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

So what they're doing is, uh, they basically take like a vacant property, same thing as the spirit store. They take a vacant property and they say, hey, we'll cut you a check for 10, 15 grand if we can use your house, right? Or they'll, they'll, they'll rent a property or they'll find a vacant property and they basically just use it for the month. They have this operational thing where they could just spin up the haunted house and then they charge like $40, you know, to enter. And you could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars about, about a month.

All right. You want to go with Rahul or you want to go with Rahul?

All right. Troll of the Year. We haven't even done our, our Millie Awards for the end of the year thing that we always do. I'm calling it now the Troll of the Year.

Give the background.

So Elon takes over Twitter. I guess the purchase went through. I feel like there was never like confirmation, like he actually wired the money.

He just literally showed up at the office and like, yeah, there hasn't been like a proper ribbing ribbing, ribbon-cutting moment. Like, it's not like it was more like a squatter.

He just like went into the office and they're like, I guess you own it now. You seem to be here. Yeah, it's mine. Like playground rules. Like, wow, that's all it took to have Twitter.

Have you ever heard of, uh, like a coup? Like a coup d'état? Like with governments? Uh, you know, I was— I, I read a lot of—

yeah, they're pretty cool.

Yeah, they are. I read a lot of history— history jokes, or history jokes— I read a lot of history books about, uh, whatever, and they talk about like a coup And I'm like, so you literally just like walked into the White House and you just said like, you know, this is mine. And like the general has promised me that he's going to convince these soldiers to attack, you know what I mean? It's like an interesting concept. You're like, so it's all just made up, I guess. Like these rules that we live by, this is just— this is fiction. And that's kind of like what I felt like he did. He just walked in like, well, I own this now.

Thank you. Have you seen, you know, Derrick Lewis, the UFC fighter? Have you seen that compilation of his thing where he says, just get up? No. So they're like, Derek, uh, you're a big like knockout artist, but like, you know, the knock on you has always been like, what if you get into a wrestling thing? You know, how's your jiu-jitsu? Are you training? Jiu-jitsu ain't real, man. And they're like, what? He's like, man, you don't need jiu-jitsu, just get up. And they're like, what? He's like, why? I don't want to stay on the ground with another man between my legs. No, I'm not into that. Like, I'm not gonna do jiu-jitsu, I'm just gonna get up. They're like, but you, you need jiu-jitsu to get up. He's like, no, I'm just gonna get up. And so then there's this, and so there's a clip of him saying that, and then there's like a 6-minute compilation of literally somebody takes him down. He doesn't do just, he just stands back up. So powerful. That's how I feel. That's what Elon Musk did. He's like, nah, just walk in. Yeah.

He's like, what do you mean? He's like, well, I'm just going to walk in with a sink and take it. So anyway, he does this thing where he just, he says, this is mine., and there's all these reporters outside of Twitter's office and something crazy happening.

Waiting for a story. They're waiting for the story about something going wrong. Elon comes here. Oh, there's a protest. There's a walkout. And so the, what, what happens is the first big story that happens is there's a picture of these two guys and, um, kind of like, you know, kind of like nerdy sort of engineering looking guys and they're holding giant cardboard boxes.. And it says these two data scientists, the data engineers, data scientists were fired today from Twitter. Here they're seen walking out with their possessions in their boxes. And, and I saw it and immediately something looked a little off because I was like, this guy just looks so goofy. But I was like, well, that's pretty believable. You know, there's a bunch of goofy looking people that work in tech, but okay. Oh my God, he looks— wow, man, they really found the perfect character. He looks pretty goofy. And then I read the name and it says—

but he, but he, but he had a box in his hand. So each had a brown box. Like, which is just foreign because like if you work at a tech company, like you don't even probably own anything.

You own enough just to put in a book bag, put your laptop in your backpack.

And like if you do get fired, do they even like— is that a thing where you like hand people a box anymore? I don't know.

You know what I mean? They played it perfectly. So then it says Rahul Ligma and something Johnson, uh, Daniel Johnson were fired today, blah blah. And then, and I saw that and I was like, oh my God, this guy executed a Ligma, like For those who don't know, ligma is a, is a little joke that people play on the internet where it's like, like you say something, but ligma, and it's almost like ligma. What's like, I'm not familiar. Ligma nuts, right?

So that's the joke.

And they did this to basically, I think CNBC was the first one who like reported it and then it just kept getting the same photo kept getting spread everywhere because everybody wanted this story about.

And the lady who tweeted, she was this CNBC reporter and I, the original tweet said something like, we're at the scene of Twitter. These two engineers just came out and 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 Alegre says now he has no idea how he's going to be able to afford his Tesla payments. And then he's sitting there holding a Michelle Obama book. And so it's like him with his box is holding this Michelle Obama book.

I don't know why.

And he just said, 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.

Let's go get them.

He goes, he goes, bro, the media is so dumb. I literally put 5 minutes of planning into this. Even my uncle in India has seen the picture now. He goes, he goes, the first thing is, did you just see the cameras and just walk out there? He goes, yeah, basically. I got to the gym, it's near Twitter's headquarters. I saw all these cameras, so I just went.

Dude, that is so funny. The better— who is this guy?

He's like a founder of like a tech startup, basically. He just did this for fun. Oh my God. Yeah, I am ready to invest in his things as like stealth startups. I'm like, I'm ready to invest in whatever he's doing.

Any value? There's hella TV cameras.

Name your price, Ligma. So, so he goes, okay, so that was him. Did you see the interview with the other guy, Daniel Johnson? No. He also had a little gem. So that his was on video. So they're like, you know, um, how do you feel about this today? He's like, I don't know. I just gotta like, I gotta go home. I gotta talk to my husband and wife and regroup.

Wait, what?

He goes, I don't know, I just, I just really want to go home. I just really want to go home, talk to my husband and wife, and just regroup. The most San Francisco thing ever.

Did anyone comment on that?

The news didn't even like, you know, they just played the clip, and then I saw that, I was like, wow, that is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Perfect timing, man. These guys are like, you know, comedic geniuses basically.

So yeah, this is pretty gold.

Amazingly well played. Yeah, do you want to talk about the Elon war room, like what he's actually doing in there? Like, do you want to talk about that or not really?

Have you followed? Not really. I mean, like, I read that he said like, hey guys, you have a week to get this one thing done. And I think that that's cool. That's, that's a good way to run things. I'm nervous he's gonna screw it all up and because I make money from Twitter, so like I don't want it to go away.

But of course, I don't shill, bro.

Yeah. Yeah. I got consulting calls to take. So I don't really care though. Like when he talks about this shit, I'm like, it doesn't impact me that much. I don't care what you're gonna do.

Well, I just want— I don't care. It's not gonna impact me, but I do find it interesting how he's going about this. So basically the report is he goes in and the first report I thought again was another troll, but I guess this is real. You see this? He's like, he told every engineer to print out all the code that they've committed and they've written in the last 3 or 6 months and have it ready for review. Did you see this?

Why print? So you could just see the, the page length.

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, uh, shred the papers. Actually, we're gonna review on the computer. Just be prepared to review. And so people are like, all these engineers like, I printed out like, you know, 300 pages of code. I guess I'll just shred this. I don't know what's going on here, dude.

And what's crazy is like If you go to businessinsider.com, the headline is like, you know, I think it says like the toil of working at Twitter and it's like painting it like these people here. They're in a cold line. Yeah. It's like, this is what it's like to toil at Elon Musk's Twitter. The expectation is literally to work 24/7.

And does that really say that? That's straight clown behavior. I can't believe they're doing that.

I can believe it. And it says, this is it, one of the people familiar said, describing the feeling of the company under Musk. Your job is on the line. It's like, dude, your job's always on the line. Uh, like, is it— you know, like, this isn't like— it's not your right to work at Twitter, you dumbass. Uh, but I, I, uh, I, I thought it was funny because, like, come on, man. Like, you're, you're coding this. Yeah, you're gonna have to work 50 hours maybe for a little while, but also I think a lot of employees at Twitter are probably like, this is awesome, we've been sitting on our ass, let's, let's do it. And that side doesn't seem to be getting covered a lot.

Yeah. And so he created, I guess, a war room. So he basically brought in a bunch of people he trusts. So he brought in people from his other companies. Like he brought in his chief legal person. That guy's now like the general counsel. Basically he brought in, he created a war room and here's who's reported to be in the war room. It's, uh, Elon, his, uh, his, his chief counsel. Then it's Jason Calacanis.

Oh, I think Jason's, Jason's amazing, but like, what the hell does he know?

I guess, uh, Sriram from a16z. So just venture capitalist who's a former PM, used to work at Twitter, also, you know, had a run at Twitter, um, and Clubhouse and, uh, Snapchat. Yeah. And then also, um, I guess like some other people, some engineers or people from, uh, like Boring Company or Neuralink or whatever, like some people he trusts, like his cousin is there, like, and they basically just set up shop and they were like, all right, what we're gonna do with this thing? And they're like, change the logged out page. It forces you to sign up. No, you should be able to read tweets before you sign in, uh, you sign up. And then, which is like an experiment's been tried many times before, and there's like, um, you know, we need to have this verification program. You have 5 days to deliver this, I guess. And so they're just like sort of, uh, trying to figure this out of, you know, who stays, who goes, what are we building, how are we going to turn this thing around. And, um, fascinating. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in this, uh, 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. Um, I hope they don't screw it up though, because I got some fucking courses I gotta sell. So don't screw it up. They're gonna screw it up.

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, um, you know, verification or the algorithm, you know, like not serving me the tweets I want. Like the problem is that just only, I don't know, whatever, like 300 million people use Twitter and it's like, you know, 5 times smaller than like the other big social services and it doesn't really grow that much. And like, it's not like, you know, my mom doesn't use Twitter because she's like, oh, there's too many bots. If I tweet about crypto, that will tell me to buy crypto. That's not her problem. She just doesn't see value in it. And like, you know, she just says, I don't get it. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't know why I would need this. Like, you know, I don't, 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 Bollywood or whatever, right? Like, you know, everybody finds a need in the service and like, that's the core problem with Twitter is that the core need it addresses is only for like people like us. And like, it doesn't address the need for a whole bunch of other people on the planet. And if they wanted it to be more valuable, then they would need to do that.

Our software is the worst.

Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM.

Our software is the best.

HubSpot, grow better. Happy Halloween, dude.

Yeah, you too. I, uh, since I'm not 12, 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 obsess over Halloween. To me, it just seems like when your wife was buying a wedding dress, were you like, this is bullshit, you're gonna spend all this money for something that you're literally gonna use for 3 hours in your entire life? And that's how I feel like Halloween is.

Wow, shots fired at wives, shots fired at Halloween, shots fired at weddings.

Well, I mean, our— like, you, you know what I mean? I just find it like to be the most impractical thing there is. It just, it's a lot of work for like a few hours, bro.

You probably bought like a, 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.

Uh, Producer Ben, what are you? You look more like a figure skater or some like, like a figure skater in between rounds.

Like, I don't, I don't always want to put the hood on, but it's a narwhal. It's got like a little horn on top, little horns. My wife has a matching costume. A narwhal is just a whale that has a— yeah, if you're, if you're a parent, then I get it. But like, for the people who work really hard at, uh, this stuff, to me I'm just like, that just seems like such a waste of time. My wife loves it. She's this person.

Yeah, my wife too. She, uh, like we bought a bunch of costumes or whatever. I'm Aladdin, which is pretty, uh, you know, stereotypical. I felt, uh, 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 Sandberg book. I'm going to lean into it.

That's a cheat, Matt. Lean into stereotypes.

So this new thing called Yagging, it just has a soft J in there.

So, so there was like, all right, there's like this, you know, festival where they would like, they were like, oh, the demons are coming. And so they would like dress up as demons themselves and like, you know, dancing and whatever. And that was like to ward off the demons, like, hey, we're already here. Like, that was the logic, which is pretty, pretty weak logic if you ask me. And so, you know, then something had the pope says something. He's like, oh, this is, you know, November 1st is like the Day of the Saints or whatever.

All Saints' Day, baby. We in Catholic school, we celebrate it every year.

And so then the 31st became All Hallows' Eve. And so, okay, how did it go from that to kids dressing up as Aladdin and going trick-or-treating? What was, what was the gap? And basically it was like, for a while it was this kind of like, look, like, um, nobody really spent money on this. It was sort of like this more like adult dark holiday where you would buy like certain things, you'd have people over for dinner, maybe things like that. And then over time it got commercialized. And what I was trying to figure out, where did it get commercialized? How did we go from this like obscure pagan holiday to this mainstream $10 billion a year thing? And the best explanation I could find was that there was like kind of a society thing, which was like people wanted a holiday. It was a good excuse to celebrate. They liked that it was commu— they could make it community and family oriented over time rather than, uh, like this kind of adult, um, 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 kind of spring, maybe a little bit of summer, and then there was this dead time until the holiday, the winter holidays. And so they were like, okay, sales always dip. Let's figure out what we can do to make sales not dip during that time. And so they kind of needed to like invent an occasion for you to spend on. And so they started—

which is pretty common, right? Like if you think about like, you know, like big, there's like the, the Hallmark lobby, man. Yeah. They've like really been pushing Valentine's Day on us for years. I mean, I think that there's like a, that's like a pretty common tactic. I imagine Amazon is thinking like Prime Day is gonna be a holiday of like just random deals.

You know what I mean? And it's not like a coordinated attack, but it is like a bunch of people who all have an incentive. So they had an incentive to do, um, to, to, 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 and a couple of the businesses. So like I said, about $10 billion in spending, uh, $3 billion of that is costumes. $700 million of that is pet costumes, which is kind of crazy. Um, there's basically like, you know, $3 billion on candy. And there's like a huge amount, like, I don't know, like basically almost half the country is going to like give out candy during, during Halloween, which is kind of an insane level of adoption that's going on. So Walmart's the biggest winner. They, they not only make a bunch of money, they spend a bunch of money advertising during this period. They'll spend like tens of millions of dollars in the week of Halloween, just like blasting ads. And so do all the companies that that are stocked inside there. Skittles, Cheetos, Lunchables, everybody's got like a Halloween-themed thing. And so a couple of the interesting finds I had when I was doing this. So the first is a lot of people know about Spirit, the Spirit store, right? And people have heard about this, but like the backstory of Spirit's kind of 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. It's your, your Thursday night date night, Spencer's.

Spencer's. That's what I thought. Yeah. Like Spencer's, like Uh, you know, like a Hot Topic alternative. Spencer's also owns Spirit Halloween. Yeah.

Same place every time?

No, different places. They even have a kick-out clause. So they say, hey, look, you could take the— 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 can just kick us out. Like, like anytime you can just kick us out, basically. And so they found this like no-brainer proposition to landlords. And so they do these pop-ups. They now have 1,400 stores. So like Fast, you know, rewind back to, um, you know, like 2010, they only had, you know, 700 stores and the whole Halloween spend is on the same trend. So like I said, $10 billion this year. Well, rewind to 2010. That's when I graduated from college. It was $5 billion. Rewind to 2005, it was only like $3 billion. And so that's like kind of a big, like just during our, you know, lifetime, our adult lifetime, this thing is like, you know, more than doubled in, in size.

And Christmas tree light show means what?

You pay $20 and you and your family drive through a park and you look at light shows. And basically he's got a staff of I don't even know how many staff he has. I think over 100. They work all year round for 4 weeks of work. Can you imagine what your company's like? Like, what happens if there's like a terrorist attack or, you know, like whatever, or COVID? I mean, something happens where just like all 50 weeks worth of work is ruined for those 2 weeks. Do you know what I mean?

And so what a wild stat.

Here's some other interesting little businesses that were around this. Okay. So have you ever heard of Rubies?

No. What is Rubies?

Rubies is probably the biggest, I think, costume maker. I don't know if they're still the biggest, that they were at a point in time. So here's the kind of interesting story for Rubies. Uh, started in New York and they're like, oh, we're doing decorations and costumes for Halloween. Halloween wasn't as big of a deal. It's like in the '70s they were doing this. And, um, at the time Halloween costumes were all the same. It was all just ghosts and witches. But then in the '70s and '80s, it transitioned into basically like Hollywood and it was like, oh, movie characters and like TV characters became like the big thing. And so, and Rubies kind of fell behind because there were these other companies Collegeville and Ben Cooper that like got all the licenses. So they were winning, they were crushing it, and poor Ruby's was just sort of like puttering along until that fateful thing happened. I didn't even know about this, but there was something called the cyanide killer. You ever hear about this? There was this big scandal where I guess in Tylenol packages, like, oh yeah, laced with cyanide, and people—

and they never caught—

they never caught the person, never caught the guy, and it scared a bunch of people. It's like, holy shit, Tylenol, like this like safe thing.

How many people died, like 3 or 4?

dude, I wonder your costumes. I wonder what their research methodology is. You know, we've talked about that company WGSN. It always interests me. It's a $100 million a year business that does like $30 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 going to be popular. So Starbucks makes sure that they're 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 know.

Is that really what they said, or you just making that one up?

I think it— yes, I think it was the lemon. Like next year lemons are gonna be like a new thing instead of pineapple, which I don't even know how you would draw a lemon on like an iPhone case. I mean, it just looks like in the sun But anyway, they said that like lemons are going to be such a specific problem.

Your brain just went to—

well, like, have you ever seen, you know, like pineapples on iPhone cases? It's like, but how do you make like a round, like yellow thing? There's like no density to it.

Like, I don't know, we can workshop that afterwards. So, uh, so, so, so I think, you know, these guys probably, you know, you know, like that meme, like the hello, hello fellow kids or whatever, hello fellow children. Like the guy shows up at the high school, he's like 40 years old, he's got the skateboard on his back and he's like, hey there, fellow kids. Like What is the good— you know, what's the good buzz this year? And like, you know, they're trying to figure out like what's going to be hot. Um, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the research method, but I am, I am intrigued. But basically they got to be fortune tellers. They got to figure out through movies, politics, all that stuff. Is it Pokémon? Is it Wonder Woman? Is it Trump? Is it— what, what is going to be the costumes? And so, so that's one interesting one. Um, couple other, you know, pretty interesting, um, pretty interesting things. I'll give you some like I'll give you some like smaller niche like side hustle things. So, um, so first, uh, haunted houses. So haunted houses apparently do $300 million a year. It's kind of—

that's crazy.

Kind of a big number for something that's like useful, you know, like for—

dude, I hate haunted houses. What, do you go?

Uh, I've been— I'm not like— I'm not a big like thrill seeker, like roller coaster haunted house kind of guy. I'm not like afraid of it.

I'm not into it. I don't pay money to be scared. That's my, that's my rule with movies and haunted houses. 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. It's like, no thanks, you know. Uh, pretty sure, pretty sure I should be getting paid if I'm gonna get scared or slapped. That's my rule and I'm sticking to it. Um, so, so there's like, you know, haunted house is kind of interesting. There's a guy who, um, somebody tweeted this at me. They're like, yo, this local one near our place. And I did the math Um, so it's basically like small, like, haunted house. What they're doing is, uh, they basically take like a vacant property, same thing as the spirit store. They take a vacant property and they say, hey, we'll cut you a check for $10,000, $15,000 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 can just spin up the haunted house and then they charge like $40, you know, to enter. And you could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars in about a, about a month just off these things. And they have like, it's pretty crazy how like, you know, as a little side hustle you could do a haunted house. Let me give you some other ones that I think are kind of interesting. There's a guy who created this website called Zombie Pumpkins. You ever seen this? No. So it's like, I think it's zombielpumpkins.com. So 2 million people a year go to this site just to print out a stencil that they can use to carve their pumpkin. So he was like, you know what? Uh, if you go try to do pumpkin carving, it's going to be a pretty generic face. I'm going to make like super accurately drawn things so that you could have like a really dope looking pumpkin. Like you can have like a really cool site, really like, you know, Michael Jackson looking pumpkin. It'll look like it if you just follow my stencil. And so, uh, you know, 2 million people go to this thing. It gets like a million of those hits, you know, like at the last week of October or something. And, uh, you know, he donates a bunch of the money that, that comes from this to, uh, 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. Uh, okay. Here's another one. Pumpkinsteins. So how would you like a pumpkin that instead of carving a pumpkin to look 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 don't know, he's like some farmer somewhere and he spent 4 years trying to solve this problem. He's like, what if I could just grow a pumpkin that was already a decoration? So you don't have to do any work.

So he tried like this.

That's how, how do you spell it? Uh, Pumpkinstein, like Frankenstein. Yeah. He tries to grow it. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Finally, the fourth year, he's like, what if I tried this? Like, I don't know, type of seed or whatever it was. And he got it to grow into this mold. And the mold basically just looks like a Frankenstein head. And so he started selling 'em and he does like, you know, a few hundred sales and he does a few thousand sales. Retailers start coming to him. He opts to go with Sam's Club cuz he is like, you know what? Like he was selling these for $100 a pumpkin. He is like, you know what? Sam's Club, we could sell 'em for $30 and make money doing that with, at their volume.

And so these are amazing. These are amazing.

These are cool. Um, another one, Home Depot. Have you heard about the 12-foot skeleton? No. So this is like one of these like viral, I think maybe from TikTok. I don't know where, but like my wife has been talking about this. She's like, oh, I really want to get the 12-foot thing. It's always sold out. And I was like, it can't be that. I mean, like, let's just go to Home Depot and get it. Like, have you seen Home Depot? It's just like full of shit. Like there's no way they're just like out of every Home Depot. She's like, you don't understand. And she shows me there's like buy and sell groups on Facebook where people are buying these things for $1,000 plus. Like they retailed for like $300 or something like that. And eBay's, they're selling for $1,000. It became such a hit. Home Depot figured out this giant lawn, uh, skeleton, uh, was like the big hit. Then Lowe's came out this year and Lowe's was like the 12-foot mummy. And I was like, wow, you know, who's gonna come out with the 12-foot 1-inch, you know, um, 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 in popularity. Um, 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. Um, you know, you don't have the spirit. You're sort of the, um, the Grinch of Halloween as, as, as you're known. Um, And I realized, as I've known, Halloween is the anti-holiday. It's not the cookie-cutter warm and fuzzy. It's dark. It's kind of more adult. It's more creative. It's one of the few creative holidays. And, um, social media is the boom for Halloween because social media— what is social media? It's a, hey, look at me. And Halloween is the perfect, hey, look at me moment. It's, hey, look at my house. Hey, look at my costume. Hey, look at my body. Hey, look at my candy. Hey, look at my kids. I look at everything, right? So it's the, hey, look at me thing. And also it's an excuse to act like a kid. And I'm bullish on anything that gives people an excuse to act like a kid. I think that's why Burning Man is popular. I think that's why Halloween is popular. And, you know, even things like the Ice Cream Museum and stuff like that, I think is, you know, really popular for that reason.

Dude, it feels like you just prepared a debate on why Halloween's great and why I should dig it. And you have totally won me over.

So you're saying there's a chance?

Yeah. Like, you just put together this big speech on why Halloween is cool, and I'm into it. I think it's awesome. This 12-foot skeleton thing is awesome. This Pumpkinstein is awesome. I'm all about it. This is awesome.

And so let me tell you more ideas or, or little, little, little niches. So I'll tell you a couple niches and a couple ideas. Niche thing. We had a guy come rig up lights to our house this week because he did every single house in our neighborhood and we just moved into this place. And then our neighbor was like, oh yeah, you want lights? You got to hit the lights guy. He's booked. But like, if he can try to squeeze you in, you'll have lights for this season.

And we were like, 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 kid's shopping cart. Like, he's got like a play, like checkout aisle. And I was like, oh wow, that cart says Target on it. And he goes, yeah, or maybe it was your wife, but it's one of you guys were like, yeah, this has been one of the most in-demand toys. We had to like find this cart on eBay for however—

we bought two, we flipped one and we bought the other.

Yeah, you're like, we had to get this cart, like the kids wanted this cart, which they didn't, but you guys did.

I think probably the moms want this cart.

Yeah, the moms want— it was like, we wanted this Target toy cart. And I just thought You know, that's kind of interesting. Now I'm hearing this. You are totally becoming a suburban dad. This is awesome. I'm— I like this side of you, sir.

But why would he do it this way? He should do it where I'll come and pick them up on, uh, like right after Thanksgiving and, hey, by the way, while I'm here, do you want Christmas lights?

Well, these were Christmas lights actually. It's like they start the Christmas stuff now and then you get these.

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

Yeah. I don't even know, but they, he should start being like, you want Halloween and I'll do a bulb change in like November. He should be upselling. He was too honest of a guy in general. Cause like he was like $60 to take them down. I was like, bro, once you put the lights up, you could charge me $6,000 to take them down. What am I going to do? Like, you know, like where's the gouging? You shouldn't have even told me that price until like Jan 1st. You should have called me like, hey dude, you need those down. Uh, it's actually illegal to have those up here right now.

Yeah. You look like a, you look like a redneck. You gotta take those things down. We, we were pretty redneck when I was young and we'd leave 'em up all year round and we would call 'em party lights.

That's an 8. I dig it. 8.

All right, cool. Um, okay, my next one is gonna be Spirit Store for Christmas. Am I dumb? Is there no Spirit Store for Christmas?

I don't know, but I do know that my wife is like your wife where like this weekend we were walking around and she's like, anything that had a pumpkin-flavored candle, she was walking in and like she bought like a caramel apple. She's like, I got to get a caramel apple today. Like, we have to have one today.

Yeah. What is that motherfucker Pavlov been doing to our wives, man? Like, there is something with this certain scent and certain color that, like, you know, I must have. Must have this.

It's like in my life. I just learned this weekend. Have you ever heard of nesting? Do you know what that is?

Yes.

I didn't know what that was, so I just—

it's a real thing, dude, by the way.

It's, it's so like, for the single guys listening, uh, I guess for 98% of our audience.

Yeah, yeah, to all the neckbeards out there, for all the people listening to this on a Peloton in your one-bedroom San Francisco apartment.

But basically, when a woman, I guess, is like— I don't know when it happens, but like, I think later in the pregnancy part of the pregnancy, she starts to nest. I guess that means like you start like preparing for the baby. You want to like clean constantly. Basically, you want to have an environment where the baby can come to and be safe. And so you want to clean, you want to organize, you want to make sure that there's no corners. That's— so that's a real thing.

It's— well, I, I definitely experienced it. Like, we were like, what's going on? Other people who had already had kids were like, oh, nesting. Yeah, baby's coming soon. You know, you could sort of feel this. It's like, is your wife suddenly cleaning, organizing? All of a sudden the to-do list just gets like knocked out because it's like, oh, there's a burst of clarity and energy and like urgency around preparing the home for a certain thing.

That's crazy. So, you know, it's interesting, like we, we, we think that we are like these civilized, like creatures different from an animal, but then like there's these, these situations that happen. For example, if you're a man, if someone like disrespects you publicly, you start feeling this like, what is this rage I feel inside of me? Like, I want to go— do I want to go fight right now? Or like, Or like with a woman, it's like the nesting thing. And like there's all these like things. And having a kid is like a really good example of when like these weird things just start happening that like I thought I was different. I thought I wasn't just one of those animals, but it turns out I'm just a beast like, you know, the rest of the animal kingdom. And nesting is one of them. And maybe there's something about Halloween where just Sarah just has to drink or eat pumpkin-flavored shit just constantly. Well, and it's this And like, it's the same way with Christmas. She's like, oh, we got to go get the cinnamon thing. Yep. I'm like, we don't need it. But she's like, no, no, no. Like, I understand.

I need this hot thing that I'm going to hold with both of my hands near my nose like a small koala. And it's like, what is this? What is this position that all women assume during, during winter? So the Spirit CEO even said this. He goes, fall, the turning of the leaves, the pumpkin spice latte. And the Spirit store. We have become a symbol of the changing of seasons. People now wait for our store to pop up. That's how they mark time, the passage of time in their lives. So anyways, I thought, you know, I thought, why isn't there a Spirit for Christmas? What, what does Spirit do well? Decorations, desserts, and daggone good gift ideas. That's the 3 Ds of Spirit.

You are suburban. I'm gonna start calling you Ted. Ted Perry, you're gonna see somewhere like, day gone.

Dude, you know, like, I think that's something that you and I, or whoever's listening, don't think about enough, is when you're thinking about a company to build You rarely do you think this would be awesome to run, and being CEO of the Holiday Company would be awesome. Yeah, I mean, that would just be like a fun thing. Are you changing the world? Nah. Are you having a blast? For sure.

You know what I mean? Season, as we say at the Holiday Company.

Yeah, that's the— this is— it's, it's the holiday code. Yeah. What a beautiful word.

Yeah, it is criminally underused.

Yeah, I love the tiz. Uh, yeah, so I'm about this. We're on to something.

So, um, okay, a couple other, uh, interesting things. So this pet costume thing I think is like a real trend. Um, you know, we've seen pet vitamin companies like Zesty Paws sell for $600 million. We've seen pet— every— you know, pets is like a huge niche. And so if $700 million is spent a year on pet costumes, I feel like you could just kind of like I mean, I can't tell you off top of my head who is the go-to for pet costumes. And so that tells me there's more than enough room on the e-commerce side for it. The story behind HalloweenCostumes.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 with demand as Halloween grew. And now it's effing huge.

All right.

So that's my Halloween rant. That's my Halloween breakdown and backstory. Let's see. Did I miss anything?

So I wanted to talk about a few things. Well, we go to this one topic really quick. It's— I think it's only okay. So I don't want to spend that much time on it. But then I want to hear your Suli 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 just— it's—

it's kind of a shitty pitch. Humane.

Yeah. I don't actually know what it is and I don't think anyone knows what it is. But basically I saw this YouTube video talking about it. It's the first time I've ever heard about it, which is interesting because they've raised $130 million from like some of the best VCs out there. And the people who started it, it's this husband and wife company. I think they spent like one of the— the husband spent 20 years at iPhone or at Apple building the iPhone. I think he was like one of like a 6 or 10 person team to like the original team to come up with the iPhone. His wife was also a director of engineering, I think, of of Apple or something like pretty impressive like that. And they've recruited like 100+ employees. Most all are from Apple, like 60 or 70 of them are from Apple and they're like Apple ballers. They're not just like the average, just like entry-level person. And so it's kind of an interesting signal. And they filed for all these patents. One is like a wearable multimedia device and cloud computing platform with laser projecting projections. Another one's like a portable Yeah, I mean, that could, that could go anyway, you know what I mean? Like, we're gonna see a bunch of interesting stuff. Another one's like a portable battery pack. I mean, like, they've done all these amazing things. They don't even have a website. Like, you can't, you can't really learn anything about it.

You go to the website, first of all, if you go to the website, you got to commit 3 typos to get there. It's hu.ma.ni, humane but split up with 3, 2 different periods. And then you get there and it's a picture of like the sun and it just says, what did it say? It said like, I forgot what it said, like change everything.

Yeah. So I have a, I have a strong take on that, but let me finish this, which is basically their whole point is that they view phones as a divider between us and the world and they want your phone or whatever it is going to replace a phone to be an extension of our bodies, which that's like pretty vague. I don't know what the hell that means, but I guess it means like They want to build a new iPhone, but it's not going to be a handheld device. It's going to be like clothes that you wear or lenses in your eyes. I'm not exactly sure, but two takes. One, I completely agree. And I think that as an industry, we're like way in— we're too early to say that there's something actionable right now. But I do think in like 10, 20 years, we're going to be anti-phone. We're going to be like, like, what the fuck? You're looking at this shit. This is like cancer. Why are you doing this?

Why are you—

you're smoking? What are you doing smoking? That's kind of like how we look at smoking. Number 2, I think, unfortunately, I, I don't know you guys, Bethany and Imran, I think those are the two founders. I'm sure you're wonderful people, but I think any company that raises that much money and has a site that says change everything and has raised $120 million and has never shown anything, I think they always fail. 9 outta 10 times, I think that they're gonna fail because of their hubris and it's like, What the hell are we making here?

What's one that didn't fail? Is there an example? Like Quibi was the most recent one that was like this and Quibi failed. Magic Leap before that. Magic Leap failing in progress. What were the other ones like?

You know, Cero, that one failed.

I mean, the only one I can think of is Jet.com.

And but one would argue that that didn't succeed. Well, I could— one would say it didn't fail, but like they probably sold 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.com became this main, you know, big consumer thing that was going on, but like, you know, who knows? The world is really big. Maybe there were a ton of loyal Jet.com users who were, you know, using it all the time and the business was working, but it did seem like it was the, the team, the story, the technology that got acquired by Walmart in order to make Walmart's online thing better. Uh, but nonetheless, still a definite win. Mark Lowry, friend of the pod, love the guy.

Uh, you know, owns a fucking NBA team. So like it worked, you know, in terms of wealth creation.

Owns a place in my heart.

More importantly.

Uh, but like, you know, how many of these dream big, raise big, hype big, build in stealth for multiple years and then like launch with the world-changing device, um, or world-changing product?

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm reviewing the track record here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If I had a nickel every time that happened, I mean, I would maybe have a dime. Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't happen a lot.

Like, you're playing the game Minesweeper, it looks like that. Um, you know, okay, so, so here's a couple things. Um, number one, we did talk about this before because when they came out, the patent I think got leaked, and it looked like at that time the device was some kind of clip-on sort of like camera that you basically would wear on your, your chest. Um, sort of like a GoPro, but for everybody. I don't know if this is still the product or not, but I remember that was the, the idea. Um, and it was like, oh, that's cool. You'd kind of have this like hands-free, you know, camera audio device, that sort of thing.

Oh yes, I do remember that.

And so that was kind of interesting, but that, that would only be to capture. It wouldn't be to, um, you couldn't like look at that and read something or watch video or anything like that. So it wouldn't fully replace the phone., but I'll say a couple things. I think they're solving the right problem, which is the phone is not the last. It's not the last frontier. There's certainly gonna be some kind of wearable device after this. Is it a watch? Is it glasses? Is it, uh, 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. Um, you know, that, that seems to be where everybody's going. And so like, we'll see, but definitely will happen and definitely will change the world when whoever does get that form factor right.. So it is inevitable in my opinion. The next thing, the phone really is causing like, you know, a lot of damage and problems in terms of how society, like, you know, with the extreme strength that came from this device that helps us never get lost, never be bored, never, never be alone, all that good stuff. You know, I remember going to a doctor and he was like, he did a scan and he's like, oh yeah, you have a little, you know, slight thing up your C4, C5, whatever, like your vertebrae. He's like, uh, I was like, oh shit. Like, what did I, you know, Did I—

what did I look down?

He's like, oh no, everybody has this now. It's from looking at the phone. He's like, it's like the most chronic problem in the, you know, the country right now is people's vertebrae are like, you know, messed up because their neck is always craned down. And I was like, oh damn, man, I gotta really start raising my phone higher when I'm looking. I gotta really get like a selfie stick or something. Is there a neck brace?

And he sells them.

Yeah. Then the doctor sells them on his like dropshipping store. So, um, okay. So I think they're solving the right problem. I also think that the, like people think the common thing people would say, and this is kind of the white knight thing that I hate, which is I don't want to have more technology. I don't, I don't want to have, you know, glasses that have my phone on them and my eyes all day. Like, Shoot me now. I'm like, all right, I will shoot you now.

You're in your impression.

I'm gonna kill you.

Your impression of a white knight, you're basically like a white Californian guy. I think you put a little more like lower-ness in your voice, and I think you've got the best white guy impression I've ever heard of.

Yeah. Social media. All I can say is they need a Rahul Ligma in their life. So. We'll talk about him in a second. But, but dude, so, so I think that there's this idea of like, oh, you know, social media is too crazy. I want to detox. I want to— I'm not going to— I don't want more technology. Oh my God, I don't want to live in a world like that. Guess what? It's coming and you're going to love it and you're going to do it. And like, yes, it will have some negatives associated with it, like anything, but like it is going to happen. What one thing that's going to happen with it is Zuckerberg has this law. He said I don't know if you remember this back in the day, but he coined this term Zuckerberg's Law. Did you ever hear what this was?

He tried to get away from it. He said it one time in an interview and never said it again because it sounded bad, but it stuck with me, which was he goes, every year people are basically willing to share up to twice as much as they were willing to share the year before. So in terms of we weren't sharing our status updates about what we were doing all the time, but then Twitter comes out and now people are just sharing every random thought on their mind. We weren't sharing our location before, but then Foursquare and others came out. Now we started sharing location, uh, photos. We were only sharing, you know, we weren't sharing online. Then we shared albums, then we shared a single photo. And then with Snapchat, we'll just share like, you know, tons of photos cuz they all disappear. So like basically as long as a product can unlock, there is like pent-up demand to share twice as much as you're currently sharing. And I feel this all the time. There are so many moments in the day that I wish I had captured. My kids did something cute or, Or somebody, you know, my trainer said something awesome to me in a workout, but I'm not, you know, I don't have 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, uh, like big pent-up demand to be able to share way more moments or capture way more moments and share some portion of those than is happening today. And that will happen with either glasses, uh, you know, like maybe a drone camera or like a, this wearable thing on your chest. So I think those things are all working for it. The thing that's working against it is once you get this cute-ass domain and you raise like $100 million and you go into stealth and you hire 100 people and you're basically like, we're going to change the world, you're basically saying, I'm going to follow this path. I'm going to walk off this cliff like the many before me, that many companies before me that have done this. Hey, Magic Leap, I can see you down there. That is the challenge with some of this stuff.

Yeah, I don't think it's gonna work, but I think it's a cool— I'm glad they're doing it. I'm glad they're doing it.

Yeah, what do you say? Face tats and cornrows.

Yeah, it's like, hey, like, what's he say to his wife? I'm like, hey, you want to feel what it's— you want to feel what it feels like to spend $130 billion? Like, you know what I mean? They're just like, like, you feel like spending money? Like, you know, they just like are coming over the way just to blow this cash. But, um, Pick one more of these things for the last few minutes. Sully or Warren Buffett. They both are incredibly interesting.

Uh, let's do the Sully one. All right. So he tells the story. He goes, you know, when I sold my company Tiny, uh, TinyCo was the name of his company. It was a mobile gaming company. He says there was two parts. There was our original games that we had been making, like Tiny Monsters, Tiny Zoo, stuff like that. And our licensed game, like we made the Family Guy game, the Harry Potter game, Marvel game. And we got acquired, uh, the acquirer, the guy who, the people who bought us, they really wanted the, like the licensed famous IP games. And so after the acquisition, we decided to sell the first one and there was a bunch of potential acquirers and they all, you know, one of them, you know, offered us $500K for it. I thought it was a good offer, but we could get more. So I created a new bidder. I hit up a former engineer from TinyCo and I told him to bid. I said, you're going to need to offer like $1 million, like 2 times the current offer to get the deal because you're just like some random guy. And he did. And it was a lot more than James could imagine. It was more than the market price. And as such, he won the bid.. And I was like, congrats.

All right. You had a million dollars, right? It was only a million dollars.

And so would you ever do that? Would you, could you see yourself tapping out?

Yeah, I think about that all the time.

Uh, you know, really?

Yeah. Not tapping out forever, but I feel like, uh, 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 $0 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 10 grand a year all in on production. Paying my editor a couple hundred bucks a month. And I was like, booking the studio 4 times a month, that's $400. I was like, I probably net will lose $10,000. I'll have some sponsors, but net will lose $10,000. I was like, yeah, I'm totally happy to do that because I think this project's going to be a lot of fun. And instead of starting a new business, I started this podcast and this podcast turned out to be 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, um, I kind of want to do that again. So I kind of want to go look at like, what's something I would be willing to lose money doing? Because it's that fun to me or that intriguing to me. Because I think that that's probably a better signal of like what I really want to do and therefore will take an interesting shot at doing something.

Dude, I think that like a lot of people dream about retiring. Um, and I've, I've a few times in my career I've taken like as much as a month off to a year off sabbatical type thing.

Yeah.

I used to call it a sabbatical and, uh, I was like, I'm on a sabbatical. And, uh, 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 like, like your, your friends can't hang out with you on a Wednesday at, you know, 1 o'clock. Like you're just so bored and you're like, I need to go create. I need to produce. I need to like, and then I just realize I am not built and men or, you know, all people, but I, I can only 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 100 hours a week, but I think we are created to work like 30 hours a week. And like, that's the minimum where it's like you just have to produce and you have to contribute. Otherwise you feel pointless. And I think you die sooner.

Well, geez.

For first, I don't know. Yeah. When people do, I don't think people retire.

I think women are way more active in general. Men are more lazy.

Yeah, sure.

As a stereotype.

Yeah. I don't, I don't mean men in particular.

I just.

I mean, human, but also, I mean, like, I only know my— I only know, like, what men are like because I'm a man, you know? That's what I mean. So, yeah, sure. All humans, I'm sure, are like that. I just haven't had this conversation with a lot of people. But I think that when you retire, like, I've got family and they're like, I'm going to retire. I'm like, I don't think you should retire. I just think you should work a little bit less or do a 6-month vacation, because I think the sooner you retire, that's just— you're just like, you've just actually taken off 4 years on your life. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you're going to retire, you at least got to go volunteer. Like, you got to contribute in some capacity. You got to have something that you're living for.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Uh, my— I wouldn't take a sabbatical. Uh, I would, I would just pour my energy into a more creative project that like is not the best business use of time. Like, I have a bunch of ideas that I think could make a bunch of money, and then I have a bunch of ideas I think would be really fun to do that would probably not make any money and might not even get anybody to use it or like it, or maybe it'll turn out crappy, but like, I'm intrigued to do it. And so that's the temptation for me.

My thing with that is all the things I want to do, they all cost money. So I'm like, fuck, I need to earn more.

Yeah.

But you know what I mean?

In reality, you don't.

Well, it's only, I guess perception's reality.

Who knows?

Yeah.

All right. You got to run. You can change perception easier than you can change reality. So just change that. Yeah. I got to run. But yeah, good episode.

Alright, that's a pod.