Everyone wants it, but only some people have access to the golden goose. If you weren’t born into a large inheritance, wealth can seem like it will always be outside of your grasp. Luckily, there’s rich people all over the place, and there are plenty of ways to squeeze money out of their sponge bodies.
The first and most important thing to know is that no way of making money is a given. If a business plan has a 99% chance of succeeding, you could still be the unlucky grey duckling, that single person out of a hundred, those ten people out of one thousand, those hundred people out of ten thousand, those thousand people out of a hundred thousand, those ten thousand people out of a million, those hundred thousand out of a ten million, those million out of a hundred million. Which means that even if you have a 99%-effective business, and everyone in the United States tries it out, there will still be 3 million people who couldn’t make it work, just because of lady luck.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. At that point, if you still haven’t succeeded, then you should reconsider the way you’re doing business. Try looking into, and thinking deeply about the concept of the Null Hypothesis.
But first, a basic biology lesson is in order. Each rich person, in addition to standard human organs like lungs & hooves, is born with a spongy layer of fat that lies between their skin and their muscles. This layer of sponge is vital for trapping luck particles from the atmosphere and converting them into a form that can be more easily liquidated.
“Think of it like a big ol sandwich” explains Dr. Landre, who I met with in New York City, home of the big bucks. “If you start eating that sandwich near roadkill, it’s not gonna be great. Cuz they got all the luck smushed right out of em. But if you come to my house, and hug both me and my rich wife before eating the sandwich, I bet things will go great for you.”
“By the way, in case your readers didn’t know, I’m a woman. So if you, the reader, thought (based on my title and prior dialogue) that I was a man, you could maybe take a step back and think about why that is. Not necessarily that you’re bad for making that mistake, but it’s easy to slip into very assumptive thinking if you’re not careful.”
Like normal fat, the amount of spongy fat under your skin (which Dr. Landre calls the “stratum lipidus”) fluctuates depending on your diet, the amount of exercise you get, and a host of other factors. But the number one indicator of the size your stratum lipidus is how much time you spend squeezing rich people.
“If you’re rich, like my wife and myself independently are” Dr. Landre continued, with a self-satisfied look, “then it’s really easy to keep your stratum lipidus thick with luck. We want to Dave and Buster’s recently, and I kid you not, the first coin that my very wealthy wife put into the little bulldozer coin game triggered a jackpot and we won the giant teddy bear. And then, when my little sister, who, I swear to God, looks like a scrawny-ass baby-bird from her straight up lack of stratum. Like, that is one lipidus that has no lipids in it, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t know what I mean, I mean that I bully my younger sister because her body type is different than mine, and also because she stole my glossier sample pack, and I will truly never ever forgive her for that because I really needed that at the time she took it, and so I was left looking like an absolute idiot, and so now, I plan to spend the remainder of my waking days making her look like an idiot in public by calling her the meanest names I can think of.”
Dr. Landre insists that it’s really just about the net wealth of the people you’re hugging, but with diminishing returns. You want to generally hug people who are just slightly richer with luck juice than yourself. Ideally, they will be exactly 1 rung above you in the social ladder.
“Each and every person you hug will leak some of their luck juice onto you. But like a sponge, you have to squeeze your own stratum lipidus if you want to absorb a lot. And keep in mind that when you squeeze two sponges together, the amount of liquid in each will end up being the exact same. So, if you’re like me and my lovely and very economically endowed wife, then you can hug each other all the time, quite sensually in front of your stupid younger sister so she sees how much more happy and successful you are than her. Especially since Brad is an ABSOLUTE dry sponge. Hugging him not only was the low-light of 14 straight Thanksgivings, but also stole so much of my hard-earned luck, that I even considered not entering a bracket for March Madness. So now we only hug my parents at Thanksgiving.”
And Dr. Landre isn’t the only rich person who swears by this hugging method. Her associate, Dr. Landre-Peters started leaving her family members behind in 2009, and her luck has only gone up.
“I met Dr. Landre back in 2007 when we were both very into the drug scene. At the time, she was incredibly wealthy because of a large inheritance that she managed to secure in its entirety, thanks to a loophole that allowed her to prevent her sister from receiving any of the money. Since then, we’ve been doing excellent. My parents were always incredibly loving and supportive, but they didn’t love Dr. Landre in the way that I did. And by that I mean that I no longer wanted to hug them, because it would maybe hurt my rep.
“So I threw my phone into the Hudson river, changed my name, and started my life anew. And now that I’m not paying for my parent’s nursing or lodging, I’ve got much more money in my bank account, and much much more sponge in my dermis.”