My First Million - The Inside Story Of The Fake Twitter Employees Who Trolled The Media and 8 Profitable Side Hustles For Halloween & Christmas

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Episode 381: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) have the inside story about the two fake Twitter employees who trolled the media, where billions are spent for Halloween, and eight side hustles for the holidays. ----- Links: * Spirit Halloween * Rubies * Zombie Pumpkins * Pumpkinsteins * Hu.ma.ne * Suleman Ali * 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) - Troll of the year: Rahul Ligma & Daniel Johnson (08:25) - Elon Taking Over Twitter and Elon's War Room (19:00) - Halloween Research - How much people spend (29:25) - Zombie Pumpkins (30:15) - Halloween Ideas (37:35) - VR Haunted House (43:30) - Pet costumes (44:20) - Hu.ma.ne (54:15) - Suleman Ali's Twitter thread ----- 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 what they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property. Same thing as the spirit store. They take a vacant property. They say, hey, we'll cut you a check for 10, 15 grand if we can use your house, right? Or they'll rent a property or they'll find a vacant property. And they basically just use it for the month. They have this operational thing where they can just spin up the haunted house. And then they charge like 40 bucks, you know, to enter.

And you could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars in about a month. All right. You want to go with Rahul or do you want to go with Rahul. All right. Troll of the year. We haven't even done our Milly Awards for the end of the year thing that we always do. I'm calling it now. The troll of the year.

Give the background. So Elon takes over Twitter. I guess the purchase went through. I feel like there was never like confirmation. Like he actually wired the money. He just literally showed up at the office. Yeah. There hasn't been like a proper ribbing ribbon cutting moment.

Like it's not like definitively. It was more like a squatter. He just like went into the office. And they're like, I guess you own it now. You seem to be here. It's mine. Like playground rules. Like, wow.

That's all it took to have Twitter? Have you ever heard of like a coup, like a coup d'ata, like with governments? You know, I was, I read a lot of. Yeah, they're pretty coup. Yeah. I read a lot of history jokes or history jokes. I read a lot of history books about whatever. And they talk about like a coup.

And I'm like, so you literally just like walked into the White House and you just said like, you know, this is mine and like the general has promised me that he's going to convince these soldiers to attack. You know what I mean? It's like an interesting concept. You're like, so it's all just made up, I guess. Like these rules that we live by, this is just, this is fiction. And that's kind of like what I felt like he did. He just walked, he's like, well, I own this now. Thank you. Have you seen, you know, Derek Lewis, the UFC fighter, have you seen that compilation of his thing where he says, just get up? No. So they're like, Derek, your big, like, knockout artist, but, like, you know, the knock on yours always been, like, what if you get into wrestling thing?

You know, how's your jihitsu? Are you training? Jishitsu ain't real, man. And they're like, what? He's like, man, you don't need jih Tzu. Just get up. And they're like, he's like, why? I don't want to stay on the ground with another man between my legs.

No, I'm not into that. Like, I'm not going to do jih Tzu. I'm just going to get up. They're like, but you need jih Tijuana. He's like, now I'm just going to get up. And so then there's a clip of him saying that. And then there's like a six minute compilation of literally somebody takes him down. He doesn't do just he just stands back up.

He's so powerful. That's how I feel. That's what Elon Musk did. He's like, nah, just walk in. Yeah. Take it.

What do you mean? He's like, well, I'm just going to walk in with a sink. And take it. So anyway, he does this thing where he just, he says,

this is mine. And there's all these reporters outside of Twitter's office. And something crazy. For a story. They're waiting for the story about something. going wrong. Elon comes here. Oh, there's a protest. There's a walkout. And so what happens is the first big story that happens is there's a picture of these two guys and kind of like, you know, kind of like nerdy sort of engineering looking guys. And they're holding giant cardboard boxes. And it says these two

data scientists, the data engineers, data scientists were fired today from Twitter. Here they're seen walking out with their possessions and their boxes. And I saw. And immediately something looked a little off. Because I was like, this guy just looks so goofy. But I was like, well, that's pretty believable. You know, that's much of goofy-looking people are working tech. But okay. Oh, my God, he looks, wow.

Man, they really found the perfect character. He looks pretty goofy. And then I read the name. But he had a box in his hand. So he each had a brown box, like, which is just foreign. Because, like, if you work at a tech company, like, you don't even probably own anything. You own enough just to put in a book bag. Put your laptop in your backpack.

Yeah. And, like, if you do get fired, do they even, like, is that? a thing where you like hand people a box anymore? I don't know. They played it perfectly. So then it says, Rahul Ligma and something Johnson. Daniel Johnson. We're fired today. Daniel Johnson were fired today. And then and I saw that and I was like, oh my God, this guy executed a Ligma. Like for those who don't know, Ligma is a is a little joke that people play on the internet where it's like, Ligma, you say something, blah, blah, Ligma. And then someone's like, Ligma?

What's like? I'm not familiar. Ligma nuts. Right? So that's the joke. And they did this to basically, I think CNBC was the first one who, like, reported it. And then it just kept getting, the same photo kept getting spread ever because everybody wanted this story about and the lady who tweeted, she was this CNBC reporter. And I, the original tweet said something like, we're at the scene of Twitter. These two engineers just came out who said they're the first to be laid off. And it's just so clear how defeated they are. And like there's like an audible, or what does she say? She's like, there's just a visible, uh, there's just visibly defeated. and totally broken.

And Rahul-Ligma says, now he has no idea how he's going to be able to afford his Tesla payments. And then he's sitting there holding a Michelle Obama book. And so it's like him with his box just holding this Michelle Obama

book. I don't know why. And he just said, and she tweeted out like, you know, this is just, they say, the first of many that's going to happen. It was just like a crazy, crazy scene. So people are, people are, have heard this part of the story,

But now we got that My First Million exclusive juice on top of it. So somebody in our group chat knows this guy who did this. And he shared a text message that the guy sent before he did it. So he goes, he goes, yo, bro. And the person says, sup. He goes, are you doing anything in the next hour? Want to help me pull off a stunt? I'm at the gym and I need a box, L.O.L.

I'm going to walk out in front of the Twitter office with a box in my hand. There's hell of TV crews outside. And then this is literally how he, pulled to something and he just goes he gets an empty box in a Michelle Obama book there's nothing else in the box and he watched out and the TV crews go for it and so that was I thought amazing

and then he so that was like I mean what kind of genius is this person then he goes there's hell a TV cruise let's go get him he goes he goes bro the media is so dumb I literally put five minutes of planning into this even my uncle in India has seen the picture now

and he goes he goes in the first thing goes did you just see the cameras and just walk out there he goes yeah Basically, I got to the gym. It's near Twitter's headquarters. I saw all these cameras, and so I just went to it. Dude, that is so funny. Who is this guy?

He's like a founder of like a tech startup, basically. He just did this for fun. Oh, my God. Yeah, I am ready to invest. And his thing says, like, stealth startup. So I'm like, I'm ready to invest in whatever he's doing. Any valuation. There's hell of TV cameras.

Name your price, ligma. I'm in. So he goes, okay. So that was him. Did you see the interview with the other guy, Daniel Johnson? No. He also had a little gem. So his was on videos that they're like, you know, how do you feel about this today?

He's like, I don't know. I just got to like, I got to go home. I got to talk to my husband and wife and regroup. Wait, what? I don't know. I just, I just really want to go home. I just really want to go home, talk to my husband and wife and just regroup. The most San Francisco thing ever.

Did anyone comment on that? that? The news didn't even like, they just played the clip. And then I saw that. I was like, wow, that is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Perfect timing. These guys are like, you know, comedic geniuses basically. Yeah, this is pretty gold. Amazingly well played. Yeah, do you want to talk about the Elon War Room? Like, what he's actually doing in there? Like, do you want to talk about that or not really? Have you followed this? Not really. I mean, like, I read that he said like, hey, guys, you have a week to get this one thing done. And I think that that's cool. That's, that's a good way to run things. I'm nervous he's going to screw it all up. Because I'm, because I've

money from Twitter, so I don't want it to go away. I got courses to shill, bro. Yeah, yeah. I got consulting calls to take. So I don't really care, though. Like when he talks about this shit, I'm like, it doesn't impact me that much. I don't care what you're going to do. Well, I just find I don't care.

It's not going to impact me, but I do find it interesting how he's going about this. So basically the report is he goes in. And the first report, I thought, again, was another troll. But I guess this is real. Do you see this? he told every engineer to print out all the code that they've committed and they've written in the last three or six months and have it ready for review.

Did you see this? Why print? So you can just see the page link? And then they changed their mind. I guess they realized how bad of an idea that was. And like, you know, an hour later, they're like, shred the papers. Actually, we're going to review on the computer.

Just be prepared to review. And so people are like, like, all these engineers are like, I printed out like, you know, 300 pages of code. I guess I'll just shred this. I don't know what's going on here. Dude, and what's crazy is like, if you go to Business Insider.com, the headline is like, you know, I think it says like the toil of working at Twitter. And it's like painting it like these people.

Here's there in a cold line. Yeah, this is like, this is what it's like to toil at Elon Musk's Twitter. The expectation is literally to work 24-7. And I think that that's straight clown behavior. I can't believe they're doing that. I can believe it. And he says, this is it. one of the people familiar said describing the feeling of the company under Musk,

your job is on the line. It's like, dude, your job's always on the line. Like, you know, like this isn't like, it's not your right to work at Twitter, you dumbass. But I, I thought it was funny because like, come on, man, like you're coding. Yeah, you're going to have to work 50 hours, maybe for a little while. But also, I think a lot of employees at Twitter are probably like, this is awesome. We've been sitting on our ass. Let's do it. And that side doesn't seem to be getting covered a lot. Yeah. And so he created, I guess, a war room. So he basically brought in a bunch of people he trusts. So he brought in people from his other companies. Like he brought in his chief legal person. That guy's now like the general counsel, basically. He brought in, he created a war room. And here's who's reported to be in the war room. It's Elon, his chief counsel. Then it's Jason Kalakanis. Oh. I think Jason's Jason's amazing. But like, what the hell does he know?

Yeah. Then it's Sri Ram from A16 Z. So just venture capitalists, who's a former. PM used to work at Twitter also you know how to run at Twitter. And Clubhouse and Snapchat. Yeah. And then also I guess like some other people, some engineers are people from like boring company or neuralink or whatever. Like some people he trusts like his cousin is there. And they're like, and they're basically just set up shop and they were like, all right,

well, we're going to do with this thing. And they're like, change a logged out page. It forces you to sign up. No, you should be able to read tweets before you sign in. You sign up. And then, which is like an experiment has been tried many times before. And it's like, you know, we need to have this verification program. We have five days to deliver this, I guess.

And so they're just like sort of trying to figure this out of, you know, who stays, who goes, what are we building? How are we going to turn this thing around? And fascinating. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in this, in this war room. I think that would be like probably the most interesting thing to do right now. I think it would be awesome. I hope they don't screw it up, though, because I got some fucking courses I got to sell. So don't screw it up for me.

I don't think they're going to screw up. My point of view. always been very simple, which is all the things he complains about are things that, like, power users would be annoyed at on Twitter, like the bots problem or, you know, verification or the algorithm, you know, like not serving me the tweets I want. Like, the problem is that just only, I don't know, whether or the 300 million people use Twitter. And it's like, you know, five times smaller than like the other big social services and it doesn't really grow that much. And like, it's not like, you know, my mom doesn't use Twitter because she's like, oh, there's too

many bots if I tweet about crypto that will tell me to buy crypto. That's not her problem. She just doesn't see value in it. And like, you know, you just says, I don't get it. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't know why I would need this. Like, you know, I don't need to check this. Whereas Instagram and WhatsApp and like Snapchat have all given her a reason that she needs to have it. Like she needs to have Snapchat if she wants to see more pictures of our kids. She needs to have Instagram if she wants to keep up with what's going on with like Bollywood or whatever. Right. Like, you know, everybody finds a need in the service. And like, that's the core problem with Twitter. is that the core need it addresses is only for people like us.

And it doesn't address the need for a whole bunch of other people on the planet. And if they wanted it to be more valuable, then they would need to do that. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best.

HubSpot. Grow better. Happy Halloween, dude. Yeah, you too. Since I'm not 12, I don't dress up. I don't understand, like, shots fired at producer Ben. Well, I just, like, don't understand why people, like, obsessed over Halloween. To me, just seems like, when your wife was buying a wedding dress, where you're like, this is bullshit, you're going to spend all this money for something

that you're literally going to use for three hours in your entire life. And that's how I feel like Halloween is. Wow. Shots fired at wives, shots fired at Halloween, shots fired at weddings. Well, I mean, are, like, you know what I mean? I just find it, like, to be the most impractical thing there is. It just, it's a lot of. to work for like a few hours.

Bro, you probably bought like a giant sled so you could do sled pushes in your backyard. Like, you know, come on. I'm sure you have some ridiculous purchase up your sleeve, too. I have a sled. Producer Ben, what are you? You look more like a figure skater or some, like a figure skater in between rounds. Like that's what you like. I don't always want to put the hood on, but it's a narwhal.

It's got like a little horn on top. A little horns. My wife has a matching costume. A narwhal is a fake creature. It's a whale that has a, yeah. If you're a parent, then I get it. But like for the people who work really hard at this stuff, to me, I'm just like, that just seems like such a wasted time.

My wife loves it. She's this person. Yeah, my wife, too. She, like, we bought a bunch of costumes, whatever. I'm Aladdin, which is pretty, you know, stereotypical, I felt. Lean in, bro. Is it racism if it's your wife? Yeah.

Lean in. I say lean in. into it. I got the Cheryl Sandbird book. I'm going to lean into this one. That's the sheet, Matt. Lean into stereotypes. But speaking of Halloween, I did a bunch of research about Halloween. I wanted to rant about it to you. I'm sure you know a bunch of things about Halloween because I feel like this is like, I say that because this is a rabbit hole that's kind of obvious. And I feel like, you know, I went into this rabbit hole and I saw some footprints on the way out. I was like, I think that's Sam's size lemon right there. I don't know what's

What's going on. But let me tell you some things I found. Okay. So first and foremost, Halloween. Okay, what the heck is this? So this was a, it's kind of crazy that today Halloween is this like family neighborhood thing where everybody, you know, young kids are going out and getting candy. Older kids are dressing up, you know, with an excuse to dress up like kind of slutty. And like, you know, this is like, you know, this is this giant, giant occasion where people are spending $10 billion a year now on Halloween is what gets. which is kind of crazy. That's more than almost any other holiday except for Christmas, which is off the charts at almost a trillion dollars gets spent on Christmas. And so, so I was like, what the heck is this holiday? Who made this up? Where did this come from? First of all, it's like some weird part of like, you know, the Celtic calendar, the Celtic calendar. I don't even know what it is, but like basically it's like the Boston Celtics, as you know. It's this new thing called yagging. It just has a soft day. So there was like, there's like this, you know, festival where they would like, they're like, oh, the demons are coming.

And so they would like dress up as demons themselves and like go dancing and whatever. And that was like to ward off the demons like, hey, we're already here. Like that was the logic, which is pretty, pretty weak logic if you ask me. And so, you know, something had the Pope says something. He's like, oh, this is, you know, November 1st is like the day of the saints or whatever. All Saints day, baby. We, in Catholic school, we celebrated every year. And so then the 31st became All Hallows Eve.

And so, okay, how did it go from that to kids dressing up as Aladdin and going trick-or-treating? What was the gap? But basically, it was like, for a while, it was this kind of like, like, nobody really spent money on this. It was sort of like this more like adult, dark holiday where you would buy, like, certain things you'd have people for dinner, maybe things like that. And then over time, it got commercialized. And I was trying to figure out where did it get commercialized? How did we go from this, like, obscure pagan holiday to this main thing. stream $10 billion a year thing. And the best explanation I could find was that there was like kind of a

society thing, which was like people wanted a holiday. It was a good excuse to celebrate. They liked that it was community and family oriented over time rather than like this kind of adult thing. And then the last thing was that retailers. So like the biggest winner from all of Halloween is Walmart. Walmart makes a killing on Halloween. It sells candy. It sells costumes. It sells decorations. And it sells it to like everybody across America. And so what happened was retailers would have this giant spike and like kind of spring, maybe a little bit of summer. And then there was this dead time until the winter holidays. And so they were like, okay, sales always dip. Let's figure out what we could do to make sales not dip during that time. So they kind of needed to like invent an occasion for you to

spend on. And so they started, which is pretty common, right? Like if you think about like, you know, like there's like the hallmark lobby, man. They've like really been pushing Valentine's Day. us for years. I mean, I think that that's like a pretty common tactic. I imagine Amazon is thinking like prime day is going to be a holiday of like just random deals. And it's not like a coordinated attack, but it is like a bunch of people who all have an incentive. So they had an incentive to do to just to sell more stuff and put something in the store that's going to drive people to come by. And so I just want to break down a couple of the numbers and a couple of the businesses. So like I said, about 10 billion in spending. Three billion of that is costumes. 700 million of that is pet costumes,

which is kind of crazy. There's basically like, you know, $3 billion on candy. And there's like a huge amount, like, I don't know, like basically almost half the country is going to like give out candy during Halloween, which is kind of an insane level of adoption that's going on. So Walmart's the biggest winner. They not only make a bunch of money,

they spend a bunch of money advertising during this period. They'll spend like tens of millions of dollars in the week of Halloween, just like blasting ads. And so do all the companies that are stocked inside. Skittles, Cheetos, lunchable. Everybody's got like a Halloween themed thing. And so a couple of the interesting finds I had when I was doing this. So the first is a lot of people know about Spirit, the Spirit Store, right?

And people have heard about this, but like the backstory of spirits kind of cool. Have you ever heard the backstory of how it got started? It's owned by a popular company. Who's it owned by? Oh, your favorite, dude. It's your Thursday night, date night, Spencers. Spencer's. That's what I thought.

Yeah, like Spencer is like, you know, like a hot topic alternative. Spencer's also owns Spirit Halloween, yeah. So the way this started was, it's like in California in the 80s, this guy owned a woman's clothing store. And he was in October again, traditionally a super slow sales month. And so he's just sitting there not really getting much sales. He looks around, everybody's struggling, except for one store. He sees that this one Halloween store has a line out the door.

And so he's like, well, I'm not selling shit anyways. And so he just turned like three-fourths of a store into a Halloween store just for for the month of October. And so it's his women's boutique. So there's like women's clothes in like a quarter of the store. And then three fourths became Halloween stuff. And it really works. And so he just does that again the next year. He's like, oh, that's my Halloween playbook. But now he's like, all right, just forget my store. I'll just open up another store and another store just for the month. And so that's their model. These guys basically what they do is they go find vacant property. So, you know, an empty box. And they say, hey, landlord, you don't have a lease.

Well, I'll lease it for two months. How about that? And the, landlords initially were like, well, no, like, what about a two-month lease? Like, no, thank you. And they're like, okay, well, look, here's my offer. If you don't have a tenant by July, might as well take it. Some revenue is better than no revenue. And like, especially after the 2008 real estate crash, this became like a pretty enticing option for landlords to try to recoup some money. And so they do these two-month leases and it's a pop-up Halloween store. Same place every time. No, different places. They even have a kickout clause. So they say, hey, look, you could take the, How can I get more real estate?

Look, if you do find a good tenant who you want to do a long-term lease, you can just kick us out. Like anytime, you can just kick us out, basically. And so they found this like no-brainer proposition to landlords. And so they do these pop-ups. They now have 1,400 stores. So like fast, you know, rewind back to, you know, like 2010. They only had, you know, 700 stores.

And the whole Halloween spend is on the same trend. So like I said, 10 billion this year, well, rewind to 2010. I graduated from college, it was $5 billion. Rewind to 2005, it was only like $3 billion. And so that's like kind of a big like just during our, you know, lifetime, our adult lifetime, this thing is like, you know, more than doubled in size. And so, um, can you imagine that, by the way, all that work for a week?

Like I know a guy who owns a Christmas tree light show business that I can't reveal how big it is, but whatever number you're thinking of how much revenue does, tripled it by times it by, no, times it by 20. We're talking like 9. figures. And Christmas tree light show means what? You pay $20 and you're and your family drive through a park and you look at light shows. And basically he's got a staff of, I don't even know how many he is. I think over 100. They work all year round for four weeks of work. Can you imagine what your company's like? What happens if there's like a terrorist attack or, you know, like whatever or or a COVID?

I mean, something happens where it's just like all 50 weeks worth of work is ruined for those two weeks. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that is the risk. That is the risk with these. Like right now, like it's Halloween right today. The whole company is working on next year's Halloween real estate, how they're going to do the logistics to like, because they can just get an empty shell. They got to pop up the whole store. Get all the inventory there.

Do all the decorations there. And then run the staff the store just for this like, you know, real blitz. And 90% of the traffic comes in the two weeks before Halloween because their main proposition is just like for people who were, you know, who procrastinated. It's like, hey, it's too late even now to order. online. So, you know, just come into the store and just get what you can get. And it's that big of a business. They do like a billion dollars a year in revenue, the spirit store. So that's just kind of crazy for billion dollars and basically like probably a three week time period for the majority of that of that spend. Eight percent of all candy sales of the year happened like on Halloween. It's

really crazy. That's wild. And so what a wild stat. Here's some other interesting little businesses that were around this. Okay. So have you ever heard of Ruby's? No, what is Ruby's? Rubies. Rubies is is probably the biggest, I think, costume maker. I don't know if they're still the biggest that they were at a point in time. So here's the kind of interesting story for Ruby's. Started in New York and they're like, oh, we're doing decorations and costumes for Halloween. Halloween wasn't as big of a deal. It's like in the 70s, they were doing this.

And at the time, Halloween costumes were all the same. It was all just ghosts and witches. But then in the 70s and 80s, it transitioned into basically like Hollywood. And it was like, oh, movie characters and like TV characters became like the big thing. And so, and rubies kind of fell behind because there were these other companies, Collegeville and Ben Cooper that like got all the licenses. So they were winning. They were crushing it.

And poor Ruby's was just sort of like puttering along until that fateful thing happened. I didn't even know about this. But there was something called the cyanide killer. You ever hear about this? There was this big scandal where I guess in Tylenol packages is like a whole bunch of Tylenol got laced with cyanide and people died. And they never caught, they never caught the person. Never caught the guy. it scared a bunch of people. It's like, holy shit, Tylenol, like this, like, safe thing.

How many people died, like three or four? I'm not sure. I think it was more than that. But it was a big story. It definitely was big news. And so people, so candy sales plummet. You know, like people start getting pretty afraid. And so these companies got a little over their skis because everything was going so great. And they start to falter during this sort of like this crash when people started to the Halloween sales crash because people did not want to go eat candy from strangers during the sort of like cyanide, you know, rush, I guess. And so Rubies ends up buying up Ben Cooper and Collegeville and basically consolidates all the licenses under one roof during that time. And so now they have Disney, Marvel, whoever. They got like, and their job is

basically, there's like a, you would think this is like, I don't know, a bunch of theater geeks that run this company. But in actuality, like, the big thing they have to do right is, is like, you know, operations for the supply chain. Like cash management. No, no, no. Forecasting. they got to predict who is going to be popular next year for Halloween. So they're like, okay, Donald Trump is a Trump mask is going to be here or here or here. And then they work with all the studios. The studios give them like a little like sketch sheet of like, hey, here's the movies coming out next year and a year after. And here's who's the good guy?

Here's the bad guy. And here's what their costumes look like. And like, you know, you're under extreme lock and key. But like, yeah, we make a lot. We make, the movie industry makes hundreds of millions off of Halloween costume royalties. They get like an eight to 10 percent royalty. And so they're like, all right, fine, you can get access to these designs in order to start prepping for future costumes. I wonder what their research methodology is.

You know, we've talked about that company WGSN. It always interests me. It's a hundred million dollar a year business that does like 30 million in profit. Yeah. And all they do is they help. I mean, all they do is simple, but it is like a pretty amazing thing. But they like help predict which color is going to be popular. So Starbucks make sure that their labels on shit is like the right colored pink or like,

Apparently, they predicted that pineapples were going to be popular. Did you know that pineapple was a popular thing this year? Yeah, yeah, I'm all about it. And they, like, somehow knew that. And they're saying next year, it's going to be the lemon, which I don't know how this works. Is that really what they said or you're just making that one up? I think it, yes, I think it was the lemon. Like next year, lemons are going to be like a new thing instead of pineapple, which I don't

even know how you would draw a lemon on like an iPhone case. I mean, it just looks like in the sun. But anyway, they said that like lemons are going to be. Such a specific problem. Your brain just went to. Well, like, have you ever seen, you know, like, pineapples on iPhone cases? It's like, but how do you make like a round, like, yellow thing?

There's, like, no density to it. Like, I don't know. We can workshop that afterwards. So, so, so I think, you know, these guys probably, you know, you know, like that meme, like the hello, hello, fellow kids or whatever, hello children, like the guy shows up with the high school. He's like 40 years old. He got the skateboard on his back.

And he's like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what is the good, you know, what's the good buzz this year? And like, you know, they're trying to figure out, like, what's going to be hot. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the research method, but I am intrigued. But basically they got to be fortune tellers. They got to figure out through movies, politics, all that stuff. Is it Pokemon?

Is it Wonder Woman? Is it Trump? What is it going to be the costumes? And so that's one interesting one. A couple other, you know, pretty interesting, pretty interesting things. I'll give you some like, I'll give you some like smaller niche like side hustle things. So first, haunted houses. So haunted houses apparently do $300 million a year.

It's kind of a big number for something that's useful, you know, like, for... Dude, I hate haunted houses, by the way, you go. What? Do you go? I've been. I'm not like, I'm not a big, like, thrill seeker, like, roller coaster, haunted house kind of guy. I'm not like afraid of it. I'm not trying to pay money to be afraid.

I don't pay money to be scared. That's my rule with movies and haunted houses. I pay money to do the opposite. Yeah, it's like, you know, those guys who pay girls to, like, you know, slap them and stuff. It's like, no, thanks. Pretty sure I should be getting paid if I'm going to get scared or slapped. That's my rule and I'm sticking to it. So there's like, you know, haunted house is kind of interesting.

There's a guy who, somebody tweeted this at me. They were like, you know, this local one near our place. And I did the math. So this basically was like small like haunted house. So what they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property. Same thing as the spirit store. They take a vacant property. They say, hey, we'll cut you a check for 10, 15 grand if we can use your house, right? Or they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll rent a property or they'll find a vacant property. And they basically just use it for the month. They have this operational thing where they can just spin up the haunted house.

And then they charge like 40 bucks to enter. And you could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars in about a month just off these things. And they have like, it's pretty crazy how like, you know, as a little side hustle, you could do a haunted house. Let me give you some other ones that I think are kind of interesting. There's a guy who created this website. called zombie pumpkins.

You ever seen this? No. So it's like, I think it's zombie pumpkins.com. So two million people a year go to this site just to print out a stencil that they can use to carve their pumpkin. So he was like,

you know what, if you go try to do pumpkin carving, it's going to be a pretty generic face. I'm going to make like super accurately drawn things so that you could have like a really dope looking pumpkin. Like you can have like a really cool site. A really like, you know,

Michael Jackson looking pumpkin. It'll look like it if you just follow my stencil. And so, you know, Two million people go to this thing. It gets like a million of those hits, you know, like at the last week of October or something. And he donates a bunch of the money that comes from this to charity, which I thought was pretty cool. And he charges money.

So you pay money and you get stencils. Yep. And every year he releases new ones. Okay, here's another one. Pumpkinsteins. So how would you like a pumpkin that instead of carving a pumpkin to looks like something? What if the pumpkin just grew and only looked like a Frankenstein hit? That's what this guy did.

So this guy's got a crazy story. He's like a, I don't know, he's like some farmer somewhere. And he spent four years trying to solve this problem. He's like, what if I could just grow a pumpkin that was already a decoration? So you don't have to do any work. So he tried like this. How do you spell it? Pumpkinstein, like Frankenstein.

Yeah, he tries to grow it. It doesn't work. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Finally, the fourth year, he's like, what if I tried this like, I don't know, type of seed or whatever it was? And he got it to grow into this mold. And the mold basically just looks like a Frankenstein head.

And so he started. selling them and he does like, you know, a few hundred sales and he does a few thousand sales. Retailers start coming to him. He opts to go with Sam's Club because he's like, you know what? Like he was selling these for $100 a pumpkin. He's like, you know what? Sam's Club, we could sell for $30 and make money doing that at their volume. These are amazing.

These are amazing. And so he goes and he's like, all right, he's like, this can be kind of a thing. He said he got 90,000 orders last year. So that's like $4 or $5 million in sales of these. He started going to other farms and bribing them, being like, hey, I'll pay you $11 ahead. Follow this blueprint. I need more production.

I cannot possibly keep up with a production at my rate. And so he goes and he gives other farms like $11 per pumpkin that they can produce that can be sold this way. And then they had like a malfunction and like the face still looked right, but the back got all screwed up and it like looks like it like exploded. And then that was way more popular. People are like, oh, that's cool. It like exploded in the back.

And he's like, oh, shit. Now I got to figure how to do this intentionally. it's like this crazy little like, you know, like accidental, you know, side hobby. Wow. These are cool. Another one, Home Depot. Have you heard about the 12 foot skeleton? No.

So this is like one of these like viral. I think maybe from TikTok, I don't know where, but like my wife has been talking about this. She's like, oh, I really want to get the 12 foot thing. It's always sold out. And I was like, it can't be that. I mean, like, let's just go to Home Depot and get it. Like, if you've seen Home Depot, it's just like full of shit. Like this is no way they're just like out every Home Depot.

She's like, you don't understand. And she shows me there's like buy and sell groups on Facebook where people are buying these things for $1,000 plus. Like they retailed for like 300 or something like that. And eBay's they're selling for $1,000. And it became such a hit. Home Depot figured out this giant lawn skeleton was like the big hit. Then Lowe's came out this year. And Lowe's was like the 12 foot mummy.

And I was like, wow, you know, who's going to come out with the 12 foot one inch, you know, ghost next year? It's like this crazy little trend, but there's all these things. So all these things that really weren't categories before are becoming categories, like the inflatable lawn decorations are just like surging in popularity, different types of candy, different types of costumes. Like it's all sort of surging in popularity because people are just more and more willing to spend. I got thinking, I was like, why is Halloween so awesome? I love Halloween.

You know, you don't have the spirit. You're sort of the Grinch of Halloween as you're known. And I realized as I'm known, Halloween is the anti-holiday. It's not the cookie cutter, warm and fuzzy. It's dark. It's kind of more adult. It's more creative. It's one of a few creative holidays.

And social media is the boom for Halloween because social media, what is social media? It's a, hey, look at me. And Halloween is the perfect, hey, look at me moment. It's, hey, look at my house. Hey, look at my costume. Hey, look at my body. Hey, look at my candy. Hey, look at my kids.

I look at everything. right? So it's the hey look at me thing. And also it's an excuse to act like a kid. And I'm bullish on anything that gives people an excuse to act like a kid. I think that's why Burning Man is popular. I think that's why Halloween is popular. And even things like the ice cream museum and stuff like that I think is really popular for that reason. Dude, it feels like you just prepared a debate on why Halloween's great and why I should dig it. And you have totally won me over. So you're saying there's a chance. Yeah. Like you just put together this big speech on why Halloween is cool and I'm into it. I think it's awesome. This 12 foot skeleton thing is awesome. This pumpkinstein is awesome. I'm all about it. This is awesome. And so let me tell you more ideas or little little niches. So I'll tell you a couple niches and a couple ideas. Niche thing. We had a guy come rig up lights to our house this week because he did every single house in our neighborhood. And we just moved into this place. And then we.

our neighbor was like, oh, yeah, you want lights? You got to hit the lights guy. He's booked. But like, if he can try to squeeze you in, you'll have lights for this season. Dude, you're just getting sucked in all the suburban traps. By the way, for the listener, I went to Sean's house the other day for dinner. And I walked in and I'm like, oh, that's a really cool kids shopping cart. Like, he's got like a play, like, checkout aisle. And I was like, oh, wow, that cart says target on it.

And he goes, yeah, or maybe it was your wife. But it's one of you guys were like, yeah, this has been one of the most in-demand toys. We had to find this cart on eBay for however hundreds of dollars. We flipped one and we bought the other. Yeah, you're like, we had to get this cart. Like the kids wanted this car, which they didn't, but you guys did, I think, probably. The moms want this cart. Yeah, the moms, it was like, we wanted this target toy cart. And I just thought, you know, that's kind of interesting. Now I'm hearing this, you are totally becoming a suburban dad. This is awesome. I like this side of you. Sir, you know I have a fanny pack. You know I was equipped for this life.

So this guy comes over and he's like, I'm like, how much for the lights? And he's like, I'll do it in, I'll do it this day, this morning. You get like a one hour window. And it's like $600 to put up lights, you know, like $200 for the lights themselves. They last year for 10 years. And then it'll be like 60 bucks to take them down in January. And I was like, all right, I guess like, I'm not going to fucking climb up there. So yeah, go ahead.

Like, you know, either we're not going to have lights or like, we're going to get in the spirit of things. And this guy just cleaned up around the neighborhood. It took him an hour. Wait, but why would he do it this way? He should do it where I'll come and pick them up on, like, right after Thanksgiving. And, hey, by the way, while I'm here, do you want Christmas lights? Well, these were Christmas lights, actually.

It's like they start the Christmas stuff now. I feel you. Okay. I thought it's Halloween lights, whichever that, whatever that is. Yeah, I don't even know. But he should start being like, you want Halloween and I'll do a bulb change in like November. He should be upselling. He was too honest of a guy in general because he was like $60 to take him down.

I was like, bro, one. you put the lights up, you could charge me $6,000 to take them down. What am I going to do? Like, you know, like, where's the gouging? You shouldn't have even told me that price until like Jan 1. You should have called me like, hey, dude, you need those down. It's actually illegal to have those up here right now. Yeah. You look like a redneck. You got to take those things down. We were pretty redneck when I was young and we'd leave them up all year round and we'd call them party lights. Well, they're called February lights now. And then they're March lights and April So this guy, I'm pretty sure this guy made like $20,000 this month in my one neighborhood with like essentially zero cost.

All he had to do was know how to string up lights. And, you know, that's a skill that I think could be learned. And so like, you know, there is a like neighborhood site also here that I think is like a $10 or $20,000 side also. Like there's, you know, probably like 100 houses in this area, flyer them. And then go start putting up lights and just say, hey, knock on the door. You know, we just put up their lights. Would you guys want lights this year? Like, I think that's a, that's kind of an easy win.

Okay, let me give you now some ideas. So you don't like haunted houses. I'm fine with a haunted house, but man, the effort to get out there is probably going to be cold. Gotta get the kids ready. You got to go in the car, you know, all that stuff. Why isn't there a haunted house I could just do from the seat of my chair at home? That's right. VR haunted house.

If you ever put on a VR headset, there's a, One thing VR is kind of amazing at. VR is kind of amazing at this like immersive experience where you can like, look left, look right and you can just get scared. Like if you've ever done the demo where you're rock climbing and they're like, look down. You look down.

It's legit scary. And then they'll make your character like start to slip. Yeah, you get that feeling in your stomach. And so VR haunted house, no brainer. I don't know if there is one or not. But like, you know,

these, there are I think 100 VR apps that do over a million dollars a year. I feel like the VR Halloween app, the VR haunted house app. You know, you can sell this thing for 20 bucks a pop and probably make, you know, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand, if not a million dollars in a year just with the amount of sales that go on in VR. Because you'll be competing against nobody. And they'll feature you, right? Because you're cool content for that month.

So you'll get like free promotion basically through the Oculus store. That's an eight. I dig it. Eight. Okay. Cool. Okay. My next one is going to be Spirit Store for Christmas.

Am I dumb? Is there no spirit store for Christmas? I don't know. but I do know that my wife is like your wife where like this weekend we are walking around and she's like anything that had a pumpkin flavored candle she was walking in and like she bought like a caramel apple she's like I got to get a caramel apple today like we have to have one today before what is that motherfucker what is what is that mother fucker have been doing to our wives man like there is something with a certain scent and certain color that I you know I must have must have this pumpkin in my life I just learned this weekend have you ever heard of nesting do you know what that is? Yes. I didn't know what that was. So I just learned what it was. It's a real thing, dude, by the way.

It's, it's so, for the single guys listening, I guess. For 98% of our audience. Yeah. Yeah. Do all the neckbeards out there. For all the people listening to this on a Peloton in your one bedroom, San Francisco apartment. But basically when a woman, I guess, is like, I don't know when it happens.

But like, I think later in the pregnancy, part of the pregnancy, She starts to nest. I guess that means like you start like preparing for the baby. You want to like clean constantly. Basically you want to have an environment where the baby can come to and be safe. And so you want to clean. You want to organize. You want to make sure that there's no corners.

So that's a real thing. It's what I definitely experienced it like. And we were like, what's going on? Other people who had already had been like, oh, nesting. Yeah. Baby's coming soon. You know, you could sort of feel this. It's like, is your wife suddenly cleaning, organizing?

All of a sudden, the to do list just gets like knocked out because it's like, oh, there's like burst of clarity and energy and like urgency around preparing the home for a certain thing. That's crazy. So, you know, it's interesting. We think that we are like these civilized, like, creatures different from an animal. But then like there's these situations that happen. For example, if you're a man, if someone like disrespects you publicly, you start feeling this like, what is this rage I feel inside of me? Like, I want to go, do I want to go fight right now? Or like, or like with a woman, it's like the nesting thing. And like there's all these like things. And having a kid is like a really good example of when like these weird things just start happening

that like I thought I was different. I thought I wasn't just one of those animals, but turns out I'm just a beast like, you know, the rest of the animal kingdom. And nesting is one of them. And maybe there's something about Halloween where just Sarah just has to drink or eat pumpkin-flavored shit just constantly. And it's like, it's the same way with Christmas. She's like, oh, we got to go get the cinnamon thing. Yep. I'm like, we don't need it. But she's like, no, No, like, you understand. I need this hot thing that I'm a hold with both of my hands near my nose, like a small koala.

And it's like, what is this position that all women assume during winter? So the spirit CEO even said this. He goes, fall, the turning of the leaves, the pumpkin spice latte, and the spirit store. We have become a symbol of the changing of seasons. People now wait for our store to pop up. That's how they mark time, the passage of time in their lives. So anyways, I thought, you know, I thought, why is it there a spirit for Christmas? What does spirit do well?

Decorations, desserts, and baggone good gift ideas. That's the three Ds of spirit. You are suburban. I'm going to start calling you Ted. Ted Purrie. You're going to use the word like, day gone. The daggone. I need another D.

The daggone good gift ideas. So Christmas has all those things. Yeah, triple D. It has decorations. It has specific dessert. Eggnog, candy canes, all this stuff. And you need gift ideas. You need to go try out toys and things like that.

And so, you know, Hallmark tries to capture this. I think they're doing it wrong. I think spirit needs to get in the spirit of things. Spirit needs to pop up for Halloween. Stick around for Thanksgiving and the Christmas push. And then wind things down right after Valentine's Day. That's the spirit you need to get. you need to get on this six to eight month program.

I'm sure you've thought of this and you have a good reason why you don't. But I like to play pretend CEO. Dude, you know, like, I think that something that you and I or whoever listening don't think about enough is when you're thinking about a company to build, really do you think this would be awesome to run? And being CEO of the holiday company would be awesome. Yeah. I mean, that would just be like a fun thing.

Are you changing the world? Nah. Are you having a blast? For sure. You know what I mean? season, as we say at the holiday company. Yeah, that's the, it's, it's, it's the holiday code is always the season. Yeah.

Yeah. What a beautiful word. Yeah. Tiz. Crily underused. Yeah, I love the Tiz. Yeah, so I'm about this. We're on to something.

So, okay, a couple other, uh, interesting things. So this pet costume thing, I think is like a real trend. Um, you know, we've seen pet vitamin companies like Zesty Paws. all for $600 million. We've seen pet. You know, pets is like a huge niche. And so if 700 million is spent a year on pet costumes,

I feel like you could just kind of like, I mean, I can't tell you off top of my head who is the go-to for pet, you know, for pet costumes. And so that tells me, you know, there's more than enough room on the e-commerce side for it.

You know, the story behind Halloween costumes.com is also crazy. It's all the same thing. It's basically like somebody stumbled into this idea and then couldn't even keep up a demand as Halloween grew. and now it's effing huge. All right.

So that's my, that's my Halloween rant. That was a good one. You know, breakdown and backstory. Let's see. Did I miss anything? So I wanted to talk about a few things.

Well, we go to this one topic really quick. I think it's only okay, so I don't want to spend that much time on it. But then I want to hear your Sully story, the Twitter thing, and the Warren Buffet thing. I think those are all awesome.

But this is just one thing to put on your radar. Have you heard of this company called Humane? Humane. Is this the like, phone on your chest. Yes. So basically, this is just, it's, it's, sorry for the shitty pitch, you made. Yeah. I don't actually know what it is. And I don't think anyone knows what it is. But basically, I saw this YouTube video talking about it. It's the first time I've ever heard about it, which is interesting because they've raised $130 million from like some of the best VCs out there.

And the people who started is, it's this husband and wife company. I think they spent like one of the, the husband spent 20 years at iPhone or at Apple, built. the iPhone. I think he was like one of like a six or 10 person team to like the original team to come up the iPhone. His wife was also a director of engineering, I think of Apple or something like pretty impressive like that. And they've recruited like a hundred plus employees. Most all are from Apple. Like 60 or 70 of them are from Apple and they're like Apple ballers. They're not just like the average just like entry level person. And so it's kind of an interesting signal. And they filed for all these patents. One is like a wearable multimedia device in cloud computing.

platform with laser projecting projections. Another one's like a portable. Yeah, I mean, that could go anyway. You know what I mean? Like, we're going to see a bunch of interesting stuff. Another one's like a portable battery pack. I mean, like they've done all these amazing things. They don't even have a website.

Like you can't, you can't really learn anything about it. You go to the website. First of all, if you go to the website, you got to commit three typos to get there. It's hue. . .mah, like any humane, but split up with three, you know, two different periods. And then you get there and it's a picture of like the sun. And it just says, what did it say? It's like, I forgot what it said like change everything.

Yeah. So I have a strong take on that. But let me finish this, which is basically their whole point is that they view phones as a divider between us in the world. And they want your phone or whatever it is going to replace a phone to be an extension of our bodies, which that's like pretty vague. I don't know what the hell that means.

But I guess it means like they want to build a new iPhone. but it's not going to be a handheld device. It's going to be like clothes that you wear or lenses in your eyes. I'm not exactly sure. But two tanks. One, I completely agree. And I think that as an industry, we're like way in, we're, we're, we're too early to say that there's something actionable right now. But I do think in like 10, 20 years, we're going to be anti-phone.

We're going to be like, like, what the fuck? You're looking at this shit. This is like cancer. Why are you doing this? Why are you smoking? What are you doing smoking? It's kind of like I'm looking at smoking. Number two, I think.

unfortunately, I don't know you guys, Bethany and Imran, I think those are the two founders. I'm sure you're wonderful people, but I think any company that raises that much money and has a site that says change everything and has raised $120 million and has never shown anything, I think they always fail, nine out of ten times. I think that they're going to fail because of their hubris. And it's like, what the hell are we making here? What's one that didn't fail? Is there an example. Like Quibi was the most recent one that was like this and Quibi failed. Magic leap before that, magically failing in progress. What were the other ones? Docerro, that one failed. I mean, the only one I can think of is Jet.com. And. But one would argue that that didn't succeed.

Exactly. I would say it didn't fail, but like they probably sold a slightly above the valuation in which that they raised that. Yeah, like I don't know if the underlying business was healthy or not. I didn't feel like Jet.com became this main, you know, big consumer thing that was going on. But like, you know, who knows? The world is really big. Maybe there were a ton of loyal jet.com users who were, you know, using it all the time and the business was working.

But it did seem like it was the team, the story, the technology that got acquired by Walmart in order to make Walmart's online thing better. But nonetheless, still a definite win. Mark Lurie, friend of the pod, love the guy, you know. I was a fucking NBA team. So, like, it worked. You know, in terms of wealth creation. Owns a place of my heart.

Small corner. More importantly. But like, you know, how many of these dream big, raise big, hype, big, build and stilt for multiple years and then like launch with the world changing device or world changing product? Yeah. I'm reviewing the track record here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I had a nickel every time that happened, I mean, I would maybe have a dime. Yeah.

It doesn't happen a lot. You ever play in the game, Mind Sweeper? It looks like that. You know, okay, so here's a couple things. Number one, we did talk about this before because when they came out, the patent, I think, got leaked. And it looked like at that time, the device was some kind of clip-on sort of like camera that you basically would wear on your chest. Sort of like a GoPro, but for everybody. I don't know if this is still the product or not, but I remember that was the idea.

and it was like, oh, that's cool. You'd kind of have this like hands-free, you know, camera, audio device, that sort of thing. Oh, yes, I do remember that. And so that was kind of interesting, but that would only be to capture. It wouldn't be to, you couldn't like look at that and read something or watch video or anything or that.

So it wouldn't totally replace the phone. But I'll say a couple things. I think they're solving the right problem, which is the phone is not the last, it's not the last frontier. There's certainly going to be some kind of wearable device after this. Is it a watch? Is it glasses?

is it something like this? Is it a drone that's floating above your head all the time? I don't know. But most likely it's going to be glasses. You know, that seems to be where everybody's going. And so, like, we'll see. But definitely will happen and definitely will change the world when whoever does get that form factor right. So it is inevitable, in my opinion.

The next thing, the phone really is causing, like, you know, a lot of damage and problems in terms of how society, like, you know, with the extreme strength that came from this device that helps us never get lost, never be bored, never be alone, all that. good stuff. You know, I remember going to a doctor and he was like, he did a scan. He's like, oh, yeah, you have a little, you know, slight thing up here, C4, C5, whatever, like your vertebrae. He's like, oh, shit, like, what did I, you know, did I? What did I look it down? He's like, oh, no, everybody has this now. It's from looking at the phone. He's like, it's like the most chronic problem in the, you know, in the country right now is people's vertebrate are like, you know, messed up because their neck is always cramed down. And I was like, oh, damn, man, I got to really start raising my phone higher when I'm looking at it.

I got a really get like a selfie stick or something. Is there a neck brace? And he sells him. Yeah, then the doctor sells him on his like drop shipping store. So, okay, so I think they're solving the right problem. I also think that the, like, people think, the common thing people would say, and this is kind of the white night thing that I hate, which is, I don't want to have more technology. I don't want to have, you know, glasses that have my phone on them on my eyes all day. Like, shoot me now.

I'm like, all right, I will shoot you now. In the knee. I'm going to kill you. Your impression of a white night. You're basically like a white Californian guy. I think you put a little more like lowerness in your voice. And I think you've got the best white guy impression I've ever heard of. Yeah.

Social media. all I can say is they need a rahuligma in their life. So we'll talk about him in a second. But, but dude, so I think that there's this idea of like, oh, you know, social media is too crazy. I want to detox. I want to. I'm not going to, I don't want more technology. Oh, my God.

I don't want to live in a world like that. Guess what? It's coming and you're going to love it and you're going to do it. And like, yes, it will have some negatives associated with it like anything. But like, it is going to happen. one thing that's going to happen with it is Zuckerberg has this law he said I don't know if you remember this back of the

but he coined this term Zuckerberg's law does you ever hear what this was? No. He tried to get away from it. He said it one time in an interview, never said it again because it sounded bad but like it stuck with me which was because every year

people are basically willing to share up to twice as much as they were willing to share the year before. So in terms of like, you know, we weren't sharing our status updates about what we were doing all the time but then like you know what Twitter comes out. And now people are just sharing every random thought on their mind.

We weren't sharing our location before. But then Foursquare and others came out. Now we started sharing location. Photos, we were only sharing, you know, we weren't sharing online. Then we shared albums. Then we shared a single photo. And then with Snapchat, we'll just share like, you know, tons of photos because they all disappear. So like basically, as long as a product can unlock, there is like pent up demand to share twice as much as you're currently sharing.

And I feel this all the time. There are so many moments of the day that I wish I had captured. my kids did something cute or my trainer said something awesome to me to work out. I don't want my hands on the keyboard at that moment to capture that video, that note or that image. And so I think that there is

a big pent-up demand to be able to share way more moments or capture way more moments and share some portion of those than it's happening today. And that will happen with either glasses, you know, like maybe a drone camera or like this wearable thing on your chest.

So I think those things are all working for it. The thing that's working against it is once you get this cute-ass domain and you raise like $100 million and you go into stealth and you hire 100 people and you're basically like we're going to change the world you're basically saying I'm going to follow this path you know I'm going to walk off this cliff like the many before me that many companies before me that have done this like hey magically if I can see you down there right like you know that is the challenge with some of this stuff yeah I don't think it's going to work but I think it's a cool I think it's a cool move I'm glad they're doing it.

Yeah. What do you say? Face tats and coronerous. Yeah. It's like, hey. Like, what's he saying to his wife? And they're like, hey, you want to feel what it's, you want to feel what it feels like to spend $130 billion?

Like, you know what I mean? They're just like, like, you feel like spending money? Like, you know, they're just like coming up with the way just to blow this cash. But pick one more of these things for the last few minutes. Sully or Warren Buffett. They both are incredibly interesting. Let's do the Suley one. All right.

So he tells the story. He goes. When I sold my company Tiny Co was the name of his company, it was a mobile gaming company. He says there was two parts. There was our original games that we had been making like tiny monsters, tiny zoo, stuff like that. And our license game, like we made the family guy game, the Harry Potter game, Marvel game. And we got acquired. And the acquirer, the people who bought us, they really wanted the like the licensed famous IP games.

And so after the acquisition, we decided to sell the first one. And there was a bunch of potential acquirers. And they, you know, one of them, you know, offered us 500K for it. I thought it was a good offer, but we could get more. So I created a new bidder. I hit up a former engineer from Tiny Co, and I told him to bid. I said, you're going to need to offer like a million dollars, like two times the current offer to get the deal because you're just like some random guy.

And he did. And it was a lot more than Jam City. Imagine it was more than the market price. And as such, he won the bid. And I was like, congrats. All right. At a million dollars, right? It was only a million dollars.

I was like, congrats, you got it. Okay. Now here's the deal. We've underinvested in these games. You should, you know, you got to work like 60 hours a week, just put some money into ads to grow it, add these features, that'll help, you know, retain it better. And like, you're going to be able to three or four X the revenue in the next 12 months. And the guy like, you know, sat there and he's like, I got a better idea. He's like, I'm working today at as an engineer at this company.

I'm just going to quit. And then he's like, I look, he's like, I'm just going to do the absolute minimum to keep this thing like refreshed and working. And so he goes, instead of doing more work, he goes, you know what? I'm good with this. I'm just going to tap out of the workforce at age 31 and I'm going to retire. I don't need to spend any more money. I'm going to live, you know, like within my means. And like this app that I just bought for a million dollars is going to keep giving me cash flow for, you know, forever. I don't need a job anymore. And I'll just always maintain it so it keeps bringing me that cash flow. And in the meantime, I'm going to work on my hobby projects and other software things. I just scratch my itch. And he goes,

he goes, then, you know, just like the world started working in his favor on top of that. He goes, you know, like Epic and Apple gone into a lawsuit. Apple had to change their rev shared deal. So they said for anybody making less than a million in revenue, we'll give you 30 percent. Instead of take a 30 percent cut, we'll take a 15 percent cut. So immediately profit went up by 15 percent for this guy. He goes, the business has generated more than three million in profits since he bought it. The purchase price assumed that revenue would go down over time, but it remained steady and actually grew during COVID. And he goes, takeaways. The only way to win the rat race is to opt out. This is a takeaway that I understand intellectually, but I have not

accepted emotionally. Frankly, I'm still blown away by my friend's act of saying, yeah, I have enough. And he goes, number two, when I tell you something to buy something, buy it. And I tell you to work harder on something, don't do it. And then he was like, you know, the self-serving part of this thread was like, you know, a lot of businesses have these little baby businesses inside that are undervalued. Like, if you have one of these, like, you know, I want to buy one. I think these businesses have a lot of value in them. And so, and so, and so, Yeah, so basically, and I think by the way, he didn't just buy the whole million with a million dollars of cash up front. He financed the poor share of it.

So he put down maybe three, four hundred thousand and finance the rest as an example. Would you ever do that? Could you see yourself tapping out? Yeah, I think about that all the time. Really? Yeah, not tapping out forever, but I feel like tapping out in the sense that I really have this urge to work on whatever the most creative and fun project is, which might make $0 or negative dollars. But don't you do that now in a way?

Like that's how I started this podcast. My plan when I started this podcast was like, I think I'll probably lose 10 grand a year all in on production, you know, paying my editor, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month. And like, you know, I was like, you know, booking the studio, you know, four times a month. That's 400 bucks. I was like, I probably net will lose 10 grand. I'll have some sponsors, but net will lose 10 grand. I was like, I'm totally happy to do that because I think this project could be a lot of fun.

and instead of starting a new business, I started this podcast. And this podcast turned out to be like my favorite thing I've ever done, the best project I've ever started, and actually turned out to be a pretty good business, actually on top of that. And I kind of want to do that again. So I kind of want to go look at like,

what's something I would be willing to lose money doing because it's that fun to me or that intriguing to me because I think that that's probably a better signal of like what I really want to do and therefore we'll take an interesting shot at doing something. Dude, I think that like a lot of, people dream about retiring. And I've, a few times in my career, I've taken, like, as much as a month off to

a year off. The badical, I think. Yeah, I used to call it a Sambatical. And I was like, I'm on a Sanbatical. And every single time, I love it at first. And at the end, I'm like, dude, I got to go do something. I can't, I can't just do this. Like, like, your friends can't hang out with you on a Wednesday at, you know, one o'clock.

Like, you're just so bored. And you're like, I need to go create. I need to produce. I need to like, and then I just realize I am not built in men or, you know, all people, but I can always speak about a man's perspective. We are not built to sit idle. We are, you know, created to work. I don't think we're actually created to work 100 hours a week, but I think we are created to work like 30 hours a week. And like, that's the minimum where it's like, you just have to produce and you have to contribute. Otherwise, you feel pointless and I think you die sooner.

For first, I don't think that's a, dude, when people retire, I think women are way more active in general, men are more lazy. Yeah, sure. As a stereotype. Yeah, I don't, I don't mean human in particular. I just, I mean human, but also I mean like, I only know my, I only know like what men are like, because I'm a man, you know, that's what I mean. Uh, so yeah, sure, all humans, I'm sure are like that.

I just haven't had this conversation with a lot of people. Uh, but I think that when you retire, like, I've got family and they're like, I'm going to retire. I'm like, I don't think you should retire. I just think you should work a little bit less or do a six month of vacation. Because I think the sooner you retire, that just, you're just like, you've just actually taken off

four years on your life. Do you know what I mean? Like if you're going to retire, you at least got to go volunteer. You got to contribute in some capacity. You got to have something that you're living for. Yeah, yeah, totally. My, I wouldn't take a sabbatical. I would, I would just pour my energy into a more creative project that, like, it's not the best business use of time. Like, I have a bunch of ideas that I think could make a bunch of money. And then I have a bunch of ideas I think would be really fun to do that would probably not make any money. And might not even get anybody to use it or like it. Maybe it'll turn out crappy, but I'm intrigued. to do it. And so

that's the temptation for me. My thing like that is all the things I want to do, they all cost money. So I'm like, fuck, I didn't earn more. Yeah, but you don't mean. Like in reality, you don't. Well, it's only, you know, I guess perception's reality. Who knows? Yeah. All right. You can change perception. Easier than you could change reality. So it's just

change that. Yeah, I got to run. But yeah, good episode. All right. That's a pod.