My First Million - Is Time Out a Billion Dollar Business? - Plus Russian Stocks, Right-Wing Media Sites, and More

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss why Time Out is a surprising business that could be worth a billion dollars, whether it's worth buying Russian stocks, and what Shaan would do to build a large right-wing media property. ----- Links: * Time Out - https://www.timeout.com/ * DC Enquirer - https://dcenquirer.com/ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:30) - Time Out (8:25) - Russian stocks (11:30) - Right wing media sites ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

So listen to this. You don't get out of your house, so this maybe won't mean anything to you. But have you ever heard of the- I know Time Out. I know Time Out. I've read Time Out. So Time Out started in the 60s. You know that?

It's from the 60s. It's like been around forever. And it started as like basically a magazine and then a blog where it's like local markets. But what they're most known for now, have you ever heard of the Time Out Market? No. What is that? Okay. So-

They do like restaurants stuff, right? Yes. So tell me what you know about timeout. So I lived in London and I think there I used to pick up timeout and I lived in Boulder, Colorado. And it's like, you know, if you want to see kind of like what new restaurants there are, kind of like get reviews of restaurants. It was like it's like your friend who's a foodie who will like tell you what's up. Like, oh, you got to check this place out. Oh, it's great.

This is a great place for a date. And it kind of, and then they release it like, like, I felt like a lot. Like maybe every week or month or something. It was like pretty frequently updated. And I think it's free, right? So I used to use it for that. Yeah, it was like free. It was just like sitting around.

everywhere. And I just, I can visually see that red, it's like a red logo, right? Timeout. Yeah. So it's a pretty timeless brand. It's been around for a long time. It started in England, actually. So if you live in London, it was probably most popular there. But basically in 2014 or maybe 2018, they started doing this new concept called a Time Out Restaurant or Time Out Market. So Google Time Out Market and you'll see it. But basically what they do is they went into, I think the first one was in Lisbon, where I was, I went to it when I was in Lisbon, but I've gone to it in Miami. They have seven markets now, but basically what they did was they went to like a touristy place and they found like the 20 most popular restaurants based off of their blogs and like what all

the touristy stuff. Like, oh, you got to go to Portugal so you can taste a coffee from here, a croissant from here and like some fish from here. And they basically just created a food court like in the middle of the city and they gave 20 restaurants different stalls. And so when you go to this different city, I went to it in Miami. Miami was cool because like, you know, Miami, they say, you got to get a Cubano from this place.

You got to try the Cuban coffee from this place. Yeah, it's like, I'm getting in a cab just to go get the sandwich. Yes, and so what they did was they set it up so you can go to this one food court and you could try all of the famous vendors and the famous restaurants. And I went in Lisbon. I went in Portugal and it was awesome. And it was packed. This place was packed.

And Time Out, I like you remember Time Out being this like free thing. And I'm like, that's kind of neat. Like, I don't have brand affinity towards this. But when I went, this place was jammed, packed with young people and like young, hip-looking people. And Timeout, I didn't think as a young hip brand. And I started researching this. And so Time Out, they're publicly traded. And their market cap has been obliterated in the last three years because, A, their digital media like went to shit because it was mostly restaurants advertising with them.

And B, the way that a lot of investors thought that they were going to grow and get big was through these markets, which also were basically closed down all of 2020. but they're killing it right now. This place was packed. And so basically they have a $168 million market cap. In 2019, they did about 70 million pounds in revenue. So what's that? Like, is that times two for dollars? Is that like $130?

It was, yeah. I think I don't know if it's still that. So somewhere north. But in 2021, they only did $40 million in revenue. However. 1.3x now. 1.3X. Okay.

So they were doing the equivalent of over $100 million in revenue. But check this out. In 2019, pre-pandemic, their timeout markets did $23 million in revenue, 2020 and only $12 million. But they only have seven locations, which means each one of these food courts does $3 million in revenue. And the reason why, so they have them in Lisbon, Miami, New York, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Dubai. And they've got some coming up in Prague and a couple other places. The reason why this is interesting is, A, this is just awesome. I think this is an amazing example of a company that has a digital media presence.

That's doing a really good job of diversifying. Two, this is a really sick business because if they're only in seven markets and they're doing, you know, 23 million in revenue, like there's easily a future where you could imagine 50 or 80 of these in, you know, a variety of like, you know, touristy cities. It's kind of cool, right? Yeah, this is one where the actual experience sounds fucking awesome. And so I kind of want it to be a great business. And I bet in actuality it's like a good business, not a great one. But it also feels like something that kind of anybody could spin up as a side hustle. Um, you know, like if you're in Durham, North Carolina, there's every city has like, you know, 15, 20 spots that are like, oh, the ice cream over here and the, you know, the, the sandwich over here. And oh, you haven't tried the bonbons over here. Whatever. Right. Like every place has that collection of stuff. And then it becomes kind of prestigious to be picked. And all you're doing is basically making a pop up tent. That's like a food court. But instead of, you know, Sabaro and Citibon, you're putting in like cool hip places, right? In fact, you're. this place should actually just have a Cinebond every four stalls because that's what people really want. But besides that, you know, I feel like this is a great, this is a great little side hustle that I think anybody who's a foodie could create and do pretty well with.

I thought it was so fun. And when I went there, I was like, oh, this is brilliant. And so I ended up going there when I was at Portugal, I wanted to go there just like every day. I'm like, let's just go like, I'd rather just go here every day. It tastes all like a little bit of food. I'll spend $10 here and just try it on. I wish we had done this in Miami. Like I would have paid a $100 all you could eat just to like walk through this and be able to grab stuff you know like at all you can eat pass yes it's it's awesome and i went to this and i realized how much fun i had i went to i did the one in miami too um i would i'll totally do the one in new york but i thought this was such an interesting basic simple concept and they pulled it off and it was really fun and i think that this is actually i think a second

i don't know if this could be an amazing business i think that time out though they could be worth over a billion dollars in the next two years once they like open up right now they're only worth 168, that's pound. So it's like 200 million. Sounds like a stock tip. I feel like we got a stock tip here. I'm not saying that. Sampar is flashing the buy signal hard. Analyst Sampar projects time out. I want this to get aggregated by like some random Reuters, you know, like, you know, motley fool is going to like turn this into into a article here. All right. And then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing. I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier, to be honest with you. Because if you're listening to this

and you like what you're hearing right now and you haven't gone and subscribed to the My First Million podcast wherever you get your podcast, then that's the thing you've got to do. There's nothing more important than doing that right now. And don't do it because I said to do it. Do it because you want to do it. Do it because that's who you are. Would you buy, so would you buy any Russian stocks right now? They're getting crushed, obviously. No, just because like, I don't want to try to make money off this opportunity. I know that's kind of like off brand, but you know. I'm on board with that.

I'm on board with that. But let's like let's say beyond that. Let's say like you're Russian and you're actually in favor of this war and you're just crazy and you're in. Do you think that would you have faith in the Russian stock market? Well, a lot of these were getting close to zero. Like, you know, like real businesses were like dropping, you know, 50, 70, 80 percent. And so yeah, you know, you're getting tremendous.

value. So if you're a citizen there and you're a believer and you know, you don't want to be in the local currency anyway. So you need to, you'd rather, if you just told me, you can either stay in the ruble or you can take your ruble and turn it into something else. I'm going to always take something else. And there are options on something else got cut off. Like, okay, you can't get dollars. You can't get crypto. You can't get different things. So what are you going to buy? And, you know, because they were limited in many ways across those. Some, like, there was like, you know, they stopped the amount of rubles you could sell. And so, you know, if you could get into stocks, hey, it's better than, better than staying in the paper.

Yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't buy a Russian company just for the same reasons that you said. But we did the episode in the oligarchs. And that was like a once in a lifetime opportunity where Russia was going from communist to somewhat capitalist. And in my head, I'm like, this might be another one of those opportunities where you could like buy like the equivalent of Exxon in Russia, which hopefully likely won't go or I don't care about hopefully, but it likely won't go away. but you could get like a huge discount. All right. I got a couple of things for you.

But first, did you see this thing about the right wing site that went viral? Which one? Okay, so check out this. I wrote this thing on our dog. Right wing site goes viral. It's a link to a tweet. So this guy, Jed Legume,

which is just a, got to be a fake name. Jud legume, he says, a far right website launched 36 days ago, and it's already more popular on Facebook than the Washington Post. The D.C. Inquirer has executed in an audacious scheme to manipulate Facebook's algorithm and ad platform and meta is letting

them get away with it. And so basically, the article talks about this publication that was created. So let me, it's called the DC Inquirer. And they'll have articles that are like, you know, the freedom convoy is on the verge of victory in Canadian provinces, right? And they will get a bunch of people to post about it. And what they showed was, you know, the freedom convoy is on the verge of victory in Canadian provinces, right? And they will get a bunch of people to post about it. And what they showed was that, and so they got like all these right wing pages that are like impeach Joe Biden or I love America, keep Texas red, save America. And they were all posting the same thing. And so that should be kind of like a, it's basically like a coordinated kind of like ad campaign or whatever. And it started to get really, really big. So the page,

this guy, Brandon Gill created the page and, you know, it has like, I don't know, over a million you know like a million followers or something like very quickly and it's all run under this like yeah it's basically like this right wing thing they got popular now you've told me about this before which is that extremely conservative or extremely liberal sites will get very popular very quickly especially on Facebook but and I was pretty surprised to see this yeah there's a but here liberal side like yeah obviously polarized on one side does well conservative does significant better because this is a principle that is always true, which is a group of people that feel downtrodden, like feel like their underdog, they band together and they get in, and outrage does more

for sharing. And in America, so there's like groups like minorities, women, a lot of like far right conservatives because media is typically left, they think, you know, our voice is being stomped out. And so they band together. So if you go to Huff Po and you go and look at the comment section and then go to Brightbart and look at how many comments. Have you been to Brightbart.com? Yeah, I've been there. Go to Brightbart and just like click a random article and look how many comments. Sometimes it's 20,000 comments.

It's crazy. So I totally believe it with this website. And by the way, I'm looking up DC Inquirer. I googled it. I don't see a website. Is it literally just a. So basically it looks like what he's done. He's basically created like a web of like accounts that are kind of all the same.

So basically it's like there's the guy's personal account. this guy Brandon Gill. And his bio is like, you know, I'm the founder and editor of DCinquire.com. So that's the, that's the URL, DC Enquirer with a to E. EnQ. And it's like, his bio is Patriot, period, proud West Texan, period, businessman, financier, rancher, conservative, Christian, Dartmouth, husband. It's like, bingo, you get, you hit all the words.

Congratulations. By the way, Sam, you are also rancher. You are also a husband. I like most all those things. Proud Texan. Yeah. Is he also a fan of corn dogs? Because this guy's like perfect.

Like corn dog officiato. You may have a best bud here in the way. Yeah. So then he's like two pock too? So then he's got like basically a whole bunch of other pages. So I think Red Wave, I Love America, all those pages. I think those are his pages. So they've all been built up, like ones at a million,

one's at $650,000, one's at $200,000. And he's running ads that are like, if you go look at Brandon Gill's ads in the ad library, so if you've never done this by four, by the way, it's amazing, like one of the best tools available to any internet person is if you go to Facebook.com and then you just Google Facebook ad library, and then you can look up the ads of any brand, what ads they're running.

So if you look at the brands he's running, it'll be like a picture of Joe Biden as like talking at a rally, like kind of confronting somebody, and it says, if you want Joe Biden removed from office, tap the big thumbs up in the right corner. And so it's like, you know, it's clearly like running political ads that are not marked as political ads, basically.

So this guy's point was like, oh, he's getting away with it. You know, Facebook, you know, you need to shut this down. What I thought was interesting was, dude, this would be an amazing little prank. Like, if I'm mischief or I'm just like someone out there with like a shithead with too much time on their hands, here's what I would do.

I'd basically do the same thing. I'd make a extremely conservative, site and I would put out some articles and I would get the traction and I would do this for like two months and then the third month I would just pull the rug on everybody and I would just switch to an extremely liberal LGBTQ website with the same email list. I would just switch everything overnight once I get all these people subscribed which just for sure would make the news and then that story of the prank pulled would create a new cycle of its own and then you can basically go get any job you want in any marketing, PR, or whatever agency, because you can be like, yeah, I just, I did this.

Like, so instead of sending your resume out and cover letter, like, do a stunt that shows your knowledge of how the internet works, how media works, how PR works, how marketing works. And, you know, you'll impress a lot of people with your ability to, like, pull off a stunt like that. That's actually how BuzzFeed started, too, was Jonah Peretti was pulling stunts like this. I think he did it with Nike. Nike. Yeah, what was it again? I don't remember exactly. but he basically said, he revealed like a fake Easter egg.

So he said like, I think it was like if you do something with this pair of shoes, something happens. Something like that. No, no, no, no. It was an email thing. It was like a sweatshop thing. Okay, so here's what it is. Oh, so he goes to, Nike had this feature, personalized ID where you could like write your name. I don't know if you did this.

I did this. I got my name on my shoes. I thought it was so cool. He goes, so he writes an email from Jonah Paredi to Nike ID personalized at Nike. com he goes greetings my order was canceled because my personal Nike ID does not but my oh no my my order was canceled but my Nike ID does not violate any of the outlined rules in your message so the personal ID on my custom shoes was the word sweatshop sweatshop is not a name of another party's trademark the name of an athlete blank or profanity I chose the ID because I wanted to remember the toil and labor

of the children that made my shoes could you please ship them to me immediately. Thanks and happy new year, Jonah Parady. And so then he sent that. Obviously, that's not going to go viral as an email, but he screenshots that and started getting it and put it out there. And then that got like kind of like a big newsstorm going. And he was doing stunts like this before creating BuzzFeed and kind of showed this guy knows how to make the internet, you know, how to tickle the internet. And he did it well. One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube is these videos where people will do one of two things. They'll go. it's usually always political stuff, and they go to someone and they say, isn't this outrageous?

This person said this thing, and they'll read what a person said, and go, do you don't agree with that? Do you? And they go, oh, no, I don't agree with that at all. Like, I'm a conservative. There's no way I would be like, oh, well, this is what Donald Trump said. Or like, you know, like, they'll do something like that. Well, they'll make you disagree with something that you, whatever. And then they'll do, or they'll do it. And they'll say, do you agree with this? And they'll read out, like, a speech from Hitler. And they're like, yeah, I totally agree with that. And like, oh, Hitler said. So it's not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's actually not that fair to do that. But.

Well, they also go to 100 people and 96 have like a normal reaction. And then the four that fall for it. It's like they stitch those together and it just makes it look like everybody at this Trump rally feel is dumb and does make this mistake. And it's like they kind of make New Yorkers or rally, you know, participants or teens, like are millennials on college campuses. They'll make them look like idiots because they'll. Right.

All you got to do is you talk to enough people. You're going to catch five people. who fall for the trick, right? It's like Borat, right? Like when he does these tricks or these stunts, they do go viral and they do make the other party look bad, but they don't show you all the people that didn't fall for it and don't believe that and didn't say something stupid in response.