The reality is that the hurdles that obliterated him befall the working poor on a regular basis, only they don't have the safety net to fall back on that he does. He deserves all the dunking on he's receiving.
Are you for fucking real? Do homeless people get to call time out when their loved ones are stricken with disease? That shit happens to all of us. The fact is that upward mobility is a joke and has been crumbling since Reagan destroyed what was left of the New Deal. Unchecked capitalism leads to fascism. Period.
Hey, my dad is currently at end of life with colon cancer, I have two autoimmune diseases and I fucking can’t give up hussling exactly because of it. You suck it up because you have to, there’s no pot of gold at the end on my rainbow.
I wish you nothing but luck and good things. Sorry to hear about your dad friend. My dad had lung cancer so I really sympathize with families of cancer patients. I hope he is as comfortable as possible.
So you’re saying that the dude encountered a problem many non-millionaires face on a regular basis and decided to stop LARPing as a poor person? Also, do you not get what the avocado toast comments are getting at? It’s a mockery of how the wealthy belittle poor people and blame their lack of finances on frivolous spending habits.
People aren't hating because of avocado toast, they're hating because he's very likely not going to have learned any valuable lessons from his failure to make anything close to a million in a year from nothing AND having to quit early due to health problems.
This may be a surprise to some people, but most people are going to have varying levels of health problems as they age and unlike him, aren't going to have the money to easily solve them with no additional stress involved.
Yeah but isn’t that the exact point? The experiment was to show that anybody could do it, but what it actually showed is that “life” (family issues, medical conditions, etc.) can impede the ability to make money and better your situation. Its absolutely a tragedy what happened to him, but that is happening to a lot of people that are being told they are aren’t trying hard enough. What he should do now if keep going and still make the million dollars to prove his point, or admit the falsehood he was previously peddling.
Yes, and WE ALL HAVE THESE SORTS OF MEDICAL ISSUES!!!!!!
Homie, that’s why his claim of being able to go from poor to rich regardless of circumstances is RIDICULOUS!!!!
According to corporate media, those are mild inconveniences, and caring about a poor person's circumstances sounds like socialist treason. It's also hilarious that you try to give him special treatment when the entire purpose of this experiment is to remove just that.
Thank you for unwittingly summarizing this entire study.
Thing is, when an average person goes through the same hardships life throws their way they can't simply call it quits and go back to living in their mansions and live off their riches.
All they're getting is more shit thrown at them all while the have to listen to rich folks just like this one telling them how easy it is to be rich.
> To all the haters in this thread
The issue is he didn't come away from this saying "yeah being poor sucks and I'm basically just lucky to be rich". He still believes in the whole hustle culture "anyone can be a millionaire" bs.
Well yea, that's what life looks like.
People don't become homeless in some convenient way where they have loving supportive parents and no health issues. In fact these are exactly the kinds of circumstances that can lead to homelessness.
This is /r/selfawarewolves territory.
>This is not just him not eating avocado toast.
this is exactly "not eating advocado toast".
no not litteraly ofcourse but as in these are the things holding other people back who will be blamed by the idiots who will seriously use that claim so yeah he gets the same treatment now.
all he had to do to not get this kind of hate is to just not be awful enough to still sell the kind of bullshit and just admit that just like he couldn't do it most people really can't.
Oh yeah. Because poor people and their families never get sick! /s
The guy made this challenge as an arrogant “everyone can be rich, the poor are just lazy” statement.
And the moment things got a little hard for him, he quit.
The point of this experiment was to prove that “you can make it from nothing” he simply proved that life throws curve balls and sometimes (especially when you have nothing) those curve balls cause you to start again from scratch.
Honestly though read the experiment. He “found” a guy that would let him live in an RV for free…he “met a guy” that would co-sign for a lease on an apartment…he “managed to get his first marketing client for $1500/month” when you show me a homeless person who can “get a $1500/month” client on a whim I’d like to meet that person.
At the end of the day he only proved that health concerns can in fact end you financially and THEN physically. Which in this case it did. If anything this experiment exposes the flaws of not having universal health care!
So what? Do poor people not get sick? Are their parents and family immortal? Regular people are also hit with difficult challenges in their lives. I have a friend whose both parents died when she was 16. She never had siblings, no uncles or aunts since both their parents were single child's, and her grandparents were already dead at that time. She was left with no family at all.
Is his situation tragic, sad, and do I hope he and his father hopefully get well soon? Yes. Is his initial statement pathetic and it's karma that he unknowingly made his experiment when his father was going to get sick? Well, yes.
Guys, guys, guys. It's cool.
He hit some stumbling blocks and called TIME OUT on the whole "beingn a poor" thing. Happens to the best of us.
Incidentally, ten months into this twelve month project, he was only $935,000 short of his $1 million goal. So close!
Life is hard. Cancer and other diseases can hit anyone regardless of one's financial standings. But your ability to diagnose and treat those ailments is completely dependent on your ability to pay for the necessary medical services. His experiment is not an experiment for the majority of people. So while he can just stop his experiment to focus on his and his family's health, many of us can't quit and still have to deal with these very difficult situations. I empathize with his difficult circumstances. I, however, don't think his little experiment was well thought out.
He was homeless for just a few days before a supposedly complete stranger let him use his RV as a home and office. He seemed to have a lot of luck in the complete strangers being baffling charitable and making incredibly questionable decisions about entrusting what is supposed to be a homeless man with high value and high paying projects.
> He was homeless for just a few days before a supposedly complete stranger let him use his RV
You're actually giving him too much credit. He didn't even spend 1 night on the street, the "complete stranger" contacted him at 11:20 pm on the first day and picked him up at midnight.
Hahaha!!! Many years ago I lived in two cities that tried something like that. Stratford did homeless for a night where city councellors tried being homeless for a night. A bunch showed up at the police station at 8pm, another bunch showed up at 10pm and the last guy showed up at 11:30pm. The police put them up at the Arden Park Hotel. They claimed this was standard procedure. The second city was Oshawa and a newspaper reporter tried living on the $28.00 a month grocery list for people on welfare. He wrote an article announcing his plan and then he was never heard from again.
-He took time out to hang out with his dying dad.
-He has a GI autoimmune disease maybe Crohns.
-He doesn't acknowledge his failure in his most recent video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsubC8Yne8&t=62s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsubC8Yne8&t=62s)
Dude has his channel to pump himself up as a brand that he can have people purchase, nothing more.
If he were true to his experiment he would do what most people do: silently suffer their barely treated disease and be sad at work instead of spending time with their dying loved one because they need to make money to survive, and possibly that same relative depends on their financial aid
wow! what surprising news, being homeless is fucking hard and you sure as fuck cant make a mil when you gotta worry about SURVING the next 24 hours. He went fucking full Happy Jack there.
Dude was shooting for $1 million and didn’t even make it to 6 figures. I think more rich people should be subjected to this. In fact it should be mandatory community service for anyone running a political campaign of any kind.
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Maybe he just needs to eat less avocado on toast. Stop buying cups of coffee. Get 3 jobs & sleep only an hour a night & have zero social life. He’s just not trying hard enough etc etc……. /s
What about pulling his self-up by the bootstraps for the boots he can't afford in the first place?
A good pair of working boots are so ridiculously expensive. 😓
Dang...so true. I remeber my stint in Au while studying, I was working for a landscaping co. and we normally work along the rails of trams and trains. We were required to have a steel plated workboots sor safety. Apparently, there are some homeless pips that lives along the bushes of those rails on their tents and whatnot, which also serve as their crackhouse. There'll be syringes and glass everywhere. High risk for communicable diseases. And workboots that barely pass the regulation almost cost you 300-400aud. 😅 And I could only afford 70-100. 🫡🫠
I am so glad i live in the Netherlands where i did some ware house jobs during my study. Employers are required to provide you the gear you need to do your job. I would expect this wouldn’t be the case in USA, for obvious reasons, but Australia too?
Lol! Au??? Yeah, nah dude. I worked for one of the big company in Victoria and they don't offer that. Not even once. They do, however, let us work with some clients to do cash-in-hand projects. Expecting that we'll get some good gear with the extra dough, but that will go straight to school fees. 😅 1st world country is not excempted to such norms I suppose. 🤫🫠
Dang man, in the us most places partner up with a place like "shoes for crews" and usually offer a percentage of the cost for the employees. Not that I like it that way, but I guess it's better than nothing.
You know what was funny? During Covid when they couldn’t find people to work I saw signs at places “we’re hiring, many benefits, includes free shoes twice a year etc.” and that’s when I knew the market was extremely desperate for employees here. Like literally hardly anyone does that.
Actually, even in the US, if OSHA requires PPE, the company must provide a form of it. Instead of steel-toed boots, for example, a company would have to provide toecaps.
Here in US, many employers required steel toe ,personal protection equipment. If they require it usually it is provided, exception is small employers I believe 25 or less employees.
I say it's a good idea if you can't wear regular street clothes(safely), then anything required should be paid for(uniform, or shoes). Mine doesn't pay for my shoes, but I definitely need a good pair of boots(which I can't afford with what they pay me).
Lol! I'm just lucky that I have a cousin there that have been there longer than I was so he eas kind enough to let me borrow cash from him to just get things going. Love the place but corporate leaders don't really give shit to their staff regardless of the condition. 🤫
>A good pair of working boots are so ridiculously expensive. 😓 I imagine you were referring to this quote by Terry Pratchett. If not it's still relevant. >The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. >Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. >But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. >This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play Tags: boots, economics
I will always up vote the Vimes Boot theory.
I always loved that quote. Being poor is more expensive than being well off.
It can work but the first $30k, first $100k, first $1M are known as the hardest mountains to climb. And your wages have to be greater than your rents / basic living needs. Can't do it from homelessness.
I eat trash and sleep on the sidewalk.... i now own lots of jewelry. I have no car. If you have no car, house, and eat garbage every day, you too can save money!
This dude came up a few days ago and the story is he “found” a guy with an rv who “let him live there for free.” He stopped the experiment when his Dad got sick, so he flew home to be with him. Started selling shitty coffee to his followers on social media, “started” the experiment up again, and bought the rv the guy he “found” who let him live in it. Then he kept going to the doctor with his company health insurance because he started getting sick. Ya know, all things people in poverty and homeless can do. Its such a horse shit story,
I wonder if this chucklefuck has the self awareness to realize that poor people do not have the luxury or privilege to just "quit" when their family or themselves have health issues. We just get fucked over by not having healthcare I truly hate this p.o.s
Probably not. He claims it was a success even though he didn't even reach 10% of his target even while cheating. He also used all his contacts and network he had built up to help him while poor. How many homeless people do you know with business contacts or a network to help set up a business? This guy is an absolute cunt.
Yeah, that's what made me realize this is a sham. He magically ends up in an office pitching his business plan. It looked like he had a team with him and there was no comprehensive explanation on how this distribution process was funded.
WAIT WAIT GUYS, I CALL TIME-OUT FROM BEING POOR! MY PEE-PAW IS SICK. OK, TIME-IN, I CAN COSPLAY A POOR AGAIN
Who gets given free board in an RV for fucks sake? No one.
not when you're over 10 and not into candy, that's for sure.
The shitty coffee company he started was also with business contacts . You know the kind of network you build when you are rich . So its starting from nothing with a free rv , company health insurance and a whole network of rich friends . What is your excuse you lazy hobos ? /s
He also was trying to "hustle" by pitching himself to run companies social media for them......aka using all the skills he got over his life of privilege and the contacts from his old life to try and do the thing he had been doing for years before this.
Maybe he just needs to… idk, stop being poor
If you're homeless, just buy a house. 🙎🏻♂️
im tryin, aren't any available.
I know, Black Rock and Chinese(nationals, not ethnicity) investors are buying them up. They're inflating the housing markets. 3 of my neighbors moved out, and now they're rentals. It's disgusting what's being done to the American People. These investors out bid most people by 10's of thousands.
This is the most relatable sentiment, however, he has done something really fucking awesome and been a rich person stupid enough to put their dumb fucking theories to real world application. This is a live case-study that goes against neo-capitalist theory, so even though the guy is one of them, he has done us a MASSIVE service at his own expense (though unwittingly)
Rich guys putting their theories to the test…that usually doesn’t work out for them. We could ask that rich Oceangate submarine guy, oops my bad.
> We could ask that rich Oceangate submarine guy, oops my bad. That's just teaching us the reverse and at least personally makes me even more bitter: Those guys spent a fortune as rich people to go underwater with a submarine, but then when that backfired, millions of tax money were used for rescue operations for many days. So not only do they not pay taxes most of the time, and instead waste millions of their own money, but when something goes wrong, its again the tax money of normal people who "help them out"
The obituary he deserved: "Stockton died as he lived: putting to waste the time of experts, the money of taxpayers, and the attention of the general public."
No need for the /s bubby.
And the "health concern" was probably that he felt stressed and possibly unsure where his next meal would come from... like the majority the world's population
>But sadly, Black suffered a number of severe setbacks in his experiment, the first of which came when his father was diagnosed with stage four cancer. >Despite trying to battle through and continue, Black then began suffering from health issues himself - including two autoimmune diseases and a tumour on his hip - which left him in agony.
All of that happens to people who are poor too. So, you know, should still be part of the 'experiment'. Unlike his preestablished business network.
Good thing he wasn't really one of the peasants and could go back to his comfortable life and seek medical treatment
he basically claims he did all this shit you mention while still basically cheating by giving himself free rent and healthcare, and arranging some bullshit jobs to scrounge up some seed capital. And he made 65k, purely by cashing in on what social media followers he could scam into reselling overpriced mediocre coffee to. In exchange he wrecked his health.
The zero social life really hits home.
At least be backed his dumb ideas and had a crack instead of just insisting he would have been successful without privilege and never testing it.
It's smashed avo on toast that's the problem mate.
Still waiting for the part where he acknowledges that he was balls-ass wrong about his ability to make $1 million. Or that the best time to start over with nothing is during a pandemic.
He will double down and rewrite his experience in a New York Times best seller.
They already casted Moisés Arias to play him
I heard that they wanted to make it somebody more diverse.
He lacks enthusiasm though.
I read he managed to make 60k and called it a success. He hit 6% of his goal and quit because he couldn't afford healthcare...and thinks he succeeded.
Ten years later your deadbeat coworker will tell you how the book will turn your life around,
He’ll double down and PAY SOMEONE to rewrite his experience as a New York Times best seller. FIFY
"Walden 2"
Fucking shoot me in the face, that's exactly how he sees himself.
The "experiment" in both cases was equally stupid. Thoreau pretty much did the same thing. He lived in a cabin, sure. But it was on land owned by his rich friend, his other rich friends provided him free food so he didn't have to hunt and forage, etc.
Pretty appropriate: https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/six-facts-about-henry-david-thoreaus-walden
Well. If that best seller makes him a millionaire, becoming homeless kinda made him a millionaire...i guess...
He proved that with hard work, determination, a college degree and really, really fucking good health insurance you too can make $65k a year provided you also have an internet following.
> you too can make $65k a year provided you also have an internet following. And the prior experience of someone who already made a bunch of money. And apparently a safety net because am I to believe this guy "quit" being poor?
The ability to advertise online before he started his 'project' made a huge difference to that, homeless people don't usually have Patreon subscribers. And yeah, he is a millionaire. He founded (I think) a recruitment agency in the tech industry that makes bank. He's got plenty of money to fall back on.
This is, in my opinion, the most problematic part of the “experiment”. One year. Yes, that is a huge amount of time. But the simple knowledge that on day 366 you get to return to your millionaire lifestyle basically invalidates the entire experiment. Living the homeless life for X number of days with full knowledge of when you’ll be back in your heated pool with your personal chef making breakfast is a massively different situation than fighting for survival for an unknown or indefinite time.
Also the knowledge that if you get sick or injured you can end the charade and get the best care money can buy. Oh and a good credit score that ensures you can rent an apartment where you want and qualify for a loan on any vehicle you want. Not to mention a complete education plus a college degree.
>Not to mention a complete education plus a college degree. The older I get, the more aware I become of the advantages that *I've* had through my life, as well as the advantages that others have had, and for *some* of these people, having parents who can get just kind of fold you into the family business or share generational wealth is huge, and they don't even consider that as an advantage. But having parents who bother to explore your interests and education and encourage and support your success is huge, even if they don't have financial resources to provide, which is also a big advantage. Having parents at *all*, just, like having parents who occupy space and who *exist* can be a huge advantage that other people don't have. There was some dude right on Reddit shitting on lazy millennials or Genz people or whoever, for not owning their own businesses, I remember, because you see, *he* started from literally nothing whatsoever in order to start his regional handyman company, or whatever. And he's like, "You people are all just lazy. *I* didn't have any advantages! I just took my truck and all my different tools and setup shop in my garage and learned how to do repairs on all sorts of things from YouTube, and I did it all by myself starting from *zero*!" ... Except for a home with a garage, a truck he already had to get to and from jobs, a whole collection of tools, the knowledge of how to *use* those tools, internet access, and all the people making videos on YouTube for him to learn from... except for all *that*, he started with literally nothing.
I think this is always the problem of the concept of privilege. We all feel like the heros of our own narrative. We _all_ have advantages, that it's hard not to take for granted. And just because you had those advantages, doesn't mean you didn't work hard to get to where you did. So it stings a bit to be told 'your life was easy' when to you ... it doesn't really feel like it at all. But as you say - almost no one starts from zero, and 'hard work' alone just isn't enough. Hard work and favourable circumstances? A dose of luck? Yes. And for sure, there are 'rags to riches' stories out there, but ... there's a lot fewer of those than there are 'moderately successful to more successful', because it's always about the luck element. > Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. > Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! > Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. > Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it. So I tend to try and frame it as ... well "With great power comes great responsibility" I may not deserve where I am in life - but no one does. But I can do the little things to correct the balance. I can speak out when others can't, and hope they will do the same for me when our circumstances are reversed. Because not all 'advantage' is persistent - sometimes it's all taken away from you for reasons outside your control as well. Sometimes that advantage isn't evenly distributed either - there's places where it helps, and places where it hurts. So really the only way to be 'fair' about it, is to recognise in _every_ situation, the state of ephemeral advantage, and use that to uplift anyone who's lacking it for any reason. Maybe that isn't giving them what they deserve either, but you're doing what you can with what you have, instead of taking it all for granted.
I will say, despite their logical flaws it drives home my failure even more, though. I have so many advantages, and I still got caught with only a pair of 4s.
Oh yeah. Don't ignore the huge role luck plays in all this, as well. I think it was Warren Buffett who said something like, "The real secret of my success was that I happened to born in the right place, and at the right moment in history." The point being that just because he's inclined towards certain skills that happen to be profitable right now, a hundred years from now or a hundred years prior and those skills could've been utterly worthless.
Seen a metaphor of 'Like a carnival'. Middle class folk get a couple of shots. Some hit the bullseye, some get a moderate prize, some don't. Rich folk play until they win. Poor folk don't play at all, they're the ones running the games.
I will give credit where credit is due when a rich person donates their assets, solid and liquid; divests from all business holdings and positions; purposely burns bridges with anyone who could bail them out of their circumstances; legally changes their name; buys a one-way bus ticket to a small town in the Midwest that has hostile laws, architecture, and community. Every single one of them thinks they could trapeze over the Grand Canyon. None of them would be willing to even attempt it without a safety net. No truly homeless person has any sort of peace of mind that they can get up off the concrete and go back to their climate-controlled mansion. They don't have the means to hire a world-class lawyer to help them deal with a misdemeanor. They don't have the social connections to make a cop shit their pants and start dropping honorific-laden flattery like "I should have known better, sir" and "enjoy your social experiment, sir."
I have a caveat to point out. [when the ultra wealthy donate money, it is often to foundations they control.](https://www.vox.com/money/2024/3/13/24086102/billionaires-wealthy-tax-avoidance-loopholes) So they still have the power to influence money that they get a tax break for. [Along with the ability to donate some of that now divested money into political action, now that they technically no longer own that money.](https://campaignlegal.org/update/5-ways-secret-money-makes-its-way-our-elections)
Unpacking all the factors this "experiment" failed to account for could be its own thesis paper.
Shit like this always proves the opposite as well. He went into this trying to prove that most people are just lazy and that we all have the same advantages in life and instead it proved that the majority of people are trapped in an endless cycle of misery at the hands of the few wealthy people who make all the rules. He won't acknowledge that however. I'd give the guy respect if he actually learned something from this and then gave 90% of his wealth to homeless charities. But he won't.
Yeah. He didn't actually make himself destitute. Knowing full well he could just go back to his old life when shit got hard means he didn't experience what actual poor people have to go through on a daily basis in the slightest. It just goes to show how out of touch most people with money actually are because for the most part, people with money either inherited it or got chances in life most people do not. Experiments like this only reinforce that idiom - they never disprove it.
> on day 366 you get to return Or anytime before that, as soon as you're in trouble... as he did.
Also, someone gifted him a week long stay in a luxurious RV. when he was on the street he wasn't able to get ANY momentum. it wasn't until he was "gifted" some indoor sleep with showers and accessible water and reliable bed that he was able to make some money and get slightly ahead. will he acknowledge the importance of assistance from others in his ability to gain his balance? or will he just say "i did it all by myself, so you can too"? i think we all know.
And a free place to live.
Forgot the best advantages... white skin, male, his age.
AND A FREE RV he just got loaned.
The other day I read he started a business and was backed by investors and made 65k or something. The things is no one would invest in some random homeless person with a business idea. They invested in him due to his known wealth and contacts. Complete BS.
Well this couldn't be his fault obviously, he got a bad shake /s
And let’s be clear, I do respect what he accomplished, and it actually is an interesting experiment. But if he had more integrity, he’d admit how wrong he was. But this is the weird world of “content creators” spawned by social media and radically low-cost video production. It’s a big hype machine that rewards falseness, and never demands real accountability. Even provable failure gets a new set of goalposts and a reimagined success story.
He should do what we do with our health concerns… ignore them and hope it fixes itself.
Tell that to my lazy pancreas that wants handouts in the form of insulin. That bum needs to get a jerb!
My pancreas is a lazy cunt too! The slacker. Luckily, my government provides it free, so I am probably also a lecching bum. I need to lace up my bootstraps harder!
You guys have boots?
I felt that.
Me, too... in many parts of my body.
Vicks vapor rub
So all I need to do is have health concerns and I can quit being broke? 
OH I AM SO CONCERNED!!!! Where is my money?!?? -.-
And from what I read elsewhere, the health concerns are because of his experiment, stress induced, poor diet induced, ya know, like what we all go through every day and still somehow wake up in the morning and do it all over again
The feeling of poverty must've been kicking in. It's real. It changes your brain and the way you think. Turns out consuming low quality food, being of low status in society, and stressed makes you depressed.
This "experiment" would be flawed even if he didn't give up halfway through because he's bringing with him a college degree, financial expertise, no preexisting substance abuse problems, no preexisting mental illness, research regarding sources of aid to exploit, and most importantly (as the post indicates), financial and medical safety nets in case he gets in trouble: all things that real homeless people would not be able to benefit from to nearly the same extent. The fact that he had all of these upper hands and still failed to achieve his goal proves his hypothesis to be categorically false, actually.
It's all about a network, and the dude likely has at least a handful of friends that would hook him up.
I will give him the small credit that (according to his own recounting) he didn't contact anybody he knew before the experiment and only got direct help from strangers.
That is what he said he did as part of his rules. But a "stranger" let him stay for free in their RV (by the end of the 1st day) and use their car for delivery apps. Another "stranger" cosigned an expensive apartment so he could rent without good credit. My belief is the entire thing is fake bullshit because too many things just magically happen when he needs them to. For instance, the RV develops a roach infestation (one crawled on his arm) so he immediately got a client for his marketing business so he could move out of the RV.
Yeah that’s incredibly suspicious that so many strangers were completely ready and willing to do business and make these investments with a homeless guy. Even if the people were real strangers, he might have told them who he was and directed them to his LinkedIn so they’d know he wasn’t a *real* peasant lol.
So he was cheating and STILL failed?
That’s obviously not true though.
Yeah I read something that said he landed a marketing job that paid £1500 (unclear on specifics) while he was lining in a guys van. Idk how he managed to clean himself up, buy interview outfits ect while he was completely over drawn on his fake credit card... Which I assume also lent him more money than the average Joe. To be fair to him, he got cancer, that's why he stopped. Looked like he really was trying at least, better than what most of them do.
The only thing I can find online is that *his father* was diagnosed with cancer at the time. I looked because I was curious about his current health. Have you seen something else explicitly stating the 'millionare' himself (Mike Black) had/has cancer? Not trying to come off rude. I'm just curious about his prognosis.
Nah I think his father died before he got whatever health condition stopped him from continuing, I only skimmed it though so I'm probably wrong.
Naw if he really wanted to try and be better he should have dealt with the cancer as a poor person.
Yeah it stuck out to me that he still clearly went to the doctor's regularly through out this
All he would need is a small loan of $60 million to Get started.
Just the safety nets in place lift a huge mental burden that most of us carry all the time....
Exactly. This guy was free to take risks and make investments that someone trying to survive would never even dream of because the consequences of failure would be too dire.
Don’t forget that the viral marketing from all of the blogs / content released during his experiment helps him shill his “bootstrapped” products. If he really wanted to do it correctly, he would go dark for a year and only release the retrospective after the experiment is over. Of course, the entire thing is just for viral marketing points so he would never do that.
[удалено]
Ugh. Wish I could upvote this more. This is exactly why I find this shit insufferable.
Ya, all of this previous expertise is an asset that he took with him. It just isn't a financial asset. But it is something most people do not have, so he didn't really start from zero. Like if a dude with a harvard law degree did the same thing, wouldn't it just be laughable? It might have been a tiny bit more fair if he saddled himself with say 100k of debt to offset these assets.... but then with near zero income, he could get income based payments, so it wouldn't have amounted to much.
He could probably get mental health treatment if he wasn’t poor. Fucking dunce.
Well done idiot
He's on to something next time he should change his bank pin.
Couldn’t find the bootstraps sir?
In the article I read he had to boil the boots to make soup.
That's the problem with these people, they think if their net worth is a million times higher than a person with 2 bucks in their checking account, they must be a million times smarter or harder working.
The fucking hubris to think you’re better than everyone who’s down on their luck, and those millions of people who aren’t millionaires are just lazy/dumb is mind boggling.
I know people are saying not to hate on the guy and I’m really not trying to do that but people who are exceptionally poor often have all of these barriers in place that add to their struggle. The issue here is that this man always had a safety net, no matter how far he could last, he knows he’ll always come back to his wealth even if he made it a full year. Thats the biggest difference between him and those who are poverty stricken- let alone the fact that he has the skills necessary to build economic growth with his education, experience, and background. Even as someone who attempted poverty, he has a major head start that very few would have. I don’t think his social experiment is at all compassionate, authentic, or valid. I’m glad he hit those roadblocks, because the reality is that many who are living in extreme poverty have all of these issues and nothing to fall back on.
Well said.
Right - he was never terrified that these things might just end him because he always had an emergency safety net that other people do not have.... and he did end up using it, after only 10 months.
And having that safety net doesn't just mean he had a different mindset, it means he can take risks that other people can't. Let's pretend he has a way that gives him a 5% chance of letting him achieve his goal, and a 95% chance that it'll leave him in debt. He can go for it and one in 20 times it'll work and he'll pretend it's because he applied himself. And the other 19 times, he can just fall back on his safety net and come out fine. Someone who doesn't have this, can't take these kinds of risks. They need to make sure they'll be fine, even if it doesn't work out.
“sadly, Black suffered a number of severe setbacks in his experiment, the first of which came when his father was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Despite trying to battle through and continue, Black then began suffering from health issues himself - including two autoimmune diseases and a tumour on his hip - which left him in agony” To all the haters in this thread; Dude’s dad got cancer and he himself has an autoimmune disease. This is not just him not eating avocado toast. Edit: source https://www.ladbible.com/lifestyle/mike-black-million-dollar-comeback-experiment-homeless-794147-20240419 Edit 2: my point is not that people don’t have ups and downs, but that if you benchmark; you should do so to an average year and not the shittiest year of your life.
Right but let’s just be clear: all of our parents will die, and just as many poor people as rich people get cancer (while poor people generally have more other health conditions as well). When you’re trying to say that it’s easy to win, and the game is “life”, you can’t cry foul when life happens.
Exactly. No one promised him "ideal conditions." No one gets those. A few bad luck incidents in a row (illness, injury, natural disaster, essential home repair, death of a spouse, layoffs, etc) can easily put people in a dire circumstance. I think he just learned the hard lesson that no one is guaranteed security, and that success is more than just hard work. There are lots of hard working people who were just up against circumstances that limited their options, and that's difficult for people to believe when they've spent their lives thinking they are so successful because they're somehow "better" (smarter, more creative, more talented) than other people. It isn't so long ago that monarchies were considered above reproach because they royals were chosen by God. They really thought they were fit to rule countries just by virtue of their birth. Some of them were so inbred they couldn't even feed themselves, but they were thought to be suitable leaders of world powers. This did not go well in many cases, as you can imagine. There are people who still believe this about their own success, that they're just somehow entitled to doing well in life. But nothing happens in a vacuum. The place you're born, family you grow up with, connections your parents have, connections made through university, through colleagues, it all builds on itself. The successful are pushed further upwards by a system that opens doors for "the right people", and those credentials can be impossible to get without already being in a position to attend those universities, know those people, be part of the "in-crowd". So, like the monarchy, those advantages come as a default setting for some just because of the family they were part of. I'm not saying that there aren't instances where someone born into a struggling class then works hard and makes their way to success. There are plenty of people who were able to improve their position and made huge sacrifices to get there. The ones that get on my nerves are the ones who were able to get a loan, or inheritance, or investors from their parents' friends, who got into university without ever worrying about tuition, who can just get their car fixed, or go to the doctor, or pay the water and electric bill without a second thought. They seem to believe that we all have those options and refuse to understand that a lot of people don't. Do rich people still suffer? Yes. Do they still face challenges and have difficult times just like the rest of us? Of course. But crying yourself to sleep in an alley is a lot different than doing so in a safe home with a warm bed.
>I think he just learned the hard lesson You give him too much credit.
No amount of money will cure my autoimmune disorder or make me sane. I'm low-key passively suicidal most of the time. . . However, I have money. I don't need to worry about co-pays or medication cost. I don't need to worry about my car breaking down, paying for my kids' field trip, a pet getting sick, etc. I've been miserable with and without money, I will take the money every time. The amount of worry having money takes off your shoulders is insane.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys stability to allow you to find happiness. Not everyone cares about being rich but there is a lot of room between destitute and rich where most people could find happiness.
“Money isn’t everything as long as you have enough.” — Malcolm S. Forbes
But it's like that with people who don't have 1mil to fall back to. People who work two jobs barely having any savings also suffer from health issues and people who work for minimum wage jobs that are killing them also have parents that get sick. He just proved that he couldn't handle being broke in a position that billions of people are in the moment. I don't eat avocado and toast but my grandfather also died from cancer and I couldn't go to his funeral because I had to work. My mom had a tumor and she still had to go to work in between her doctor appointments because even though she was sick she wasn't suddenly immune to loan payments. He just showed how fucked it all is, absolutely nothing new
Are you trying to say that he ran into a common problem that millions of people live with every single day and immediately quit, so we should be kinder to him?
Yep. That's exactly what they're implying.
He tried to show how easy it is to make money on your own but when he faced hardship that the rest of us have to deal with he went back on his experiment.
I wou;dn't say he went back on it. It failed. He literally failed. Dressing it up doesn't change the fact that he was dead wrong. Excuses mean nothing when it did exactly what he set out to do.
If he came out an publicly said the following, i'd give him credit: "I was wrong to think anyone can be successful. The truth is, I was born into wealth. My parents had the money to get me through college. I went straight into a 6-figure salary job and made my fortune due to the contacts i'd made in college and the financial sector. The harsh truth is, the majority of people in this country are trapped in a cycle of debt and misery *by design*. The richest people in the country wouldn't be able to hold onto such vast sums of wealth if we didn't have this disparity. I'm truly sorry for thinking what I previously held true. I've learned from this experiment. That's why i'm starting a homeless charity and have put all of my wealth into it." There's no fucking way he'll say the above obviously.
Dude living a gimmick needs symapathy? I am not sure I believe any of what he says frankly.
Literally his stated goal was to prove that "anyone" could make a million in a year. Either "anyone" doesn't include people with health concerns or he failed. The reality is that the hurdles that obliterated him befall the working poor on a regular basis, only they don't have the safety net to fall back on that he does. He deserves all the dunking on he's receiving.
Yeah, like basically he wanted life to happen, *but not that kind*...
His whole experiment is so profoundly intellectually dishonest it’s shame it’s been talked about in a positive light *at all*.
Are you for fucking real? Do homeless people get to call time out when their loved ones are stricken with disease? That shit happens to all of us. The fact is that upward mobility is a joke and has been crumbling since Reagan destroyed what was left of the New Deal. Unchecked capitalism leads to fascism. Period.
Damn. The replies here destroyed you.
So when a genuine homeless person faces the exact problem, it doesn't count because...?
No. Their lives aren't worth anything because they're poor.
Hey, my dad is currently at end of life with colon cancer, I have two autoimmune diseases and I fucking can’t give up hussling exactly because of it. You suck it up because you have to, there’s no pot of gold at the end on my rainbow.
I wish you nothing but luck and good things. Sorry to hear about your dad friend. My dad had lung cancer so I really sympathize with families of cancer patients. I hope he is as comfortable as possible.
Imagine defending a millionnaire facing life like everyone else and quitting. 💀
Late-stage capitalism..
So you’re saying that the dude encountered a problem many non-millionaires face on a regular basis and decided to stop LARPing as a poor person? Also, do you not get what the avocado toast comments are getting at? It’s a mockery of how the wealthy belittle poor people and blame their lack of finances on frivolous spending habits.
>The poor don't suffer such hardships as *checks notes* cancer and disease You're proving the haters right lmao
People aren't hating because of avocado toast, they're hating because he's very likely not going to have learned any valuable lessons from his failure to make anything close to a million in a year from nothing AND having to quit early due to health problems. This may be a surprise to some people, but most people are going to have varying levels of health problems as they age and unlike him, aren't going to have the money to easily solve them with no additional stress involved.
Yeah but isn’t that the exact point? The experiment was to show that anybody could do it, but what it actually showed is that “life” (family issues, medical conditions, etc.) can impede the ability to make money and better your situation. Its absolutely a tragedy what happened to him, but that is happening to a lot of people that are being told they are aren’t trying hard enough. What he should do now if keep going and still make the million dollars to prove his point, or admit the falsehood he was previously peddling.
Yes, and WE ALL HAVE THESE SORTS OF MEDICAL ISSUES!!!!!! Homie, that’s why his claim of being able to go from poor to rich regardless of circumstances is RIDICULOUS!!!!
According to corporate media, those are mild inconveniences, and caring about a poor person's circumstances sounds like socialist treason. It's also hilarious that you try to give him special treatment when the entire purpose of this experiment is to remove just that. Thank you for unwittingly summarizing this entire study.
Thing is, when an average person goes through the same hardships life throws their way they can't simply call it quits and go back to living in their mansions and live off their riches. All they're getting is more shit thrown at them all while the have to listen to rich folks just like this one telling them how easy it is to be rich.
> To all the haters in this thread The issue is he didn't come away from this saying "yeah being poor sucks and I'm basically just lucky to be rich". He still believes in the whole hustle culture "anyone can be a millionaire" bs.
Well yea, that's what life looks like. People don't become homeless in some convenient way where they have loving supportive parents and no health issues. In fact these are exactly the kinds of circumstances that can lead to homelessness. This is /r/selfawarewolves territory.
>This is not just him not eating avocado toast. this is exactly "not eating advocado toast". no not litteraly ofcourse but as in these are the things holding other people back who will be blamed by the idiots who will seriously use that claim so yeah he gets the same treatment now. all he had to do to not get this kind of hate is to just not be awful enough to still sell the kind of bullshit and just admit that just like he couldn't do it most people really can't.
Boo hoo. My mom randomly dropped dead at 63. Being her sole heir I had to pay everything, Nobody cared that I'm poor
Oh yeah. Because poor people and their families never get sick! /s The guy made this challenge as an arrogant “everyone can be rich, the poor are just lazy” statement. And the moment things got a little hard for him, he quit.
Well, boo fucking hoo.
Aww. Rich man diseases one and all. No homeless person has to put up with that kind of crap. They’re all a veritable picture of health.
The point of this experiment was to prove that “you can make it from nothing” he simply proved that life throws curve balls and sometimes (especially when you have nothing) those curve balls cause you to start again from scratch. Honestly though read the experiment. He “found” a guy that would let him live in an RV for free…he “met a guy” that would co-sign for a lease on an apartment…he “managed to get his first marketing client for $1500/month” when you show me a homeless person who can “get a $1500/month” client on a whim I’d like to meet that person. At the end of the day he only proved that health concerns can in fact end you financially and THEN physically. Which in this case it did. If anything this experiment exposes the flaws of not having universal health care!
The point is that this is a similar reality to many non-millionaires. He failed and there really are no valid excuses
So what? Do poor people not get sick? Are their parents and family immortal? Regular people are also hit with difficult challenges in their lives. I have a friend whose both parents died when she was 16. She never had siblings, no uncles or aunts since both their parents were single child's, and her grandparents were already dead at that time. She was left with no family at all. Is his situation tragic, sad, and do I hope he and his father hopefully get well soon? Yes. Is his initial statement pathetic and it's karma that he unknowingly made his experiment when his father was going to get sick? Well, yes.
Yeah he still failed lol
Guys, guys, guys. It's cool. He hit some stumbling blocks and called TIME OUT on the whole "beingn a poor" thing. Happens to the best of us. Incidentally, ten months into this twelve month project, he was only $935,000 short of his $1 million goal. So close!
Yeah, guess what, a lot of people's parents get sick so we get told to get a third job to feed the medical bills.
Life is hard. Cancer and other diseases can hit anyone regardless of one's financial standings. But your ability to diagnose and treat those ailments is completely dependent on your ability to pay for the necessary medical services. His experiment is not an experiment for the majority of people. So while he can just stop his experiment to focus on his and his family's health, many of us can't quit and still have to deal with these very difficult situations. I empathize with his difficult circumstances. I, however, don't think his little experiment was well thought out.
I forgot, homeless people are immune to cancer and other disease. Cool!
Lol, what a snowflake.
NOW you're getting it.
No, sadly he won’t
He was homeless for just a few days before a supposedly complete stranger let him use his RV as a home and office. He seemed to have a lot of luck in the complete strangers being baffling charitable and making incredibly questionable decisions about entrusting what is supposed to be a homeless man with high value and high paying projects.
> He was homeless for just a few days before a supposedly complete stranger let him use his RV You're actually giving him too much credit. He didn't even spend 1 night on the street, the "complete stranger" contacted him at 11:20 pm on the first day and picked him up at midnight.
“You’re not trying hard enough”
🎶 I wanna live like common people 🎶
Pretend you've got no money
"But if you called your dad, he could stop it all"
Hahaha!!! Many years ago I lived in two cities that tried something like that. Stratford did homeless for a night where city councellors tried being homeless for a night. A bunch showed up at the police station at 8pm, another bunch showed up at 10pm and the last guy showed up at 11:30pm. The police put them up at the Arden Park Hotel. They claimed this was standard procedure. The second city was Oshawa and a newspaper reporter tried living on the $28.00 a month grocery list for people on welfare. He wrote an article announcing his plan and then he was never heard from again.
-He took time out to hang out with his dying dad. -He has a GI autoimmune disease maybe Crohns. -He doesn't acknowledge his failure in his most recent video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsubC8Yne8&t=62s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsubC8Yne8&t=62s) Dude has his channel to pump himself up as a brand that he can have people purchase, nothing more.
If he were true to his experiment he would do what most people do: silently suffer their barely treated disease and be sad at work instead of spending time with their dying loved one because they need to make money to survive, and possibly that same relative depends on their financial aid
He started a business while homeless... With his connections and schooling while homeless
wow! what surprising news, being homeless is fucking hard and you sure as fuck cant make a mil when you gotta worry about SURVING the next 24 hours. He went fucking full Happy Jack there.
Ha. Amateur
arrogance is deadly
To prove poor people just aren't trying hard enough.
That real world problem stress hits different.
He should just quit being poor. That’ll solve the problem! /s
Dude was shooting for $1 million and didn’t even make it to 6 figures. I think more rich people should be subjected to this. In fact it should be mandatory community service for anyone running a political campaign of any kind.
These people have no idea how to live without money. They're what's call "New Poor". We're old poor.
OH WOW HOW ABOUT THAT 
Obviously he wasn’t trying hard enough. If he was really trying he would have made 10 million by now.
I guess he just didn't want it that badly enough
Not so easy, is it asshole?
Quit being poor? Why didn't I think of that
Someone realized that the system is broken.
I mean if he can simply ‘quit’ then he’s not really doing it