Unbundling Disney, Why CNN is Just Like the WWE, YouTube Creator Camps, and More

The only thing I think people love more than their kid, or love as nearly as much as their kid, is their dog. And, um, and so I'm surprised that there's not a place like Disneyland for dogs that is basically the happiest place on Earth for dogs.

Dude, Nick's thing is kind of weird. Let's see if it works.

Yeah. What's your prediction? Let's do it. Let's predict it now. Do you think this goes anywhere? You think it becomes worth something or no?

So the background here is our friend is this guy named Nick Huber who goes viral all the time for writing about like storage units.

Self— self— he's a self-storage guy on Twitter. His handle is Sweaty Startup.

I'm an investor in his, so I'll disclose that. I don't know what that means here, but I'll— we'll say it. Created— he made this thread like as a joke, or he made a joke about tomatoes. I don't even remember the joke, how he could grow tomatoes and sell them or something, and people like made fun of him and it went crazy viral. And then he created a tomato NFT project called Bromatoes, um, as a joke, but kind of not a joke. Do I think it's gonna go anywhere?

No. Kind of like well-executed where you're like, this isn't a joke. The art is amazing. The art is great.

It's great in the sense that it's like well-executed bad art. Like, it's a tomato that's a bro, that's a guy. So, uh, do I think it's gonna go anywhere? Of course not. No, I don't think so. Do you?

There's a chance. Uh, like, I don't know if you saw that he, uh, he posted a tweet from this account that's called, I think, Cosmo Divici or something like that. Did you see that tweet that he posted where somebody— he's like, oh, this just got interesting, and, um, That, that is one of the most popular NFT curator accounts. They own like tons of Punks and Bored Apes and whatever. And it's supposed to be Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg is the one who— I don't think it's him who writes the tweets because it's like a totally different writing style, but he says it's Snoop Dogg. Um, Snoop Dogg says it's him, and they funded it obviously with like millions of dollars worth of NFT purchases. And so I thought that was kind of interesting that he's got some, um some, you know, some heavy hitters in this, uh, this NFT world, the NFT collector space together.

How did he do it? So like, he told me that I think there's like either 1 or 2 or 3, like there's like 4,000, I don't remember, some like single-digit low.

Usually it's, usually it's 10,000 or 8,000, but, uh, doesn't matter. But let's just say 10,000 because that's what most of the projects are.

How do you literally make an image? Because like his images are all different. Is it like some code where you're like, you have like 18 different features and it's, and it swaps them?

Yes, exactly. So you have all these traits like hair, eyes, nose, mouth, body, shirt, pants, whatever. And then each one might have 10 variations, 12 variations, 25 variations. So there might be 25 hairstyles. And then you go through and you set, you, so you have an artist make 25 hairstyles and it's just the hair part. And then they say, you say the rarity, you say, okay, this is the most rare hairstyle, the golden mohawk. I, I only want that to appear 1% of the time. So you put that in all into a program. And it spits out a collection of 10,000 variations, 10,000 combinations of these things, and with the rarity, uh, so that some of them have the super rare attributes and then some of them have very common attributes. So that's how all these work.

What program do you use for this?

I don't know what people use. I think it's maybe just one smart contract, or maybe there's a special app for this. I'm not sure what, what people use.

Damn, I mean, that's crazy. That's, that's crazy to me.

But it's gotten so easy that, like, you know, Nick can take his tomato meme and, and get it done. Now he hired a good artist cuz the art he has is like actually like really good. It's 3D art. It's really nice. But you know, you see a different, um, 10,000 art collection drop, you know, every 4 hours or something in the crypto.

Got it. Okay.

So like I bought one yesterday. So if you go to OpenSea, uh,.io, I saw this. It, it is really, it's funny. Like these are such a, It's such degenerate gambling. Um, but I saw this thing go— if you see it on Twitter early, you should basically go mint the thing or buy the thing. So I saw this thing called Chainrunners. It took off, uh, right away. I saw people, I saw interesting people on Twitter talking about it. I think, uh, now the first guy who really, I, I think I, the guy who kind of think kicked out, kicked it off in the tech industry was the founder of Figma, who, this guy's Zoink. Um, And so the founder of Figma, which is like a multi-billion dollar design company, uh, he is a big NFT collector. He, he owned one of the most rare CryptoPunks. So he changed his profile picture to this, or, or like, you know, posted about it. And immediately, like, I started, I started seeing every VC doing it. So I bought in and, you know, I made double my money in a day. And, you know, you can get in and out of these things very quickly. Um, there's another, uh, I'll tell you about another one of these. This is kind of in the weeds, so I almost regret doing this early on in the show, but let's do it. There's this thing called Wolf Game. So go to wolf.game, and I think this is kind of a sign of something that's to come. It's a little confusing when you, when you first go to it. I only understand, let's say, 30% of it right now, but I, the part I understood made me think, oh shit, this is something new. So what is this? So crypto is now going into gaming. And what does that mean? It means like in the old way of gaming, you would put like, let's say a game like World of Warcraft. People who played World of Warcraft would spend thousands of hours grinding that game, playing that game, leveling up their characters, earning new stuff, and they would get zero economic value for it. So you would, you would put, you know, thousands of hours in and you would get $0 in return, but hey, you got the shiny helmet and your character now says level 60, congratulations. And it was, that was still good enough. People did that. People all around the world do that. Then games like Fortnite come out. Fortnite says, hey, you can play this game, it's about shooting each other, but you can have your character have all these special, special, um, costumes. They do nothing for you in the game. They're all— it doesn't make your character any better, but if you buy our in-game currency called V-Bucks, you can buy these special like capes and swords and helmets for your character.

All right, great.

People spent billions of dollars on V-Bucks, um, and, and bought tons of stuff in the game. And if they decide, like many people, many people who were 12 years old playing Fortnite and dropped, you know, $180 in the game buying stuff, now if they're tired of Fortnite, they want to go play a new game, that, that money is lost. You cannot take your items to another game. So why is crypto gaming going to be big? It's going to be big because when you buy an item in a game, you're going to own that item, and then other games will allow you to bring that item in. So it'll make, it'll make it way more valuable to buy things in games because you're gonna be able to use them, you're gonna be able to resell them later if you get tired of the game and somebody— you want to sell it. That doesn't exist today in most games. And secondly, you'll be able to take it with you to other games. All right, so now let me tell you what this Wolf Game thing is. What Wolf Game is, is it's almost like a gambling system. So you imagine, uh, if you go to the website, it's like little pixelated art, like 8-bit.

Yeah, it looks neat, like it looks like kind of punk rock a little. Like, I— all this, this whole, this whole genre of people online. It totally is like the freakers— what was it called? You know what I'm talking about? Like the, um, uh, like the steampunk type of vibe.

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely like this big overlap of like steampunk and crypto. So here's how the game works in a very— again, I don't even understand the full game, but here's how it worked when I, when I went to it. You could buy a sheep. So let's say you buy a sheep. If you, if you stake the sheep in the, in the barn, you may— meaning you put your sheep in the barn, every day you're gonna get— every sheep produces 10,000 1,000, uh, wool. And, um, and so your sheep is kind of like working for you. It's like farming wool for you, okay? And wool, wool has some value. Well, wool is like, uh, it's the in-game currency. It's like V-Bucks. So, so you buy a sheep, the sheep produces wool for you. Okay, that's interesting. You could also buy a wolf. If you buy a wolf or you own a wolf, um, here's how a wolf works. And this, this is the story of the game. The story of the game is If you put your sheep in the farm, they're safe because the farmers have made a truce with the wolves to say, do not attack, uh, the sheep in the, in the farm. And in exchange for the safety, it's like a mafia, in exchange for the safety, you get 20% of the wool as a wolf, as a, as a bribe, as a payment.

This is so crazy.

If somebody ever takes their sheep out of the farm, they can keep 100% of the wool for themselves, but there's a random chance that the wolf will come eat your sheep and take all of the wool and maybe take your sheep or something like that. And so the wolf didn't get 100%, there's a small chance that you might lose your fricking sheep. And so you could play it safe and pay the tax, or you can risk it for a bigger reward and you can lose your sheep. And so the whole game is basically about owning these sheep, owning these wolves, and the, the like random chance, the random probabilities of certain things happening. And the whole time you're accumulating wool, which has some, has some value in the game, right? It's the, it's the in-game currency. And I thought this is very interesting. It's kind of a stupid, silly game, but it's interesting because, um, it's a game that didn't just like add, um, crypto at the end. It kind of started with this, like the game is designed around buy this character, the character earns you money, buy this other character, that character steals money or collects a tax. And it's basically a game that's made to make you money. And I don't know if you know what's going on with Axie Infinity, but this is like a kind of—

yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the, the infinity thing is like the biggest moneymaker in the world. Right now, it seems.

Yeah, they've made like, I don't know, over $2 billion. Uh, the game has made over $2 billion in like a year. And it's this new model called play-to-earn. And play-to-earn basically just means normally when you played a game, you played just for shit, you know, shits and giggles. But now if you play and you do well in the game, you actually are earning the in-game currency, which is like, can be cashed out at any time. And so there are people, we have a friend that has a team of people in the Philippines just playing the game full-time. He pays them a salary and they play the game for him. And they, it's like an investment property. They make back 25% percent yield on top of the salaries that he pays them. He pays them to play this game all day.

I, I think I can—

I, I can imagine, um, you know, people obviously see this as like kind of fucked up. Uh, I think a lot of people will have a bad reaction to that, so I don't want to say their name because, oh my God, I didn't ask them in advance.

All right, that's amazing. Do you want to, um— all right, well, so like right now I'm looking at a sheet and you've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things here. Honestly, they all seem pretty good. Do you just want to like start banging through some stuff?

Yeah, let's do it. Uh, your boy went to Disneyland last week, had a ton of time. We— I had to skip one episode of the pod, but that made me get exposed to a bunch of new ideas. And then I got sick, so I haven't been able to work. I've just been sitting there, you know, doped up on Benadryl. So I got all kinds of, of crazy ideas that I want to bounce off you. The first one is about Disneyland.

Okay, so I got this text from Sean saying, "I'm at Disneyland." Or no, maybe it was a tweet. It was a tweet. I saw a tweet. You go, "I'm at Disneyland, and all I wanna do is land on DILF of Disneyland's.

Dad, I wanna F of Disneyland." Yeah, have you ever seen this Instagram account? DILFs of Disneyland?

No, but...

They're pretty funny.

I understand it.

It's basically just, like, hot dads that they take pictures of that happen to be at Disneyland that day, and they're always doing something that's hot to the mom, like... Oh, he's, you know, wiping the daughter's mouth because, you know, he didn't just leave it dirty. You know, he's picking— he's changing a diaper or whatever. It's like, that's what's hot. Uh, so that was my goal. I did not make it on a Deals with Disneyland. Pretty upset about it, but you know, I will recover. Um, okay, so Disneyland is kind of amazing, and when I was there, I was pretty blown away, and my wife was blown away. So my wife doesn't really care about business You know, she's interested in it, but she's not like a nut about it like you or me. Even she like basically grabbed my arm halfway through the thing, was like, 'This is amazing.' She was like, 'I'm kind of blown away by this guy's entrepreneurship to create this place,' because Disneyland is kind of a one-of-a-kind type of idea. And, uh, it's meant to be, you know, the happiest place on earth, and it really is for a lot of people. When you're there, uh, you can really see, um how happy people are. And in doing research for this, I went and watched this documentary about the starting of Disneyland, and in the comments— or at the end of the video, he goes, that's what— that's the backstory of Disneyland, but it means something different to everybody. In the comments, say what it means to you. And the YouTube comments are like eulogies. It's like essays about what Disneyland means to these people. It has like a huge emotional register. All right, so let me break you— make you make out some of the numbers. So let's start with the numbers and then the backstory. Some of the numbers. So Disneyland does about $3.8 billion a year of revenue. Every day about 50,000 people come to the park. So, you know, just roughly speaking, they make about just over $200 per guest, um, per guest per year. And that's, that's not counting the hotels, the flights, and the, and a bunch of the auxiliary stuff. So a ticket into the park is like $120, and then you spend like another $100 on food and merch while you're there.

Man, I feel like it was $100 when I was a kid.

Yeah, actually it started— so I went back, I was like, what was the initial price of this? Because Disneyland prices have been inflating actually like crazy. There's a chart showing inflation of Disneyland and it's like just up and to the right. Disneyland started at $3.25 to get in back when it, when it launched in 1955. So, you know, the minimum wage back then was 75 cents, and I think the average person's income was like $4,000 or something like that. So, you know, everything has gone up. Um, but now, you know, they, they basically have a off-peak, peak time. So if you go to peak time, it's gonna be $200-something. Normal is like $150, and low is like $100, something like that. So, um, so what happened? So Walt Disney, basically his story is kind of amazing. So he grows up and he's actually from your hometown. I don't know if you know this, you probably do, but he's from Missouri.

And I didn't know that.

Apparently there's a place in Missouri called Electric Park. Have you ever heard of this? No, because this is the inspiration for Disneyland. When he's 8 years old, he goes to this place called Electric Park, and Electric Park was kind of known for two things. One, it was, it was an amusement park, and the second is it was really clean. And that's like one of the biggest things about Disneyland is Disneyland is really clean. So imagine having 50,000 guests over to your house, but somehow everything stays really, really clean. Um, and that was like, he's fanatical about this. When he designed the park—

Electric Park in Kansas City. Yeah, I see it.

When he, um, when he designed the park, he made it so that I think every 30 feet there's a trash can, because he watched guests at amusement parks and he would see that if you— if the trash can was further than 30 feet away or whatever, they would just be like, ah, fuck it, they would just leave it on the ground or throw it on the ground or whatever, just dispose of it in a bad way. but if there was a can within 30 feet, they would like make the effort to go toss it. And so he made it so that at any point, and I tested this out when I was there, I was, I would often like check, okay, am I 30 feet within a trash can? And sure enough, like it's actually like legit, there's always a trash can near you and this place is super clean. So he goes to Electric Park and he wants to be a cartoonist. He, uh, ends up working at an ad agency and then he creates his first business. It's called Laff-O-Grams. And he's basically doing these like kind of like animated, uh, cards. But you know, a bad business deal leads, it starts working, but then he cuts a bad business deal where, uh, he's owed a bunch of money by one client, and then they don't pay him and the business goes under. And so he says, okay, let's go to Hollywood. And, um, and he tells his brother, let's go to Hollywood and let's create another business. And so they go and they create Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and this is where they create Mickey Mouse. This is where they create Snow White. That's the first big hit. So the company goes from like in debt or making no money to making millions of dollars off of Snow White. That was like the big win. And so he's like, okay, um, this is kind of working. And, um, the business is doing all right. It's not going gangbusters. Um, but it's afloat. And he's working on his next stories. He's working on Pinocchio. He's working on a couple other stories. And he's always had this crazy idea about amusement parks ever since Electric Park. And he takes his daughter to the local merry-go-round and he's like, ah, this is like so boring. Like, why isn't there something more grand? Than just this merry-go-round. Like, my daughter loves this, but like, this is so boring for the parents, and this is just one ride. Like, what if I made a place that was, um, you know, what if I made a place that was fun for both the parents and the kids to go to? Uh, which is like a similar theme with all Pixar movies and Disney, Disney movies, which is like, the movie is enjoyable, Toy Story is enjoyable to an adult and a kid. It has like two layers to it. Both can enjoy a different piece of it. And so he's like, And so what, how did they actually come about this? How did they actually like figure out the idea? So they started by doing research. They went to every theme park they could find. They went to the World's Fair. They went to a whole bunch of places getting inspiration and ideas and mesh and thinking about what is bad about this experience? What can be made better? So things being dirty, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, okay. Um, and he starts thinking about the design of the place. And Electric Park had this, um, train that went around the whole park. And so if you go to Disneyland, that's still the thing. There's right when you enter, there's a train and the train will take you around the whole circumference of the park. And he's like, all right, I'm gonna build— and he used to tell people, one of these days I'm gonna build an amusement park and it is gonna be clean. And he takes two guys off of Pinocchio and he says, hey, listen, um, I want you guys to start, uh, start working on like Secret Project X. And, um, he's like, you know, it's a shame that when people come to Hollywood, there's nothing to see here. Like people all around the world have heard of Hollywood. They come here, there's the sign where it says Hollywood in the, in the letters on the hill, but there's nowhere to see Hollywood.

Hollywood I'm, I'm so out of it. Is Disneyland in LA?

It's in LA.

Yeah, it was in like Anaheim. Okay, I, for some reason I thought it was in Florida.

That's Disney World.

Got it.

Oh dude, you're like not in Disney, you're not in the Disney World at all. Okay, um, so he—

I mean, I know a little bit, but I— come on, Disney World and Disneyland, that's an easy confuse.

No, no, that's, that's fair, that's fair. Um, so he basically— Disneyland came first. So he basically is like, uh, guys, if anybody came to even see our animation studio, they just see a bunch of dudes hunched over drawings. It's not very impressive. Let's build something amazing in Hollywood. And the guys get super excited. They start doing research, but then reality hits. They have to— they're working on Pinocchio. They gotta ship it. They're working on Fantasia. They gotta ship it. Then World War II happens. So all of the— all of World War II happens. And then he comes back because he hires this guy Kimball to work in his studio. And Kimball's like this junior kind of animator guy. And Kimball invites all the coworkers over to his house for like a barbecue or a birthday party or something like that. And in the back, in the backyard of his house, he's like, oh, by the way, you guys don't know this, but my hobby is I build these little trains, almost like the steamboat style train, but like it's like a life-size thing. It was very small. Uh, it's like, you know, one, one, uh, like whatever, one link of a train basically.

Have you, have you— his, this guy's name is Ward Kimball. If you Google him, he looks like a cartoon.

And you can see his, his train too. So Walt goes to this thing, he's blown away that he's seeing the train up close, and he's like, dude, Ward built this thing? Okay, we're— the whole Mickey— he says, he comes back to the office, he sends a memo, he says Mickey Mouse Park is back on. And he tells the shareholders, shareholders say don't do it, movie studio is already on, on edge, this sounds like a big distraction, it's against the charter of the company. Uh, we don't want you doing this. He says, okay, um, no problem, I understand, I'll create a new company. So he just creates another company to create the park. He's like, I'm still gonna do this, but if you don't want in, I will— I'll do this myself. And, um, and he calls it like, uh, Redlaw or whatever, something like that, which is like, you know, uh, Walter backwards, uh, is kind of the neat way he names it. He starts working on it, and so he's like, all right, how do I fund this thing? He thinks it's going to take $5 million to build Disneyland. And in actuality, it ends up taking $17 million to do it. And so he's like, all right, how do I fund this? He, uh, he takes his, uh, his life insurance policy and he takes a big loan against that. That gives him like, you know, a hundred grand or so to, to go do this. Then he sells a house that he had in Palm Springs. So that's like the next seed money. Uh, like he goes through that pretty quickly. Then he, then he goes, all right, I need some bigger money. How do I get millions of dollars for this? Okay. He goes to ABC, the TV network, and he says, hey ABC, you're struggling right now. You don't have much TV programming. I will create this, this program called like whatever, like the Wonderful World of Disney or something like that. I'll create a TV show for you that'll air every Sunday if you invest in my park idea. So Disney basically puts down half a million dollars plus another about $6.5 million of loans and bonds, and they own 34% of Disneyland. And so that's how he got the next $7 million. And then he did the same thing with two other companies and then he sold some sponsorships and he, he like accumulates together the $17 million.

Hustled his way.

He hustled his way to doing it. The other thing that he did was he was like, all right, um, you know, this, this thing works because, um, he's like, I, I gotta hire, I gotta have like the, uh, the rides work automatically. And so he created this thing where if you go to Disneyland now, you sit in a ride and you go and it's sort of like a, It's like a, a stage play that plays out, but it's all synchronized. When your little like rollercoaster cart enters this room, the lights go on, the character makes a sound, and then when you leave the room, it all folds back into its thing. And that's called animatronics. And so basically audio animatronics was like the thing he wanted to do, which was like he wanted live animals, but it's too much work. So instead of live animals, he created these robotic animals and he said, I'm gonna synchronize the movements to music on a loop. And there's this one guy who was just working on only this and he was kind of in front of a green screen trying to make this like puppet do this thing synchronized to music. And eventually they finally figured it out and that was like the big breakthrough. So, okay, let me fast forward a little bit. They opened the park, they build the whole thing in less than one year. They opened the park and he only invited like 1,500 people to it or something like that. Uh, like invite only launch, but somebody counterfeited the tickets. And so double the number of people showed up with counterfeit tickets on day one because double the number of people showed up. Uh, everything breaks. The plumbing breaks because there's too many people using water in the park, more than the load was able to handle. So he— they come to him, they're, Walt, we got a problem, the plumbing is broken. You have to make a choice, toilets or water fountains. He's like, toilets for sure. And so he, uh, there's no water, there's no drinking water that day. The asphalt was still so freshly poured that like women's high heels was getting stuck in the cement because it was like caving in. It was basically a giant disaster. And he does some PR. He basically says, look, um, we, you know, we had to work out the kinks. Give me a month, and basically, give me, give me some time and this thing will be smooth. And sure enough, within a month, the, the baby is, you know, humming. And in 7 weeks, he does a million visitors. So it was kind of an immediate hit once he did it because it was such a great idea.

Disney, right off the bat, or at this era, at this point, how famous were they? They were like, I mean, they were a big deal.

They weren't like a semi-famous. They hadn't had like that— I mean, nowhere near what they are now, but like they were semi-famous. Really, the ABC show which he was doing while he was building the park was almost like the hype video for the, for the park launch.

Was he just grinding the whole time?

Yeah, a crazy amount of work. And so he, he creates this thing and, you know, it's basically the 6th or 7th most visited tourist destination in the world now. And, um, you know, it's kind of— and I think crazy place.

I think which is kind of shocking. I think Disney, or the theme park division prior to COVID, was the most profitable part of the company, wasn't it?

Except for— well, not profitable because they had a lot of expenses, but in terms of gross profit, yes, because they had a lot of revenue and a lot of expenses. Um, but now Disney+ is like the bigger thing because Disney+ is like pure profit. Disney+ basically took all that IP that people loved and created a streaming service.

But before that, before COVID before Plus, I like Disneyland. It wasn't It wasn't a project, it was, uh, like a major value creation. A lot of value was created there.

I wanted to know, is this a, is this a loss leader or is this a, um, a cash cow? And it's, it's more like a cash cow. It's hard to tell because every company's like accounting makes everything look like it's like losing money, you know what I mean? Like accounting can make something look amazing or terrible regardless of it. But you know, the parks division, Parks and Resorts, was doing, you know, billions, like, I don't know, like $30 billion a year or something crazy like that. So it was, you know, obviously became a smash success. When he wanted to do Disney World in Florida, he creates 5 stealth companies cuz he's like, Disney was a hit. He's like, I'm looking for the second location. If anybody finds out where I'm looking, the price will go up. So he creates 5 shell companies. He starts buying up land in Florida. Sure enough, it leaks out the day after it leaks. The price per, I think, acre went from like $180 an acre to $18,000 an acre. Basically, he couldn't buy anymore once the news leaked. And, uh, and, you know, he had this like kind of like inspiring vision. So he's like, Disneyland, I want this to be the happiest place on earth. And he's like, I want people to have no problem, no problems when they're here. I want this to be an escape from your problems, you know, um, in real life. And Disney World, he's like, he created this thing called Epcot, which, uh, I don't know if you've ever heard of Epcot, but Epcot is basically Government agency? No, it does sound like it though. EPCOT is like right next to Disney World. It's this huge dome-looking thing, and it stands for— it's an experimental— what is it? It's Experimental Prototype Community of the Future, uh, something like that, of tomorrow. That's what it stands for. Um, and so what he did was EPCOT is basically like— it takes the cutting edge of what the future looks like and it creates like a mini simulation of the future. So you can go and see the latest, what the, what the future is going to look like in terms of technology Did you go? I've been once when I was a kid. Yeah. And it's kind of amazing. And so, um, and he's like, you know, did, but all of these projects, he, he, I'll, I'll read you some of the quotes that I thought was pretty great for him as like an entrepreneur. He goes, um, I want this to be, uh, the happiest place on earth. I want parents and kids to have fun together. He goes, um, with, when it came to Epcot, he was saying, um, where is it? He goes, I want this to be a living blueprint of tomorrow. I want this to be an always evolving thing. Epcot is never gonna finish because tomorrow will always be different. Than today. Uh, Disneyland itself will never be completed. It will go— it will go on as long as there is imagination left in the world. And so since then, you know, they built the park for $17 million, but obviously they pour in like hundreds of millions of dollars every year to upgrading the parks, changing the rides and the themes and all that stuff, um, in order to kind of keep it continuously evolving. So that's kind of amazing.

I orig— I, I, I brought up Six Flags to you a while ago. Do you remember when I brought that up?

Yeah.

So the guy who invented— I don't know if he invented, but he inspired me and he kind of invented the genre a little bit of email newsletters. It's this guy named Bob Pittman, and he had this accelerator called the Pilot Group. And basically he funded a bunch of entrepreneurs and he taught them like, he's like, here's what I think you should do. And like 5 or 6 relatively big name companies came out of it. Like PureWow, Daily Candy, Thrillist, which is now a multibillion-dollar media company called Group Nine, and like 2 or 3 others that you— someone here would recognize. I forget what they're called. And he did this newsletter thing and he like made it huge. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Six Flags.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Which is kind of interesting. And before that, he invented— or he was like on the founding team for MTV. He helped he was the first CEO and president of MTV. And his, uh, big thing was being— prior to starting the newsletter businesses, he was the CEO of Century 21 Real Estate, which is a multi-billion-dollar thing, Clear Channel Outdoor, uh, he was the CEO for a minute of AOL, and then he was the CEO of Six Flags.

Super impressive.

It was a killer company when he ran it. And I think pre-pandemic, they— They raised, uh, they had too much debt, but it was making good money. So these companies, I think, are pretty badass actually, and they're gonna roar back right now. If you started working on this 2 years ago, you'd be in an awesome position, right?

Um, and so I wanted to talk about some of the, like, kind of spin-off ideas. So that's, you know, that's, that's the backstory of Disney. But when I'm there, I'm thinking, how could this be better? And, uh, so I have one, one tip for Disney, Disneyland itself, which is Obviously the absolute worst part, the only part that takes away your happiness at Disneyland is waiting in lines. So the average ride, you know, you're waiting 30 minutes to 45 minutes just to ride this ride for 90 seconds. And, uh, especially if you're waiting with like a little kid, the kids don't understand that you're waiting. They're like, I wanna go now. I want it my turn. Like my daughter's just, it's my turn now. It's Blushy's turn now. Let's go. And I was like, well, they do kind of nothing. To make the line experience better.

Well, don't they have a FastPass that everyone buys?

They used to, and they got rid of it because a bunch of reasons. I think A, everybody was buying it, so it became less useful. Then B, um, they got a bunch of shit for it, like, oh, you know, kind of elitist. It's elitist, exactly. So they had to kind of back off that. So they do have this thing called the VIP Tour that you can pay for that basically takes you to the front of line of everything, but you have to pay— it's— what is it? It's basically you pay $6,000 to $10,000 a day for a group of up to 10 people. Uh, and so if you're willing to drop, you know, $1,000 per person, uh, you can—

dude, you probably just feel like a huge douche though, like doing that.

Totally, totally. Uh, yeah, because you're just looking at a bunch of sweaty crying babies and you're like, get out of the way, plebs. Yeah, exactly. And so, uh, but I gotta— you know, it probably does feel good. So I think the thing that they— that Disneyland needs— the site— so there's psychology that's associated with this. There was this, um, TED Talk that got popular back in the day. I don't really remember it exactly, I'm kind of gonna butcher it, but this guy was like, there was this problem which was like with a subway station or train station, and everybody was so annoyed, um, with like, I guess like, uh, how long the train took to get from one place to another. They— people hated riding the train, so they, they commissioned this like bounty. They said, request for proposals, uh, you know, guests are not happy because the trains are running too slowly, and most people, the common way to solve this was engineers are like, we have to do all these, we have to do this massive engineering overhaul to make the train go 20% faster, 30% faster. It's just, we're gonna require billions of dollars and the trains have to be shut down for 2 years while we rebuild the train with this new infrastructure that's gonna be faster. And then one guy was like a psychologist and he was like, why don't we just wait, make the ride more pleasant so that you don't feel the, the slowness of time? He's like, you don't have any food carts on the train. Like, there should be a food trolley that's walking through the train for pretty cheap, like, snacks. And he's like, the person will see the trolley, then they'll— the focus will go away from just waiting for the train to arrive to— at their destination— to, like, waiting for the trolley to get to them. And then they'll buy— I believe, uh, and they'll be eating the snack. And, like, that was, uh, like, a $2 solution that would— that actually, like, improve the rider experience by, like, you know, whatever, some amazing percent.

I think it's Rory Sutherland who created this. That's Roy Sutherland, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that's right. All right, I knew I recognized this guy. He was— so he's a marketing agency guy, and he was the boss of Ogilvy, uh, one of the big, uh, advertising firms. And their whole shtick is just like perception, and I think the, the talk is all on perception.

And this exists everywhere. So like Instagram, I remember when they first came out, one of the things that was a magical experience about Instagram was aside from the photo filters, was that when you would take a photo and you'd say post, it would like instantly load and post. And people were like, how did you do this? Like, that's incredible. And, um, you know, back then iPhones were so bad and the connections were so poor that it would take like multiple minutes to upload a single photo onto the internet. And these guys are doing it in a few seconds.

They weren't probably actually uploading it.

Well, there's— no, no, they were. They actually were. So first he was like, dude, why don't we just like say it's done and then it'll happen in the background and like whatever. Whatever. But people would go check and they say, oh, it's not posted here, this app doesn't work. So what they did was they realized, oh, every— what everybody does is they wait till the caption's done to start up. They wait till you have the photo, the filter, the caption, until they start uploading the photo. What they did was they separated, and they would do it all on one screen. So what Instagram did was they would let you take the photo and filter it, and then they would say next, next, you'd hit a button, and then you'd start to write your caption. And they knew people take like 2 minutes to write their caption. Like they're trying to think of what to say. And during that 2 minutes they would just upload the image in the background. So the image was already uploaded back then, like during that wait time. Um, and so they, instead of making you wait, they did it while you were already doing something else. And that was like a big thing. So this perception stuff actually does have an impact in products. That's what I think Disney needs to do.

I think they need to— another example of that is when Uber first came out, and maybe they still have this, when you pull up your phone or when you used to pull up your phone, they would show you all of the cars in your area crawling around the map.

Oh yeah, they're so close to you. And I think that was faked actually.

And it was fake. It wasn't real.

Yeah.

And it wasn't real, but it would make you feel like they're everywhere. And if you just click it now, it's about to be here. And sometimes I don't remember why, if it was random, you would open it up and there'd be no cars around and you're like, oh, eff that, I'm gonna go to Lyft. But it was fake. And this idea, I, there's this great book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Yep. And it's a famous, famous book. And in one of the principles of great design is you need a feedback loop. For example, if you were to click a button on your computer, like a submit button, and it wouldn't tell you it was submitted or something like that, or when you close a door, you don't hear a click, right? That lack of, that lack of feedback, it, it, it's annoying and it's disturbing. It bothers you. And so this is kind of in line a little bit with that.

Yeah, totally. And so I think what Disney needs to do is they need line entertainment. They need something to happen in the line to keep you occupied. They need to extend the ride essentially into the line. There needs to be things built into the line, little characters that come out, things that drop from the ceiling, you know, little magical snowflakes that fly out every 2 minutes, uh, you know, candy that gets thrown into the crowd, whatever. Something needs to happen in the line. That's my, my one tip for Disneyland. Okay, besides that, I was thinking, why aren't there more of these? So Disneyland was built in 1955, and you have Six Flags, you have like kind of like smaller adventure parks, But what, what are the other opportunities here? So I think if you take the elements of it, you have a target, which is, let's say, a kids, um, you have IP that they love. So, you know, they're excited to go see Mickey Mouse and Lion King and Aladdin and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and all these characters that they've seen in the movies. They get to see them in real life. That's the big thing. And, um, and then you have rides. And you have food and you have also you have parades and, and amusement, like entertainment that way. So what other niches are like, do you think that there's other business opportunities that somebody who is like a Walt Disney, somebody who is a creative, creative mind could go build today? What do you think is out there?

Yeah, I, I think there's many and I think that we've actually talked about a few. So the, the, the first one, which people laughed at, but it's kind of amazing. Was the Museum of Ice Cream, and I, I thought that was amazing. Another one is Meow Wolf. Meow Wolf is this business that has locations in Arizona, New Mexico, and Vegas, I think. I don't remember where else. Supposedly they do north of $100 million in sales, and it's basically like in— it's like if Cirque du Soleil was a museum and you could walk around and like touch different art, and it's kind of like all in your face and it's kind of interesting. I think you can do that. I think that there's one thing that I think is kind of amazing that's out right now, which is it's called the Van Gogh Experience. And so I like Van Gogh stuff. My wife is like huge into that. And so we pay money and we go to the Van Gogh Experience. And so I do think that there's like little niche things that you can do related to this. I think that like what I would do is I would look at what the most popular exhibits of science museums and art museums are, and I would make something special out of it. For example, do you remember like 15 years ago The body, uh, what was it called?

Uh, the bodies, I think it was called Bodies.

I think that's all it was. That way it was like a huge hit success. Right. And you'd go to all the science centers or whatever they're called, science museums throughout the country. And they have like real life bodies that you can, that like cadavers that were donated and they dissected them and they tell you how the inside of the body works. That, I mean, I don't know if that's a mainstay somewhere, but like that's a good example. What I would do is I would look at all the science museum and all the art museums exhibits that are long— the longest lasting, as well as all the Broadway stuff that's the longest lasting. And I'd be like, all right, well, those are all hits. Like, why are they hits?

Right, right. Things that IP that people love. Yeah, I think if you— I think, I think that the trick here is unbundling. So I don't think you want to make the full theme park. I think you want to unbundle components and either just remix those or just do only that thing. So I'll give you some of the ideas that I had while I was waiting in line for 45 minutes for a ride. I came up with all— these are the ideas I came up with while I was sitting in line. So the first one was target market. Um, the only thing I think people love more than their kid, or love as nearly as much as their kid, is their dog. And, um, and so I'm surprised that there's not a place like Disneyland for dogs that is basically the happiest place on earth for dogs. I would take my dog there if I could just give my dog like an amazing day. Um, I would do it. Uh, you know, I don't know about you, you're a dog guy too. I don't know if you have that, that pull. Ideally it'd be local, not like, you know, gotta fly to LA to go do this. So maybe it's, maybe it's more like a traveling circus. But why is there not just an incredible set of experiences that, uh, dogs love? You know, dogs have a blast in, and you can just see your dog doing it and take pictures of them and give them, give them what they deserve. What do you think, dude?

It sounds like an insurance nightmare.

Any more than an amusement park with like kids on roller coasters?

Yes, so much worse. You have a Foo Foo dog that is won't hurt anyone. I've got like an 80-pound pit bull who's well-behaved, but if he ever wanted to hurt something, he'd kill it. And it sounds like it'd be so challenging to— like, I mean, I would be stressed out about that constantly.

Okay, fair enough. We got some liability concerns. All right, what else? Uh, we've talked before that IP— how do you get great IP? So Disney obviously used the Disney portfolio of IP— Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, whatever. What are the new— what are the new forms of IP? So I think if you ever use YouTube for kids, you're like, Cocomelon, Blippi, these are characters that they watch just as, you know, just as much as like, you know, uh, Disney movies because it's all on YouTube. Um, so they're on YouTube, they're invented by like kind of individual people there. And then they got all rolled up by this thing called Moonbugg and Moonbugg owns a bunch of this stuff. And then Moonbugg got rolled up by that thing that Kevin Mayer is doing.

Billions, I think.

He was the former CEO of Disney, then he partnered with Blackstone, and Blackstone gave him $2 billion or something like that to go buy all this IP. So he bought Reese Witherspoon's movie studio for $800 million, he bought Cocomelon, he bought, uh, Blippi, he bought about, you know, bought all these different, you know, different, uh, forms of IP. So I think that YouTube channels have IP that people care about. That is, uh, if you, if you, if you combine them all together and there was You know, the way that Disney does is like there's different areas of the park for each world, each character theme. I think you could do it that way, dude.

Yeah, I'm on board with this. Keep going.

Religion is another one. So, um, take it—

there isn't— isn't there— doesn't that exist? Isn't there like a, like a Muslim version of this? I don't know.

I've never heard of it.

I thought that there was, but, uh, in the South, uh, they have their— maybe it's Christian. There's like a Christian theme park. Have you not heard of this?

What I had in mind, no, it's like a Bible.

I think it's like a Bible theme park. There is, uh, it's in the— yes, it's like a Christian— I, I don't— The Holy Land Experience is one of them, and then there's a Holy Land, and then there's Ark Encounter with like a real life size Noah's Ark. But there is this thing called a Holy Land Experience. It's based out of, uh, Orlando, Florida.

Yeah, okay. I don't know if that does well or not, but I could see a religious-themed theme park doing well, right? The merry-go-round, that's Mary. You know, you got Jesus's, Jesus's, uh, you know, jumping ride, whatever. You know, you, you just go totally, totally, uh, fun with religion.

It does okay. So it's a nonprofit, so you could actually go and look at all their expenses and revenue. It looks like it brings in, uh, $10 million a year in ticket sales.

Yeah, I think it could do— I think you could do a lot better than that. Them setting it up as a nonprofit tells me that, you know, their ambition is probably not not, not huge there with it. So I think you could do that with any different religion. Um, okay, what else? The other side of it is like you unbundle parts of the experience. So maybe the parade is amazing and like, you know, the parade is, is one of the experiences that you could just offer individually. Or maybe like Museum of Ice Cream. I think that's a good example is it takes the go take cute photos in front of all these different backdrops and with you in some costume. I think it unbundled that and it just offered that. There's no roller coasters, it's just the photo part. And so I think there's a whole bunch of things here, and I think this is gonna get bigger because as the world gets increasingly digital, there's gonna be this demand for real-world experiences. But the real-world experiences can't be something that I can do digitally just as well. It has to be unique and it has to be sort of exhilarating in a way that is a, it's a reason to get out of the home. It's a reason to get away from a screen. And so things like like we've talked about in fitness, like Tough Mudder or Spartan Race, things that are like, you know, photo things like a Museum of Ice Cream. Um, and now I think that theme parks are another one where there's a big opportunity to do this well.

So I used to work for that TV show I've talked about a bunch, American Pickers, and we had this store and it was in Nashville. It was a really small store, maybe 4,000 square feet or less. It wasn't very big at all. And people would complain all the time They're like, oh, I thought this was going to be huge. It was tiny. And people would come from all over the world, Australia, Europe, all over the South. I mean, people from the South love this crap. And they would come and they would— it was free to come and they would just want to look at all the items that they'd seen on TV. And I remember correctly, on a— and this was in 2010-ish, when a good day we would sell $30K in t-shirts and mugs. Just at that store. We would crush it just off that store. If I was a MrBeast or someone who wanted to partner with MrBeast, or there's a bunch of these YouTubers, they do a lot of interesting things. There's this one guy, I think his name is Petcock. I forget his exact name. He's this older guy on YouTube with 20 or 15 million subscribers and he shoots every gun. So like any type of gun you can imagine, he has like shot it like an old revolutionary gun or some like weird experimental shotgun. And it's got a huge following, but he's in the middle of like— he owns like a plot of land where it's like, it's like, you know, you could do anything you want. Same with— there's a couple of the guys named— there's another YouTuber named Roman who's got, uh, he's based out of Ohio. He's got this massive plot of land and he's always like inventing all these weird go-karts and shit. Or MrBeast always does this weird like epic stuff. If I was a YouTuber, I think you could create like these epic experiences. Do you remember that thing called— do you remember Woodward?

No. What is that?

So, Woodward was this— It started out, I think, in Pennsylvania, and it was called Woodward Camp, and it was a sleepaway summer camp in Woodward, PA. And it was a huge outdoor skatepark with bunk beds and stuff. And as a kid, you would pay $2,000 or $3,000— I don't remember— thousands of dollars. It was expensive enough that my parents never would've done it. And it's in this rural area, and you pay all this money to go to this sleepaway camp, and you skateboard and BMX and do all this crazy shit as a kid that you think that, like, that you see on Rocket Power or whatever. And it crushed and eventually was sold to Powder. Uh, what is it called? Powder? It's like the largest, um, or Vail Resorts, one of those. It's like the largest private equity landowning and resort companies in the world. And they eventually bought it for a lot of money. And so anyway, I think, I think there is a lot of movement here.

You say the MrBeast thing just reminded me, um, have you— did I talk about this movie, this documentary, Boy State? State on here. Did I talk about this?

No.

Have you, have you watched this thing?

No.

Boys State. Unbelievable documentary. Gotta watch it. It's, uh, it's on, um, I don't know if it's on Hulu or Apple TV+ or something like that.

I got—

it got recommended to me. I watched it. I loved it. So what Boys State is, it's a camp. It's a 1-week camp, I think, in Texas.

And Austin.

It simulates Texas politics. So you get there and, uh, it's like on day one you get divided into like kind of their version of the Democrats and Republicans. It's like, you know, you join Team Blue or Team Red, and immediately they become like super fucking tribal and like hate the other side, which is hilarious because they just like— it's arbitrary, it's completely arbitrary. So what this documentary is, is it follows one session of Boys State. Uh, hold on one second.

If you— and you could— I'm actually looking at the notable alumni from, uh, it's like everyone, uh, like, so, I mean, there's like hundreds of famous people who went, famous politicians who went to it.

Yeah, exactly. So you go there and you, you get divided up, so you're on the blue or the red team, Democrats or Republicans. They call it something else, I forget. And then, um, the documentary follows what happens that week, which is you, uh, you run— the party basically nominates people So you can say, I want to be governor, I want to be treasury, I want to be, you know, vice governor, or whatever the, whatever the offices are. So like, there's a handful of roles. You first, um, you first, you know, debate, or you nominate yourself, and then you give a speech, debate in your party to be the nominee for governor, and then you run against, uh, the other, the other side. And, uh, and so it's, it's kind of an amazing documentary because it just shows how instantaneously these games, these politics X games just completely infect your brain and change the way you act. And like, these kids who are like— I don't know how old they are, they seem like they're in like 8th grade or so, um, I could be wrong on that— but they're like, they're acting just like a politician acts. They're like making promises, they're talking about what's wrong in the country, and one side loves guns, the other side hates guns, and it's literally such a simulation. And then at the— and then it follows the, the election, and the election happens, and it kind of culminates and like, you know, it follows these 5 characters and it culminates in one of them winning the thing. And, um, it's just this crazy documentary. So I think that that experience of a camp is kind of interesting too, to me. Uh, I think this has been going on for like 70 years, and like you said, a whole bunch of like famous politicians went and actually did this when they were kids. And, um, when you said MrBeast, that reminded me of like, why isn't there a creator camp? Like Okay, why, why we talked about Boy Scouts going under and like who's gonna replace Boy Scouts. If MrBeast basically said come to this one-week sleepaway camp and create, become a creator, like create your channel and like it's all about you're gonna be here, we hand you a little selfie stick with a camera and you're gonna create your vlog content, you're gonna create your channel, you're gonna create your brand, you're gonna have your fans, you're gonna follow each other's channels and like it's just a place to like come to learn how to be a be a creator.

And that, that's actually a fantastic idea because if you look at the stats, I think that either you or me or one of us shared something where they asked like 15-year-olds what they wanna do when they grow up. And like 20 or 30%, like a shocking large number said they wanted to be a YouTube creator. And the second largest thing I think was a Twitch creator. Like it was still the same thing.

Yeah. Basically it's a video, like a YouTuber basically is number one. And that, that's just kind of all encompassing of like an online content creator. And it used to be back in the day like athlete, musician, um, you know, politician, scientist, astronaut. And like 10— about 10 years ago, you know, it flipped and, uh, and YouTuber became number one. And people, you look at that, they shake their fists and say, this is what's wrong with the country. And, uh, other people say— other people who realize it, you can't pass a judgment like that. It's sort of like, is what— if that's what people want, that's what people want.

You just also— if kids want If kids were actually going to follow through on what they would say when they were younger, there would be a whole lot more marine biologists in the world.

Exactly. Like, I would be a dinosaur right now.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's exactly that many vets out there.

Exactly. Um, so I think that's a great idea as like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I, and I think it's fan service too. So I think you would just become more famous. You'd build fan love and you'd print like, I don't know, $20 million every summer. Running your camp. It's pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I think, like, I went to a space camp from NASA when I was, like, in 5th grade.

Did you really?

The state of Texas sent every 5th grader to it, so it's kind of amazing.

What?

Yeah, and they only did it once, so I was just lucky to be in that timing.

I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly.

It's an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship, and, like, you get to play commander and, like, do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there's a version of that, like like, I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they're fascinated with the police. I think they're fascinated with the Army. And like, if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh, people will pay for that. And I think they're going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built.

Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the Week? Yeah, or do you want to go a different one?

No, it's good. It's just a crazy story. I don't even know what the point of this one is.

Let's go to a different one. Then we can do a different one.

All right, let's do a quick one. Quick idea. This, I saw this, it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what's his name? I'll give him credit real quick. Somebody, somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and, uh, I thought it was really interesting. So it's a specialnames.cn. So, uh, what's the guy's name? The guy's name, Mike, Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there's a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She's basically made a few hundred thousand dollars, and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So, so basically in China, every, uh, Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know— they kind of know that for, for business purposes and travel purposes, it's just easier to have to like be like, yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha. And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it's not your native thing. So It's like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I might pick something that's really weird or off, like it doesn't sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh, would be like their Western name. It's like, no, no, you shouldn't have picked that one. Like, you know, that's kind of a strange name. If you were trying to have like an easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman's service is, she— you could go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it's like, are you on the website?

It's, it's like, yeah, I'm looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says the baby we named, and it says a million— they've named over a billion babies, but the English is, is off.

Yeah, well, the actual site's in Chinese. I think it's a Google Translate that you're looking at. And, uh, you just say boy or girl. I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says Jasmine.

And then— no, so you, you pick 5 attributes like, um, nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that, and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says the Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb— Caleb Carr. I don't know who that is. Is that a famous actor? Zachary Taylor, I guess, the American president. Yeah, it's pretty funny.

And so this site, I thought, what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And, you know, this girl's made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And I thought that was like—

how does it make money? Just through ads?

Really cool side hustle. For a college kid.

It just makes— they just make money through ads, I think.

Yeah, I don't know exactly. I thought you pay her to do it, but maybe you're saying you just got a name right away.

I just got a name.

I was doing it on my phone, so it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell.

And they— and they— and the logo is just this generic-looking white lady. Like, that's like the spokesperson.

If that's her or not.

That's definitely not her.

So let me do this. Oh yeah, it's like a cartoon.

This is awesome.

So there's a hilarious little side hustle that I loved. Okay, let's do, let's do this shitty Billy of the Week. I read the story and I was blown away. This is not really— this is interesting only in that it's a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out just now? So there's this guy named Michael Goguen. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like one of the biggest venture firms ever.

Is he the one who stole money from them?

No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him, like sued him for, or accused him of, uh, of like sexual abuse. She said, you know, he's— I've been in a relationship with him for 8 years or 10 years or something like that, and he's extremely abusive sexually to me, and blah blah blah. Uh, she's a stripper that he met somewhere, and then she became his girlfriend, and then whatever. And, uh, this— the suit— he, he didn't lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like like he got acquitted or whatever. Um, but you know, still Sequoia was like, you know, we decided it's best to part ways. So a story came out in the Daily Mail. You know it's good because it's on the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the, the trash of the trash, but it's the junk food you can't resist. And, um, basically there was some wild shit about this guy. So here's the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Goguen, uh, he basically, after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana Montana, and he basically sets up his, like, estate in Montana. He owns, like, I don't know, uh, 100,000 square feet of, like, space of houses in, in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar. Under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room, and the Boom Boom Room is where he takes, like, you know, girls that he meets. And he— so this guy's on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it's just full of—

Have you done the— wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again.

A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with is what Michael says.

Okay, so do the math. If you— so if you— if this has happened over a 20-year period, yeah, 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days.

Yeah, every day and a half.

Is that crazy?

What?

I don't believe that. That doesn't make sense to me.

I don't know if it's true. I don't know if he did it or he didn't. Sort of like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, that means you slept with 2 women a day. Like, this doesn't make any sense.

Um, yeah, his response, by the way, he was like, yeah, sometimes it was 3 though.

Yeah, exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy's wild. So, so he basically, um, he— there's tons of— so what happened was he had created this like security company company to cover his tracks. And it's like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him. And they were kind of like his fixers. They're the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they're suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he'd have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um, and they would have— he'd be like, you need to do this. Like, go, I'll put money in your account, you pay her off. And, um, and eventually one guy— so he had a friend who, um, The story is he brings his daughters over to the friend's house with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You just have sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, this is messed up. And he's like, he calls him a pedophile. And he's like, dude, like, I don't, you know, don't, don't bring up my flaws. And like, you know, there's a one-time thing and blah blah blah. And the guy's like, oh, this this messed up. And he's like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, if you come out and say this, I'm gonna like ruin you. And, um, the guy's like, you know, eff that. He then sleeps with the guy's wife as like, you know, part of this, part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed and he's like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he's doing. Um, while he's meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff, you know, leading this professional life. The guy's worth $5 billion, by the way. So he's, he's, he's a, he's a multi-billionaire himself. Stuff. So the guy goes to his, like, security guy and says, we need to kill him. We have— this guy's getting too— he's too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We gotta kill him. And don't— and they're basically, like, in the article, it's like, don't, like, communicate anywhere except for Wickr, this, like, self-deleting text messaging app. Um, and the guy goes to him and says, hey, hey, like, talks him off the ledge. No, let's not kill this guy, whatever. But that was, like, one of the allegations, and And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off.

And how much do you think— how much do you think you'd have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think, I think 9 out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up.

Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it's like jewelry Uh, like, he, he slept with one woman, then she got— the husband found out, got divorced, and then he paid for— he bought her a 5-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce. And, uh, you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy— like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like, this is like a crazy-ass 3-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he's just like this, you know, cookie-cutter white VC-looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And, um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

So I, um, I've read— I, I, I read a little bit about like odd billionaires, and I've maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it Do you— have you ever met someone who's like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like, like they have a— like, for example, this is like public knowledge. Peter Thiel basically employed this, this 3 lawyers, big shot lawyers, and they're— and basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed— and this is a great book by Ryan Holiday, I forget what it's called, but he employed these 3 lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like '09. And he goes, however long it takes, your full-time job.

Yeah, yeah.

He goes, just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we're going to pounce. And he employed these guys the whole time. And there's some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like, for example, in the book they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like, that's what it— like, he always— he's got a team and they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he's a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you— do you think you've ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who's got some of these weird-ass things like a, like a security force who does exotic things like this?

A fixer? Yeah, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I've talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like the Filipino guy. Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was— I talked about before. I mean, he's like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And, um, you know, he, he had a crazy elaborate like business. Like, his— him as my boss was really weird. Like, he was really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like, on the wall that had everybody's computer tracked, and your productivity was like this. Like, he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show— like, your, your little square would flash red if you weren't being productive enough. And I don't even know how it was like measuring that, like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don't know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had 4 women that just managed his email. Um, like, if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that's outside. He's like, this It's yours, drive it around. And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like, I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like an insider trading slash pump and dump scheme that they were doing. And I was like, whoa, that's like crazy illegal. Um, and they were like, yeah, it's great. We're going to make so much money. It's, this is, it's going to work. It's going to be—

you said that, you said this is illegal.

I didn't say, I'm just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this, I'm 20 years, I think I was 21 years old. Like, I didn't know shit about shit at that point. But I knew enough to be like, I think this is wrong, what they're talking about. And then he would, you know, every day would, after work, would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was. And two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever. And like, this is the way he did business. And he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And, um, you know, this is a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like 3 months, And then I left and I came back and started a startup here. But like, you know, that guy was wild. Like, he lived a wild life.

That's awesome. Yeah, I've, uh, I, I don't know if I have any firsthand knowledge of, or if I've like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven't told me. But, uh, I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don't know, I haven't heard this.

This Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern-day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it's not underage girls. I guess that's, that's the difference. But like, basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation. And he's got this bunker and he's like bribing police. And like, if these things are true, which you don't know if they're true or not, but this thing came out, it's pretty crazy. Uh, it's, it's a wild story.

Yeah, this is crazy. I, uh, I didn't know about this. I, I would believe just based off what— I believe this is very— this could be very true. Like, this doesn't shock me, like, knowing what I know a little bit. Like, and I have heard, like, rumors of people who I'm, like, secondhand or thirdhand connected with that they're freaks. And, uh, like, I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up, and I 100% believe this.

And Silicon Valley, who are very successful, like, things that I didn't realize until I kind of got closer to— I'm not inside that circle because I'm not, like, in that that tier, but I had a couple friends in that circle. And it's like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought— swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley, dude. It's the swinger lifestyle.

Weird. It's weird.

You know about this pineapple thing, by the way?

Tell me.

So I learned this from TikTok. I don't know if this is real or not, but basically like this, this, the silent symbol for signaling to others if you're a swinger or not apparently is an upside-down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that's upside down. It's a wink to anybody else who's in the lifestyle that, hey, we're down. Uh, I had, I had no idea.

That's crazy.

Or if they're wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party.

I've got a girlfriend who does it, and she, uh, and, and she tells me about it. And my wife and I were like, I was like, Sarah, like, you know, like, I'm not interested in this, just so you know. Like, I don't want to do this. This is, this, uh, and she's like, yeah, me neither. But It's so fun to hear about.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like uber, uber, dude.

I've got a couple friends that are into it down here in Austin where I live. Uh, these guys have this company, you know, Onnit, um, Aubrey Marcus, and then he's got this other guy named Kyle, uh, who is a friend or works there. I'm not sure the relationship, but they like, they mix work and play and they're open about their, how they're, they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh, Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is, and they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they, they share, they share relationships.

Yeah, it's, I mean, you know, more power to you if it's your thing. Uh, I, what I'm saying is I didn't know how common that was, uh, like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh, like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like, I guess like there's a certain level of, uh, party that I just never did and had never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them.

Dude, I'm such a prude. I've been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them— whenever I've seen them do coke, I'm like, oh, I don't, uh, I don't really like you as much as I used to like you.

Exactly.

It just like, it made me uncomfortable. I didn't feel— I didn't like it. But this is crazy, and it is way more common than I, than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like, if you're a nerd and you're now worth $1 billion or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want to do stuff. And also, if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Bilzerian has this new book out, and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he's like, man, I've had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do, I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work. And, and, and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like, I try to be simple now, although like it's really hard. I, I, but all the items, they don't, they don't bring me joy.

Um, speaking of making me happy, I, there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It's not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it's worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Basically, there's this guy— I want to give him credit because it's a very interesting read, um, and I'll explain it while I'm looking for the link. So basically, there's this guy who, uh, Dan Liu, I think is his name. Um, how do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L-U-U. And go to this link. So go just search— or never mind, I'll just Slack it to you. So go to this link. And this guy, this post, and basically what he— all he did was he's like, hey, you know, there's, there's all these like claims that you'll hear commonly. You'll hear them over and over and over again, and they're referencing studies, and they have fancy names, and then you they reference studies and the people take them as facts. And then if you ever— he's like, turns out if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as, like, I think, or it's literally the opposite. And he gives 4 examples, and I loved reading this, so I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say there's a, there's a link between happiness and, uh, and income. And basically the thing you'll hear in pop science is Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn't go up beyond that amount. So what does this mean?

And it's total bullshit.

Don't chase money. And, um, don't chase money. You should— it's not gonna make you any happier. And so he's like, so he goes and he's like, because it's become common knowledge that money doesn't make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it'll say, um, household income of $75,000, after that your day-to-day happiness doesn't rise. Um, it goes— this happiness, uh, correlate income, like, study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And, um, and you know, the problem is, like, when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He's like, the problem is it's on a log scale, and like, most people just don't know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you're going up by factor of 10 every Sorry. So even if it's, even if it's flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn't look like as big of a jump because it's not like the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh, if you actually look at the— and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert's like book, uh, on, uh, on behavioral, uh, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um, Um, if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that, uh, if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it's basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up, and there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn't go up at the same rate. So yes, it's true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from $1 million to $2 million or $2 million to $4 million, but the happiness does keep going up. Uh, you're sad at life, your satisfaction does keep going up on, on all the reported scales. It's basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven't found it yet. You know, like, uh, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, and actually, there are things that, like, um, that I— and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some— that there's— there are some things that, that, uh, contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, oh yeah, you'll get that money, then you'll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery, lottery, yeah, within a few months you're back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you'll be depressed after. And, um, and he's like, you know, it turns out that that's not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at— if you actually look at the study. Um, the second thing is the, the reverse. They also say it's true. Something bad happens to you, people will say, oh, you're so resilient, you'll bounce right back to your, your previous level of happiness. And he's like, actually, if you go look at the study, it actually does show that disability, divorce, loss of a partner, or unemployment actually long-term negative effects on happiness. And even like unemployment, after you get re-employed, it still persists. And that's what the studies actually show. He's like, it's kind of amazing, you, you know, how this can happen. Like, the study literally says what the answer is, and then people will summarize it as something completely different. Like, they'll either take a very weak effect and make it sound like it's a total, like, strong effect, or they'll take something that said no correlation, they'll say it's a correlation. He has 4 examples.

Or usually what happens is like like there'll be a time where, um, someone has one cute line in a study and then a news article cites it, and then a thousand things cite that. Here's another example of that. Yes. Have you heard that, uh, it's a crazy stat. I don't remember exactly. Somewhere like half of Americans can't afford a $500 bill if an emergency came up. So I, I went and read. I was, I was like, I don't believe that that's true. And I went and looked at where I started. I researched this a while ago and it's bullshit. It's that— that's a— it's a— what happened is, um, there was a study done and there was a line in the abstract saying like, uh, you know, like this could be as bad as— it said something like a non-committal, like perhaps or maybe, or like something like that where it's like— I forget exactly how the scientists or the, the, the how she phrased it, but it's, it's not true. It's not a fact. It was like a, it was just a line. And so many people cited that and ran with it to believe it's true. Another example is, uh, I believe the food pyramid. So the food pyramid, I, if I remember correctly, they were, it was like a hypothesis or something. It was like, we just, we think this might be true. Um, and like some people were just kind of tinkering. It was like a, it was like a project someone was tinkering with. And I think it was WHO, the World World Health Organization took it and ran with it. And they're like, well, you know, we don't know if this is real. And in fact, in the '90s, they had to change it because they're like, well, we actually put like all fats and all carbs in the same category when they're like, you know, it was just like this oversimplification that some people were just tinkering with and someone ran with it. And there's loads of examples. We should actually do an entire podcast just on examples of that. Another one is like, dude, have you ever heard that you could see the Great Wall of China from space?

Yeah, I've heard that. Is that not true?

It's— of course it's not true. If you can see the Great Wall of China from space, why couldn't you see like a highway?

Yeah, it's true, the height wouldn't really matter.

Because it's so easy to get these one-liners and run with them, and you get— they're really cool. You could find a lot of them in interesting studies. And I've actually been learning— Peter Attia, this guy named Peter Attia has this really good blog post on how to read studies. And so I read health studies all the time, and you can go and read them, and they'll make these broad claims, but you'll say, oh well, you tested this on only 20 people, and they just— these 20 people like called you or checked in with you occasionally for the like 3 weeks. Like they called you every other day. We don't know what they were doing throughout the day. Like there's just so much information going on, who knows, you know, exactly what happened. It's not good enough to say it's a fact.

There's a, there's a name for an effect. I don't remember the name of it, but it describes this phenomenon. The name doesn't really—

is it Dunning-Kruger?

Dunning-Kruger is a good one. That's in this, in this thing that he talks about. But there's an effect like this, uh, which is like like there's something that happens where you read a newspaper story and let's say day to day you read the newspaper, you say, okay, this is good, it's informing me, I trust this, this must be true if it's here. And then you read about something you know about and you actually see, oh my God, like I actually know about this and this is actually either not quite right, totally off, or misses, it leaves out some important information. So you would think that people would, once they have that experience, they would like readjust their trust in the rest of the newspaper. And the name of the effect is some kind of like amnesia effect where like you, um, you turn the page and then you resume trusting the next thing that you didn't know about that's in the newspaper. It's like even though you just sort of proved to yourself that like this should not be the, you know, the record, the canon of like what's true and what's, what's not about a subject, um, but there's this like common effect which is that people will experience it on something they know and then as soon as they get back to something they don't know they sort of rebound back. I forgot the name of that, but I've seen this to be true, you know. For me, for me, I hope at least, at least, you know, that was one of the biggest changes of my childhood was I used to think if something was in the newspaper or on CNN that like, yes, that's what it is.

And you know what changed? And you know what changes it? When you become the person writing it. So I became the person writing it, and you know, I created a website and I would write stuff and I saw people cite it. Sometimes you and I will say stuff and we're saying like around, or we're saying I heard this crazy story about X, Y, and Z. And hopefully we think that people are saying like, you know, this is just banter. And like, we don't— it's when we do know the facts, we'll say it's a fact. But oftentimes we're like, you know, I think it's around blank. And I'll see people cite us and I'm like, well, you took that out of context. So I was just— I wasn't well-researched on that. I was just kind of— I kind of knew it. And once you become the person making the news, you see that it's bullshit. And that's why I believe that fake news, even though people are like criticizing Trump for that. I'm like, it is actually real. It's very easy to make fake—

this is, you know, what's the difference between, you know, CNN and the WWE? There's not much. They make up storylines for entertainment. And, uh, and so like, you know, all these three-letter acronyms— the NFL, same way— it's storylines for entertainment. And like, if you say that the news is just reality TV, right, it's storylines loosely based on reality, Um, that's very different than, you know, getting your information from it. And I get it, it's tiring to go try to get accurate firsthand information a lot, and people use shortcuts. And that's why, that's why the system is the way that it is. But, um, you know, the sooner you, sooner you realize that the news is just entertainment, the faster you'll either stop consuming it or consume it with like a very severe filter that says, this may or may not be true, I'd I should cross-check this again. If it's important, I should go dig into it. And if it's not important, uh, you know, I should kind of like, you know, take it with a grain of salt. This is great.