AI Santa and Four Other Simple Business Ideas (+ Vice Goes Bankrupt!)

this is such a good idea by the way this is a phenomenal idea this is a ten out of ten opportunity and dude he pitched doing why have i not invested this i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on what's travel we got a bang we got a doo we gotta we got a two man trio here and it's just me sam have no guest today sam what's up nothing i've liked having guests actually normally i hate it lately i've enjoyed it what's the difference so we should do more i like the people we've chad with it's been better yeah not like those other crusty guests in the past i have got a meaty topic it looks like i don't know if you have meaty ones but you have four good ones but they're smaller is that right alright i'm gonna tell you about a business that i think it's kinda interesting been ben put this on a radar yesterday he goes he goes dude your sister should open a play street a play street i was like what the hell a play street so i look it up have you heard of this thing play street museum but probably not you know not you don't have little kids but basically imagine like a good for you version of chuck cheese let's start with that as the as the analogy so like chuck cheese is you know it's like because having the tweet is like come eat wrap pizza i had my child casino so dude my parents just say the there were i i always thought the chuck of cheese near my house had burnt down but they just about say no it it burnt down we can't go anymore it it if i drove either there when i got a license and it wasn't burnt down i just thought it had burnt out that was their excuse you that it burnt down sixteen years older just slamming the drive the drive with the steering wheel just like goddamn it it's been with yeah like it's like it's like one of those facts your parents tell you in your five and you just believe it to be true like totally you know i think i took my i told you my my father one time said real men don't drink with straws but he was referring to like a jack and quote so like for years i was like oh we don't we're not a lot of drink straws it's like the chuck cheese it's it the chuck cheese like chip wall broke down you know it's not there anymore check your cheese on what that was the street chip oh too good alright so this thing play street is basically you go there it's a nice clean plate it's like a like a dream play room your kids so it's like they got a giant train set they have some learning games they got like you know the floor all it's like child safe and you basically pay fifty beautifully fifteen bucks beautifully and you get to play for an hour and a half or something like that for and so ben goes yeah bingo go to this place and i see that basically the one near me at least he goes i think they're two fifty grand a month like i go fifty grand a month that's kind of a lot and he goes yeah he goes they basically they have and i forgot the exact numbers but it's like seven sessions a day it's fifteen dollars each and you have twenty five kids i think in the in the thing at once and he goes they're basically seventy five percent full in these sessions you kinda do the math alright that gets you kinda like the forty k plus you can host your kid's birthday parties there in the nights and weekends and so some people do that it's like i think they're probably you know an extra eight to ten k of of of sort of event revenue per month and then if you look at the cost you know you got your rent it's probably like you five k and you have to you you know you have your staff you're teaching you you're sort of like your your supervisors or whatever that are like overseeing the the play base and like resetting it cleaning it in between sessions i think i'm pretty sure this thing is like netting a something like thirty k a month in profit maybe twenty five k month and profit and and they have tons of these locations yeah so look so it turns out their franchising or something like that i don't know if these numbers are sure by way this is like complete guess work on my side but i wouldn't be surprised my sister owns some preschool in san francisco and the numbers are somewhat similar now that's different that's you know they pay you know a lot more but for for for you know regular schooling but it's interesting to me that these place spaces can can do so well and it's like it's weather proof it's like you know you like i know with me like we go to target three times a week you might ask yourself sean what you what do you need from targets so don't you know you can order online and what i tell you is this is this is take care for me like i i john goes to target so much that in his home you have this like target like a a target checkout place that and a target like grocery cart that you said you had to like sign because it was like a collector's edition or like it was all sold out everywhere right did didn't go crazy for this bite on ebay and do a big market yeah i exactly these target mini grocery carts kids love them because they're they are used to the kids like to do anything they've seen their parents doing so the whole mini grocery checkout plus plus target cards is is is like in high demand so i go there often and i do it because you gotta kill time it's like how do i kill ninety minutes and know ideally and i would do something that's like enriching to them you know worst case scenario we just go to starbucks or target or whatever and this would be better i would gladly pay fifteen bucks for my kids to be able to go play in a place that's not a park which is like weather weather dependent so i think these are really cool ideas i think i think this play thing is a is a cool idea and i could see this you know this franchise is doing like you know decently well probably not the best franchise in the world but i think it could do decently well where are the locations they're like texas there's like none in california none in new york it's like bunch of like but what are they it's like a it's like a what it's just commercial space so like you don't need any food stuff so you just you know it's like a just a blank like retail space yeah i mean their branding is pretty pretty good it's like kinda like how escape rooms work escape rooms work because right they require no specific real estate they can operate in a very small footprint and they take like two staff to run at any at all day and say escape rooms actually are like you know fairly fairly good you know franchise businesses or they were for period of time now unlike a escape room which is kinda like you don't know if if escape rooms are fad or if they're gonna be like popular three years from now these you kinda know are gonna be popular because it's like you know every parents got this problem alright let me tell you about another another thing like this another problem you haven't really thought about this business called two sixty sample sale you're heard of this no google it it's like kind of a cool new york thing so what what they do is any e commerce or fashion brand has a ton of you know photo samples or product samples that they get from there their manufacturer they use them in their photos shoots to create the the you know pictures on the website or for advertisements or marketing or whatever and then those don't live in the warehouse like they live like where the photographer is or where their offices and you just end up piling up boxes and boxes and boxes of photo samples you know over time because let's say you you you know most fashion brands or apparel brands have you know thousands of skus for each skew you had a sample made before you had the production one made but you didn't just have one sample made you have each of the sizes made and because you needed it for the photos shoot to be able to show the range or be able to cast different types of of models and so what ends up happening is you get a ton of these samples over over the years that you can't really it's like not worth your time to get rid of and so this business popped up again like you know the markets are like you know water and water's gonna just float and everywhere there's empty cr and there's empty cr in this market here for getting rid of these samples so what they do is two sixty samples i says send us your shit brand and we will host a pop up where we're gonna sell you along with a bunch of other brands all that a great markdown so we have high quality brands at a markdown because these are samples so you're not like training your customer that like you know hey this is like t tj maxx discount or something like that it's a good story this is these are samples that you're gonna get for for less and they'll like they'll just give the brand a commission back they'll say you know every time we sell something of yours you get a small commission it's better than nothing it takes it out of your space how'd you how'd do you find this this totally out of your out of your do they're only base in la miami new york and the pictures are like smoking hot women right and then like it looks like a a picture of like a huge line out of a warehouse in soho so not women and weight out of those things i don't do it you know anyone doesn't do it yeah so yeah yeah none of this checks your box yeah your invoice so married and so in the house that this i did not go to this you're right but i'm in the e ecommerce world i got my own commerce brand plus i know and talk to a lot of other commerce people and i know about this problem so i heard about the solution and i think it's very clever i think it is a smart thing to do i also think these guys are not that well known and they're only doing it in certain certain area certain locations and and whatever i think this could be done at many times over i think i think like a aspiring hustle could do this by vertical so you could go get a bunch of health and wellness and fitness brands or beauty brands and be like hey beauty brands send us your products and we're gonna we'll have a a a stations where you can demo them and and sample them and then buy them so i think you could do this for other verticals i think you can just do this in other places like hey if these guys are do new york and la i think that they're like like locations like beverly hills in brooklyn or something do this in texas do this in do this in different different parts of the the country i think you could have you know it's like your own little farmers market it's your own flea market that you you get to to stock and run and but you don't have to do it as a full time job so you could do it with every quarter or twice a year or something like that and still have it be successful so i thought this is a cool have you do you know kings charcoal you you've you've seen it it's like the most popular charcoal like the blue do do you know how that was created i think it's a byproduct of something else right what what was it a exact product of wood ford ford so ford when when when ford was making cars they had like you know have all these furnaces making metal and they took like the leftover char and they're like what should we do this and so they pushed it together and compact it really tight and that's how charcoal came to be and that's like a byproduct business and i love byproduct stuff you know it's kind of like it's tangent it's kissing cousins with like the sharing economy i love that stuff i love byproduct stuff and this is one of those that's awesome this is actually quite cool their website is really challenging to use which is i think actually a good sign because i can't tell like apparently they do sell stuff online right but it's mostly but one thing i do hey whenever i go to new york dude seeing people wait in line to buy like supreme clothing like just renters told put the gun in my mouth man like i've never doing that i've not doing that i'm not gonna wait in line and spend my valuable time to purchase a thousand dollar like thing that should be cost the only thing works of that is bottle service at a club it's like the cost for paying you know seven thousand dollars for a table to and paying a thousand dollars per bottle that they could literally walk across the street buy for forty dollars it's it's literally the c tax it's like oh you're a chu come to this line please please please yeah hey come right you gonna right ahead you you you walked through the chu line i'm not a man of god but when jesus made like the list of seven deadly sins the example of deb and gil glut was people waiting in line for five hours to go to a supreme store i mean like whatever like i see that stuff i'd like this is the worst form of consumers and i cannot stand this i so i they have these pictures here it turns me off but man but yeah i i would maybe buy this online but i ain't stand in line i'm not standing in line with a bunch of these people to buy this stuff i can't stand that whenever i see that it makes me wanna like throw away everything and go live the here's an idea you're gonna like more host chair so got dm m from a guy named michael f and he shows me this thing called host share dot c it he goes here's the here's here's here's the situation you have a short term rental right yeah a property yeah shout it out so people can go state it at marathon ranch dot com marathon ranch marathon ranch is it dot com yeah or dot c i don't know yeah dot com marathon ranch sam comes by has dinner with you it gives you massage it's fantastic so you don't have a hundred percent occupancy right you have some nights that are unused is that correct it's a sixty percent occupancy rate is is a profitable month you got let's say forty percent that's unused nights what you're doing with those nights this is the sharing economy bro what you're doing with those nights michael f has an answer for you his answer is trade your unused nights with other hosts who have unused nights you stay for free there they stay for free in your place and i think this is a really smart idea i don't know how many hosts let's google is how many hosts on air airbnb b i don't know how many properties they have or how many host four million okay so you have a market of four million host that you could make a inter host like network basically where you say hey if you're a host you get to travel for free so you get i i now i don't know how they make things equal so like if your property is way more dope than somebody else's i don't know how you make that that trade they okay how do you normalize the values across properties we calculate how many shared nights you would be staying in in exchange for twenty one in exchange for the twenty one days of travel per year the formula is established so higher higher value property share last nights lower value property share more nights so for instance if your average night is five hundred dollars you'll share approximately fifteen nights of a year whereas if you're a hundred dollars you gotta share forty five nights in a year take to same minimum that's great so like what's your property per per night right now seven hundred dollars seven hundred dollars so you're gonna basically what they'll say is hey make your thing open for twelve days out of the year and then in exchange you get twenty one days free booking in this network would you take that deal that's yeah in fact i do so go to live live kindred dot com so it's kindred k i n d r e d and then live live kindred dot exist so i use this service so my dream situation is i wanna find like another couple that has like similar style or like once as i do that it lives in new york and they wanna be in austin and we could just swap and i've not found a good solution for that but there's this thing called lit live kindred kindred that i do that i have used where someone will stay at my home when i'm not there and then i get credits for the marketplace and then like i'm gonna go to tahoe new mexico like i have like eight credits because someone stayed at my house for eight nights and i know that so i'm gonna go and stay somewhere else for free and it's actually pretty cool i wish that it was just like a direct swap so i could do six months here and we could just swaps six months for six months but i've been using services like these i actually think that i don't think i'm not bold enough to say like this is the future but i think that like you know there are a lot of people like me who do split time dude finding a place for those split like when you split time it's really challenging and i'm always looking for a good solution yeah that's that's good i i didn't know that something like this exists so with this do you it's are and i think they raised money by the way from you give up your space is that right so you give up you put your space in the network but you still have to pay or you it's free i there's some type of service fee frankly i don't think it's a good business i don't understand how they make money and because what what i signed what i signed up for i was like i'm getting a lot of value i'm not spending a lot of value i don't know how you guys are doing this so like subsidy right now you're getting that in horribly value exchange yeah so like we're trying to use our credits quickly because i think i don't know if they're gonna stay business or not because i don't i don't understand how it works but it is awesome if it's awesome if it does work that's hilarious so yeah i like these types of businesses where where or that solved this problem is host share populate tell the guy i just created it yeah if you could pull it off it's pretty amazing it's a smart model i think it's hard to pull off because like i don't understand how host share makes money i they have to charge a flat so i think they have to basically say it's five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars a year to be in the network and you know you only pay if you use more than five nights or something like that make it a make it a fair trade and you know i think i i think basically then they they're trying to get a subscription right so they're trying to say can i get fifty thousand people to pay us a thousand dollars a year on this subscription there's a few things like that i forget what the big one is called but there's they there's things for like for luxury rentals where i'm almost certain that they just partnered with hotels where you pay like five grand a year do know what i'm talking about is it's called avant yeah i don't know the name of it but i what you're talking about like you get access to this second i from boutique hotels yeah and i've looked into them when i originally saw i didn't have enough money like i i wasn't in the spot that i could do it and so i've been looking for things like this i actually i really like these businesses there's one there's this company called the the nerd wallet of england i forget what it was called it's called the penn money market sw yeah or there's a guy named simon who started it and so basically he started like the nerd he started a blog that compared like mortgage rates and things like that and if he bought one or got a mortgage through him you got affiliate fee it's a i think it's called super money market is what it's called it's publicly traded in england anyway the guy sold all his shares after he took a public twenty years later and he now owns this thing called like simon's resorts and so it's this rich guy who went and bought like fifty resort or fifty like really nice how homes around the world and i actually don't know they they frame it up like this is his personal stuff and you could just use it when he's not there but it's actually pretty cool and so i love these types of things because i think they're just neat to like buy all this shit and share it with everyone i think it's really cool yeah i like that can i tell you about a little random experiment i'm gonna do so i wanna make for this christmas season a deep fake santa so basically you're gonna be able to come on the site and pay thirty five dollars and you and you type in your message you could say hey wish my daughter jessica merry christmas tell her great job with the soccer thing and be nice to her brother big sports hannah great legs and soccer and and so you'll be able to type in that message and then it'll basically create a video that's santa saying this to you so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna try this thing that rep has so rep has this new thing where you could basically buy developer cycles have you seen this no but so you can go so let's say you need something built you can basically just go and buy you can put up a bounty so you're like alright i want somebody to build me this deep fakes santa i it's gotta do a b and c and you put up a bounty you put up put up the dollars and then people will just build it for you and and you can you basically have an award so it's kinda like a like ninety nine nine code yeah exactly and and you can do it in their currency which is called cycles and so they kinda help you estimate like roughly how many how many cycles should this be for this to to to work out but i haven't used yet i really wanna try this about thing i think it's great because so you're gonna you're gonna pull an emerson you're gonna you're gonna be this smart guy who just does a money grab no i'm gonna bring i'm gonna pull justin mayors i'm gonna bring the joy of a christmas of of belief really of the belief in magic that's millions of kids around the world this christmas what are what are you doing for the children this year sam is that your you're gonna do the justin mayor's pitch like so we had a problem we wanted to bring joy to children but like and we thought what better way to do that than a fifty dollar world full of war and divisive ness children joy is all we have left it is what they call the last refuge and people say that magic is magic but the magic is getting people to believe the magic and how do you get people to believe using deep fake technology and that's what we yeah how do you get people to to believe in you lie we're gonna we're gonna create a fake cartoon about a fake person we're gonna charge real money and it's gonna be a fantastic result are you really gonna do this because i really wanna try this bounty thing i wanna play with this i think this could a call what's the url gonna be i think it's gonna be called santa's real you know dot org given it a dot org yeah let's make all of our businesses dot org just so we could like just so we can be the better than other people yeah for a long time i wanted to make my business dot net so be would think that i've been around for a long time but down your personal website has to be a dot net and then your business should be a dot org org yeah but dot org is way better i'm gonna do a dot org there's way burning that's stupid s x y z crypto bullshit i word dot org is that what they are or like dot a i dot i o if you have a data io o like i'm not in india i wanna dot org we are at for profit dot org it's fantastic is that what dot org means it's a i you have to be a nonprofit for to get a dot org but who makes that decision is there like a governing like present your yeah for your five zero one three or something like that i have no idea i've done this to been clear i've always been firmly in the dot com camp but i'm ready to i made my nut and i'm ready to go and get get my dot oregon on for the rest of my life that's like on stage andrew or or backstage we were like so what are you doing and he use the p word i know the sla us with the phil yeah it's like dude if he don't say that word around me don't say fl bill flex me bro and so now instead of phil it's dot works you you know what i'm a wilkinson that'll org hey go ahead and email me there today i wanna talk about vice vice dot com the reason i'm talking about them is because they are about to declare bankruptcy right queue the michael scott clip where he just walks out and declares bankruptcy let's think about that i love that clip now yeah i'm i agree most every joke i said on this podcast i'm stolen from that too so the reason i wanna talk about them is not because of vice but because of the story of the founder shane smith and if you're under the age of twenty six vice probably means nothing to you they've actually like very quickly lost relevancy but to give you some background of what vice is so vice originally was up like a punk rock magazines based out of montreal so it was three canadian guys one of those guys being gavin mc mckenna you know who gavin mc mckenna is no who's that have you have you heard a proud boys proud boys like the political thing yeah he started prod okay which a lot of people don't realize and so it was like these three like kinda like punk rocker guys and gavin mc mckenna is being one of them shane smith who i'm gonna talk about today was the other one and basically the way it started was they got like a grant from the government where they were able to launch this magazine and that's how it started it started as a skateboarding punk rock magazine and they would write like these amazing articles where it was like vice guide to drugs and they would like write all these stories about drugs they would use the word all the time they would like like wow it's kinda like you know how like some you probably don't know about this but like in the punk rack community they like sometimes they'll like talk about nazis to talk about like use racist language but they do it as like shock factor because it's like i wanna be in your face that type of thing that that's what advice is all about i don't remember i don't know if you remember like the old school covers of these magazines but it would be like a tab of lsd on like a hot chicks tongue do you remember it like i remember remember seeing the device magazine i remember reading something or actually they called it just z is there a difference between of z in a magazine because that's what that that's what i just just just the just the culture if someone's a z it's typically more it's like punk rock thing whereas if it's a magazine it could be like g okay gotcha so you've never seen these but it started out as like hardcore punk rock where they would write articles about doing drugs having sex like just rock and roll shit and that started getting picked up and so they started this company in ninety four but in ninety nine they moved to new york and that was like where things change and that's right where like the internet just got started what it looks like you're looking at something i'm at the magazine covers and i'm and you're saying rock and roll and i was just thinking about like this is what cool like basically like this is what influential people it's like kinda like our musicians are influential people and they did this stuff it's like the the the tongue with the lsd on it it's like someone just biting a tu of hair i don't know what why there's bunch of hair in someone's mouth and i was just thinking about pod and roll and how it would be just like someone entering cold plunge someone meditating so it's like yeah we're part of that pod and roll things yeah with the famous podcast forecasters you know what i mean they're all just son of cold hot cold man is crazy the temperature variance is an insane things have changed things have changed the cool has changed yeah the definition of cool has changed which is actually part of the thing i'm gonna to discuss but so the internet starts coming around in the late nineties they raise a little bit of money like two million dollars they moved down to they moved down to new york and that's where they like really get going so they create the website advice dot com originally was a magazine there was a free magazine that they would just hand out and they would make money off ads and it would be the three of them running articles and they would do something that i used to do all the time where they would have like fake authors so it it'd be like someone who wasn't real just fucking make up stories is really what it was which is you know it was an entertainment magazine so that's fine but they start growing and it takes off after a handful of years and so they kinda created this thing at the time now we just know as like branded content where it was now sometimes people call them tutorials things like that but basically their whole stick was we're gonna make awesome content and we're gonna get the eyeballs of millennials which back then millennials were like the gen z today you know it was like the elusive hard to reach audience and they said we're gonna reach these millennials and we're gonna make the best content and we're just gonna plaster your logo on there and that's gonna be good enough for you and this is like pre facebook so like performance advertising wasn't really much of a thing so it was like the way to advertise and eventually they blow up and the important part of the story isn't exactly that they blew up because they did but the story is like the antics that they went along and and and built this thing with and so so they raise money from rupert murdoch who's you know the founder of fox they raise money from all these amazing people via come eventually they raise money at a six of billion dollar valuation today they're nothing but they still make six hundred million dollars a year in revenue and so i wanna talk about some of the crazy stuff that the founder did as well as how their business model works and so have you ever heard of the the guy shane smith who is the ceo and kind of the main man never alright so he had a whole bunch of interesting things that he did so if you google shane smith you'll probably see like pictures of him like it's a it's a a guy who almost looks like a punk rock santa at claus where he's kinda of like a bigger guy and he like you'll see like he's got sleep tattoos and you'll see him shirtless all the time and smoke at a cigar he's like see any pictures like yeah he looks like he looks a little bit like the guy who's the number two guy billions i forgot what the guy's name is like not not axe but his his right hand man yeah there's a lot like that guy if that guy i had just like chest tattoos if he just had like a tattoo around his nipple this that'd be this guy dude so he's just like crazy and so vice originally the way that they became respected is they would do all this crazy stuff but it was him doing it shane the ceo and so he would go to liberia during when they're having a civil war and he would just bring a camera and just get dropped in liberia and figure it out in two thousand thirteen he traveled to north korea because he organized a basketball game between the harlem globe shutters and the national team of north korea and that was like the big shit and then eventually do you remember a hearing about dennis rodman going to north korea that was for advice documentary and they would make these like free documentaries and they would post them on it was originally their site and then they moved to youtube and they would get lots of views and they would like put like an intel logo on there and that's how they made money and so they and so he was known for walking around his office of like vice and i've been to the office it's like as magnificent as you would think it's like the coolest of the cool and he would walk around shirtless and he would just like say crazy stuff he was known for just being like this wild guy and so one time when he hired a ceo her name was nancy this was recently he said where the modern we're the modern day bonnie clyde and we're here to take all your money and he would just say stuff like that all the time there was another time when they were just getting started and i believe it was into it they came was into it or ibm one of those they came to the office in order to pitch or vice was gonna pitch into it and so what they did was there was a really shitty office at the time twenty four hours before the meeting he built like a glass conference room so it looks legit and so you could see your employees and then he went and hired a bunch of like actors and got a tons of friends to come and work in the office to make it look like they're important because he always like said something like we don't want them to think that we're or what he say we want them to think that were rich like they like he was like we're gonna act as it right and he did and they eventually got a twenty five million dollar deal from this company and it worked out and there was another time where there is this a two thousand three vice made it their documentary on themselves and he tells a story about when they started the company how he got arrested in bangkok bangkok and he said something like a few years later they're were like yeah remember that story used talked about being imprisoned at bangkok and he was like yeah yeah i remember that and he tell me more about that he goes well i made it all up we needed the story on how the we needed a story of how the company started and i had heard the story from someone else so i just took it over and we needed and i just had to take make it mine like i watched everything number three and decided that was my life dude he would do crazy stuff like that all the there was another time where i was reading this interview with him he there was this headline about how he spent three hundred thousand dollars at dinner in vegas and a reporter goes did you really spend three hundred thousand dollars for dinner he goes no it was three hundred and eighty thousand dollars plus tip and it was barely dinner it was mostly wine it's so he's just he the guy like wild he even tells crazier stories where he goes this was a quote from the financial times so we go i i'd be at the party and would just go get wasted take coke have sex with girls in the bathroom and then get and then afterwards mail my advertisers drugs because i knew if i sent them a bunch of drugs in the mail they would keep buying ads with us and he admits all the stuff he's it's crazy and this does get this eye i'm bankrupt i just don't get it well so did we go wrong was it when we mailed our customer's drugs or when i did drugs during the day when i was working with my shirt off having sex in the bathroom dude he tells a story about him and his cofounder having threes sums with like people who are gonna buy ads with them and he says that they were like mobs who accidentally cl shovel together while they bearing a body step out of if that analogy makes sense someone when someone was like once it feel like having a having sex with your c cofounder and you know you guys ever like touch touchy he goes yeah but it's just like too mafia guys and our shovel accidentally clan while we're preparing in the body wow this guy is a show man he's a total show man of course it didn't work out well there's a an all seriousness this didn't totally blew it it didn't it didn't work out well for the company but it worked out for him so google shane smith house yeah i see a fifty million dollar house ira i'm two steps ahead you already googled it so this there's this amazing article that came out in two thousand eight where it's all about shane smith and says chain smith's living large and it documents his new house that he purchased for thirty million dollars i think and it says beautiful mansion up in la somewhere while he recently sold it for fifty million dollars so like this guy has totally come out on top of this of this whole thing and i it just really fascinating that he basically came in he spent about fifteen twenty years doing this thing right before like tied the tide change and like these guys were the opposite of woke now vice is like the woke of the awoke but right before that change happened he got his money he got out and he bounced and he hired a ceo and his story is super super fascinating and so you've never heard of him i've never heard of him i briefly knew that vice started as of as a z or magazine what's your main takeaways because this is entertaining because this guy's like felix dennis just like rein coordinated so what's your takeaway you're a media guy you're you're a bit of a wild man what's your take on that the that i mean this this makes you look like a like a you know choir or something but what's your takeaways from this story i have a bunch of takeaways and so but first let me tell you how their business model works because that's part of my takeaways so a lot of people don't realize how they make money they're going bankrupt now but they still make six hundred million a year in revenue but it's just like wildly unprofitable so they the their company it's basically like i consider it like a mortgage backed security for media and so do you remember like the mortgage backed securities of two thousand eight where it was basically like banks would buy like tens of thousands of mortgages in one tran turns out like four thousand of the ten thousand were shit that's exactly what vice does and so they they got famous because they only had like twenty or thirty million monthly visits to their website vice dot com which isn't a ton that's not a ton for hundreds of millions in revenue what they did was they did they partnered with o m g fax dot com dot com and all these other clickbait websites and they would roll that up and so they would sit call them part of the vice network and so they would tell people you know like intel or whoever the big advertisers are look we we reach all of millennials and we have a hundred million two hundred million monthly unique to our network in reality it was on like shit sites like you know all those other things and that was like once that came out it was kind frowned upon and then the other way they made money was they had a agency called virtue like vice and virtue which is pretty clever but their whole company is basically a creative agency so they would make content for snapchat facebook and then eventually hbo and and they would get paid like a service fee basically for it and it was basically one big agency and that's how they made money which brings me to the takeaways takeaway one if you're gonna be a company that makes money from multiple different streams of revenue you gotta nail one first they didn't even nail one like stream of revenue they had like five other things that added up to a lot but not one of them worked wonderfully at least not enough to be profitable so that's one major takeaway the second major takeaways is they'd would always say they're gonna be the next disney think go we're gonna be a mini disney shane once said we're worth ten billion right now but conservatively i think we're gonna be worth forty or fifty billion in a couple of years that couple of years would have been like in two thousand twenty or something never worked out he goes we're gonna be just like disney except with like cocaine didn't work out why because no one likes them if you're gonna build the next disney you gotta be like people gotta love you you know people love mickey mouse they don't really love like shane smith you know and all that stuff you know they like them they don't they don't really love them so if you're gonna be a meaty company like that you have to have something that people love the next thing is news if you're gonna be in the news business that's really really hard because you have to stay relevant and i actually think that you should be something that typically people don't grow out of but they grow into meaning a wall street journal a new york time if you're gonna be like one of these publications economist financial times things like that you wanna grow into it meaning like as you get older you want to like aspire to be able to read it and like it and understand it and brag about it whereas advice it was like since i'm no longer twenty eight years old reading about this stuff it's not exactly cool and plus the people working there you kinda look silly i've always said about this about bars bars sports i'm like dude dave port is getting older there like some of these antics are kinda not gonna be cool anymore they're more so like pathetic you know what mean and that's kinda happened with vice yeah you basically you either stay with the s and you just start to look like a clown as you get older and older or you gotta sell get out and change your life you know change your lifestyle and it's pretty interesting because it it's very hard to let go because a if you weren't such a nut you wouldn't have got that got this level of success in the first place so it's kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy and then on the second second part of it you know it's very easy to get addicted to the character the the the fame the money that comes with with acting a certain way you're being rewarded rewarded rewarded and then you know now you're fifty seven and you're or you know or you you're you've vince mc man now or you're hugh he now or you're whoever right like it's hard to leave the character even though you might actually you maybe you actually should you know go out of it anyways but i'm glad that these guys know go out it it's it's for our entertainment thank you thank you for your service shane smith it is and the last two things if you're gonna build a media company avoid new york city like when you're a creative services business you need it's a it's a talent arbitrage and it's really hard to do that when you're in a really high cost of living city like new york and also you saw that they like became this woke company which i don't entirely believe like go go broke like that type of thing i do think that i think that like there's a niche you can make money in any niche in no matter if you're woke or not but they like changed that way when that wasn't originally what they did and i think they changed that way because they moved like williamsburg and and everything like that and they totally changed their their their stick but the last thing is actually a compliment so you texted me the other day right before you're about to go on to you were gonna speak at this conference and you said what did you say about to drop some show ship on these pitches that you said about to show these bitches show ship yeah and that is totally true and that is what he did and frankly even though he it seems as though he con a lot of people he kinda got the last laugh and he had show ship throughout the entire thing and had it worked out it would've have been a lot cooler but having show ship it totally works by the way there's like stories ask me like oh do you get nervous before public speaking it's like i don't know man phone's nervous probably wouldn't be thinking i'm about to drop some show ship on these bitches yeah it's a different add of attitude exact versus i hope i don't make dude he tell he like throughout his career you can like there's so many crazy stories about this guy it's all about show and shit he does them wildest this stuff where he like tells stories the the way he tells stories it captures your attention and some of his employees were like when i'm with shane i feel like i'm going to war and i'll go to any war with him right or there's like johnny knoxville did a interview and he was talking about shane and he goes he's the greatest leader you could ever have also the greatest stricken buddy but and and like does this a little brian yeah he like has all of these like amazing one liners even if they are full of shit but whatever i hear him i'm talk i'm like oh my god i believe everything you said so for example have you ever heard me say the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector is to not bullshit i've used that line a couple times i stole it from him so he would like he has all these like amazing one liners and that show it's absolutely captivating there's like a story about him with rupert murdoch and rupert murdoch and shane our walking and rupert murdoch is like a you know if you see the movie or tv so succession he's like that guy he's like a mean old man and shane sits down with them and goes you don't have millennials but i do i have everything you don't have and like he's talking to this billionaire testosterone this oh is real the value of my youth want one of the things i don't have alright but he just like totally like swings above his weight and i think it's really fascinating to learn from this guy so if you're listening to those google shane smith it's there's like crazy stories about this guy good segment by you good good job by you good job i like that one i actually have a a spin off of that you mentioned a company in there that i was like that sounds familiar i kinda of remember this name so you said o g facts do you know who started o g facts i do i forget his name but he's an odd right it's got emerson sparks and i met emerson parts maybe ten years ago and so and when he was building o g facts and building a network called dose media he's like a genius right he's he is i met him and i was like wow this guy is super smart i actually think that he is kind of like if he had just applied himself to some other areas he would have like totally done done some of like you know absolutely amazing things everybody would know his name versus just gonna me and half of you knowing his name so i'm gonna tell you a couple things about emerson sports so the guy when he was twelve years old built a website called mug net and i don't know if you're a a harry potter guy but i'm i'm a harry potter guy and i was on mo net all all the time and i used to love this because it was the number one harry potter fan site in the world tons and tons of traffic i mean at the time harry potter was like you know justin bieber it was harry potter was was super super famous and in between the books people wanted a place to discuss to post theories to post fan fiction to debates you know what should have happened blah blah blah and a mo that when he's twelve he builds the super popular site getting millions and millions of visitors when he's eighteen he publishes a best bestselling book his best selling book is called i think it's called harry potter should have died controversial views from the number one fan site and basically it's like harry survived but should he have you know i run the world's biggest fan site for harry potter and here's some of the controversial viewpoints that people have about harry potter you can already see this guy's got the he's got the certain that oh you that comes with the sandwich you know he's got the sauce and he's got the show ship and so he i i bet him maybe he was don't know how old it was maybe twenty two or something like this at this point and where did you meet him i don't even remember man i i remember being on a call with up a video call and it was him and i think it's girlfriend at the time and they were creating something called dose media and i go i so what is it you he goes well we were gonna make like really viral content so they had o g facts that was one of their companies they had like four or five websites like that one that was like science fax ones that was funny things one that was whatever controversial or pop culture stuff like references to tv shows and things that were hot right now and they had these websites and i go okay so how do you like at the time in my mind i was like going viral is getting you know lightning strikes you you know you it's just not something you try to do it's just something that happens or it doesn't happen and it usually doesn't happen he's like no no and he had built a four part system and this is the first guy he's like yeah we're a different type type of technology company we have eighteen engineers and we have four writers and we reach millions of millions of people a month and i was like no no it was actually good i was like so what it what are the engineers do he's like well basically all the viral content on in the world starts either in one of three places reddit image or four chan and he's like basically i built a detector that would find stuff that's going that's getting hot on those on those three platforms first before it hits instagram before it hits facebook before it hits twitter it's gonna get popular there first and he goes so we built a detector then we built a like a then the writer basically would would build like like write a summary and then we'd built a ab tester that would basically create headlines headlines and and and like different like frames of that same story and it would test them really quickly that we had a tester that would spray that out we would pay to get that in front of like you know five thousand ten thousand people we would find what what's the winning angle and then we would have the post and then distribution right and then we would actually distribute that to our audience so we could engineer higher degree of viral morality in every piece of content why because we're finding the best stuff we're packaging it quickly with our writer then we're remix it with our automated av tester that's gonna juice up the headlines and then the images then we're spraying it out getting data feedback telling us which of these fifteen variations is the winner and then we post the winner and i was like to do this is amazing and over the few years i saw him build this up and he his traffic kept going up and up now the problem was his traffic wasn't that valuable was kinda of fly by traffic it was kinda like the lowest common denominator of the internet and from facebook i think it was very dependent on social networks and then facebook changed and for a while facebook was like rewarding the hell out of anybody that could post viral content and then it got two clickbait bait on facebook and then facebook just manually went and unplugged the like viral engines for for for these companies and so like ten companies died like you know in the in that transition i don't think his totally died but i think it it definitely slowed down and i think he also grew up and was sort of like what else do i wanna do in my life so now i just went to by the way really quick before that before you go on to him did i have i told you about my partner at hampton joe he had a company called little things which was the same thing as that it was a content like clickbait website he started at new york and then like he had all these he had multiple floors in an office building and it was killing it they at a hundred million in revenue he had a deal sell they went through due diligence the deal was gonna close in two weeks that change that you just referred to it happened to little things at the time little things was the most trafficked website from facebook in the world so it was like a little things and then it was like puff po and then like buzzfeed buzzfeed yeah the deal was about to close i think for a hundred and something million he was gonna walk away with fifty million after taxes two weeks before the money was supposed to go through that change happened the deal he lost the deal and weeks or months like only a couple months later they had a shut down the company and was resolved because they built everything on top of facebook that's a mike tyson gut punch right like a and birds fly fish swim and deals fall through that is the the the the the the sad part about deals that that that is too common yes and that's very common that's what happened this guy emmett it's smart i'm sparks so what happened to about sparks emerson spa smarts alright yes but here's his bio now he's his his thing says like ai history complex systems a bitcoin and then he goes was goal i'm wanna die number one on the leader word of people who change the world and so his what he's doing now is something called nonlinear linear and nonlinear linear it looks like is basically a is basically a a a company that is funding people working on ai to make it make sure that it's safe and so so they they fund basically nonlinear entrepreneurs people who are trying to work on these like exponential technologies and so yeah they we x x risk x risk nonprofit i don't even know what extra nonprofit means by connecting founders with ideas funding in mentorship and so that's what he's working on now but this guy always gonna be do good interesting things this guy can't this guy can't be uni interesting dude when i read about him i i was like why are you doing this dude like you're doing this dose media thing like you seem like a genius you're just absolutely wasting it this is a what do you say it's a high high effort low or what do you say like the had a good one for this it's a ten out of ten ten out of ten entrepreneur we're going at a four out of ten opportunity and that's how i felt when i met i remember literally like this is now ten plus years later i've not spoke to this guy you mentioned o g facts and in my mind i'm like that guy smart follow with that guy right because he left such an impression on me where i was like this guy is really really clever really smart really also like wholesome like even at the time he was like even though he was working on something that's like typically i would say almost everybody i know that's in this kinda like viral media actually just like there's kind of shit heads and and i mean that like in an enduring way like you know some people should so it's alright you're just like yeah i'm trying i'm i found this arbitrage of i'm making it happen and so he was not that he was really soft a really a really nice guy ben says risk is the risk that something can end the world it's to existential risk okay yeah good so he's he's gonna save the planet which is good dude in his website is a is a dot org yeah noble the dot org type guy i had when i was in austin friend was hanging out with justin mayer who's been on the pod before i think i can quote this because i think it's a good quote but he said he goes justin said the best thing he goes it doesn't matter how you make your first nut just gotta make your first nut but after you do that then you wanna work on a noble mission and he's like dude you he's like i like that he's like you know do whatever you gotta do to make to make your first nut which is you know get your the first few million dollars where you're financially free and your in your you don't have to have a job you can work on whatever the hell you want but then after that don't go chase the second nut go go after something that's a noble mission go after something that's awesome and you know very few people actually do that in i don't even think justin is doing that at the moment but but i love the quote is he doing like an fsa spending store that's like the most like opportunistic thing i can hear i think of the way that he pitched it it was pretty awesome he said something like obesity in america is like an epidemic and sixty percent of people are overweight we wanna make you eat healthier by making it easier to acquire like you know this types of food and this type of health care and we're doing it via and then he like that's where the pitch comes in it's always think still look at his site i think it's called true medicine t med so t med says food is medicine an excise medicine sleep medicine we don't mean this in a theoretical sense food exercise and sleep are all scientifically proven to prevent or alleviate physical and mental illness in short these are all medicine it's a t meta is a payment integration that enables qualified customers to use pre tax hsa and fsa funds to purchase health voting products and services from the favorite merchants soon it'll be fifth available in the checkout flow for all merchants do or for merchants who sell healthy food supplements extra equipment and other health and wellness products this is such a good idea by the way this is a phenomenal idea this is a ten out of ten opportunity and dude he pitched why have i not invested in this let me i didn't invest because i was just like saying no to everything and i deeply regret it i deeply regret it because by the way this is the best way to pitch a business which is like you like paint this like dreary picture like the world is obese you know did you know that like if you add up all the terrorist attacks all the guns all the cards so it's it would only be one tenth of the people who die you know from being obese like you know that type of fact and you say like if we continue this this is what the outcome is gonna be this and that and and so we need to solve this the way that we are happened to happen to be try to solve this is by doing x y and z and i'm like alright that's a great pitch yeah this is wow i'm am so jealous that i'm not invested in this i'm i'm i'm messaging him right now alright yeah that's it that's bob we're out here yeah i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel and never look back