Amazon, Tigers and The Mob w/ Amazon FBA Expert Kevin King Ep. 19

Amazon, Tigers and The Mob w/ Amazon FBA Expert Kevin King Ep. 19 Hey there, guys and gals. This is your humble producer behind the scenes here at I Know This Guy. Just a quick reminder to please hit that subscribe button on whatever platform you're using, whether that's Apple or Spotify, Stitcher, Himalaya, or Sierra 3000. I don't know; there's a new one every day, anyways. Anyways, doing so will keep you up to date with each new episode of I Know This Guy. Thanks so much. And now back to the show. To me, life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet. Those can never be taken away from you. I mean, our time sitting there, we talked at the beginning of this thing about smoking cigars, you know, different things, or there's 15 of us out there and we have that picture. That's something that's going to stay with me and you until the day we die. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell's a bell? So dad, who do we have on the podcast today? We have a buddy of mine that's coming on. We met at a conference a couple of years ago and we've become great cigar buddies. Every time we meet, we go out for a stogie. That's cute. Yeah. Well, you know, best buds. His name is Kevin King. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's involved in Amazon. Some people may call him the king of Amazon, but. Wait till you hear his backstory. There's a tiger incident, and you won't believe it. We could talk a bit about Michael Jordan, his travels around the world, and we're talking a little bit about the mob. Wacky. A little wacky. Not that type of whack. No, no. Alright, well, let's dive right in. Can't wait to get started. We shall do that. All right, I can't wait to get started. Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Norm. It's great to be here, man. Thanks for inviting me on. Appreciate it. Well, you know what? I really wish that I could be there because you're my cigar buddy. That's right, man. I mean, this coronavirus has messed us all up, hasn't it? Well, this is why this guy's here. Yeah, his name's even Kevin. Kevin? Yeah. What? Yes, yes. What? I hope that was he named in honor of me or was his name already Kevin? No, no, no. In honor of you, when I go out and have my cigar, he comes out and I talk to him, you know, just about all sorts of crap. You're the only person that listens. So you're saying I'm like a dog. I'm like a loyal dog. Well, I'm saying that you're the only guy that ever listens to me. Like a loyal dog. There you go. No, that's cool. Yeah, normally, for those of you that are listening, Norm and I, every time we're at an event together, it's quite a few events. I think the tradition started in Hawaii, I think, actually, at an event that you were doing, your AMZ and Beyond or something. And we went out on the beach and smoked some cigars. And then every time since then, it's been like, who's bringing the cigars? It's like, I got them. I got them. Who's going to the room to get theirs if we both have them? And it's always a tradition to smoke at least one, sometimes two or three or a few more cigars. And it always has to be accompanied with a Coke Zero. Because, you know, they always have to be accompanied with a Coke Zero. Because, you know, sometimes cigars can get you a little thirsty or dehydrated. So that's usually a tradition. And then we tell stories and shoot the bull. And it's good times, man. I miss those times. Yeah. And you know what's funny? It catches on because people come out and they see us having a cigar. Like you had a billion dollars. Cellar Summit and you do you remember the picture that we took? I think there was about 10, 15 people smoking cigars and most of them never smoked before, not a lot of women that you hadn't smoked before. A lot of people. We were on a balcony at the hotel, yeah, it's like 15 of us out there. I remember it was like... Some other people were like, 'Hey, I want to try it.' And I had a bunch of cigars. I was like, 'Okay, these people have never smoked before. I'm not going to give them the good ones over here. The Romeo and Juliet are the good ones. The $10, $15 cigars. I'm digging in there. Where's the ones that are kind of dried up? They're like $1. Here you go. You can try it.' I'm joking. It wasn't that bad. Because, you know, sometimes someone smokes one and they're like, 'Ah, this is not for me.' Or they smoke a little bit of it and they put it down. I'm like, 'Ah, you just wasted a $15 cigar.' I know I've gone to parties, they're handing out cigars and you see three quarters of them left because people can't smoke them. Right. And they're high-end cigars. And oh, my gosh. So I do that trick. You know, I hate to say it, but I'll take the label off and I'll have certain cigars that, hey, if you don't enjoy a cigar, well, you get these. If you enjoy a cigar, you get these. Yep. And I think I always beat you. I think I'm always the guy who's putting yours out when there's a little stub. I'm putting mine out when it's burning my fingers. I'm always trying to get that last little puff off of there. I don't know how you do it. That's always good. Always good times. Usually until like 4 in the morning. I know. We've got to get up. I've got to do a lecture at 8:00 a. m. at an event or something. And we still do it. But I really do miss those times. So, you know, the podcast is happening during the, you know, this coronavirus epidemic. And anyways, yeah, it is. It's too bad because I do miss going to the events and I do miss hanging out with you. It'll be back, though. It'll be back. Maybe you'll have to sit six feet away, but it'll be back. Oh, yeah. Or I'll have one of those extenders, you know, to hand you your cigar. So, hey, I got you on this podcast because it's all about interesting people and people that have had. You mean to bring somebody in that's interesting? Yeah, sure. There we go. Hey, Johnny, come on. You said interesting people. What the hell you got me on here for? Oh, my God. Wait till you hear about Kevin and the stories. This is incredible. He's been to how many countries? 90. 90 countries. I don't know how many businesses you're involved in with right now, but that's crazy. So we'll get into that. But first, I really like to get into the backstory and find out what makes Kevin, Kevin. What makes me, me? Yeah. Yeah. What was it like growing up? Where did you grow up? I don’t know. I was born in Virginia, but I grew up in Texas. I grew up in a suburb north of Dallas, out by the DFW Airport. A little town called Flower Mound. Well, it used to be a little town. Now it’s a pretty big town. But that’s where I grew up most of my life. I mean, a few little small towns in Texas before that. But pretty much from the third grade on, I grew up in north Dallas. Now I live in Austin since I graduated college. So you're a Texan. I didn’t know that. Yeah, I'm pretty much. I mean, I wasn't born here, but I'm pretty much most of my life, all but a couple years. I was born in a Navy hospital during the Vietnam War. My dad always likes to say I was a cheap baby, $7. That's all it cost for me. I almost died when I was three weeks old. I had a blockage in my stomach. There's a medical term for it, but I can't remember it right now. But it's where the muscle, where your esophagus goes down right above the stomach, there's a piece of muscle that kind of grows over the top of it. It's like a valve. And so everything I would eat would get thrown back up. This muscle would kick it back up. So they had to go in and do surgery on me. Uh, and so I got a little scar down there and they had to cut this out. It's fairly common, I guess, in firstborn boys, so I I had that and my dad always likes to joke that they fixed me up good. I went from not being able to eat to now I can eat a lot. Maybe I had that surgery too, so yeah, so, no, I grew up in that's where I grew up as a as a young guy. I was an entrepreneur; I've been doing I think I sold my first something at three years old. I'd have my mom take me to the uh, back then there wasn't Walmart, but the little dollar stores and buy some bubble gum. I'd buy these little pieces of bubble gum for like a penny, bring them back, set up a store in the garage. I’d open up the big garage door where the cars are and make my little table and put some of this bubble gum on the table. And local kids would come by and buy it from me for two or three cents. And I would take old oatmeal bottles or cans that the oatmeal came in and they were like, top of it, you could make a drum out of it. So if you flipped it over, the bottom was like this cardboard kind of thing, and if you took some sticks, you could beat it and make a drum. I'd sell those as drums. I’d do all kinds of stuff. When I was in grade school, I got bit when I started getting into music. I remember Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' was the very first song. You know, you always remember your first girl, or if you're a girl, you remember your first guy. I remember my first song. Most people remember what got you into music, the very first thing. It was 'Another One Bites the Dust' by Queen. And I started following the Billboard Top 100. Got really big into that. I'd listen to the radio show every Saturday and write down the stuff-what the Top 100 was. And then I'd have my mom drive me to the record store, and I'd buy 10 albums, whatever. Make a little newsletter, take it to school, and say, 'Hey, this week's Top 10, anybody want to buy Boston, More Than a Feeling, or whatever it was?' And they'd say, 'Yeah, I'll place an order for that.' So I'd mark it up like a buck or two. And then I'd have my mom every Thursday. We'd drive to the record store, which is like 20 minutes away because the town was a little small back then. And I'd buy whatever the orders were and then bring them back on Friday and deliver them. Anything I could do to make money. I was making so much money when I turned 12, 13. My parents said, 'You're making $200, $300 a week just doing odd things.' I painted numbers on street curbs. And I remember one time when I was out. I was probably 13 years old. I went to Boy Scout camp. I was looking where the Boy Scout camp was. It's like a week-long camp, and I was like, you know what? There's a new neighborhood that's right through the woods on the other side of this Boy Scout camp. That's a prime neighborhood, a prime target to go and paint numbers on their curbs. So here in the States, I don't know if they do this in Canada, but in the subdivisions, you have the curb outside the house where the driveway goes up, and a lot of people will paint their address on the curb. So you have your address up on the house by the mailbox or by the front door. But just to make it easier for delivery people, they like to put it on the curb and paint. And so I went to the store and got these stencil kits, like a number zero through nine. And you just put the stencil down, a little spray paint, spray, you know, 1307 onto the curb on the street. And I charged like four bucks. And so I'd have my bucket of paint, my stencil set, and I'd go door to door, knock on doors. Hey, would you like me to paint your address on your curb? One side's four bucks, both sides is six bucks or something like that. And I'd get a pretty good hit rate, but a fresh neighborhood of newly built houses where no one's done this before. No one has it on the curbs. I'm like, this is like virgin territory. I can like clean house here. So at this Boy Scout camp, there was a fresh neighborhood through the woods on the other side. I had figured this out. This is the days before Google Maps or anything. I don't know how I figured it out back then, maybe in the newspaper. So I snuck my paint set and my stencils to Boy Scout camp and I snuck off one day in the middle of the day and went to this neighborhood like on a Saturday. Made like a killing, just worked like eight hours. I was gone from the Boy Scout camp. They were looking for me. They were freaking out. Like, where'd Kevin go? You know, all the adults were like, 'Oh, my God, did he get abducted?' Did we lose a kid? What are we going to tell his parents? And they're looking for me everywhere. They couldn't find me. And I come back through those little woods, try to sneak back, and there they all are waiting for me. And so I got into a lot of trouble from that. I've only worked two jobs in my life for somebody else. I worked at McDonald's. It was my first job. And I actually would create my own products at McDonald's. You're not supposed to do that. But I would start out in the back working flipping stuff, you know, and we would have all kinds of code names back there. You know, if a pretty girl from the high school came into it, you know, we'd say we'd be back there flipping the burger, say 'meat check on two.' I mean, it's a hot girl on register two, you know, whatever. So then I moved my way up to the front and I would create my own product mixes. I create my own bundles. I'm like, hey, we should be selling, you know, we have ice cream and we have apple pie, but what about selling them together? So I would create my own bundle, put a little sign on the front, 'ice cream and apple pie.' You know, the manager's like, 'you can't do that. You can't do that.' We got to sell what's on the menu. I was supposed to only be working part-time, but my father, because I was in high school, 16 years old. He's like, you can have a part-time job, but you can't have a full-time job or anything. You gotta do your studies. But I would sneak off to work. So they would schedule me for 16 hours. That's what I would tell my dad. But I was really scheduled for like 30. And so I'd tell my dad, hey, I'm going out with my buddies, going out with my friends. We're going to go hang out at Nick's house or something like that. But I'd go to work. I'd go to work. And my dad caught wind of this, I think, and I was suspicious. So I remember one time I was sitting there at McDonald's working the drive-thru. Welcome to McDonald's. May I take your order, please? I hear a voice on the other end of the drive-thru. It sounds like my dad. Yeah, I'd like some fries and a hamburger. Yeah, that sounds like my dad. All right, no problem, sir. Three dollars, whatever, coming through. He comes through the drive-thru. There's my dad. I'm not supposed to be working. And he doesn't say a thing. He just pays me the three bucks. Thank you very much. And then drives off. That day when I got home, I was in a lot of trouble, and he made me quit. He's like, 'You can't, you can't.' So I've always, I guess the point of that whole story is I've been a workaholic and I'm willing to put in the hours to do what I need to do. You know, I just recently, I was telling my wife, you know, that here in the States, the ESPN ran a documentary on Michael Jordan, big popular documentary that ESPN did like a 10-part documentary and talking about 1998, you know, the season for the Chicago Bulls. And they showed his whole history when he retired the first time in 1993. And in 1993. At that time, I was the DJ slash manager slash roadie for a group of strippers. And so we actually, we had a dance group that we actually had in 1992 called the USA Calendar Girls. And we recruited these girls out of strip clubs here in Austin. And we hired a choreographer, like a Las Vegas choreographer, a really good choreographer that would choreograph shows. And it would have a little bit of topless nudity in it, but that was it. And then we were able to book into clubs all over the U. S. So we would, you know, these clubs would book us as a headlining act from Florida to Arizona to California to New Jersey to wherever. And so we would go in and for a week, we'd be the headlining act. You know, they put us up on the marquee and newspaper ads. Now appearing in the USA Calendar Girls. And we'd do two shows a night. We’d come out and we did this whole choreographed routine. I was the DJ. I was the manager. I was the guy taking pictures with customers afterwards with the girls. I was a driver of the bus. We had a big van that we took all the back seats out of and put a mattress back there. And we'd drive from East Coast to West Coast for gigs. But we were in the Philadelphia area in October of 2003, 1993, sorry. And the girl was like, hey, let’s go over to Atlantic City and do a little gambling. It's an hour away. I'm like, yeah, sure, let’s go. So we went over on our day off to do that, and I'm sitting there gambling, playing some blackjack. The girls are doing their thing, and these two guys come up to me, and they're like, 'Hey, are you with those girls?' I'm like, 'Yeah, which ones?' They're like, 'Yeah.' They're like, 'Michael wants to meet them.' I'm like, 'Michael? Who's Michael?' Michael, right over there in the back rat pit. Michael Jordan. I'm like. Are you serious? He's like, 'Yeah.' He wants to meet him. I'm like, 'Sure. Why not? I'm not starstruck. I'm not one of these starstruck people.' Celebrities don't do much for me. But still, it's kind of cool. And so I go to the girls. Hey, Michael's over there. He wants to meet you. Oh, yes, of course, of course. So we go over. He's like, hey, why don't y'all come up? He had the whole top suite. I think it was the Trump Plaza Hotel. He had the whole top floor to himself, private elevator, everything. So we end up going up there. And I basically was the cock blocker. So I went up, and Michael and his groupies, and we went up. Nothing happened. Michael said a few words to me to make sure that I never said – just said a few words to me. And then we sat in this really nice suite. It was Michael. He picked his one girl that he was talking to, and the groupies had their girls. And here's me, the bouncer dude, basically, bodyguard, whatever, Just messing everybody's night up, uh, sitting there and we ended up leaving, and the next day he retired, the first time, um, or two days later, or something like that, and so that was, that was kind of surreal, uh, but there's tons of stories like that that we don't have time on this podcast, but, uh, I could tell you tons of stories, tigers mauling models on photo shoots and mafia mafia wanting to blow up airplanes, uh, just, I mean, the stories are, we're gonna go to those two so, you gotta tell the story about the the tigers, okay, oh, and by the way, I'm just, I'm kind of curious, people that were working with the tigers that we're going to hear about, anything to do with Tiger King, no, no, no, well, maybe I don't know, I don't think so. And back in the 90s, this is also in the 90s. This is right around the time Photoshop was becoming popular. I think it's Photoshop version 1. 0 or 2. 0. There's a software tool called, there's a plugin called Mystic Backgrounds or something like that. I probably have that name wrong. But it would create these like kind of cool background, like blue screen background. So you could take a model or situation and put them into another scene. And you could create these like surreal worlds in the software tool. So Mark, the photographer that I mean, you know Mark from Billion Dollar Star Summit. He's a photographer by trade. And he and I had this idea, let's do this fantasy line of cards. At that time, our business was trading cards, baseball cards, little two and a half by three and a half inch pieces of cardboard. And most people know baseball cards or football cards or something. But at that time, the hot thing was hot girls on cards. So every strip club in the U. S. had a set of these baseball cards. Playboy, Penthouse, all those guys. The bikini companies like Venus and Hawaiian Tropic. It became a hot thing for like three years. So we got into that. It's like, let's do a whole series of these cards. And there's this artist in Dallas named Leroy Roper that painted body paint. So his whole specialty was like he would take people, strip them down naked, and paint them from head to toe to look like an animal, or to look like a fairy, or to look like a tiger, to look like whatever you wanted. So Mark had the idea, hey, let's use this software tool and this body painter, and let's create this fantasy set of trading cards where we have pretty girls in this fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons type of fantasy world. And we're like, yeah, that sounds cool. So this was our first one. We had a girl that we flew in. We made her sign all the releases, saying this is dangerous, you know, whatever you're going to be. So she strips down naked, spends four hours getting body painted with an airbrush from head to toe to look like a tiger. Really good job. This artist is really good. And Mark's like, I want to do this scene where she's standing with a sword but painted like a tiger and she's got a real tiger next to her, you know, kind of like a goddess type of thing. And so we needed a real tiger. So he calls an agency in Dallas that provides tigers for movies and commercials and stuff. Yeah, sure. We got a tiger. We'll bring out this tiger. So they bring out the tiger. They bring the tiger to the studio and the tiger would not go in the door of the studio. It just refused to go through the door. So I'm over there watching and all of a sudden I see a big piece of meat flapping on the floor through the door. And then comes the tiger. I'm like, oh, that's not a good idea. You know, I had to get him in the door with a piece of meat. And right behind him comes a little smaller tiger. And we're talking to the people like, why do you have the second tiger? Well, it's to keep the first one in line, just to keep him kind of in check. I'm like, this is not so cool. And Mark had built this whole set. It was green screen behind, a whole wall of green screen. And he built this set. He brought in all this sand and had this sand pit. And that's where the model was going to stand, the tiger being there. And he would take out the background later and put this really cool futuristic scene in there. The tiger refused to go on the sand. It's like, no, that looks like a. I don't need to go to the bathroom right now. It looks like a, you know, a kiddie potty or whatever. It's like, no, no, I'm not going in there. So it wouldn't go in there. So Mark had to move the entire set, rebuild something on the concrete a little bit over. We finally get ready, and this is the days before digital cameras. So what you had to do back then is when you take, before you go to film, you would take Polaroids. So the back of the camera, you'd change it out, and it'd be Polaroid film. And that way you could take a shot, test the lighting, you could look at the Polaroid come out in a minute or something. You know, you flap it or whatever, and it comes on a minute, and you can look at the lighting. Make sure the lighting's right, the shadows are right, everything, before you actually start taking film. I mean, now you don't need it. It's just look on the back of your camera and adjust it digitally. So we're at that point. Get the model in the position. The tiger, we're like, okay, bring the tiger in. She's got the sword. She's standing there with the sword up. The tiger comes in, and the two trainers are just off-camera holding a chain. Know tiger's on a chain, just in case we'll take that out digitally later. We'll photoshop that out, and the tiger gets next to her; it sits down. Everything's good. We start to take the first Polaroid to check the lighting. The video crew is there, ready to do everything. I was up in a little balcony in the studio, like watching down there's like a little second-floor balcony watching, and all of a sudden the tiger, the model, is standing, and the tiger just kind of takes his paw and just kind of just taps her foot-just a little tap, like a dog would do, like a pawing of a dog or something. Nothing bad, but when it did that, she lifted her foot. Just naturally, she lifted her foot. When she lifted her foot, the tiger was like, 'Oh, what's a toy?' Put its mouth around her foot, her bare foot. Didn't bite; just put her mouth around her bare foot, thinking it was like a toy or something. When it did that, that freaked her out. So she screamed. The tiger, when she screamed, it freaked out the tiger. The tiger clamped down on her foot. Right in the middle of her foot. The trainers, in the meantime, they're up. They have it on a chain. They're pulling it on a chain. They start to beat it to try to get it to release. The tiger's like, screw you. She falls to the floor. The tiger drags her by her foot 25 feet across the studio or more into a corner with the trainers beating it. beating it the whole way, her screaming bloody murder. Mark dropped the camera. He's running to try to help the video guys, her video on the whole thing. And when they finally get it out, get the tiger to release, the guys take the tiger and the other little baby tiger. They get the, they get, they get the heck out of there. They like put it back in its cage outside and they leave. They actually left. And we're in the meantime trying to pacify her. And Mark's wife at the time got on the phone to call 911. And she, you know, she was 30 years old, 35 years old, something like that. But she's in hysterics. So she's calling 911 to emergency saying, please, please come help. We have a tiger. Tiger's been the model girl. And the police, the dispatchers thought she was joking. They thought, 'Little girl, 911 is for emergencies.' It's not for calling and making up stories. And hung up on her. So she had to call back and like, you effers. Get the freaking ambulance here right now. And so, you know, of course that goes over to dispatch. So all the news media that are listening to police radios and stuff hear it. The ambulance comes. They walk in. Here's a girl painted naked, painted from head to toe like a tiger that just got bit by a tiger. So they take her off to the hospital. She ends up going immediately into surgery. She turns out to be okay at the end of it, months later. We did everything we could. We flew her parents in. We did everything we could. It turns out the tiger had done this somewhere else. That's why they got the heck out of there really fast. The tiger ended up, we found out like two years later, getting put to sleep because it hurt somebody else as well. She ended up suing us, suing the studio, suing everybody. We got out of it, completely dismissed the case because there's some weird Texas law precedent that some traveling circus went to a supermarket, set up a tent in a supermarket parking lot, had a tiger, and it did something like some sort of similar situation. So our lawyers were actually able to get us completely off the hook. So all lawsuits got dismissed. We didn't have any liability. But I still have those pictures of right before it happened. For Exxon, the company, the gas company, Exxon, their mascot's a tiger. And so I would not go to an Exxon gas station for a long time because you pull up and you're getting your gas and you're staring at a tiger. I'm like, no, no, no. No Exxon gas for me. I'll go to Texaco or whatever. But yeah, it was it was it was crazy. I'm glad she's OK. But one thing I was wondering, though, you know, you had that airbrush artist, right? And I think Mark told me that. You were naked as well, and you were a parrot. No. In the tree? No, not me. Nobody wants to see my ass naked, that's for sure. I don't think that would sell. I think that might put us out of business really fast. Scare the tiger. Yeah, it might scare the tiger, exactly. That's what it was. You were squawking up in the tree. Oh, man, what a story. Yeah, so that's a— I mean, we've been around the world shooting models and stuff, and we've had some interesting things happen. Well, when that happened, did you stop shooting or did you continue doing what you were going to do? Yeah, no, we continued. We did a whole line of it. Yeah, we just didn't do animals, no animals. Oh, wow. It became our rule, no wild animals in the shoots. So we did another shoot in Vegas, outside of Vegas. Shortly after that, Mark's like, 'okay, no tigers.' But there's an animal park in Pahrump, which is, I don't know, an hour or so outside of Vegas. And this guy had wolves and he had owls and he had small animals, small little things, not tigers. But he said, 'oh, maybe we can try that.' You know, those are not as dangerous. So he went out there and did that. He had an owl sitting on a girl's shoulder and the owl ended up clawing into her shoulder and left a few marks. But the worst one was a wolf, tame wolf, not a problem with a wolf. This wolf was completely tame. Had the trainer there and everything. Had a girl standing next to it. Starts taking the picture. And the wolf starts getting very interested in this girl's crotch. You know how ants will sniff your crotch or your butt or whatever. Just sniff him. He just would not let it go. And started getting a little bit aggressive. And it turns out that this model was on her period. And didn't tell us. So he was smelling blood. And that turned into an almost nightmare too. You know, I would have stopped shooting this whole thing. At that point, there's no more animals after that. We went from tigers to like maybe small animals were okay, then okay, no more animals. Yeah, just airbrush them in. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. So you've done a lot of traveling. And I mean, it's amazing. We've talked about some of the countries. Well, the traveling started, I mean, just people always say, how did you do 90 countries? Well, we would travel doing these photo shoots. So we did a million-dollar model search. We went to Prague and Mexico and the U. S. and the Caribbean. And we did this huge, big production that ended up on TV, the behind-the-scenes of it. And we did an amazing race type of show where girls were having to build rafts and do all kinds of crazy stuff. We did a lot of that kind of stuff. But when we were traveling, it was cool. We enjoyed it. I love going to these different places, but we're always working. You know, I'd be going to Prague and I never really get to see Prague as we're there to work. But Mark and I would always go in advance. We would go to these cities. We're going to shoot in Prague. We'd go like a week in advance or sometimes a month in advance just for a week, then come back and go back to scout the place out, scouting trips. Like, let's go see what the locations are like, see what the logistics are like. And those are always cool to me. We'd have a local guy taking us around, showing us cool stuff. And that was fun. But there's a lot of places around the world that were not ideal to shoot in. Just financially or just logistically or just didn't make sense. But there's a lot of places I wanted to go. So we were doing all this stuff for 15 years. But in 2007, I said, you know what? I have a list. I turned 40 years old. I was like, instead of buying a nice Corvette or some nice car, something like that, when you turn 40, I was like, I'm just going to travel for a year. I'm going to go to some of the places we can't go on the photo shoots. So there's places that just didn't make sense. So I made a little list, and I had organized the company to where we had 16 people working for us in an office at a time where I could leave for like two weeks. And as long as I had internet connection, I would be okay. I could communicate back. I had everybody doing their jobs. And so my thing is I'm going to leave for a week or two every month, and I'm going to go somewhere. It started off with India and then Bali, and then it went to other places in South America, Cuba, just Egypt. But on some of these trips, it would be just me, and I'd hire a local guide if I didn't speak the language. And usually by the end of the trip, it would be like 10-day trips, like in Cambodia. By the end of that trip, my guide became a friend. And he was like, 'Hey, I want you to come to my house.' So I go to his house, and it's a house the size of – 10 by 10, you know, there's three people living in this 10 by 10 little shack. And his wife had scooted a bunch of stuff out of the way and borrowed some folding chairs from the neighbors and made a little dinner on their little tiny stove for us. And it was cool. You know, I got to meet his family and you get to see how the real people live, the real culture and the real people. And so, but some other times people would go with me. Maybe my brother, I'm interested in going to New Zealand, so I'll take some time off work. Or I had a couple of friends; one of the models that I travel with, just purely platonic, no, just straight friends, nothing, no romantic interest. And we would, we would travel and do stuff. And so, but that one year turned into seven. So I did that for seven years, where I'd be in Austin for a couple of weeks and then gone for a couple of weeks. And I just made, and the more places I went, the more I wanted to see. And so it became; I went to all seven continents. And had some really amazing experiences, and it changed me. I met my wife on one of those trips. My current wife I met on one of those trips. It's complete. So that's how it evolved into that. So are you a photographer? I would not call myself a photographer, but on these trips I took a lot of pictures, and I didn't have a blog back then. I was an editor of my newspaper in college, in high school. So I have experience in that. And so I would write little trip stories. And this is not, here's Kevin eating some noodles in the market. It was more of like a National Geographic type of, this is what it's like in this country, in Peru. You know, this is exciting. Here's some pictures. And I shot video also. I had a little, small video camera and I shot tons of video everywhere. And I shot it from a documentary point of view, not a, here's Kevin doing something. And then because we had video editors that would do our other stuff for us with the model side, sometimes they'd have downtime. And so I would just have them edit my videos. And we did professional voiceovers. And I have a whole library, 30 some odd hours of National Geographic-style videos about each of these places with history and everything mixed in. Really nice videos. And I just never did anything with them. I showed them. I did a party like 12 years ago. In the middle of this, where I brought back like vodka from Russia and tea from China and some other unique foods from other countries. And so I threw a little party at my house with like 30 people. Set up a huge screening room. And I screened like – these videos are like 15 minutes long each. Screened the Russia video. And while we watched the Russia video, we drank vodka that I personally brought back in my suitcases from Russia. And then while we watched – Cuba when we passed out cigars or whatever. So I did something like that. That was kind of cool. But that's the only place I've really ever shown those. Did you bring the tiger back for the screening? I did not bring the tiger back for the screening. So out of the countries that you visited, it might be hard, but what was your favorite country and why? People ask me that all the time. Japan probably is my favorite country because I love the high-tech there. I love Kobe beef, Kobe steak, as you know. I don't eat sushi, though. And the people, it's so clean. You drop something in the middle of the street, in a busy street in Japan, you can pick it back up and feel comfortable eating it. It's so clean. So Japan's a really cool place. But some of my favorites are more the adventure stuff, like Antarctica. I would love to go back to Antarctica. African safaris, the Ice Hotel in the north of Sweden was really, really cool. There's something different about every country I like. Probably the most enlightening trip that I did was Israel. So I went to Israel. I'm not religious. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, which is similar to Catholic, but I'm not really religious. I'm more spiritual. But to go to Israel, and I had a private guide who was an ex-college professor, that took me around for 10 days all over Israel. And I ended up going into Jordan too and saw Petra and all that. But in Israel, to see you hear all this stuff on the news of what it's like over there. That's where travel changes. You see for yourself what places are like, not what the movies want you to think or politicians or newspapers want you to think. You see for yourself. So this guy, he was totally unbiased, but I got to see how three religions are living on top of each other. And everybody always wants this world peace and they're always striving for this. It's never going to happen there. It's just not going to happen. But to see all the history and these three religions and how they interact and are coexisting on this sacred land that they all claim is one of the most sacred in their tradition was fascinating and very enlightening. So that would probably be one of my more favorite trips that just really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. So talking about travel, Kevin, I hear you have an interesting story about whether it Italy or Italians? I don't know about people from Michigan, actually. Oh, Michigan. Okay. Right. Yeah. I have had my run-in with the mafia, the U. S. mafia, too. And back in the early 90s when I think I was telling you the story earlier, we were doing that USA Calendar Girls bit when I was traveling around with these models. And doing that, my background, like I said, is I was an editor of the school paper. And stuff in high school and college and whatnot. And so I, I had always wanted to start a magazine. And so I, but really what I decided after doing this, I started doing some research in Texas and Texas liquor sales or public information. I don't know about every state, but, and I was doing, saw an article at these clubs, these strip clubs back in the nineties were early nineties were doing crazy numbers and liquor sales. I'm like, that looks interesting. And then at that time, Strip clubs had always been these seedy joints, these places on the other side of town where you really don't want to be seen. And there's still a bunch of those out there. But there's also some that were like crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and just like filet mignon lunches and just like incredible palaces, especially in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta. And I got to see some of that from the other child. I was like, you know what? I would like to start one of those. I was 23 years old. I had no experience in it. It's like, how can I raise the money? So I made like a hundred page business plan. I worked like two months researching like a proper business plan, like market research, like flooring, like everything, like a huge thick business plan to open this club. But I had no, it's going to take like 3 million bucks. And I picked out a location and had all the plots for the land and everything. And it's like, how am I going to get this money? So I put an ad in the newspaper saying new. I forgot what I called it, you know, Kevin's Club opening soon, now hiring dancers, barbacks, managers, whatever. And I had no club. There was no club going soon, but I put a Help Wanted ad in the newspaper. I got all these people. It was for market research. All these people submitting their resumes and stuff to me, and I would call them back and ask questions just to learn about the business. And then one of these turned out to be the manager of a local club, and he and I hit it off. And so he's like, 'Oh, I'll help you open this thing.' So we tried to raise the money, and we just couldn't raise the money. And so what I did is I pivoted because my mom at the time worked for American Airlines, so I could fly anywhere in the U. S. for free. We had these little vouchers. You just show up at the airport. As long as there's a seat on the plane, you write in where you want to go. So I literally flew to every big city in the U. S., I don't know, 30, 40 cities, and I would go spend the weekend and go to strip clubs, not to see dancers but to do research, like how well are they charging, how is their entrance, how is their lighting, how is their this. I would then go into the library. This was before the internet. And pull microfilm. And pull all the stories about what had been written about the owners and everything for the last 10 years. And make notes. And they had this huge library of stuff and ideas. And I was going to use that for the club. But it turned out that we couldn't raise the money. So I pivoted into a magazine. And so I started a little magazine called Gentleman's Club. No nudity. No nothing. It was a glossy business magazine for that industry. And I was like, I need to get some publicity for this. So what do I do? And I was like, press releases, you know, press releases, norm, I was like a bit, press releases, maybe I can do a press release, and this is days before the internet, so I took all this information I had, I was like, okay, what are the which are the top 10 cities in the United States for strippers and roughly what kind of dollars are they doing in these cities? So, I looked through all my stuff came up with a list of uh, here's the top 10: say you know, Dallas has got 37 clubs, and they they do whatever, Three million a month in sales. And Atlanta is number two in the U. S., and it's 2. 9 million in sales, and 16 clubs or whatever the number is. I made a top ten list. Typed that up on a piece of paper. Got my old fax machine. For those of you who don't know what fax machines are, they look kind of like a big computer. And you put a paper in and it's like a scanner. And it scans out and sends it over the phone lines before you can send PDFs by email. And I faxed that to Entertainment Tonight. A couple other things. I think maybe PR Newswire at the time. I think they might have existed. I can't remember. Two days later, Entertainment Tonight sends a crew to my little apartment in Austin to film me talking about the industry. A week later, I'm at CNN in Dallas. They asked me to come up to Dallas and come onto CNN, their little office in Dallas. Shortly after that, Robin Leach reaches out to their team. They fly me to L. A. to be on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And they're doing this whole story about how I – how these strip clubs are no longer these little seedy places they're now these like palaces with marble floors and and uh tuition uh reimbursement programs and all this kind of stuff that some of these that was a trend at the time i became the de facto expert for that industry i was quoted in the front page of USA Today, New York Times, Red Book, uh Vogue, you name it every little newspaper i was a de facto guy and that led to some subscriptions for the uh for the magazine and some other stuff. But out of that, there's a guy in Detroit. This is where we're getting to this. I had to set up the story. There's a guy in Detroit that sees me on one of these TV shows. He finds me. He reaches out to me and says, hey, I'd like to fly you up to Detroit. I want to hire you as a consultant. I'm thinking about opening a club. And at the point in time, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul. I was like, I need this guy to pay his $1,000 ad bill so I can freaking pay my rent. Eating ramen noodles and uh and drinking water you know out of the faucet, I just I had no money and so I was like, I need to do anything, so I flew up to Detroit, I drove around with him, made some suggestions, came back, told him at the time, I'm looking for investors. He's like, well, how much do you need? I said, ten thousand dollars, and I was 23, 24 years old, and that was a lot of money, uh, and I was like, he's like, no, I'll do it, no problem; It wires me $10,000. I think my life is solved. I can breathe. I don't gotta figure out how I'm going to survive. I can focus on things. Well, he decides that for his $10,000 investment, we had nothing in writing. He decides that there needs to be perks involved. The girl wants to be on the cover. They got to come see him and things like that. Then he decides to move from Detroit to Phoenix to really help blow this thing up. He needs to be on the ground. He puts a little bit more money in, like another $10,000 or something. We start working together, but we don't really see eye to eye. Every weekend, or not every weekend, but a lot of weekends, this guy would just completely disappear off the face of the earth. I'm like, where are you going? He's like, don't worry. I'll be back on Monday. He would go and rent the Phoenician Resort in Phoenix and rent the top floor. The CEO of all these big companies would fly in and they would have this big, huge cocaine party on the top floor of these nice hotels. And they bring in strippers and all this kind of stuff. And I was not invited. He told me one day maybe I'll earn the right to be invited. But right now I'm not invited. But he'd just disappear. So he had a big cocaine problem. And so we didn't see eye to eye. I didn't like the fact that he wanted special privileges for someone to be on the cover. I'm like, this is a business, pure business. And I ended up saying, I'm leaving. I'm moving from Arizona back to Texas. And he's like, no, you're not. And then he accused me of a bunch of stuff that I didn’t do and sent guys to beat me up when I was moving. And I had to call the police to move out of my place to load my U-Haul. Police had to stand there because he sent two guidos to actually break my legs. So I couldn’t move. I get back to Texas. In times in Austin, people come to visit him. You see it in the movies sometimes where they’re walking out of a restaurant and they have a little clicker to remote start their car. This is more common now. People have remote starters. 30 years ago, it was kind of a new technology. They would remote start their car just to make sure someone didn’t put a bomb underneath it. When we get back to Texas, I hook up with Mark, the photographer, to do some stuff. I'm trying to recover. And in the meantime, this guy is coming after us. He's sending people to come after us. He's threatening to blow up airplanes that we're on, all kinds of crazy shit. So, yeah, I went through a phase there where we had to watch our back and be very, very careful. Wow. So just tell me if I have to pixelate your face. I didn't name any names, but I could name names. But I'm not a person. He's dead now. I could write a whole book about that chapter of my life. And my dad at the time was like, Kevin, you get out of this business. You come back to the house, live with us, go work at the local McDonald's or something. And I was like, no, I'm too entrepreneurial. On my way back from moving out, I had my U-Haul that I had packed with the police standing there to keep the guidos away and escorted me actually out of town. They followed me until I passed out of town to make sure the guidos didn't follow me on the interstate to come back to Texas. When I get back into West Texas, I'm cruising along at 60 miles an hour on my U-Haul. The speed limit's 55. Cop pulls me over, middle of nowhere, Texas, for speeding. Just going to give me a warning. Looks at my license, like, oh, you have an unpaid ticket, unpaid traffic ticket from like three years ago when you were in college. You're coming to me to the jail. So I end up going to jail in some little Podunk Texas town. It was a Friday. And so Monday was a holiday, so I had to stay in the jail until Tuesday until the judge could see me. And I remember calling it a $1,000 bail, something minor. The whole thing got dismissed, but I had to spend the night in this little Podunk Texas jail, me and one other guy. It's like you see in the movie, the old sheriff's thing in a western or something from the 1800s. And I remember telling my dad, saying, hey, I'm stuck here. And he's like, good, you can rot in there. You need to get out of this business. I'm not giving you the $1,000 to bail out. No. Only if you agree to come home, change, get out of this business, go to work for somebody. Because my dad always had this dream that I would go to work for somebody, some accounting firm or something. And I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'll sit here. I don't need your money. I'm not going to agree to that. I'll find some other way to get out of here. So I found that my uncle ended up giving me the money. And I got out and continued my entrepreneurial ways. That concludes part one of our episode with Kevin King. Make sure to tune in next time to listen to the rest of the interview. Kevin lets us know how he turned his life around after dealing with the mob and gets more into his own personal values and how he's established himself in the Amazon space. Make sure to tune in and check it out. Just a reminder to subscribe on whatever platform you're using. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.