Never Let a Good Side Hustle Go to Waste

Warheads dropped on school buses, drugged up and passed out in the Steel City, and flipping fan giveaways

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: the unending itch and scratch of the side hustle.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

Ingredient List

📺 : The four-time international whistling champion performed the National Anthem before the Orioles game this week, and it was as good as you’d imagine, but better. You can watch it here.

📖 : After a long wait on Maryland’s digital library, I finally got “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at NYU (he’s also on Substack at

After Babel

. It’s thoroughly depressing but also a must-read. A quarter century from now we’ll probably all realize that Meta and ByteDance and Google are the second-coming of big tobacco and we were just letting our kids chainsmoke their way through adolescence.

This Past Week

Had a pretty solid week, kind of a laid back calm-before-the-storm type of thing before the summer season starts. Which, honestly, has been somewhat stressful. Sometimes the impending amount of things to do and get done is really overwhelming, mainly because I’m not good at managing those types of things, no matter how hard I try. Eternal thanks to my wife who helps me through it all. She’s been married to me for 12 years today (happy anniversary), and I’m not sure how she does it.

I always enjoy taking the free Baltimore commuter water taxi over to Rye’s baseball games in Locust Point, and it’s always so nice and peaceful coming back at sunset across the Inner Harbor. Plus, going by bike and by boat to a baseball game is just generally kind of rad.

A few other things I wrote and/or edited this week:

• “Nike Pegasus Trail 5 (Shoe Review)” for Believe in the Run

• “Nike Pegasus 41 (Shoe Review)” for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic manner. You can subscribe here.

Lastly, and something I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams, my first ever signature piece of apparel drops on Monday, June 3 at 6 p.m. ET. The Legionnaire-style hat is a collaboration between Australian brand Fractel and Believe in the Run and features an embroidered raccoon (basically my mascot thanks to my affinity for picking up trash) and my own signature. It’s insane, it’s ridiculous, and it’s the hat of the summer. If you want to be the envy of all your friends and the embarrassment of all your children, you can pick it up here.

And now, onto the dinner service.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Mega Warheads

The school bus is a great place for learning. The hottest curse words, who’s cool and who’s not based on seating arrangement, and how to fall asleep with your head against a window, a skill that will serve you later in life when you find yourself on a transcontinental flight. For an entrepreneurial 11-year-old, it’s also a launchpad for learning the basics of supply and demand.

Unsurprisingly, if you have a supply of candy, kids will demand it.

When I was a kid, the candy industry was really starting to get its legs under it, offering a wide array of bite-sized sugar or sometimes a whole bag of it (thank you Fun Dip). At my school, Now and Laters were starting to really gain some traction, as were Cry Babies and Mega Warheads (which, in hindsight, is an absolutely bonkers name). Sour was the name of the game and I was here to capitalize on it.

At the time, my mom had a Sam’s Club membership, and walking down the candy aisle seemed like a glitch in the matrix– surely these companies did this by accident, how could there be this much candy in this single container? You didn’t have to own a candy store to buy this stuff, you just had to convince your mom it belonged in your house.

I was always good at math and I knew the value of bulk items divided into their singular parts, thanks to the booming baseball card market and my obsession with the penny fluctuations within Beckett Baseball Monthly. So it was easy to see that this giant container of candy was filled with dollar signs. 

My mom bought me a giant barrel of Now and Laters and another one of Cry Babies, and it was off to the races.

The next day, I posted up at my spot towards the back of the bus (I was a sixth grader after all), opened up my Jansport, and announced we were open for business. The first day of sales was slow, as most kids didn’t have any change on them. However, the word on the street got out quickly, and within days, business was booming. The large pocket of my Jansport backpack was reserved for school supplies, the middle was for candy, and the outer pocket was for money. As soon my stash made its way onto the bus, hands stretched towards me with dimes, quarters, and sometimes dollars. By the time I got home (literally five minutes later as we lived a mile from the school), I’d be bulging with coinage. There were days then I’d make $3 or $4 in that time, basically the hourly minimum wage in 1992. 

Coming home and dumping my backpack on my bedroom floor, sifting the money into their separate denominations and organizing them neatly into dollar stacks before counting them up– it was an absolute rush. Dreams of Gameboys and Upper Deck baseball packs and Nerf guns and moon shoes filled my head. The sky was the limit. I even had a ledger where I wrote down my profit statement (there was no loss) for each day.

And then, as with everything cool about childhood– the adults ruined it.

Apparently the demand was a little too hot, and while it wasn’t outstripping supply, it was outstripping all of my clients’ demand for dinner. Basically, kids were crushing candy and ruining their appetites for the healthier things in life. Can you blame them?

I found out about this when our elementary school principal pulled me out of class and took me into the hallway to give me a stern talking to. In short, she told me that parents were complaining and I had to cease operations. I don’t remember much else because, at the time, I was looking at her ear. I had recently read that if you don’t want to look someone in the eye, just look at their ear and they can’t tell the difference. So I was concentrating on looking at the side of the principal’s head and wondering the whole time if she could tell I wasn’t looking directly at her. It worked, by the way, and it’s still a trick I use to this day if I don’t want to look someone directly in the eye (you can also look in-between their eyes or at their temple).

I was a good kid and followed the rules, and that was the end of my candy resale business.

It always made me sad in a way, because it would’ve been a great opportunity for an adult to mentor me and allow me to harness that drive for business. It still stuck with me though, and the drive never really left. I guess that’s how I eventually found a way to make money reviewing running shoes for a living. 

And now I can buy any candy I want. Now, later, whenever.

And for that, I am grateful.

(In researching this, I found this amazing NPR story on why we like sour things and the history of questionable candy in America. It turns out, the exact year of my candy side hustle (1993) was when sour became the hottest trend in candy in America. I guess I saw a trend and I capitalized on it. Nice work, 11-year-old Robbie).

Course 2

Appetizer: Hot Dog Race

I had just moved to Baltimore a couple years earlier and for the first time in legitimately forever, the Orioles were making some real noise. I had finally landed a “real job” as a contractor for the Coast Guard, but I was still living in the slipstream of the broke mentality from the decade before. That time when a hundred dollars made a night and day difference between whether I had a little bit of fun that month or just sat out back drinking Keystone Light. When I first moved to the city, aside from paying rent (that story is covered in The Rooms That Mean the Most), my number two priority was to attend as many Orioles games as possible, for the least possible strain on my wallet. This type of situation is fertile grounds for a good side hustle.

Everyone knows about the reverse side hustles, where you’re not making money, but you’re saving money by doing scoundrel type things. The most basic of these is sneaking alcohol into the ballpark to avoid the $14 beer gouging. There are a thousand ways to skin this cat, whether you go with the airplane bottles or the “fill up my soda bottle halfway with rum” route, both of which are perfectly passable. I’ve only gotten caught once, and that was trying to carry a can of Yuengling in a hoodie. 

But then there’s the real side hustles, and baseball is rife with them. Especially the secondary market for promotional items. This is probably the biggest side hustle for Orioles fans like Ronnie from Dundalk, and it’s one that still works incredibly well to this day. As you probably know, sports teams have promotional items to get fans into the game. Common items are bobbleheads, t-shirts, bucket hats, fedoras, etc. and they usually go to the first 15,000 fans or something. Depending on the items, some of these can go for good money on the secondary market. In the past, hot items for the Orioles have been the Hawaiian shirt and hot dog race tees from 2019, which they just re-issued on Memorial Day and are currently selling for $40 on eBay. 

This was the route I went down for a while in 2014. Prior to their resurgence over the last two years, the Orioles had been god-awful for my entire adult life. Things had recently turned around under the management of Buck Showalter and a solid core of players. There was a buzz about the team, but fans had yet to really return to the ballpark, doubtful that the squad would actually go anywhere. Point being– you could get cheap game tickets, all day every day. Cheap game tickets meant cheap promotional items, which meant you could sell them to all the fans who were excited about the team but weren’t coming to the games. It was kind of a perfect storm for side hustlers.

And boy, did people take advantage of it. At the time, I heard of some people who would buy 25 upper deck or standing room tickets for $8 each on Stubhub, cycle through the gate over and over to get the promo items, then flip them on eBay for four times the price of their ticket. It’s a pretty tidy profit for a couple hours of work on a Tuesday night. I was all about the resell, but that kind of operation required two people, and I was trying to prove to my new wife that she didn’t make the worst mistake of her life, so I didn’t have a partner in crime who could wait outside the gate and collect my t-shirts. As such, I was left to my own devices. 

I bought tickets to one particular game that I knew was going to be hot– the Orioles promotional team was upping their game and they had a very cool t-shirt with “The Oriole Way” on the front and a bunch of things that made the Orioles special on the back. It was maybe the best shirt they’d put out in a decade, so I knew the resale value would be solid, at least $20-$30 a shirt.

The game was against the Red Sox, so when I first got in the stadium, I was offering to buy Sox fans beers in exchange for their shirt. At the time, beers were $8, so it was a good gamble. A couple people took me up on the offer, but most people were skeptical, as if I were trying to scam them. I mean, I was, kind of. I get it. However, it was a lot of work for a little pay out. And honestly it was a bit disappointing. 

But you never know when the winds of change will blow in a perfect storm, until they actually do. 

Because in the seventh inning of the game, the rain came, suddenly. And it was a torrential downpour of epic proportions. Which meant it was time to hunt and gather.

Now, I want to be clear that, in hindsight, I find my following actions to be somewhat dubious and ethically murky. However, at the time, I thought the game would be called and the fans would be gone for good. 

As the rain came down in sheets, the fans fled for higher ground (i.e. the exits of the upper deck). Me? I went the opposite direction, into the storm. A good number of those who bolted from their seats left their promotional t-shirt behind. Whether they were forgotten or abandoned, who’s to say? I’ll go with the latter. I already laid out the estimated resale range for you, and if you know me at all, this was the equivalent of finding $30 bills all over the ground at Camden Yards.

Row to row, section to section, I dashed through the rain, scooping up as many t-shirts as my arms could handle. At the time, you were allowed to bring in backpacks to the stadium. I had a Camelbak hydration pack and it was stuffed and smashed to its absolute capacity. Whatever I couldn’t pack, I carried. In total, I ended up with over 20 t-shirts of various sizes. The next day they went on eBay and I made close to $500 on the whole thing.

Turns out, that rainstorm was just a pause in the game, and twenty minutes later everyone went back to their seats. Some of them were surely surprised to find their t-shirts missing. 

“These are our seats, right? I left my t-shirt right here…” I imagine them thinking, turning around in circles and trying to figure out the mystery.

I’m going to assume they were all Red Sox fans. Should’ve let me buy you a beer.

This is actually money I found on the ground, but still works for the intended purpose

Course 3

The Main: Cafeteria Sushi

One of my random jobs in high school was working in a cancer research lab at Penn State’s School of Medicine as an assistant to a head researcher, whose last name I still remember (Mulder), as I was a pretty big X-Files fan at the time. I have no idea why I was there, but I had gotten the job through a kid named Kyle who introduced me to both the Wu-Tang Clan and Phish. One of those things was more valuable than the job I had, as I had zero interest in science and was paid $6 an hour to copy medical journals and transport bags of research equipment in hazardous waste bags to the autoclave machine for sterilization.

At one point, I also had to clean a room of old medical equipment that was full of black mold, which was the first time I learned to not ask for work if there wasn’t any. Just show up and take the paycheck. 

That job lasted for a handful of months, but while I was roaming the halls, I noticed there were a number of fliers on the bulletin boards, asking for medical test subjects, with lab phone numbers at the bottom on tassel pull tabs.

I pulled one off. 

And so began a long and winding road of nurses, needles, nerve shocks, stress tests, fluorescent lights, and drugs. I was in the world of medical studies, which can trap you reall good if you’re not careful.

I don’t remember the first medical study I ever did, but over a decade of my life, I did more than I could count. For those who are unfamiliar with this world, it goes a little something like this:

Medical institutions need human subjects to test their drugs or hypotheses on. Sometimes these are regimented clinical drug trials, sometimes these are simple stress tests or nerve reactions or sleep tests. Sometimes they’re experimental drugs like psychedelics, like down here in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins. All the time, the subjects are desperately broke people looking for a large sum of cash in exchange for their bodies. Basically, we were prostitutes.

I wish I could recount all the many studies I’ve done, and maybe I’ll do so further down the road. Some of them were pure torture, like when I had to lie motionless for two hours inside a thick wetsuit lined with tubes that heated up to 105F, sweat pouring and pooling all around while I tried not to dislodge a thin needle stuck into a nerve in my leg. Others were really fun, like continually subtracting a number from a higher number as lab staff yell at you, trying to stress you out. Still others were downright painful– needles going straight through your thigh or vitamin C injections into your arm that made it feel like it was breaking. 

But nothing compared to the drug studies.

Clinical drug studies on humans are necessary for the development and approval process of drugs for pharmaceutical companies. You can’t put a drug out into the wide open unless you test it on other humans first. As such, there’s an entire industry of third party companies who cater to this recruitment of test subjects. One of the biggest is Novum Pharmaceuticals, a company that paid over $6.6 million last year alone to participants of their research studies. While I was attending college in western Pennsylvania, I heard– through word of mouth– that they had a Pittsburgh operation. Go west, young man, there was gold to be had if you wanted it enough. 

The money, of course, is what got me. Twelve hundred dollars for two weekends of watching TV? Sure beats working in the cafeteria. It’s also what gets everyone, which is how some people make drug testing a full-time job. And how the place looks like the first round of Squid Games while you’re there. 

Here’s how it works:

Forty test subjects arrive on a Friday afternoon. Everyone changes into scrubs, just to make sure you both look and feel like a prisoner. Because you are a prisoner for the next 60 hours. You are confined to a windowless facility that has two large rooms for bunkbeds (one for men and one for women), a bathroom with showers, and one communal room for eating, watching TV, and playing pool. Fluorescent white lights were used as the mood board for the design inspiration. 

Meals are served like actual clockwork. You’re assigned a number between 1 and 40, and that number is aligned with the time you get your food. For example, if you’re number 27, you get your breakfast at 6:27. When you get your food, you must eat everything on the tray within a half hour and show it to the attendant. This is how I tried salad for the first time at the age of 19 (a story for another time). 

The drug is administered on Saturday morning, half of the group gets the drug, half the group gets the placebo, followed by a multitude of blood draws. You’re monitored until Monday morning, and then you’re let go. The next weekend, you do it again, but with the drug or placebo that you didn’t get the first time.

My first (and most memorable) clinical drug trial was for an antidepressant. I don’t remember the name of the drug and I’m not sure we even knew. But before we get into the drugged-up part, let’s talk about the people first. 

I would say it’s a mix of college kids and crazy people, but that would be too generous. It’s just crazy people, trapped in a room with about six college kids. One could argue we were all crazy. There were a whole bunch of lifers in there, people who make their entire living hopping from drug trial to drug trial, their bloodstream carrying trace sediments that could map out the entire history of the late 20th century pharmaceutical industry. There were college kids, including myself and my RA at the time (who got me into this whole mess in the first place, thanks Steve). Randomly, one girl was from my high school. Her name was Aja, which I still remember and feel like it’s worth mentioning, as she was named after the Steely Dan album of the same name. For what it’s worth, I’ve met more than one person named after that album. Then there were just random people who needed the money. Point being– nobody was doing this for fun.

Things could get testy at times. After all, we were all being constantly poked with needles under the watchful eyes of the test administrators while confined to a small space with no privacy. Back then, the TV was a rear projection big screen that only had a VCR hooked up to it, and all the options were the typical jury duty selections. Get a whole bunch of drugged up test subjects in a room to select a movie and see how that goes. Luckily I spent my entire summer’s savings on a Compaq Presario laptop, so I had something to entertain myself and write on. I tried to keep to myself, mostly because I didn’t speak crazy or smoke weed like the other subjects, sneaking into the bathroom and turning on the showers to do so, risking blowing apart the entire study for all of us.

Nevertheless, despite my best efforts to lay low, I still managed to become public enemy number one.

As I mentioned, the drug is administered on a Saturday morning. Again, each subject takes their dosage by the minute aligning with their number. After we all do shots!-shots!-shots! of antidepressants, everyone is then led to another room full of beds where we’d lie down for the next 4 hours as nurses come around and take our blood every 20 minutes. So that’s 12 blood draws in 4 hours, a large chunk of the 20 total blood draws for the weekend. We were in beds to eliminate any potential mishaps due to the frequency of blood being taken from our bodies. 

Halfway through the morning, I had to go to take a piss. I notified the nurse and walked to the communal bathroom next to the infirmary hall, pulled down the front of my scrubs and started to go. As I was going, other things were coming in, namely the sides of my vision, which were very black and unstoppable. And then I woke up on the floor. 

“Robert! Robert! Wake up!” 

I opened my eyes and two nurses were around me; one was legitimately a hot nurse so that was both cool and embarrassing. Embarrassing because the entire area below my waist was drenched with urine, since, you know– my penis didn’t pass out. That thing just kept going, and I’ve always wondered if they found me on the floor, just all of it out, spraying everywhere like a full-on firehose operated by a ghost. That was the first and only time I’ve ever passed out, much to the dismay of everyone in the trial. Because from that point on, if anybody wanted to use the bathroom, they had to use a wheelchair to get there. This was a diktat from upper management, not a Vox Populi, Vox Dei type of thing. Needless to say, the populi were not pleased.

I didn’t get shanked and nobody stole my Boston Market cornbread off my dinner tray, but I did get a brain fog for the next five days thanks to the brick that the antidepressant put on my brain. The placebo round was much easier, as I only had to deal with the stir crazy feeling of being confined to a bright white room for another weekend.

In the end, I got my money and that’s all I cared about. It also wasn’t enough to deter me from the medical industry side hustle. I didn’t do too many more drug trials (mostly cause of my class schedule), but less invasive medical studies were one of my main side gigs for the next decade, enough that I still remember some of the doctors by name. 

I’m actually gonna send this to Cheryl now, and see if she remembers the guy in the band that would beg for crackers and a $10 hospital gift card at the end of each study, just so I could get cafeteria sushi.

I wasn’t one of the crazy ones though, I swear.

Course 4

Dessert: Side Dishes

Here I am, in the 42nd year of my life, on another side hustle. This one though, it feels like I’m doing it because I love it, not because I have to scratch out another dollar to make ends meet. I’m not the driving crooner, frustrated because “I gotta make money off this, it’s simply too good.” Quick side note: I went to thedrivingcrooner.com, the site referenced in the Tim Robinson sketch, and it turns out that somebody bought the domain, then redirected it to their own Etsy shop where they sell driving crooner fedora and cigar stickers, which, ironically– is the perfect side hustle, and an idea so good they really did find a way to make money off it. 

Back to this side hustle: If you are a paid subscriber, it does make me feel real warm inside, like wow, people really value this work, enough to use money from their work for my work. It ain’t exactly sending my kids to college, but when a little bit comes in, it has a whole different feeling than flipping a vintage track jacket on eBay or illegally selling fireworks from the trunk of my car. So if you are a paid subscriber, I want you to know that it’s worth so much more than you think. 

I love my job at Believe in the Run, it’s any runner’s dream or any person’s dream to feel like they’re retired while getting paid. But as you can probably tell if you’ve followed Suppertime for any period at all, you know that I have a variety of interests. I still like to dip my toes into other waters, to see what it’s like to climb this mountain on the weekend, or swim in that creek on a Wednesday morning. 

Because how else am I gonna get the material to keep this thing going?

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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