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

what they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property same thing as the spirit store they take a vacant property they say hey we'll cut you a check for ten fifteen 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 forty 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 alright you wanna go with rahul or if you wanna go the rahul alright control of the year we haven't even done on my our mill awards for the end of the year thing that we always do i'm calling and out 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 he actually wired one he just literally showed up the office like yeah there there there hasn't been like a proper river rib rib ribbon cutting moment like it's not like water you just like went into the office and they're like you own it now you seem to be here mine like like play on rules like wow that's all i took to have twitter have you ever heard of a like a coup like a coup tie like we're with governments you know i was i i read a lot yeah they're pretty cool yeah they that i read a lot of history history jokes or history 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 to me that he's gonna convince these soldiers to attack you know what i mean it's like an interesting con concept you're like so it's all just made up i guess like these rules that were we we live by this is just this is fiction dude that's kinda like what i felt like he he just walked you know was like well i i own this now thank you did have you seen you know derek lewis the better have you seen that compilation of his thing where he says just get up no so they're like derek you're big like knockout artist but like you know the the knock on years been like what if you get the wrestling thing you know how's your ji or your training just who ain't real man and they're like what and he's like man you don't need just sue just get up and they're like what he's like why i wanna stay on the ground the another man between my legs now i'm i'm not into that like i'm not gonna you just gonna get up they're like but you you need you to get he's like now i'm gonna get up and so then there's is said hey there's a clip of him saying that and then there's a like a six minute calculation of literally somebody takes him down he doesn't do just he just stands back up so so powerful that's how i feel that's what you elon musk it he's like nah just just walk in yeah he'd take it what do what do you mean he's like well i'm just gonna walk in with a sink and take it so anyway he does this thing where he just he says this is mine and there's all these reporters outside of twitter's office and something 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 the what what happens is the first big story that happens is there's a picture of these two guys and kinda like you know kinda like nerdy sort of engineering looking guys and they're holding giant cardboard boxes and it says these two data scientists the data engineers data scientists were fired today from twitter here they're seeing walking out with their possessions in their boxes and and i saw an immediately something looked a little off his i was like guys looks so goofy i was like man that's pretty believable you there's it's much a goofy looking people are working tech but okay oh i yeah he looked wow they man they really found a perfect character he looks looks pretty goofy and then i read the name he says but he but he but he had a box in his hand so he each had a brown box like what which is just foreign because like if you work on a tech company like you you don't even probably own anything you own enough just to putting a 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 you don't i mean they played it perfectly so then it says ra l and something johnson with my johnson daniel johnson were fired today blah blah and then and i saw that and i was like oh my god this guy executed a l like for those who don't know l is a is a little joke that people play on the internet where it's like l l you say something blah blah l and it's some sorry l l what's like i'm not familiar yeah l nuts alright so that's the joke and they did this too basically i think c see was the first one who like reported it and then it just kept getting the same photo kept getting spread ever because everybody wanted this story about and the she was this cnbc reporter and i i the original tweet said something like we're at 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 l says now he has no idea how he's gonna be able to afford his tesla payments and and then he's sitting there holding a michelle obama book and so it's like him with his bog is holding this michelle obama book i don't know why and he just said it and she tweeted out like you know this is just they say the first of many that's going to happen it was just like a crazy crazy scene so people are people are are or 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 so he goes he goes y bro and person says sup he goes are you doing anything in the next hour wanna help me pull off a stunt i'm at the gym and i need a box lol i'm a walk out for the twitter office with a box in my hand there's hell a tv cruise outside and then this is literally how we pulled this he just goes he gets to empty box in a michelle obama book there's nothing else in the buy and he watched out in the tv cruise go for it and so the so that was i thought amazing and then he so that was like mean what kind of genius is this person then he goes there's hell tv let's go get them 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 here he goes hey 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 his near twitter's headquarters i saw these cameras so i just went amazing that is now so funny the better that who is this guy basically he's like a founder of like a tech startup basically he's just do this for oh my god yeah i'm i i'm ready to invest and his thing says like stealth startup so i'm like i'm ready to invest in whatever he's he's doing i value bella tv there's hell tv cameras name name your price l give me so so he goes okay so that was did you see the interview with the other guy daniel johnson no he also had a little gem so his was on videos that they're like you know how do you feel about this today like i don't know i just gotta like i gotta go home i gotta talk to my husband and wife and regroup what do you want i don't know i just i just really wanna go home i just don't really wanna go home talk to my husband and wife and just the most francisco thing ever i wanted did hit anyone comment on that the news didn't even like like they just played the clip and then i saw that i was like wow that is the funniest thing i've ever perfect timing and these guys are like you know getting geniuses basically so yeah this is pretty gold amazingly well played yeah i do you wanna talk about the elon war room like what he's actually doing in there like do you wanna talk about that or not really have you fall no really i mean like i 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 gonna screw it all up and because i make money from twitter so like i don't want it to go away but i course don't chill broke with yeah yeah like i got consulting calls to take so i don't really care though like what when he talks about this shit i'm like it's doesn't impact me that much i i don't i don't care what you're gonna do well see i just wanna i don't care it's not gonna impact me but i i do find it interesting how he's going about this so basically the report is he goes in and and the first report i thought again was another troll but i guess this is real do you see this he's 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 get see the the pacing goes 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 a shred the papers actually work at a review on the computer just be prepared to review and so people are like all these engineers like i printed out like you know three hundred pages of codes i guess i'll just thread this i don't know what's going on here dude and what's crazy is like if you go to business insider dot com the headline is like you know think it says like the toil of working at twitter and it's like painting it like these people here's their what yeah this like this is what it's like the toil at elon musk's twitter the expectation is literally to work twenty four seven and it really say it that's that's what you got great clown behavior i can believe they're doing that it it i can believe it and 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 it you know like this isn't like it's not your right to work at twitter you dumbass but i i i i thought it was funny because like come on man like you're you're coding this it yeah you're gonna have to work fifty hours maybe for a little while but also i think a lot of employees at twitter probably like this is awesome we've been sitting on our ass let's 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 so he basically brought in a bunch of people he trust so he brought in people from his other companies like he brought in his chief legal person that guy now like the general counsel basically he brought in he created a war him and here's who's reported to be in the war room it's elon his his his chief counsel then it's jason cal oh and then i think jason's jason's amazing but like what the hell does he know yeah i got sri rom from a sixteen z so just venture capitalists who's we former pm used to work at twitter as also you know how to run at twitter and house and snapchat yeah and then and then also i guess like some other people from some engineers are people from like boring company or neuro link or whatever like some people he trusts like his cousin is there are like and they basically just set up shop and they're were like alright what we're gonna do with this thing and they're like chase change a locked out page it forces you to sign up no you should be able to read tweets before you sign in you know you sign up and then which is like an experiment been tried many has before and there's like you know we need to have this verification program you have you know five days to deliver this i guess and so they're there's just like sort of trying to figure this out of you know who stays who goes what are we building how are we gonna 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 gotta sell so don't gonna screw up online my 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 vacation 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 three hundred 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 there's too many bots if i tweet about crypto that will tell me to buy crypto like that's not her problem over she just doesn't see value in it and like you know you get says i don't get it yeah i don't get it i i don't know why i would need this like you know i don't 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 her kids she needs to have instagram if she wants to keep up with what's going on with like fo would 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 it's only for like people like us and like it doesn't address the need for a whole bunch other people on the planet and if they wanted it to be more valuable then they would need to do that our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous hey of our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better happy halloween dude yeah you too i since i'm not twelve i don't dress up i i don't understand like shots fired at producer ben well i just like don't understand why people like obsessed over halloween to me just seems like when your wife was buying a wedding dress for where you like this is bullshit you're gonna spend all this money for something that you're literally gonna use for three hours in your entire life and that's how i feel like halloween wow just fired wives shots halloween jump find to well i mean i like you know what i mean i just find it like to be the most impractical thing there is it just it's it's a lot of work for like a few hours bro you probably bought like a 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 color producer what are you you look more like a figure skater or some like like a figure skater in between rounds like i don't always wanna put the hood on but it's a na wall it's got like a little horn on top little horn and my wife has a matching costume normal just fake the whale that has a yeah the if you're if you're a parent then i get it but like for the people who work really hard at the stuff to me i'm just like that just seems like such a waste of time my wife loves it she's just person yeah my wife too she like we bought a bunch of costumes whatever i'm a aladdin which is pretty you know stereotypical typical i felt you know lean in bro is it racism if it's your wife yeah lean in i say lean into it i got the sheryl sand sound san book i'm gonna lean it into sheet matt 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 feel like this is like like not i say that because this is a rabbit hole that's kind of obvious and i feel like you know i i went into this rabbit hole and i saw some footprints on the way out i was i think that's sam size eleven right there i don't know what's going on but let me tell you some things i found okay so first and foremost halloween okay what what the heck is this so this was a it's kinda 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 kinda s and like you know this is like you know this is this giant giant occasion where people are spending ten billion dollars a year now on halloween is what gets spent which is kinda crazy that's more than almost any other holiday except for christmas which is off the charts at almost a trillion dollars get 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 like you know the celtic calendar the celtic calendar i don't even know what it is but like basically it's like like calendar yeah the boston celtic as you know so new they called y it just has a soft know so so there was like alright there's like this you know festival where they would like they're were like oh the demons are coming and so they would like dress up as demons themselves and like y dancing or whatever and that was like to ward off the demons like hey we're already here and like that was the logic which is pretty pretty weak logic if you asked me and so you know then something had the pope says something he's like oh this is you know november first is like the the the day of the saints or whatever and say baby we in catholic school we celebrated every year and so then the thirty first became all hall eve and so okay how did they go from that to kids dressing up as aladdin and going trick or treating what what was what was the gap but basically it was like for a while it was this kind of like look like nobody really spent money on this it was sort of like this more like adult dark holiday where you would buy like certain things you'd have people for dinner maybe things like that and then over time it got commercialized and what i was trying to figure out where did he get commercialized how did we go from this like obscure pagan holiday to this mainstream ten billion dollars 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 you to celebrate they like 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 in like kinda spring maybe a little bit of summer and then there was his time until the the winter holidays and so they were like okay sales i was dip let's figure out what we could do to make sales not dipped during that time so they kinda needed to like invented occasion for you to spend on and so which is started which is pretty common right like if you think about like you know like bit there's like the 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 can like prime days is gonna be a holiday of like just random deals you know what mean like coordinated attack but it is like a bunch of people who all have an incentive so they had an incentive to do choose to sell more stuff and put something in the store that's gonna drive people to to come by and so i just wanna break down a couple of the numbers in a couple of the businesses so like i said about ten billion in spending three billion of that is costumes seven hundred million of that is pet costumes which is kinda crazy there's basically like you know three million on a three 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 during halloween which is kind of an insane level of of adoption that's going on so walmart is the biggest winner they they not only make a bunch of money they spend a bunch of money the advertising during this period they'll spend like tens of millions of dollars in a week of halloween just like blasting ads and so do all the companies that are stocked inside their skittles cheetos lunch everybody's got like a halloween themed thing and so couple of the interesting finds i had when i was doing this so the first is a lot of people know about spirit the spirit store right and people have heard about this but like the backstory of spirits kinda cool have you ever heard the backstory of how it how it got started it's owned by a popular company what's who's it owned by oh your favorite dude your your first thursday night date night spencer spencer that's what i thought yeah like spencer is like you know like a hot topic alternative spencer also owns spirit halloween yeah so they so the way this started was it's like in california in the eighties 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 it 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 fourth of a store into a halloween store just for the month of october and so is his women's boutique so there's like women's clothes in like a quarter of the store and then three fourth 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 alright 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 are 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 two thousand eight real estate crash this became like a pretty enticing option for landlords to try to recoup some money and so they do these two month leases and it's a pop up halloween store same plates every time no different places they even have a kick out clause so they say hey look you could take look how can i get more real estate look if you find a if you do find a good tenant who you want to do a long term lease you could just kick us out like like anytime you could just kick us out basically and so they found this like no brainer proposition to landlords so they do these pop ups they now have fourteen hundred stores so like faster you rewind back to you know like twenty ten they only had you know seven hundred stores and the whole halloween spend is on the same trend so like i said ten billion this year well rewind to twenty ten that's what i graduated from college it was five billion rewind to two thousand five it was only like three billion and so that's like kind of a big like just during our you know lifetime or adult lifetime to think is like you know more than doubled in in size and so i just imagine that by the way all that work for a week like i i know a guy who owns a christmas tree light show business that i can't reveal how big it is but whenever number you're thinking of how much revenue does triple times it by tons no times it by twenty we're talking like nine figures and krishna street light show means what you paid twenty dollars and you and your family drive through a park and you look at light shows and basically he's been a staff of don't even know how many step is i think over a hundred they work all year round for four weeks of work can you imagine what your company is like like what happens if there's like a terrorist attack or you know like whatever or or or or a covid i mean something happens we're it's just like all fifty weeks worth of work is ruined for those two weeks do you what i mean yeah that is the risk that is the risk with these like right now like it's halloween right today there the whole company is working on next year's halloween real estate how they're gonna do the logistics to like because they just get a empty shell they gotta pop up the whole store get all the inventory there do all the decorations there and then run the staff the store just for this like you know real blitz and ninety percent of the traffic comes in into two weeks before halloween because their main proposition is just like for people who were you know who procrastinate 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 a year in revenue the the spirit store so that's just kinda crazy for billion dollars and basically like probably a three week time period for for the majority of that of that spend eight percent of all candy sales of the year happened like on halloween 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 rub no what is rub rub is is probably the biggest i think costume maker i don't if they're still the biggest that they were at a point in time so here's the kind of interesting story for rub started in new york and they're like oh we're doing decorations of 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 ruby kinda fell behind because there were these other companies college ville and ben cooper that like got all the licenses so they were winning they were crushing it and poor rub was just sort of like putter 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 was like a bunch of tylenol got laced with cyanide and people and they never caught they never caught the never caught the guy and it's scared a bunch of people like oh shit tylenol like this like safe thing how many people died like three or four not sure i think it was more than that but it was a big story 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 fa during this sort of like this crash when people started to the halloween sales crash because people did not wanna go eat candy from strangers during the the sort of like cyanide you know rush i guess and so rub ends up buying up ben cooper and college and basically consolidate all the licenses under one roof during that time and so now they have disney marvel whoever they are like and they their job is basically there's like a you would take this like i don't know a bunch of theater geek that run this company but in actuality like the big thing they have to do right is is like you know operations for the supply chain like cash management no no forecasting they gotta predict who is gonna be popular next year for halloween so they're like okay donald trump is trump trump masks is gonna be here or here or here and and then they work with all the studios the studios give them like a little like sketchy 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 locking key but like yeah we make a lot of we make the the movie industry makes hundreds of millions off of halloween costume royalties they get like eight to ten percent royalties and so they're like alright fine you can get access to these designs in order to start prepping for dude i want your costumes i wonder what their research methodology is you know we've talked about that company w gs it always is interests me it's a hundred million dollar year business that does like thirty million in profit yeah and all they do is they help i mean they all they do is simple but it is like a pretty amazing thing but they like help they had helped predict which color is gonna be popular so starbucks make sure that their labels on shit is like the right colored pink or like apparently they predicted that pineapples were gonna 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 gonna be the lemon which i don't i don't know is that really what they said you just making that one i think it i yes i think it was the lemon like next year lemons are gonna be like a new things set of pineapple which i don't even know how you draw lemon on like at iphone case i mean it just looks like in the sun but anyway they said that like lemons are gonna be such i wonder if problem your brain just went to well like have you you know like pineapples on iphone cases it's like how do you make like a round like yellow thing there's like no density to it like i don't know we can workshop that afterwards so so so so i think you know these guys probably you know you like that meme like the hello hello fellow kids or whatever children like the guy she shows up with the high school he's like forty years old you have to skateboard out of his back and he's like yeah yellow kids like what is the good you know what's the good buzz this year and like trying to figure out like what's gonna be yeah i don't i don't know i don't know the research method but i am i am intrigued but basically they gotta be fortune chant tellers they gotta figure out your movies politics all that stuff is it pokemon is it wonder woman is it trump is it what what is it gonna be the costumes and so so that's one interesting one couple other you know pretty interesting pretty interesting things i'll give you some like i'll give you some like smaller niche like side hustle things so so first haunted houses so haunted houses apparently do three hundred million dollars a year just kind of what's crazy i've got a big number for something that's like useful you know like for did i hate haunted houses six a year what do you go i've been i'm not like i'm not a big like thrill seeker like roller coaster haunted house kinda i'm i'm not like afraid money to i'm i don't pay money to be scared that's that's my rule of movies and haunted houses i i 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 like nothing's you know pretty sure i'm pretty sure i should be getting paid if i'm getting scared or slapped that's my rule and i'm i could do it so so there's like you know haunted house is kinda interesting there's a guy who somebody tweeted the at they're like yeah this local one near our place and i did the math so this basically was like small like what they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property same thing as the spirit store they take a vacant property they say hey we'll cut you a check for ten fifteen 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 forty 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 it's pretty crazy how like you know as a little side hustle that you could do a haunted house let me give you some other ones that i think are are kinda interesting there's a guy who created this website called zombie pumpkins you ever seeing this no so it's like i think it's zombie pumpkins dot com so two million people 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 do pumpkin carving it's gonna be a pretty generic face i'm gonna make like super accurately drawn things so that you can have like a really dope looking pumpkin like you can have like it's a really cool site i really like you know michael jackson and looking pumpkin it'll look like it if you just follow my stencil and so you know two million people go to this thing it gets like a million of those hits you know like the last week of october or something and you know he donate a bunch of the money that that comes from this to 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 stein so how would you like a pumpkin that instead of carving a pumpkin that 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 i like some farmer somewhere and he spent four years trying to solve this problem he's like what if i could just grow a pumpkin that was already a decoration you don't have to do any work so he tried tried like this spell pumpkin stein like frankenstein yeah he tries to grow it it doesn't work it doesn't work it 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 says like you know a a few hundred sales and he does a few thousand sales retailers start coming to him he ops to with sam's club because he's like you know what like he was selling these for a hundred dollars pumpkin he's like you know what sam's club we could sell for thirty dollars and make money doing that with at their volume and these are amazing these are amazing and so he goes and he's like alright he's like this could be kind of a thing he said he got ninety thousand orders last year so like that's like four or five million dollars in sales of these pumpkins guys he started going to other farms and b and i'm being like hey i'll pay you eleven dollars ahead follow this blueprint i need more production i cannot possibly keep up with a production at my rate and so he goes and he gives other farms like eleven dollars per pumpkin that they can produce that can be sold this way and then like they had like a malfunction and like the face still looked right but the back got all screwed up and like looks like it like exploded and then that was way more popular people like oh that's cool like exploded in the back and he's like oh shit now i gotta 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 do you have you heard about the twelve 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 wanna get the twelve foot thing it's always sold out and i was like can't that i mean like let's just go to home depot and get it like well if you've seen home depot it's just like full of shit like this is the way they're just like out on 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 a thousand dollars plus like they retail for like three hundred or something like that and ebay they're selling for a thousand dollars it became such a hit home depot figured out this giant lawn skeleton was like the big hit then lowe's came out this year and lowe's was like the twelve foot mummy and i was like wow you know who's gonna come out with the twelve foot one inch you know you know ghost next year it's like this crazy little trend but there's all these things so all these things that really weren't categories before are becoming categories like the inflatable lawn you know decorations are just like surging and 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 the the grinch of halloween as as as you're known and i realized halloween known halloween is the anti holiday it's not the cookie cutter warm and fuzzy it's dark it's kinda more adult it's more creative it's of 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 hey look at everything right so it's the hey look at me thing and also it's an excuse to act like a kid and i'm bullish on anything that gives people an excuse to act like a kid i think that's why burning man is popular i think that's why halloween is popular and you know even things like the ice cream museum and stuff like that i think is is you really popular for that reason dude it feels like you just prepared a debate on why halloween 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 you just put together this big speech on why halloween is cool and i'm into it i think it's awesome this twelve foot skeleton thing is awesome this pumpkin is awesome i'm all about it this is awesome so let me tell you more ideas or or little little little niche so i'll tell you couple niches in 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 at our neighborhood and we just moved into this place and then our neighbor was like oh yeah you want lights gotta hit the lights guy he's booked but like if he he can try to squeeze you and you'll have lights for this season and really dude you're just getting sucked in all the suburban traps by the way for the listener i went to sean's house the other day for dinner and i walked in and i'm like oh that's a really cool kids shopping cart like he's got like play like checkout aisle and i was like oh wow that carts has target on it and he goes yeah or maybe was your wife but it's one of you guys were like yeah this has been one of the most in demand toys we had like find this car on ebay for however 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 start yeah the mom's what 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 is awesome i'm i i like this side of you sure you know i have a fanny pack know i was equipped for this life so this guy comes comes over and he's like i'm like how much for the lights and he's like i'll do it in i'll do it this day this morning you get like a one hour window and it's like six hundred dollars to put up lights you know like two hundred bucks for the lights themselves they last you for ten years and then it'll be like sixty bucks to take them down in january and i was like alright i guess like i'm not gonna fucking climb up there so yeah go ahead like you know either we're not gonna have lights or like we're gonna 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 well while i'm here do you want christmas lights well these were cursor sites actually it's like they they start christmas stuff now and then i feel you okay i thought it's halloween lights whichever whatever that is i even know but the he should start being like you want halloween and i'll do a bulb change in like november he should be upsell he was too honest of a guy in general because like he was like bucks to take them down i was like bro once you put the lights up you could charge me six thousand dollars to take them down what am i gonna think like you know like where's is the gouging you shouldn't have even told me that price until like jan one it should've should called me like hey did you need those down it's actually illegal to have those up here right now yeah or like a you're look like a redneck you gotta take those things down we we were pretty redneck when i was young and we'd leave them up all year round and we'd call them party lights yeah well they're called february lights now and that there march lights and april lights so this guy i'm pretty sure this guy made like twenty thousand dollars 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 there's a like neighborhood cycles here that i think is like ten to twenty thousand dollar outside like there's you know probably like a hundred houses in this area fly them and then go start putting up lights and just say hey knock on the door we just put up their lights 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 gonna be cold and get the kids ready gotta go on the car you all that stuff why isn't there a haunted house i could just do from the seat of my chair at home that's right vr r haunted house if you ever put out 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 could like look look right and you could just get scared like if you ever done the demo where you're rock climbing and they're like look down or you look down in 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 twenty bucks a pop and probably make you know i don't know a couple hundred thousand if not a million dollars in in the year just with the amount of of sales that go on in vr i you'll be continue it's nobody and they'll feature you right because your cool content for that month so you'll get like free promotion basically through oc store that's an eight i dig it eight cool okay my next one is gonna be spirit store for christmas and my 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 gotta get a carmel apple today like we have to have one today save like what is that motherfucker pa love 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 just it's like in my life head 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 by the way it's it's so like for the single guys listening sitting i guess for ninety percent of our audience yeah yeah to all the next periods out there for all the people listening to this on a peloton in your one bedroom san francisco compartment 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 wanna like clean constantly usually you you wanna have a an environment where the baby can come to and be safe and so you wanna clean you wanna organize you wanna make sure that there's no corners that's so that's a real thing it's oh i i definitely experienced it like and we were like what's going on that other people who had already had to like oh nesting yeah babies coming soon you know you could sort of feel this it's like is your wife suddenly cleaning organizing all of a sudden the to do list just gets like knocked out because it's like oh there's like burst of clarity and energy and like urgency around preparing the home for certain thing that's crazy so i 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 disrespect you publicly you start feeling this like what does this rage i feel inside of me like i wanna go do i wanna go fight right now or like or like with a woman it's like the nesting thing 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 i thought i was different i thought i wasn't just one of those animals but it turns out on i'm just a beast like you know the rest of the the animal kingdom and nesting is one of them and maybe there's something about halloween where just sarah just has drink or eat pumpkin flavored shit just constantly well and it's this and like it's the same way with christmas she's like gotta go get the cinnamon thing yep i'm like we don't need it but she's like no no like thing that i'm a hold with both of my hands near my nose like a small koala and like well what is this what is this position of that all i'll live and assumed during during the 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 what does spirit do well decorations desserts and bag gone good gift ideas that's the three d of spirit you are super suburban but i'm a circle called you ted ted curry the words like day gone dag gone i need to no deep the dag gone good gift ideas so christmas has triple babies yeah triple d it has decorations it has specific dessert eggnog candy canes all this stuff and you need gift ideas you need to go try out toys and things like that and so you know hallmark tries to capture this think they're doing it wrong i think spirit needs to get in the spirit of 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 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 i i like to play potentially you know like i think that's something that you and i or whoever listening don't think about enough when you're think about a company to build you're you you really do you think this would be awesome to run and being ceo of the holiday company would be awesome yeah i mean that would just be like a fun thing are you changing the world nah are you having a blast for sure yeah the season as we say at the holiday company yeah that's the what this is it's it's the holiday code always yeah yeah be forward yeah which is clearly under you yeah i love the tis yeah so i'm i'm about this we're on to something so okay a couple other interesting things this pet custom thing i think is like a real trend we've seen pet vitamin companies like zest paws sell for six hundred million dollars we've seen pet every you know pets is like a huge niche and so if seven hundred million is spent a year on pet costumes i feel like you could just kind of like i i mean i i can't tell you off top of my head who is the the go to for pet you know for for pet costumes and so that tells me you know there's more than enough room on the e commerce side for it you know that the store behind halloween costumes dot com is also crazy it's all the same thing it's basically like somebody stumbled into this idea and then couldn't even keep up a demand as halloween grew and now it's effing huge alright so that's my that's my halloween rant that's my that was a good one you know breakdown and backstory let's see i did i miss anything we so well i wanted to talk about a few things well we go to this one topic really quick it's i think it's only okay so i wanna spend them much time on it but then i wanna hear your sue story the twitter thing and the warren buffett thing i think these are all those are all awesome but this is just one thing to put on your radar have you heard of this company called humane humane is this the like phone on your chest yes so basically this is this it's it's hard for the she pitch made yeah i don't actually know what it is and i don't think anyone knows what it is but basically i saw this youtube video talking about it it's the first time i've ever heard about it which is interesting because they've raised a hundred and thirty million dollars from like some of the best vcs out there and the people who started is is this husband and wife company i think they spent like one of the the husband spent twenty years at iphone or at apple building the iphone i think it was like one of like a six or ten person team to like the original team to come 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 sixty or seventy of them are from apple and they're like apple baller they're not just like the average just like entry level person and so it's kind of an interesting signal and they've filed for all these patents one is like a wearable multimedia device in cloud compute platform with laser projector projections another one one's like a portable yeah i mean that that can go anyway you know what i mean like we're gonna see a bunch stuff another one 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 anything about it you go to the website first of all if you go to the website you gotta commit three typos to get there it's q dot m 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 sun and it just says i what did it it like i forgot it's to 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 is gonna replace a phone to be an extension of our bodies which that's like pretty vague i don't know what hell that means but i guess it means like they wanna build a new iphone but it's not gonna be a handheld device it's gonna be like clothes that you wear or or lenses in your eyes i'm not not i'm exactly sure but two takes 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 ten twenty years we we're we we're gonna be anti phone we're gonna be like like what the fuck you're looking at this shit this is like cancer why are you doing this why are you what you're smoking what are you doing in smoking kinda like i like a spooky number two i think unfortunately i i don't know you guys bethany and i iran 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 a hundred and twenty million dollars and has never shown anything i think they always fail nine out of ten times i think that they're gonna fail because of their hub and it's like what the hell are we make what's one that didn't fail is there an example like qui was the most recent one that was like this and qui failed magic leap before that magically leap failing in progress what were the other ones like that one failed i mean the only one i could think of is jet dot com and but one would argue that that didn't succeed i what would say it didn't fail but like they probably sold a slightly above the valuation in which that they raised at yeah like i don't know if the underlying business was healthy or not it i i didn't feel like jet dot com became this main you big consumer thing that was going on but like you know who knows the world was really big maybe there were a ton of loyal jet dot com users who were you know using it all the time and the business was working but it did seem like it was the the team the story the technology that got acquired by walmart in order to make walmart online thing better but nonetheless still a definite win mark lo friend of the pod love the guy you know owns a fucking nba team so like it worked you know it's the owns a place my heart still have more importantly but like you know how many of these dream big rays big hype big build stealth for multiple years and then like launch with the world changing device or world changing product yeah yeah yeah i'm reviewing the tracker record here yeah yeah yeah if i had a nickel every time that happened i mean i would maybe have a dime yeah really it doesn't it doesn't happen a lot like you're funny way minds sweep 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 it 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 a camera that you basically would wear on your your chest sort of like a gopro but for everybody i don't know if this still the the product or not but i remember that was the the idea and it was like oh that's cool you just kinda 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 he couldn't like look at that and read something or or watch video or anything like that so i wouldn't fully 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 gonna be some kind of wearable device after this is it a watch is it glasses isn't 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 gonna be glasses you know that that seems to be where everybody is 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 house society like you 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 yeah you have a little you know slight thing up here c four c five whatever like your your vertebra like i was like oh shit like what did you know did i what did they i look him down he's like oh no everybody has this now it's from looking at the phone he's like it's like the most chronic problem in the in the country right now is people's vertebra are like you know messed up because their neck is always crane down and i was like oh damn man i gotta really start raising my phone higher when i'm looking i gotta i really get like a selfie stick or something yeah their neck brace token and it sells them like yeah then the doctor sells them about is like drop shipping door so okay so i think they're solving the right problem i also think that the like people think the the the common thing people would say and this is kind of the white knight the thing that i hate which is i don't wanna have more technology i don't i don't wanna have you know glasses that have my phone on them my eyes all day like shoot me now now i'm like alright i will shoot you now you're in your impression to kill you you're impression of a of a white night you're basically like a white californian guy i think you put a little more like lower in your voice and i think you've got this the the best white guy impression i've ever heard of yeah social media all like it say is they need a wrong in their life so what was talk about go ahead in a second but but dude so so i think that there's this idea of like oh you know social me is too crazy i wanna detox because i wanna i'm not going to i don't want more technology oh my god i i don't wanna live in a world like that guess what it's coming and you're gonna love it and you're gonna do it and like yes it will have some negatives associated with it like anything but like it is gonna happen what one thing that's gonna happen with it is this zuckerberg has this law he he said i i don't remember this back of he he coined this term zuckerberg law does your what this was he tried to get away for it he said it one time and interview never said it again because it was like sounded bad but like it's stuck with me which was he because every year people are basically willing to share up to twice as much as they were willing to share the year before so in terms of like you know we weren't sharing our status updates about what we're doing all the time but then you know twitter comes out and now people are just you know sharing every random thought on their mind we weren't sharing our location before but then force wear 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 that we share a single photo and then with snapchat we'll just share like you know tons of photos because they all disappear so like basically as long as a product can unlock there is like pent up demand to share twice as much as you're currently sharing and i feel this all the time there are so many moments of the day that i wish i had captured my kids did something cute or something you know my trainer said something awesome to me in a workout but i'm not you know i don't want my hands on the keyboard at that moment to capture that video that note or that 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 it's 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 q ass domain and you raise like a hundred million dollars and you go into stealth and you hire a hundred people and to you're basically like we're gonna change the world you're basically saying i'm going to you know like follow this path you know i'm gonna walk off this cliff like the many before me that that many companies before me that i've done this like hey magically if i could see you down there right like you know that that is the the challenge with some of this stuff yeah i i don't think it's gonna work but i think it's a cool i move i'm gonna glad there doing and yeah it's like what do you say face dad's cameras us yeah it's like hey like what you say to his wife i'm really like hey you wanna feel what it's you wanna feel what it feels like to spend a hundred and thirty billion dollars like you know what i mean they're just like like you you feel like spending money like you know they just like i'm coming up with the way just to blow this cash but pick one more of these thing for the last few minutes it's sue or warren buffett they both are incredibly interesting let's do the su one alright so he he tells us story here guys you when i sold my company tiny tiny was the name of his his company 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 licensed game like we made the family guy game the harry potter game marvel game and we got acquired 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 acquire and they you know one of them you know want offered us five hundred k for it i thought was good offer but we could get more so i created a new bidder i hit a former engineer from time and i told him to bid i said you're gonna need to offer like a million dollars like two two times the current offer to get the deal because you're just like a random guy and he did and it was a lot more than than james imagine it was more than the market price and as such he won the bit and i was like congrats alright you a million dollars right it was only a million dollars dollars i was like congrats you got it okay now here's the deal you we've under invested in these games you should you know just you gotta work like six 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 gonna be able to three or four x the revenue in the next twelve months and the guy like you know sat there and he's like i got a better idea he's like i'm working today at as an engineer of this company i'm just gonna quit and then he's like i look he's like i'm gonna 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 gonna tap out of the workforce at age thirty one and i'm gonna retire i don't need to spend any more money i'm gonna live you know like within my means and like this app that just bought a million dollars just gonna 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 gonna work on my hobby projects and other software things i just scratch my itch and he goes 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 gone into a lawsuit apple had to change their their rev shared deal so they said for anybody making less than a million of revenue will give you thirty percent just take a thirty percent cut we'll take a fifteen percent cut so immediately profit went up by fifteen percent for this guy he goes the business has generated more than three million in profits since he bought it the purchase price assumed that revenue would go down over time but it remains steady and actually grew during covid and he goes takeaways the only way to win the rat race is to opt out this is a takeaway that i understand intellectually but i have not accepted emotionally frankly i'm still blown away by my friend's act of saying yeah i have enough and now he goes number two when i tell you something buy something buy it and i tell you to work harder on something don't do it and and then he was like you know yeah 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 wanna buy one i i think these businesses are have a lot of value in them and so and so yeah so basically and i think by the way he didn't just buy the whole million with a million dollars of cash upfront he financed finance yeah right so put down maybe three four hundred thousand and finance the rest as an example and would you ever do that would you could you see yourself tapping out yeah i think about that all the time you know 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 like creative and fun project is which might make zero dollars or negative dollars but don't you do that now in a way like that's what how i started this podcast my plan when i started this podcast was i was like i think i'll probably lose ten grand a year all in on production you know paying my editor you know a couple hundred bucks a month and like you know i was like you by booking the studio you know four times a month that's four hundred bucks i was like i probably net will lose ten grand i'll have some sponsors but net lose ten grand i was like i'm totally happy to do that because i think this project should be a lot of fun and instead of starting a new business i started this podcast and this podcast turned up 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 kinda wanna do that again so i kinda wanna 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 wanna do it and therefore we'll take an interesting shot at doing something dude i think that like a lot of people dream about retiring and i've i've a few times in my career i've taken like as much as a month off to the year off the bat one yeah i used to call a sam bad and i was like i'm on a sam bad and every single time i love it at first and at the end i'm like dude i gotta go do something i can't i can't just do this i i like your your friends can't hang out with you on a wednesday say out you know one o'clock like you're just so bored 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 i can always speak from a man's perspective we are not built to sit idle we are you know created to work i don't think we're actually created to work a hundred hours a week but i think we are created to work like thirty hours a week and like that's the minimum words like you just have to produce and you have to contribute otherwise you feel pointless and i think you die sooner jeez for first i don't yeah when people would dude i don't think need retire i i think women are way more active in general men are more lazy yeah sure as a stereotype yeah don't i i don't mean man particular i just i mean human but also i mean like i 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 just haven't had this conversation with a lot of people but i think that when you retire like i've i've got family and they're like i'm gonna retire i'm like i don't think you should retire i just think you should work a little bit less or do a six month of vacation because i think the sooner you retire that just you're just like take do you just actually taken off four years on your life do you know what i mean like if you're gonna retire you at least gotta go volunteer like you gotta contribute in some capacity you gotta have something that you're living for yeah yeah totally my i i wouldn't take us a article i would i would just pour my energy into a more creative project that like it's not the best business use of time like i have a bunch of ideas that i think could make a bunch of money then i have a bunch of ideas i think would be really fun to do that would probably not make any money and might not even get anybody to to use it or like it maybe it'll turn out crappy but i i'm intrigued to do it and so that's the temptation anyway all the things i wanna do they all cost money so i'm like fuck i it'll earn more yeah but you what i mean like i can reality you don't well it's only you know i guess perceptions reality who knows yeah be right you gonna could change perception right that you could change reality so change that yeah i gotta run but yeah could have upset alright that's a pod