Amaze on Stream | Episode 8 | With Kevin King

Amaze on Stream | Episode 8 | With Kevin King Hello, everybody. Melissa Simonson here with Amaze OnStream, and I am super excited today to have the amazing, the fabulous, the very well-known Kevin King joining me. Thank you so much for joining me, Kevin. I'm glad to be here, Melissa. Of course. So I'm super excited about this because a lot of people know about you. They might know of you, and they might even have seen you at events. You always have sort of like a gaggle of e-commerce people around you who also want to know everything that you know. I am excited today to kind of dive in about you as a person, like how you grew up, how your environment, your parents, your family, friends influenced who you are today. So if you're ready, we'll dive right in. Sure, let's do it. 00:00:50 Okay. We've got a little while. This is going to be a three-hour long podcast. Part one, part two, part three, part four. So, well, I want to start with, you know, like when you were growing up, were your parents actually, were your parents entrepreneurs or what did they do? No, my dad worked for the government. My mom was a school teacher and worked for American Airlines. So, no, they're very, my father was very conservative, very much a punch of the clock kind of guy, take no risk, still is. My mom had a little bit of entrepreneur blood in her, but she never really did anything. My dad would always squelch that. Yeah, no, I had no, no true entrepreneurs and really in my family at all. 00:01:36 So, and do you have siblings and they're not entrepreneurial? No, not at all. I have one younger brother and he's not, no, he's happy working a nine to five job and doesn't want to be bothered after five o'clock and happy the way it is and just doesn't want to take that risk. Yeah. It can have a lot of ups and downs. And so that's not for everybody, for sure. That's 100%. I was just going to say, that doesn't sound like the entrepreneurial roller coaster that we're aware of. So, okay, so you're growing up. At what point was it that you started to kind of recognize that you were steering the ship a little bit? Where was that sort of pivot point for you where you wanted to take control of things? 00:02:20 Or did you have regular jobs first? No, I've never actually to this day. I've never I've never made a resume. I think I made one in college because you had to learn how to or something. I've never sent resumes out. I've never worked for anybody else. I work two jobs. I'm 54 right now. So in my life, I've had two jobs for what do you feel? What's that called? A W-2? Did you fill out? Yes. What's that called? I love that you said that. I worked at McDonald's and I deliver pizzas. And that's it. That's the only time I've ever gotten a paycheck from somebody else in my entire life. I started selling things when I was three years old. Oh my goodness. 00:02:57 Go down the street and pick up bubble gum from a local store, like a supermarket. I'd buy the gum for a penny, a little bubble gum that had the little cartoons or something on the side. I don't know if they still sell that or not now. And sell that for like two cents to the neighborhood kids. And I would take my mom's empty oatmeal. Uh, canisters like uh cardboard canisters and I would glue the top of it and and find some sticks and sell it like a drum because if you bang the top of it it's hollow you know and sound like a little drum that's up a little store uh you know we'd have when I was three or four years old it's uh parents invite some people over to hang out in the backyard and I set up a lemonade stand to sell lemonade for a nickel to everybody that was there uh so I've always had an entrepreneur spirit I've been trying to make money since I was walking, basically. 00:03:48 So knowing this about yourself and like always having ideas and like seeing opportunities, did you, you went to college then? Because you said you took a class, a resume. Yeah, I graduated from Texas A &M University with a degree in business. So I did go to college, but when I graduated, I never, I ended up. After graduation, I went and lived on some friend's couch for a year. Literally slept on the couch in the living room. I had this five guys in the house. Texas A &M is in College Station, which is about an hour and a half from Austin. And one of my old high school buddies was living in Austin. So I came over to Austin. He was still in school, finishing school. 00:04:27 And I slept on their couch and sold T-shirts on the University of Texas campus for about a year. After that, we took those t-shirts and actually sold them, hit the road and sold them to surf shops and stuff all throughout Texas, Louisiana, all the way to Florida. So I've done a lot of things. I mean, as a young child, my dad would take me to pick up aluminum cans on the side of the road. So I figured out, we passed a sign one time that said 17 cents a pound for aluminum cans or something. I'm like, Dad, I can make some money. He would, he would take a book and he would take me out to some country road and drop me off at the bottom of the hill. 00:05:09 And he'd go to the top of the hill and park on the side of the road and make sure he could see me, you know, back in the rearview mirror or whatever. And I would just, I’d be like one of those, those guys you see sometimes with the orange shirts or whatever, out there with a stick, picking up cans that people would throw out the car window, come back with a couple of trash cans, trash bag full of cans, stick them in the trunk. We’d take them over and I’d give my $4. 20 or whatever it was. And I mowed yards. I used to do my own little top 10 list in middle school. Casey Kasem, I think, had like Top 40 back then on the radio. 00:05:46 And I’d get Billboard magazine and I would say, here’s my top 20 albums. And I would make a little newsletter, take it to school and say, 'Anybody want one of these albums? I'll get it for you.' And so if some kid wanted an album or I think the set tapes were coming around at that time, this is before CDs. I would have my mom take me on Tuesdays to a record store about 30 miles away from where we lived. And I would buy whatever the orders were, two or three, four or five albums or whatever, bring them back to school the next day and sell them to everybody that placed their order. So, yeah, I did all kinds of stuff. So creative. 00:06:20 Like the ideas here are blowing my mind for the ways that you're coming up with making money. And it's funny because like, I actually, my kids, they come up with all sorts of ways to make money, but this is usually what they say to me, Mom, can we have a garage sale and sell all of these things? And they're pointing at like my stuff. We're not selling my stuff, but we'll sell all your toys if you keep going like that. Yeah, it's very creative, though, the way that you're able to see things. I think it's a creative mind that is able to look at things from that type of perspective that is a little different than most people. It's a little different. Yeah, my dad's always said I can smell a nickel from a mile away. 00:07:00 It's kind of true. Yeah, I've always been good. You know, I've really never lived under a budget. My parents tried. I was making so much money as a child. When I was 12, 13 years old, my parents; I had every video game. This is before the Nintendos and PlayStations. This is back when you had little handheld video games. And they're $30, $ 40 bucks a piece for a little, you know, basic video game. And I had like all the latest games. And all my friends, you know; I was popular with all my friends. And my parents were like, 'You're just making too much money.' A 12-year-old making $100 a week or whatever I was making, it's just too much. They made me save half. 00:07:39 So every time I come back from mowing a yard, I had my six bucks or whatever I charged back then. And they'd say, 'give us three.' And they put it away. And they ended up giving that back to me when I was in college as my spending money. So they gave me an allowance, quote unquote, an allowance when I was in college of like $100 a week or $200 a week, whatever it was. And that was that money that they had forced me to save. That's incredible that you had spending money in college from your preteen days. That is incredible. Okay, so now you're in college, and this takes you to what, your mid-20s? And then where did you go from there? How did you kind of? 00:08:17 Early 20s. I did stuff in college, too. I mean, I taught classes in college. There was a class called BANA 217 that every sophomore student at Texas A&M in the business school had to take, and they had to learn the basic computing language. I don't think they even teach that anymore, but this is before C++ and all the stuff that everything's done in now. And it was kind of a weed out class and about a thousand people probably took this class from four different professors. But for whatever reason, the professors did the tests all on the same day. So they organized the test to be on three times during the semester. And I would get a list of all the kids taking this class through there's something called the Sunshine Act in Texas where public institutions, the data that is publicly available. 00:09:00 So I'd go to the office of the registrar and begin the semester and say, look under Sunshine Act section 17. 3 of the Texas Constitution or whatever it is, I demand that you give me a list of all the students and their addresses taking this class. And they would have to do it. And I say, well I want, I don't want to print out, I want them on labels, mailing labels. And so, for two cents a piece or whatever it was back then, they you know; for $30, I get them all these mailing labels and I would mail out a brochure saying, 'Hey, uh, I know once they get put the syllabus out for the class and say that, uh, on these three dates, whatever it was, uh, the semester come to the College Station Hilton at this time; there's one at 6 o'clock or 9 o'clock. 00:09:43 It's $15, and I'll teach you everything you need to know to to pass the test on basic competing language.' And I would get half the people I got 500 people – uh, that would come and and do that. I would be up there for two or three hours just teaching them; like here's how, here's what you need to know; here's what your teachers aren't teaching. You're here's how to memorize the steps and whatever and it pissed off the teachers; they ended up after I did that for three years, and they finally they changed the way they were doing it, but they were getting upset, they were bad-mouthing me, don't go, but everybody kept coming back because it was helping, uh, so, so, uh, yeah, I'm surprised to hear that any kind of studying ahead of a test is not something teachers are in favor of. 00:10:28 I think it made them look bad because so many people were going; they felt embarrassed. Like, why are they having to go to this guy and pay him 15 bucks when we must be doing our job? That kind of thing. Right. I did a bunch of other stuff in college, too. I mean, I used to take a class. It wasn't part of the school. It was like an extracurricular class on how to bartend. And when you take those bartending classes, you use water basically in the alcohol bottles. It's not real alcohol. And I was like, 'I want to know what this stuff tastes like.' So I had the money. So I went out and I bought, you know, 30 different liquors or whatever and all the mixers and got a little bar, one of those little portable bars for our apartment. 00:11:10 And, you know, obviously. If you're 21 years old and you have a full bar, you become the popular place for all your friends to come. So everybody's coming and drinking for free, basically. I'm mixing different things and having fun. Oh, my goodness. We actually made a sign called the Ushu's Bar and Grill. We got to the point where I was like, you know what? I'm going to actually start charging people for this. So this is on the Apple II computer. This is before the iMacs and all that. My mom had an old one. She gave it to me. And I programmed in there because I know the basic computing language. I programmed a little bartending software that would keep track. It had all the recipes. It would keep a bar tab for everybody. 00:11:47 So we had that sitting on the bar. And you come on, hey, I want a Hurricane. I want a rum and Coke. And I want a Virgin Mary. But I got, John, I'm putting this in your tab. And it was basically a cost. And then every week or two, I'd say, hey, Melissa, you owe me six bucks or whatever if you're going to keep drinking here. And then I took that software and I actually manufactured on the floppy disk and I put it advertised in the back of Computer World and some PC magazines and different like stuff like that and started selling it to other people and was using the school computers to make my instruction manuals and got in trouble for that oh no yeah I've been I've been selling things and creating things for a long time. 00:12:30 I want to know about this trouble you got into. So was this because you're like creating something that was for sale, but it was on like school property? One was alcohol-related. And I was using their computers instead of like, I was using their laser printers because this is when laser printers were like to buy one, it's like three or four grand. I remember I bought my first laser printer. I had to drive from College Station to Austin, some computer place. This is before computer stores. I mean, get it from some guy for like $4,000 for a basic late black and white laser printer. So it was expensive. And then to make copies, I was basically using their laser printers to print out my instruction manuals. 00:13:06 You know, these are 16-page little fold-in-half, eight-and-a-half by 11, fold-in-half books. And they got mad about that. So I'm using school resources for my own personal gain. So I got called into the dean's office and said, if you do this again, we're going to suspend you. Right. So it seems like this is sort of a common theme that you're like, let's push the limits and see what happens. And then something happens and then you move on to the next thing. It's very common, yep. I do push the limits and I figure out how to do things in an efficient way. Yeah. How to cut steps out, how to do things as efficiently and as profitably as possible and as fast as possible to be able to scale it, even if you're one person. 00:13:50 Yeah, I mean, it's it's clearly apparent in, you know, your business and, you know, the way you run your events and stuff like that. So, OK, so now I want to know about what what came next after college. Did you have like did you have any ideas about getting jobs or did you already know that like you had no interest in that and you wanted to start something of your own? I had no interest in that. My mom was working at the time for American Airlines, so I could fly anywhere in the world. The American went for free. We had little booklets. This was before the internet really existed. And you just showed up at the airport and wrote in where you wanted to go. 00:14:25 As long as there was a seat on the plane, you would go. This is back in the day when now airplanes are all about load management. They have 95% to 100% full seats on most planes. They've gotten really good at filling those seats. Back then, they weren't so good. It's 70% full most of the time. So you could oftentimes get a seat. So I was using that to fly all over the U. S. I wanted to start a club. I wanted to start a bar. Actually, a strip club is what I wanted to do because I had gone to Hawaii on one of my mom's passes to watch Texas A &M play football. They were playing a game out there. I was like, that's a good excuse to go to Hawaii. 00:15:01 I'd never been. On the day I was coming home, I had a bunch of extra time. I went by myself. So I happened to, I was walking down the street in the middle of the afternoon and walked into this. place called Pure Platinum, which is turns out to strip club, and I was like the only guy in there, so I was just sitting there and talking to the girls since they had videos playing of this guy on the yachts cruising around Miami with like 30 hot women; uh, they're just shooting a calendar. I was like, that looks cool, I could do that. Uh, and I was talking to this girl and I didn't get dances or anything; I didn't have any money. I was basically drinking a Coke or something, killing time. 00:15:40 And she's like, yeah, we have dental insurance. We have that kind of stuff. I was like, no, strip clubs are seedy little places. They don't have that kind of stuff. And while I left, I got this videotape, a VHS tape of this, that was showing this making of their calendar. Watched it when I got back. I was like, this is cool. So I started researching that business and actually traveled all over the U. S., visiting places purely as research. I would go to Atlanta and go to the library. It's before the internet again. And I would pull every article off the microfilm about all the clubs, about the liquor business, about everything for that city. And then I'd go visit a couple of places and I'd take notes. 00:16:17 I wasn't there to party or have fun or drink. I was like taking notes. Okay, the setup is like this. The DJ booth is over here. They have a food menu. This is what everything. And then I put together a business plan, like a hundred-page business plan. I was 23, tried to raise the money and it didn't work. Um, I just nobody wanted to give me $2. 3 million; I needed three million bucks because I wanted to do like a really nice thing. This is right when the time the clubs were coming from the CD business to having filet mignons for lunch and they're really trying to up their game, marble floors, and doubt there's one in Dallas called Cabaret Royale, I think was the name of it, and it had like marble floors and like it was you know the the girls locked the girls, uh, changing room was like a spa locker room. 00:17:01 It was just really nice. So I wanted to create something like that. And I couldn't raise the money. I even put out ads in the local Austin newspaper saying I'm hiring. I'm now hiring for this new club coming soon. I got all these, I was doing it for research. I got all these applications and I called the people, hey, so tell me about this or you're a manager. And I hooked up with one of the managers that was wearing one of the local clubs. We became friends and we tried to raise the money. I couldn't do it. But that evolved into a magazine. So not a nude magazine. It was a business magazine for the industry called German's Club. And it basically profiled the entire industry. No nudity. It had a profile picture. 00:17:43 It had pictures of dancers and stuff in there. But it had no nudity. It wasn't a Playboy or anything like that. And I sold ads in there. That got me in. It's kind of like if you start a podcast, that's a way you get to meet all the other people in industry. You get to make connections and extend your network. So a lot of people say, create a podcast. Back then, that didn't exist. So it's create a magazine for the industry. So you get to meet everybody. And then that just evolved into doing the baseball cards and calendars and a bunch of other stuff and eventually a website. We did coffee table magazines. We ended up doing a lot of television programming. Ended up doing stuff for the Playboy channel for pay-per-view. 00:18:27 Not porn. This is not porno stuff. I mean, some people watching may think, 'oh, that's not porn.' And that took off and did really well for a while. That's amazing. Just to come up with an idea. And see, this is, I think, a really excellent example of when you have to pivot, right? You had a particular idea and you presumably did a lot of work. You had your business plan. You're going around trying to get funding and stuff. And I would say, I mean, that amount is already difficult. And then your tender age at that time, I think probably most people are not at the level that you were at where you were selling from the time you were three years old. So I imagine people shut the door pretty hard at first. 00:19:10 But I mean, as I had all this research, so. To get publicity, I was like I didn't have any money; I had no money, no investors; I was like, 'I need to do something, what can I do?' So, I had all this research from all these different cities; I'm like, 'I'm gonna analyze these liquor reports because you could get liquor reports like from the state liquor associations-like, how much is a club making, you know? Say, this club does 200,000. Because they have to report it for sales tax purposes. So, this club is making $200,000 a month in liquor sales. So I added all those up for all this data I had from all over the U. S. and came up with like, okay, this is a $3 billion a year industry in liquor. 00:19:45 The top clubs in Dallas is number one in the country. Atlanta is number two. And I forget, you know, Miami is number three, whatever it was. So I made like a top 10 list. And then I put out a little press release. And this is back, I think I put it on PR Newswire or I think that's what it was back then. And then I faxed it. And within hours of doing that, you know, I was like 23, 24 years old, sitting in my little one-bedroom apartment in Austin with no money. I got a call from Entertainment Tonight. And Entertainment Tonight, this is back when it was big. You know, this was before cable TV. This was like at 6:30 every night. People watched, you know, millions of, 10 million people watched the show or something. 00:20:24 And they came out and interviewed me in my apartment. And then that Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Robin Leach, they flew me to California to interview me. And I'm like this guy that I didn't have two nickels to rub together. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous as the expert in the industry. I got on the front page of the New York Times, USA Today, Red Book, Vogue, did stories. I was like the expert in the state. And as a result of that, I had. somebody in Detroit see me and call me up said hey i want to hire you as a consultant and i'm like i'm sure you're gonna pay me and he's 00:21:01 like yeah i'll fly you to New York i've been to Detroit and i want you to go around i'm thinking about opening a club so i go up there and see this guy he flies pays for everything turns out he's a he's a he was in the carpet business uh which is uh also known as back then was what the mafia was in Detroit mafia turned out to be Detroit Mafia um seriously and and You're blowing my mind right now. And he actually, it's Detroit Mafia. He's like, he had a big cocaine problem. But I didn't know this at the time when I went and drove around with him, giving him some advice and stuff. And he said, hey, how can I help you out? I said, well, I'm starting up this magazine. 00:21:41 I'm looking for investors. He's like, how much do you need? I was like, like 10 grand. He's like, wrote me a check on the spot. Here's 10 grand. Oh my gosh, that's crazy. 10 grand was a lot of freaking money to me. And I was like, holy cow. And I was living in Arizona at the time. And I went back. And then like three weeks later, he calls me up and says, hey, I'm coming to Arizona. I'm like, all right, cool. He's like, no, I'm coming there. I'm going to stay in a hotel. He rented out some fancy hotel. Ended up staying almost a year in this hotel. And he wanted to oversee his investment. And he had ideas like, 'there's going to be perks if a girl's going to be on the cover.' 00:22:19 I'm like, 'I don't want any part of that, any of that kind of stuff.' Um, he had a cocaine problem, um, and there's times I remember we'd have a meeting, someone flying to meet him, and the guys had these remote starters on the car so that you're walking out of the restaurant and you'd be 100 feet away from the car and they'd start their car to make sure it wouldn't blow up because one of those kind of things that I got threatened several times, that um, I finally said enough of this, I got to get out of this situation, uh, he started cheating me and stuff. And I remember when I tried to move out of Arizona back out of U-Haul, he sent two guys to break my legs literally. 00:22:54 No, I had to call the police to move out and guard my U-Haul and escort me out of Arizona make sure these guys didn't follow me. It got bad, and then on the way back I got arrested and ended up in jail in some little town in West Texas because I had an outstanding traffic ticket from college that I hadn't paid. So when I came through I-10 in Texas, I was going Or I-20, I think it was. I was going 10 miles over the speed limit, five or 10 miles over the speed limit in some little podunk town. The guy pulled me over. Oh, you got a warrant for a two-year-old traffic ticket. Took me to this little jail for like four days. And my dad wouldn't bail me out. 00:23:33 He's like, it was a thousand-dollar bail. I didn't have the money. And he's like, I called him up. He's like, nope, you can sit and rot. The only way I'll bail you out is if you agree to come home and get a real job. you got to come home good job you can go work at brahms ice cream shop or something until you can find a job but that'll help you i was like no no i'm not gonna do that um and so i had to call an uncle and his uncle gave me a credit card or whatever to pay to post a little little bond money um and my mom ended up coming get getting to me um but yeah so that's i stood my ground like nope i'm gonna be an entrepreneur i don't care i don't need your help I'm not going to do what you said. 00:24:14 That's some serious pressure. Like I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs that deal with like sort of the or like the judgy or like the, you know, just kind of, oh, I hope they I hope everything works out for them. You know, like the well-wishing, like there's a lot of forms that that it takes when people don't think you're making the right choice. But that is a fairly direct message from your dad. Yeah, he definitely did not want me. He wanted me. His dream was always to have me go work some corporate job and work my way up the ladder. Right. I'm sure he could see how smart you were and he saw potential, but in sort of the way that he knew what success looked like for his life. 00:24:53 Yeah. And he was all, it was hard for him to, you're with your friends. Oh, what's your son up to? He didn't want to say, you know, starting a, trying to start a club or he's got this magazine or he's doing this. It is embarrassing for him. I didn't have insurance. You know, I didn't have health insurance. I didn't have all this, you know, I didn’t have a 401k. I didn’t have, so he was like, you're just wasting yourself. But now he's changed his tune. Yeah. Well, I mean, I imagine so. Okay. So now the mafia is after you. You get arrested. The mafia didn't end there. I mean, I ended up, the photographer that was doing a lot of stuff for us, which is, you know, you know, I'm Mark. 00:25:38 Um, he was doing a lot of stuff for us and we had done a photo shoot uh or Mark and I teamed up and this mafia guy didn't like that so he would send uh guidos here to Austin to for about a year we had to watch our back, he threatened to blow up a plane we were on um yeah it was it was bad for a while I am like I am speechless. It's not a good thing for the host to be. Oh my gosh, this is crazy. So, oh my gosh, the Mafia was after you. You end up in jail. I got threatened by Michael Jordan, the basketball star. We need to dive in a little bit deeper there. 00:26:20 When Mark and I teamed up after this whole thing, this mafia guy, we bought something called the USA Calendar Girls from this guy. He had a group of girls, like four girls that were choreographed. It's like a Las Vegas show. And they were getting hired in clubs to be the headline act club for a week. And so we bought them. except from him and we changed out all four girls we recruited a guy from the Dominican Republic a choreographer to come in teach them this cool routine we put them in really nice costumes and then they we had an agent in Florida and he would actually book them into strip clubs basically but they would be the headline act and so these clubs would put us up on the bill on the mannequin on the on the on the marquee you know now featuring the USA calendar girls shows at six and ten tonight or whatever they would pay for us to to come into town and do these shows. 00:27:12 They put us up in a hotel. We'd come and do two shows. They'd pay us a flat fee. The girls could make a little bit of tips. And then we’d create merchandise. And that's how it evolved. The trading cards, 8x10s, the magazines. And we’d create really nice stuff, like collectible level stuff. And that's my background-the product stuff is, you know, I was doing stuff in Korea and other places, we're making stuff with 24-karat gold and really nice folders. It's not just cheap, you know. Some of these cards sold for 50 a piece, but they were collector's items, and so we started doing that. And we literally uh got a 15-passenger van, uh, took out all the back seats, put a mattress back there. I was the driver and the DJ. 00:27:59 So we drove. I had four girls in the back, you know, sleeping, basically. We'd drive from Austin to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, down to North Carolina and then North Carolina to Arizona and spend a week in each of these locations. And I would be the DJ guy announcing them during the shows, the manager, the driver, bodyguard-everything. Yeah. And then we were in Pennsylvania. We were in Philadelphia, I think, and we had some off-time. So we went over to New Jersey, to Atlantic City. And yeah, there's a... I don't really want to tell the story here publicly. We had an encounter with Michael Jordan, and he happened to take an affection to one of the girls. 00:28:52 And I basically was the guy that blocked anything from happening, and this was right before he retired the first time; it was 1993, right before he retired first time, and uh, and I got threatened that if uh, yeah, by his people, you know, that hey, this is to stay quiet so I don't want to talk too much about it but yeah, we'll leave it there. But I'm in my head right now. I'm trying to think like, OK, what am I going to put as the caption for this podcast? Mafia jail time. I'll think of that later. I can give you another one. We had another time we were doing a photo shoot in Dallas and we had this model who Mark had this idea. 00:29:40 This is right around the time that computers were able to do green screen, you know, your own desktop computer could do screen. You need some Hollywood computer. There's a software tool called Bryce that would make these alternative worlds. It was pretty cool. You could make these like really cool alternative worlds. And he wanted to do this shoot with a model dressed as a tiger, painted as a tiger. We knew a body painter in Dallas, a really good airbrush painter. So, you know, the model would go stand naked in front of him and he would paint her from head to toe to look like a tiger. Really. Cool art. Name's Leroy Roper. Really good. And that was his deal, was making women look like animals and stuff. And it was cool. 00:30:21 And so then we brought in a real tiger to actually pose with her. The real tiger ended up attacking her on the set and dragging her by the foot 25 yards across the set with her foot in its mouth. And so I can tell you a whole story there. Sometimes, Melissa, the next time we see each other, find me a link. It's all coming up. And I'll tell you the full story. I know we only have 30 minutes or whatever right here. That's why I said you have part one, part two, part three, part four. We can keep going. I've lived. Yeah, we're definitely not stopping there. I imagine that led to some fond thoughts of liability insurance when the tiger dragged the poor girl. She had to plan releases. 00:31:14 We had release signs and everything, but, and she ended up suing. You know, we took her to the hospital. We flew her and her parents. And she ended up suing, but she ended up losing. Yeah. Our lawyers found some case law based around some sort of traveling circus that he's able to get the entire thing dismissed. Well, yeah, it never ended up costing us other than a little bit of legal fees. Yeah. Luckily, every time after that, for about three years, I couldn't go to Exxon to get gas because I'd go to Exxon and you're sitting there pumping your gas and you see the tiger on the side of their logo. And I'm like, no, no, I don't want it. Oh, no. It was a pretty shocking. 00:31:55 I mean, I almost fainted when it happened. I was pretty shocked. Yeah, well. so how did it stop like who who jumped in or how did it on its mouth oh my gosh well see this this tiger was sitting next to the model she had a sword and she's painted head to toe like a tiger and she's on the set it's a green screen set so everything's painted green screen behind her and the tiger was laying uh they had that chains uh the two trainers it was a trained tiger this tiger had done like uh car commercials and other stuff is it was an acting an acting tiger right but tigers are animals are 00:32:32 wild and all animals are wild animals and they have their instincts and so it didn't do anything maliciously it just was laying behind her and they had the trainers had to chain uh and we're going to take that out you know in photoshop later and the model just kind of lifted her leg a little bit just lifted her foot just to kind of get positioning when she did the tiger saw that as like a toy and like put his mouth and and But didn't bite, just put it just like not just like you know, put its mouth on her foot in its mouth, but when it did that, it freaked her out so she screamed and when she screamed, it freaked the tiger out so it yeah, and she tried to then try to pull away, so then it pulled and it pulled her and the two trainers all the way across the studio, oh my, eating on its mouth, incredible, Incredible story. 00:33:25 So did you keep doing like the photography stuff after that or did you kind of lose your taste for it for a while? No, we kept doing it. You kept doing it. Not with animals though. Right, right. That makes sense. Well, actually we did one other time with animals in Vegas in Pahrump at this place and we had a wolf. Mark's like, 'Oh, it's not going to be as bad as a tiger.' And he had an owl that sat on a girl's like kind of like Harry Potter or something-it sat on a girl's shoulder and the owl kind of dug its nails into her shoulder, which wasn't that kind of sucked. But the worst one was a wolf-it was kind of the same idea, next to the girl, she's like a warrior, you know? 00:34:03 He had these concepts that do these cool fashion shoots and stuff, and had a little wolf, uh, next to her, but the girl didn't tell us it was it; she was menstruating. Oh no, the wolf smelled blood, and that caused a problem. Luckily, nobody. It's not something you would typically volunteer, right? Or ask about. We don't usually volunteer and don't want to say, but yeah, that caused a problem. Yeah. I imagine so. Wow. Okay. We were going to have to do a part two for sure. Because I feel like we're only in like your late thirties at this point. Or I mean, like. This is a twenties. Twenties. Yeah. So we're going to need to start with yours. 00:34:46 30s, next time, uh, and carry on from there because I mean, I want to kind of get from you know all of this stuff, this amazing like texture to your life that has added you know character, experience, and so much more living than so many people I know have done. And then see how that kind of transition to where you are today. So if you're up for it, I would love to do another, to be continued to be continued. Thank you guys so much for joining us on Amaze On Stream today and stay tuned for an announcement for the part two of the Kevin King Podcast. Thank you again, Kevin, for showing up today and telling us your story. I'm glad to be here. Thanks, thank you.