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

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 11/1/22 - 1h 1m - PDF Transcript

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

So people 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, want to help me pull off a stunt?

I'm a walk out in front of the Twitter office with a box in my hand.

There's hella TV crews outside.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road, let's travel never looking back.

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 million 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 and like, yeah, there hasn't been like a proper

ribbon cutting moment.

Like it's not like.

It was more like a squatter.

You just like went into the office and they're like, yes, you own it now.

You seem to be here.

Mine.

Mine.

Playground rules.

Like wow.

That's all it took to have Twitter.

Have you ever heard of like a coup, like a coup d'etat?

Like with governments, you know, I was, I read a lot of, yeah, they're pretty cool.

Yeah.

I read a lot of history, 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 the compilation

of his thing where he says, just get up?

No.

So they're like, Derek, you're big like knockout artists, but like, you know, the knock on

you has always been like, what if you get a wrestling thing?

You know, how's your jiu-jitsu or your training?

Jiu-jitsu ain't real, man.

And they're like, what?

And he's like, man, you don't need jiu-jitsu.

Just get up.

And they're like, what?

He's like, why?

I don't want to stay on the ground with another man between my legs.

I'm not into that.

Like, I'm not going to do jiu-jitsu.

I'm just going to get up.

They're like, but you, you need jiu-jitsu to get up.

He's like, no, 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 jiu-jitsu.

He just stands back up.

He's so powerful.

So powerful.

That's how I feel.

That's what Elon Musk did.

He's like, no, just walk in.

Yeah.

He's like, 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 for a story, they're waiting for the story about something going wrong.

Elon comes here.

Oh, there's a protest.

There's a walk.

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 under their scene, walking

out with their possessions in their boxes.

And I saw it 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, there's much of goofy looking people that work in 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 and he says, but he had a box in his hand.

So they 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.

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, 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 little joke that people play on the internet where it's

like, like, you say something about Ligma and then someone's like, Ligma, what's Ligma?

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 Elon goes in and fires people and the lady who tweeted it.

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, 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

is holding this Michelle Obama book, I don't know why.

And he just said, 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, 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, yo, bro.

And the person says, so he goes, are you doing anything in the next hour?

Do you want to help me pull off a stunt?

I'm at the gym and I need a box.

Well, I'm a walk out in front of the Twitter office with a box in my hand.

There's hella TV crews outside and then this is literally how he pulled something.

He just goes, he gets an empty box and a Michelle Obama book.

There's nothing else in the box and he walks out and the TV crews go for it.

And so that, 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 hella TV crews.

Let's go get them.

And 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, the first thing is, did you just see the cameras and just walk

out there?

He goes, yeah, basically, I got to the gym near Twitter's headquarters.

I saw all these cameras and so I just went, amazing.

That is so funny.

Who is this guy?

He's like a founder of like a tech startup, basically.

He did this for fun.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I'm ready to invest in his things as like stealth startup.

So I'm like, I'm ready to invest in whatever he's doing.

Any value TV, there's hella TV cameras.

Name your price.

Ligma.

So, 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 jump.

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.

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 to have a husband and wife.

Did anyone comment on 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.

So 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?

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 and like, because I make money from Twitter.

So like, I don't want it to go away, but I don't, I don't, I got consulting calls to

take.

So, um, 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, I don't care what you're going to do.

Well, I just want to, 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's like, 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 could just see the page.

Who the fuck knows?

And then they changed their mind.

Like, I guess they realized how bad of an idea that was and like, you know, an hour

later, they're like, tread the papers actually, we're going to review on the computer, just

be prepared to review.

And so people like all these engineers 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 businessinsider.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

they're in a coal mine.

Yeah.

This is like, this is what it's like to toil at Elon Musk's Twitter.

The expectation is literally to work 24 seven.

And I think that that's what I got.

Straight clown behavior.

Well, I can't believe they're doing that.

I can believe it.

And it 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 dumb

ass.

But I thought it was funny because like, come on, man, like you're you're coding this.

But 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 now here's who's reported to be in the war room.

It's Elon, his chief counsel.

And it's Jason Callicanis.

I think Jason's Jason's amazing.

But like, what the hell does he know?

Yeah, that is Sriram from a 16 Z.

So just venture capitalists who's a former PM used to work at Twitter, also, you know,

had a run at Twitter and clubhouse and Snapchat.

Yeah.

And then also, I guess, like some other people, some engineers or people from like boring company

or Neuralink or whatever, like some people he trusts, like his cousin is there, like,

and they basically just set up shop and they were like, all right, we're going to do with

this thing and they're like, change, change the logged out page.

It forces you to sign up.

No, you should be able to read tweets before you sign in or you sign up.

And then, which is like an experiment's been tried many times before.

And then it's like, you know, we need to have this verification program.

You have five days to deliver this, I guess.

And so there's 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, Alon.

My point of view has 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 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, she 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 needed addresses is only for like people like us.

And like, 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.

Yeah.

So I wanted to talk about a few things.

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 obsess over Halloween.

To me, it 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, 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 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, like a figure

skater in between rounds.

Like, I don't, I don't always want to put the hood on, but it's a narwhal.

It's got like a little horn on top.

Little horns.

My wife has a matching costume.

A narwhal is a whale that has a, yeah, if you're, 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.

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 into it.

Yeah.

I got the Cheryl Sandberg book.

I'm going to lean into this one.

That's a cheat, man.

Lean into stereotypes.

But speaking of Halloween, I did a bunch of research about Halloween and 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 going on, but let me tell you some things I found.

Okay.

This is almost Halloween.

Okay.

What the heck is this?

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 spent, 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?

It's first of all, it's like some weird part of the 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,

this dude, they called the yagging.

It just has a soft J up here.

So there was like, all right, there's like this festival where they would like, they're

like, oh, the demons are coming.

So they would like dress up as demons themselves and like, you know, dancing or 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, you know, then 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 say, baby, we in Catholic school, we celebrate it 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?

That was the gap.

But basically it was like, for a while, it was this kind of 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 over 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 mainstream $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, they could make a 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 the Hallmark lobby, man, they've like really

been pushing Valentine's Day on us for years.

I mean, I think that there's like a, 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.

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 just sell more stuff and put something in the store that's

going to drive people to come by.

All right.

A quick message from our sponsor.

You know, I was thinking about the shortest day of the year earlier.

And while we technically have the same amount of time as every other day of the year, the

lack of daylight makes it feel so much shorter, which is exactly the same kind of feeling as

working with disconnected tools.

Our work days, the same length as always, but before you know it, we spent three hours

just fixing something that was supposed to be automated.

Thankfully HubSpot's all-in-one CRM platform can serve as a single source of truth for

managing your customer relationships across marketing, sales, service operations with

multiple hubs and over a thousand integrations and an easy to use interface, HubSpot lets

you spend less time managing your software and more time connecting with your customers.

Learn how HubSpot can help you grow your business at HubSpot.com.

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, $3 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 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 their Skittles, Cheetos, Lunchable.

Everybody's got like a Halloween theme 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 Spirit is 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.

It's your, your first Thursday night, date night, Spencer's.

Spencer's.

That's what I thought.

Yeah.

Like Spencer's, like, you know, like a hot topic alternative, Spencer's also owns

Spirit Halloween.

Yeah.

So they, 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 the

month of October.

And so it's his woman'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, 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 properties.

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 am I 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 revenues 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 regroup 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 kick out clause.

So they say, hey, look, you could take the, look, how can I get more real estate?

Look, if you find it, if you do find a good tenant who you want to do a long term lease,

you can just kick us out.

Like, like any time you could 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 1400 stores.

So like fast 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, that's what I graduated from

college.

It was five billion rewind to 2005.

It was only like three billion.

And so that's like kind of a big like, just during our lifetime, our adult lifetime, this

thing is like, you know, more than doubled in size.

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 triple times it by times

it.

No, times it by 20.

We're talking like nine figures.

And Christmas tree light show means what?

You pay $20 and you 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 staff he is.

I think over a hundred.

They work all year round for four weeks of work.

Can you imagine what your company's like?

Like what happens if there's like a terrorist attack or, you know, like whatever or 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 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 of 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 that the spirit stores.

So that's just kind of crazy for billion dollars and basically like probably a three week time

period for the majority of that spent 8% of all candy sales of the year happen 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 rubies?

No.

What is rubies?

Rubies 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 rubies 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 seventies 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 seventies and eighties it transitioned into basically like Hollywood.

And it was like, Oh, movie characters and like TV characters would 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 for rubies 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, like a bunch of Tylenol

got laced with cyanide and people died and they never caught.

They never caught the person.

Never caught the guy.

And it's scared a bunch of people.

It's like, Holy shit.

Tylenol like this, like safe things.

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.

That 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 they, 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 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 of

money.

We make the movie industry makes hundreds of millions off of Halloween costume royalties.

They get like an eight to 10% 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 is interesting to me.

It's a hundred million dollar a year business that does like 30 million in profit.

And all they do is they help.

I mean, it's they all they do is simple, but it is like a pretty amazing thing.

But they like help.

They had helped predict which colors going to be popular.

So Starbucks make sure is 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.

Is that really what they said?

Are you just making that one up?

I think it.

Yes.

I think it was the lemon.

They're 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 it's such a specific problem.

Your brain just went to well, like, have yours, 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 could 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, fellow children, like the guy shows

up at the high school.

He's like, 40 years old.

You have the skateboard on his back.

And he's like, hello kids, 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, 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?

Is it what, what is it going to be the costumes?

And so, so that's one interesting one.

Several other, you know, 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, it's crazy, kind of a big number for something that's like useful, you

know, like, for, dude, I hate haunted houses six days a year.

I've been, I'm not like, I'm not a big like thrill seeker like roller coaster haunted house

kind of guy.

I don't, I'm not like afraid of it.

I'm not into it.

I'm not, I don't pay money to be scared.

That's my, 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.

You know, pretty sure, pretty sure I should be getting paid if I'm going to be scared

or slapped.

That's my rule.

And I'm sticking to it.

So, 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, 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 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 could 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, 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 2 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 can have like a really

dope looking pumpkin.

Like you can have like a really cool site, really like, you know, Michael Jackson looking

pumpkin, it'll look like it if you just follow my stencil.

And so, you know, 2 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, 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.

Pumpkin Steins.

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 like a Frankenstein head?

That's what this guy did.

So this guy's got a crazy story.

He's like a 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 tries to grow 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 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 can 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, this could be kind of a thing.

He said he got 90,000 orders last year, so like that's like four or $5 million in sales

of these pumpkins.

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 the 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 like, oh, that's cool, it like exploded in

the back.

And he's like, oh, shit, now I got to figure out 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.

I 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,

who's going to come out with the 12 foot one inch 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 it's because 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 the 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.

You know, even things like the Ice Cream Museum and stuff like that, I think is, is, you know,

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 pumpkin stein is awesome.

I'm all about it.

This is awesome.

This is cool.

And so let me tell you more ideas or, or a little, little, little niche.

So I'll tell you a couple of niches and a couple of 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 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.

And we were like, oh, you're just getting sucked in all the suburban traps.

By the way, for the listener, I went to Sean's house for 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 as one of you guys were like, yeah, this has been one of the most in-demand toys.

We had to like find this cart on eBay for however hundreds of dollars.

We bought two.

We flipped one and we bought the other.

Yeah.

You're like, we had to get this car.

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 want it.

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 up, 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 at this morning.

You get like a one hour window.

And it's like $600 to put up lights, you know, like 200 bucks for the lights themselves.

They last you 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.

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 and then you can use it for them.

I feel you.

Okay.

I thought it was Halloween lights, whichever that whatever that is.

Yeah.

I don't even know.

But bulb change in like November.

He should be upselling.

He was too honest of a guy in general because like he was like 60 bucks to take them down.

I was like, bro, once 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 Gen one.

He 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

would call them party lights.

Well, they're called February lights now and then they're March lights and April lights.

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 side also here that I think is like a $10,000

side, side also like there's, you know, probably like a hundred houses in this area, flyer them

and then go start putting up lights and just say, hey, knock on the door.

Yeah, 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 the haunted house, but man, the effort to get out there is probably going

to be cold.

Got to get the kids ready.

Got to go, 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.

The VR haunted house.

If you ever put on a VR headset, there's 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 could 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 a hundred

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.

All right.

It's nobody and they'll feature you, right?

Cause you're cool content for that month.

So you'll get like free promotion basically through Oculus store.

That's an eight.

I dig it.

Eight.

Okay.

Cool.

Okay.

My next one is going to be spirit store for Christmas.

Are you 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.

We have to have one today.

Yeah.

What is that motherfucker Pavlov been doing to our wives, man?

Like there is something with this certain scent and certain color that like, 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.

It's a real thing, dude.

By the way, it's, it's so like for the single guys listening, uh, I guess for 98% of our

audience.

Yeah.

To 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.

Yeah.

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.

Well, I, I definitely experienced it like we were like, what's going on that other people

who had already had to be like, Oh, nesting.

Yeah.

Baby's coming soon.

You know, you could sort of feel this.

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.

Like we, we, we think that we are like these civilized like creatures different from an

animal, but then like there's these, 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, 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 just, 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, no.

I need this hot thing that I'm going to hold with both of my hands near my nose, like

a small koala.

And it's like, what is this, what is this position that all women assume during, 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 a spirit do well, decorations, desserts, and baggone, good gift ideas.

That's the three Ds of spirit.

You are superb, but I'm going to start calling you Ted.

Ted, hurry.

Ted, hurry, you're going to see some words like daggone, daggone, I didn't know D, the

daggone, good gift ideas.

So Christmas has all those.

Triple D, baby.

Yeah.

Triple D 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.

You know, like I think that's something that you and I or whoever listening don't think

about enough is when you're thinking about a company to build, rarely 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?

No.

Are you having a blast?

For sure.

You know what I mean?

Tis the season, as we say at the holiday company.

Yeah.

That's it's the holiday code, tis the season.

Tis always the season.

Yeah.

What a beautiful word.

Yeah.

Tis.

I'm really underused.

Yeah.

I love the tis.

Yeah.

So I'm about this.

We're onto something.

So, okay.

A couple other interesting things.

So this pet costume thing, I think is like a real trend.

You know, we've seen pet vitamin companies like Zesty Paws sell for $600 million.

We've seen pets.

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.

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 f-ing huge.

All right.

So that's my, that's my Halloween rant.

That was a good one.

That's my Halloween, you know, breakdown and backstory.

Let's see.

Did I miss anything?

Dude, we, well, we go to this one topic really quick.

Have you heard of this company called Humane?

Humane.

Is this the like phone on your chest?

Yes.

Yeah.

Basically this is just, it's, it's kind of interesting.

Sorry for the shitty pitch, Humane.

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 building

the iPhone.

It was like one of like a six or 10 person team to like the original team to come up

with the iPhone.

His wife was also a director of engineering, I think of, 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 and cloud computing platform with laser project

and projections.

Another one's like a portable, yeah, I mean, that could, 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.

Q dot ma dot 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, it's like,

I forgot what it said, like change everything.

Yeah.

So I have a, 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 and the world and

they want your phone or whatever there 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, I'm not exactly sure, but two tanks, one, I completely agree.

And I think that as an industry, we're like way and 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 are, 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, you're smoking?

What are you doing smoking?

That's kind of like, I mean, like it's 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 it has raised $120 million and has never

shown anything, I think they always fail nine out of 10 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

magically before that magically failing in progress.

What were the other ones?

Like, you know, Sarah, that one failed.

I mean, the only one I can think of is jet.com and one would argue that that didn't succeed.

I would say it didn't fail, but like they probably sold a slightly above the valuation

in which that they raised that.

Yeah.

I don't know if the underlying business was healthy or not.

I didn't feel like jet.com became this main big consumer thing that was going on, but

who knows?

The world is really big.

Maybe there were a ton of loyal jet.com users who were 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 Wal-Mart in order to make Wal-Mart's online thing better.

But nonetheless, still a definite win.

Mark Laurie, friend of the pod, love the guy.

You know, owns a fucking NBA team.

So like it worked.

You know, in terms of the wealth creation.

Owns a place in my heart.

Yeah.

Small corner.

More importantly.

But like, you know, how many of these dream big, raise big, hype big, build and stealth

for multiple years and then like launch with the world changing device or world changing

product?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm revealing the tracker here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I had a nickel every time that happened, I mean, I would maybe have a dime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It doesn't, it doesn't happen a lot.

Like you're offering the game Minesweeper.

It looks like that.

You know.

Okay.

So, so here's a couple of 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, 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, 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, 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 like that.

So it wouldn't totally replace the phone.

But I'll say a couple of 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 like most likely it's going to be glasses, you know, that, 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, 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 your C4, C5, whatever,

like your vertebrae.

He's like, Oh shit.

Like what did I, you know, did I, what did I look down and 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, in the country right now is people's

vertebrae are like, you know, messed up because their neck is always craned down.

And I was like, Oh damn, man, I got to really start raising my phone higher when I'm looking.

I got a really good, like a selfie stick or something.

Is there a neck brace?

And he sells them.

Yeah.

Then the doctor sells them on his like drop shipping store.

So, um, okay.

So I think they're solving the right problem.

I also think that the, like people think that the common thing people would say, and this

is kind of the white knight thing that I hate, which is, I don't want to have more technology.

I don't, 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, we'll shoot you now.

You're, you're impression of a white knight.

You're basically like a white Californian guy.

I think you put a little more like lower ness in your voice.

And I think you've got this, the best white guy impression I've ever heard of.

Yeah.

Social media.

All I can say is they need a Rahul Ligma in their life.

So we'll talk about it in a second, but, but dude.

So, so I think that there's this idea of like, Oh, you know, social media is too crazy.

I want to detox.

I don't want more technology.

Oh my God.

I don't want to live in a world like that.

Just 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.

What one thing that's going to happen with it is the Zuckerberg has this law.

He said, I don't know if you remember this back in the day, but he coined this term

Zuckerberg's law.

Did 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 was like sounded bad,

but like it stuck with me, which was he goes 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, a Twitter comes out and that people are just, you know, 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 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 in the day that I wish I had captured my kids did something

cute or somebody, you know, my trainer said something awesome to me in a workout.

And I'm not, I don't have my hands on the keyboard at that moment to capture that video,

that note or that image.

And so I think that there is like big pent up demand to be able to share way more moments

or capture way more moments and share some portion of those than is happening today.

And that will happen with either glasses, you know, like maybe a drone camera or like

a, 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 a hundred million dollars and you go into stealth and you hire a hundred people

and you're basically like, we're going to change the world.

You're basically saying, I'm going to, you know, like 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?

You know, that is the, 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 are you saying?

Face tats and cornrows.

Yeah.

It's like, hey, like what's he saying to his wife?

I'm like, hey, you want to feel what it feels like to spend a hundred and thirty million

dollars?

Like, you know what I mean?

They're just like, like, you, you feel like spending money?

Like, you know, they just like are coming over the way just to blow this cash.

But pick one more of these things for the last few minutes, Suley or Warren Buffett.

They both are incredibly interesting.

Let's do the Suley one.

So we talk about this guy named Suley all the time.

You're closer to him than I am.

Him and his brother are like pretty like amazing entrepreneurs.

Suley is the perfect combination of a kind, nice person, meets a shark, meets a shithead.

You know, like he's like, and he's like really smart.

He's really fun to talk to, and he's incredibly, incredibly sharp and very opportunistic in

the best possible way.

Yeah.

I've learned more about business from him than anybody else in my life.

So like, you know, that's like the highest praise I can give somebody.

All right.

So he tells the story.

He goes, you know, when I sold my company, Tiny, 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 choir, the guy, 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 a random guy.

And he did.

He did 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.

You had a million dollars, right?

It was only a million dollars.

I said, congrats.

You got it.

Okay.

Now here's the deal.

You we've under invested in these games.

You should, you know, just 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 of 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 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

that just scratch my itch.

And he goes, he goes, then, you know, just like the world started working in his favor

on, on top of that, he goes, you know, like Epic and Apple got into a lawsuit and Apple

had to change their rev share deals.

So they said for, for anybody making less than a million in revenue, instead of take

a 3% cut, we'll take a 15% cut.

So immediately profit went up by 15% for this guy.

He goes, the business has generated more than 3 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.

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, 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 a portion of it, so he put down maybe 300, 400,000 and financed the rest as

an example.

And so-

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 zero

dollars or negative dollars.

But don't you do that now, in a way?

That's how I started this podcast.

My plan when I started this podcast was I was like, I think I'll probably lose 10 grand

a year all in on production, you know, paying my editor 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'll probably net, we'll lose 10 grand.

I'll have some sponsors, but net and lose 10 grand.

And 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 retirement.

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 thing.

Yeah.

I used to call it a Sam badical.

And I was like, I'm on a Sam badical.

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.

I like it.

Like your friends can't hang out with you on a Wednesday at, you know, one o'clock.

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 realized I am not built in men or, you know, all people,

but I can always speak about 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.

I don't think that's a man thing, by the way, 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 man 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.

So yeah, sure.

All humans, I'm sure are like that.

I just haven't had this conversation with a lot of people.

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's just, you just like take, you 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.

Yeah.

Like you got to contribute in some capacity, you got to have something that you're living

for.

Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

I wouldn't take a sabbatical.

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.

I might not even get anybody to use it or like it or maybe it'll turn out crappy, but

like I'm intrigued to do it.

And so that's the temptation for me.

My thing with 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 know what I mean?

Like in reality, you don't.

Well, it's only, you know, I guess perceptions, reality.

Who knows?

Yeah.

All right.

You got to run.

Easier than you could change reality.

So I think that's it.

Yeah.

I got to run.

But yeah, good episode.

All right.

That's a pod.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days on the road.

Let's travel.

Turn back guys.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

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