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Met Shaq for about ten seconds in Atlanta about five years ago. I'm not big into sports but knew who he was and pointed to him and said "Hey, aren't you famous?" He laughed and said "I guess so." We talked for a second about the city and he went on his day. My general impression was that he was a nice, down to earth guy.
"Oh my god its Kazaam!"
I would vote for Shaq for President.
You should really look into this Prince. He's such a genuinely good person, savvy entrepreneur, hardworking individual who is genuinely interested in 'doing good for the sake of doing good''.
The big one for me is the Shaq Shoes. He specifically built a brand of high quality basketball shoes that don't look like trash because kids were getting killed over Jordons and Shaqs Reebox brand were too expensive.
Brief article on it: https://www.complex.com/sneakers/a/gerald-flores/shaq-sneakers-interview
I find it funny that I'm not a sports ball fan, nor do I know much about Shaq, but I do know the shoe story!
“A lady cursed me out one day at the arena. I reached in my pocket to give her $1,000 and she smacked it out of my hand,” Shaq reminisced. “She said, ‘Why doesn’t anyone try to make affordable shoes?’”
Shaq just shaqin
imagine having functionally unlimited money.
And apparently the man is worth $500 million. By ultra rich standards that's not even wildly wealthy. How many people could somebody like Warren Buffet pay education costs for?
Average cost of college is under $150k/person. Warrant Buffet is worth $133,500,000,000 (rounded heavily). Warranty buffet could pay for approximately 890,000 people to go to college.
However given the fact that is most of a million people, and how much of a racket education in the US, I think the actual figure is much higher, because he could do several things to drastically reduce the overhead involved.
It would be far cheaper for him to build an accredited college and fully staff it for 20 years, providing free education, books, and rooms, to everyone who attends.
i love how warren's name deteriorates every time you type it 🤪
Weren't buffet
He could have went to a state college or university system instead of the for-profit University of Phoenix.
Shaq is great but he chose an online for profit school with accreditation concerns and then paid them more money so it wasn't online.
He paid to not have to deal with the general public interrupting his academic learning time.
I used to like Shaq, but he's been involved in promoting a lot of seriously sketchy stuff. He will put his name on literally anything if they pay him enough. Few celebrities put their name on more stupid scummy crypto bullshit. He lost my respect with that. I bet he had a financial relationship with Univ of Phoenix
"You need 15 people in the class Mr. Shaq"
"No problem, I'll just pay for 15 friends to take the class"
"....uh, we don't require 16 people, but you do you. We'll gladly take your money."
To be fair, Shaq hadn't yet earned his master's when he did that.
I mean, he doesn't want them to cancel his class if someone skips so he needs an alternate to ride the bench just in case.
That's funny. I'm imagining him responding,"Man, you don't know my friends..."
Just in case one of them gives up
He is a overall a good dude. I love what he did with his Sneakers:
As per Joe Pompliano, In 1998, when Shaq was on his way out of the Orlando arena, a mother was seen cursing at him. She posed the question, “Why don’t one of you s** o** a B****** make an affordable sneaker?” in front of him that made him wonder. He even offered her $200 which she violently refused.
The Lakers legend stopped to think about the enormous difference in the actual cost of basketball shoes and how much a typical family could spend. This led to his decision to leave Reebok and start his own line. A thought occurred in Shaq’s mind and he turned to the biggest retailer in the world, Walmart.
It’s been two decades, and Shaq has been selling most of his shoes at Walmart for $15-$30, compared to Nike’s $200 and more. This helped him sell over 120 million pairs of shoes.
Heartwarming sweatshop labour, although I expect that's the case at both price points.
Are there companies that make stuff without child slavery?
A lot of stuff actually. Many countries have strong anti child labour laws. Of course I know illegal sweatshops do still exist.
A shoe factory in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the fastest growing economies in the world now.
I imagine so, but sweatshops full of adults don't strike me as much of an improvement.
He seems a nice guy but I lost some respect when he did gambling advertising in Australia.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he didn’t know Aussie gambling is 90% money laundering.
But advertising for gambling in general is scuzzy.
To me sounds like a great guy, though he should have just went to a real university.
Why?
Shaq just wants the knowledge. He doesn't need to pay for "elite" accreditation.
There is a bit of a midpoint between elite accreditation and University of Phoenix
Why go to an online university if you don't want an online education? There are plenty of places that have in-person classes, without being elite or elite priced.
At that point, why the university of Phoenix?
That's legend shit right there.
I had a series of classes in college with 6 students, including myself. If one of us failed, the rest wouldn't be able to do the next course in the series. It didn't help that the classes were some of the most difficult in our major. Barely made it through all 4 classes lmao
Sounds like some once in a lifetime team building experiences
It was honestly incredible. We all had so much time between classes, so we'd just get that classroom unlocked and hang out in there. There was a time all 6 of us decided to just have nap time. Professor walked in to all of us sleeping in makeshift beds. A couple of us even stashed blankets in that room. We really did work together on everything. Like, we'd have communal study guides and just edit it as we saw fit, then go over it as a group before tests. I was considerably shorter than everyone else, so I was the one who got to crawl under desks to plug in Ethernet cables and all that jazz.
How to improve your life with this 1 weird trick.
Every comment:
Shaq's great, but **goes on to describe something decidedly not great**
Let me say this, between him making fun of a handicapped person on social media and him buying a tiger from Joe Exotic I'm gonna go ahead and say he's just a straight up piece of shit.
He generally comes off as a nice person but he's pretty irresponsible and ableist. People always want to build up images of celebrities but they're just human beings with flaws like anyone else.