Is Time Out a Billion Dollar Business? - Plus Russian Stocks, Right-Wing Media Sites, and More

Yeah. So it's a pretty timeless brand. It's been around for a long time. It started in England, actually. So if you lived in London, it was probably most popular there. But basically in 2014 or maybe 2018, they started doing this new concept called a Timeout restaurant. Timeout Market. So Google Timeout Market and you'll see it. But basically what they do is they went into— I think the first one was in Lisbon where I was. This is— I went to it when I was in Lisbon, but I've gone to it in Miami. They have 7 markets now. But basically what they did was they went to like a touristy place and they found like the 20 most popular restaurants based off of their blogs and like what all the touristy stuff like, oh, you got to go to Portugal so you can taste the coffee from here. A croissant from here and like some fish from here. And they basically just created a food court like in the middle of the city and they gave 20 restaurants different stalls. And so when you go to this different city, I went to it in Miami. Miami was cool because like, you know, Miami, they say you got to get a Cubano from this place. You got to try the Cuban coffee from this place.

1.3x. Okay. So that's— they were doing the equivalent of over $100 million in revenue. But check this out. In 2019, pre-pandemic, their TimeOut markets did $23 million in revenue. 2020, only $12 million. But they only have 7 locations, which means each one of these food courts does $3 million in revenue. And the reason why— so they have them in Lisbon, Miami, New York, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Dubai, and they've got some coming up in Prague and a couple other places. The reason why this is interesting is, A, this is just awesome. I think this is an amazing example of a company that has a digital media presence that's doing a really good job of diversifying. Two, this is a really sick business because if they're only in 7 markets and they're doing, you know, $23 million in revenue, like there's easily a future where you could imagine 50 or 80 of these in, you know, a variety of like, you know, touristy cities. It's kind of cool, right?

Yeah. This is one where the actual experience sounds fucking awesome. And so I kind of want it to be a great business and I, I bet in actuality it's like a good business, not a great one. But it also feels like something that kind of anybody could spin up as a side hustle. Um, you know, like if you're in Durham, North Carolina, there's every city has like, you know, 15, 20 spots that are like, oh, the, the ice cream over here and the, you know, the, the, the sandwich over here and oh, you haven't tried the bonbons over here, whatever. Right? Like, Every place has that collection of stuff and then it becomes kind of prestigious to be picked. And all you're doing is basically making a pop-up tent that's like a food court, but instead of, you know, Sbarro and Cinnabon, you're putting in like cool hip places, right? In fact, this place should actually just have a Cinnabon every 4 stalls cuz that's what people really want. But you know, besides that, you know, I feel like this is a great, this is a great little side hustle that I think anybody who's a foodie could create. Um, I do pretty well with.

I wish we had done this in Miami. Like, I would have paid a $100 all-you-can-eat just to like walk through this and be able to grab stuff, you know, like an all-you-can-eat pass.

Yes, it's awesome. And I went to this and I realized how much fun I had. I went to— I did the one in Miami too. I would— I'll totally do the one in New York. But I thought this was such an interesting, basic, simple concept and they pulled it off and it was really fun. And I think that this is actually— I think it's like, I don't know if this could be an amazing business. I think that Time Out, though, they could be worth over $1 billion in the next 2 years once they like open up. Right now they're only worth £168 million. That's pounds. So it's like $200 million.

No, just because, like, I'm not— I don't want to make— I don't want to, like, try to make money off this opportunity. I know that's kind of off-brand, but You know, I'm on board with that.

Well, a lot of these were getting close to zero. Like, uh, you know, like, like real businesses were like dropping, you know, 50, 70, 80%. And so, yeah, you know, you're getting tremendous value. So if you're a citizen there and you're a believer in, you know, you don't want to be in the local currency anyway. So you need to— you'd rather— if you just told me you can either stay in the ruble, or you can take your ruble and turn it into something else, I'm going to always take something else. And their options on something else got cut off. Like, okay, you can't get dollars, you can't get crypto, you can't get— you can't get different things. So what are you going to buy? And, you know, because they were limited in many ways across those— some, like, there was like, you know, they stopped the amount of rubles you could sell. And so, you know, if you could get into stocks, hey, it's better than— better than staying in the in the paper.

Yeah, it's interesting. I, I wouldn't buy a Russian company just for the same reasons that you said, but we did the episode on the oligarchs and that was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where Russia was going from communist to somewhat capitalist. And in my head I'm like, oh, this might be another one of those opportunities where you could like buy like the equivalent of Exxon in Russia, which hopefully likely won't go— or I don't care about hopefully, but it likely won't go away. But you could get like a a huge discount.

All right. I got a couple of things for you. But first, did you see this thing about the right-wing site that went viral? Which one? Okay, so check out this. I wrote this thing on the— on our right-wing site goes viral. It's a link to a tweet. So this guy, Jed Legume, which is just a— got to be a fake name. Judd Legume. He says a far-right website launched 36 days ago and it's already more popular on Facebook than The Washington Post. The DC Inquirer has executed an audacious scheme to manipulate Facebook's algorithm and ad platform, and Meta is letting them get away with it. And so basically, the article talks about this publication that was created. So let me— it's called the DC Inquirer. And they'll have articles that are like, you know, the, you know, like, whatever, the Freedom Convoy is on the verge of victory in Canadian provinces, right? And they will get a bunch of people to post about it. And what they showed was that— and so they, so they got like all these right-wing pages that are like, impeach Joe Biden, or I love America, keep Texas red, save America, and they were all posting the same thing. And so that should be kind of like a space, like a coordinated kind of like ad campaign or whatever. And it started to get really, really big. So the page Um, this guy Brandon Gill created the page and, you know, it has like, I don't know, over a million, um, you know, like a million followers or something like very quickly. And it's all run under this, like, uh, yeah, it's basically like this, this right-wing thing that got popular. Now you've told me about this before, which is that extremely conservative or extremely liberal sites will get very popular very quickly, especially on Facebook. But, and I was pretty surprised to see this.

Yeah. There's a but here. Liberal side, like, yeah, obviously polarized on one side does well. Conservative does significantly better because this is a principle that is always true, which is a group of people that feel downtrodden, like, feel like they're underdog, they band together and they get in and outrage does more for sharing. And in America, so there's like groups like minorities, women, um, a lot of like far-right conservatives because media is typically left, they think, you know, our voice is being stomped out, and so they band together. So if you go to HuffPo and you go and look at the comments section, and then go to Breitbart and look at how many comments— if you go to— have you ever been to Breitbart.com?

so basically, it looks like what he's done is basically created like a web of like accounts that are kind of all the same. So, so basically, it's like there's the guy's personal account, this guy Brandon Gill, and his bio is like, you know, I'm the founder and editor of DCInquirer.com. So that's the, that's the URL, DC Inquirer with an E, E-N-Q. And it's like his bio is patriot, period. Proud West Texan, period. Businessman, financier, rancher, conservative, Christian, Dartmouth, husband. It's like bingo. You know, you get, you hit all the words. Congratulations. By the way, Sam, you are also rancher. Yeah. You're also husband.

So then he's got like basically a whole bunch of other pages. So I think Red Wave, I Love America, all those pages I mentioned, I think those are his pages. So they've all been built up like one's at a million, one's at 650,000, one's at 200,000. And he's running ads that were, are like, if you go look at Brandon Gill's ads in the ad library, Uh, so if you've never done this before, by the way, it's amazing. Like one of the best tools available to any internet person is if you go to facebook.com and then you, or just Google Facebook ad library, and then you can look up the ads of any brand, what ads they're running. So if you look at the brands he's running, it'll be like a picture of Joe Biden, uh, as like talking at a rally, like kind of confronting somebody. And it says, if you want Joe Biden removed from office, tap the big thumbs up in the right corner. And so it's like, you know, it's clearly like running political ads that are not marked as political ads basically. So this guy's point was like, oh, they're— he's getting away with it. You know, Facebook, you know, you need to shut this down. What I thought was interesting was, dude, this would be an amazing little prank. Like, if I'm Mischief or I'm just like someone out there with like a shithead with too much time on their hands, here's what I would do. I'd basically do the same thing. I'd make an extremely conservative, uh, site and I would put out some articles and I would get the traction and I would do this for like 2 months. And then the third month I would just pull the rug on everybody and I would just switch to an extremely liberal LGBTQ website with the same email list. I'll just switch everything overnight once I get all these people subscribed, which just for sure would make the news. Um, there's this, and then, and then that story of the prank pulled would create a news cycle of its own. And then you could basically go get any job you want in any marketing, PR, or whatever agency, cuz you could be like, yeah, I just, I did this. Like, so instead of sending your resume out and cover letter, like, do a stunt that shows your knowledge of how the internet works, how media works, how PR works, how marketing works. And, um, you know, you'll impress a lot of people with your ability to like pull off a stunt like that. That's actually how BuzzFeed started too. Uh, was Jonah Peretti would— was pulling stunts like this. I think he did it with Nike. Nike. Yeah. What was it again?

No, no, no, no. It was, it was an email thing. It was like a sweatshop thing. Okay. So here's what it was. Oh, so he goes to Nike, had this feature, personalized ID, where you could like write your name. I don't know if you did this. I did this. I got my name on my shoes. I thought it was so cool. He goes, so he writes an email, uh, you know, from, from Jonah Peretti to nikeidpersonalize@nike.com. He goes, greetings, my order was canceled because My personal Nike ID does not, but my, oh no, my order was canceled, but my Nike ID does not violate any of the outlined rules in your message. So the personal ID on my custom shoes was the word sweatshop. Sweatshop is not a name of another party's trademark, the name of an athlete, blank, or profanity. I chose the ID because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately? Thanks and Happy New Year, Jonah Peretti. And so then he sent that. Obviously that's not going to go viral as an email, but he screenshots that and started getting it and put it out there. And then that got like kind of like a big news storm, uh, going. And he was doing stunts like this before creating BuzzFeed and kind of showed this guy knows how to make the internet, you know, how to tickle the internet. And he, uh, he, he, he did it well.

But well, they also go to 100 people and 96 have like a normal reaction, and then the 4 that fall for it, it's like they stitch those together and it just makes it look like everybody at this Trump rally feel— is dumb and makes this mistake. And it's like they kind of make New Yorkers or rally, you know, participants or teens or millennials on college campuses, they'll make them look like idiots because they'll— right. All you got to do is you talk to enough people, you're going to catch 5 people who fall for the trick, right? It's like Borat, right? Like when he does these tricks or these stunts, they do go viral and they do make, you know, the other party look bad. But they don't show you all the people that didn't fall for it and don't believe that and didn't say something stupid in response.