#2527 - MrBeast

25:06It probably would build this abandoned city, do I'm the last man on the planet, and it's like me there for some time. And then afterwards, like a couple months, like film then right afterwards, film a video where I give someone a million dollars. They live there for 10 days, but they have to fend off zombies with their friends. So then we can reuse the set location. Because if I'm going to completely set deck basically a whole city, oh my gosh, that's going to be a monster. But yeah, if I did both of those back to back, that'd actually be pretty gnarly and worth the effort. I think I like the idea now.

25:33now that I see those masks. And I think about paintball or something along those lines. What I'm picturing, too, is ideally we could find a city with a skyscraper, because I want someone with a long lens pointed down of someone picturing them on a street. It's pitch black, and they have a fire, and it's them and their three friends, and then they hear noise and zombies and stuff. Those shots would be so beautiful. It would probably be one of the most beautiful videos ever. And I'm picturing we put vines on all the buildings and stuff too. Well, if you wanted no one around, it's going to be hard because you're going to have to do it in an abandoned place.

26:08Exactly. And you're not going to get an abandoned skyscraper. Maybe. Unless you're in Detroit. Well, we also, it doesn't have to be in the U.S. We did a video, Seven Days in an Abandoned City, where there's like some place in Europe where there was a city that was like war-torn and stuff like that. And it had like hotels and tall buildings and everything. It was pretty wild. Really? Yeah. And there's no one in it now? No, no one in it. Like tourists go there or whatever. but they let us close it off for a week. It was pretty crazy. Well, that's the place then. Yeah, I just wonder if they'll, you know, it's a little bit of history there, so I doubt they'll let me go in and, like, set deck everything like crazy.

26:41And also paintball everything. Exactly, yeah. Well, with those masks, we could do airsoft, which would be maybe even easier. Well, actually, no, the problem with airsoft then is the truss system. You don't know if they got hit, so paintball is probably more effective. Yeah, you need paintball. You need paintball, and it needs to look good when it splatters against them. I just, you know, if someone on my team is watching this, just clip the last 10 minutes of this and send it to the creative team. I got you guys. I believe in you. Is there another way to kill a zombie other than paintball that would be wild?

27:11Like, is there something else? Well, one thing we've been working on, because I've always wanted to, like, do Hunger Games in real life as well, is to, like, these, like, suits where you could, you know, electronic, like, laser tag where you could just shoot and then it just, like, lights up. What about shotguns with beanbags? Because they use those for people to take out non-lethal loads. They have beanbags that they shoot out of a shotgun. The question I would need is if I shot you with it three feet away, would you still be fine? I guess you could probably adjust the pressure and stuff where it's not.

27:47Not really. Okay, well. I mean, you could, but you couldn't bury it. See, this isn't Fear Factor. This is Mr. Beast. I understand. It's a gray line. You know, it's so funny. I need to give you a blunt and let you just help me cook on this video. I can see this is something you're interested in. There's something there. You just have to figure out an exciting way to kill them where it doesn't actually hurt the stunt people or whoever's wearing the masks, whoever pretends to be a zombie. It would have to be something. I was thinking light him on fire, but that's. Could you pull up the seven days abandoned city video and just skip to some random part?

28:22I'd love for him to see how it looks because that with what you're picturing, that really would be something you can't find anywhere else. And that's what gets me excited is when it's content you can't find anywhere else. That's typically a huge indicator that if it's done well, people will like it. Have you seen the show From? From? I don't think so, no. It's great. Great show. But it's about these people. Wait, wait, wait. Look at that shot. Pause it right there. So that's just one random building. But you can maybe go to the intro or something if you want to just show them, like, yeah, this whole place.

28:54Like, look at these buildings. Oh, my God. This is perfect. Yeah. And then, like, yeah, if you pause it there, those are all the buildings in the city. I mean. Oh, dude, this is the spot. Listen, the show starts at sundown every night. Okay. As soon as the sun goes down, that's when the games begin. Nothing happens until it gets dark out. Okay. Everything is in the dark. And these people have no idea when it's going to happen, when they're going to get hit. And so they try to get their sleep whenever they can. But you keep them awake during the day with tasks. You keep them away. So during the day, they have all sorts of materials.

29:29They have supplies. They have all sorts of things. And they have to figure out how to protect themselves, how to develop shelter, alarm systems for when the zombies are close. Oh, really? Yeah, give them time to, like, figure out stuff to do to keep the zombies away. And a limited amount of materials that they can work with and just let these people get creative in their ingenuity. But then you keep – so they'll be busy during the day. So they're not going to be able to sleep. So at nighttime when it gets dark out, then they don't know when it's going to hit. So you have these people sitting around.

30:03And it might be 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m. And then 3 in the morning shit starts happening. 30 zombies come in and they've got to shoot them all with paintballs. And they're creeping in. Yeah. Like they're creeping in. Bro, you're getting me excited. I mean, it would be so fucking cool to, like, let them build a structure or something. And then, like, in I'm Legend, where he has to point the lights because they hate lights. But, like, at nighttime, like, they'll have to, we can hide lights throughout the city that they'd have to collect and then set up. So they have good vision around their fort and everything.

30:33And then they have, like, you know, cycles where they take turns watching and stuff. And then we only send the zombies out theoretically at night or whatever the structure would be. So they have chill time. Or maybe every night 40 zombies are unleashed. And then so they're like, they shot like 35 of them. But they're like, oh, shit, there's five hidden around the city. So that day while they're walking around, they're like on edge. And the tension throughout the day would be phenomenal. Yeah. There's so many cool ways to do it. And, you know, you don't have to tell them that the zombies are only going to come out at night.

31:01Yeah. Just have it that way. I'm excited. We need to stop talking about this because I'm going to leave and go film it right now. I'm fighting the urge to go call my team. You also, with the zombies, they can come out in the daytime. These people don't know because they never do it. True. Like the first five days, it's only a night. Yeah. And then day six, boom. Exactly. So people get snatched up in the middle of their house. Oh, my God. This company we used before was Gel Blaster. It's almost like Airsoft, but it doesn't hurt as bad. Oh, it shoots water? And these vests that they have set up are sensors so you can almost like what you're saying.

31:36It's like VR, laser tag. So it lights up when you hit it? Yeah, and there's like a whole talking system that says, like, you have this many shots left. You have this much energy. Can we see a video? Yeah. Is this a video? We did this at night at somebody's house. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When did you do this? A couple months ago. Oh, nice. I don't... Oh, shit. Ah. Wait, actually, now that you... It's got bad music, but... You pointed out, I have seen, like, Nerf gel blasters. I actually never thought of that. So, I mean, you could just redo the suits so that it makes sense for you. Yeah, and then reskin the guns because those look a little lame.

32:08But, yeah, that would be... It's kind of lame. It already exists. I kind of like shotguns with beanbags. I think I can easily picture the aesthetic you're looking for I gotta I have to find the blend between Joe's like recreation of this video and like what I could actually do but there I actually am more inspired than ever I think it's very doable. It's very doable. You just have to figure out a way to make it exciting but still not hurt anybody Exactly, you know, that's not hurt the zombies you'd have to like army this people up somehow I mean well the the thing too is like, you know One thing that would help is like if the zombies were ex-Navy SEALs or something.

32:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it's a little different than if they were like typical Hollywood actors and things like that. So I've learned for like some of these other things. Like it's also who you cast to do it. Right. If it was like Navy SEALs dressed up as zombies and I paid them all, you know, they wouldn't care. Also, it could be like a zombie army. like an army some army somewhere got taken over and turned into zombies and those are the people you're fighting against so you could put them with like plate carriers on and you know you could armor them up a little bit so they could take some hits have some lore behind it it would make sense too bro I'm sold I just gotta find an abandoned city Give them glowing eyes.

33:30And that's the only way you know they're out there. This whole podcast is going to be Joe helping me figure out how to do zombies. Dude, it would be fucking terrifying. It would be awesome. Imagine there's people that are in this city. There's no lights. There's no electricity. And then at nighttime, it goes dark. And maybe they have flashlights, but each flashlight only has one hour of battery life. And so you have to judiciously use that flashlight throughout the evening. To shine it around. Shut it up. So you give them a little extra tension that the flashlight's going to die because you only have one hour of flashlight battery.

34:02And then you see these red eyes. You give them a slightly glowing red eye. And that's how you can find the zombies. True. That would be cool. So you just look out into the woods. You can see the fucking eyes, man. You see the eyes. That would be crazy. And the other thing, too, would be, because I go to how do we execute it. we could do it too where like there's like uh every every day at like a certain period we we pull off all the dead zombies which are humans and we just swap them with like uh i can have recreated versions of them there so there's like actual zombie bodies like piling up right so as the video progresses they're like literally stepping over like mannequins that are set decked identically how the the people were so when they die and then they're just like literally stepping on zombies as they go building the building that would be crazy that would be crazy you know and And you can chalk outlines around the zombies so you can identify the fact that this one's a dead zombie.

34:55Or no, don't. Screw it. Let that be the fun part. But then if we put a crazy prize on it, we could do, you only get the prize, or maybe the prize is split amongst everyone who survives the whole 10 days or whatever. And then it's like to really build up this crescendo at the end. We could have it where the final day there's a massive invasion coming or something. So it's like the whole time. What if every day more and more came? So day one it was 10, day two it was 20, and then 50, and then I'm like, you know, we're going to have 400 zombies come on the final day. So the whole video they're prepping for this like Game of Thrones type invasion.

35:27Not only that, but the people that get killed by the zombie, we think they're out of the game, but they actually become zombies. So when you think you won at the end, now the final game is you're competing against the zombies. The zombies who can't win because they're already dead, but they can make you lose. Yeah, and they know you're for it. You know what would actually be even crazier is if instead of, well, you know, maybe we have Navy SEALs as the zombies, but also what if the contestants are like ex-Navy SEALs too, so they have like real strategy and stuff like that. That would be cool. Just get the most badass people that you can get for this zombie thing, like survivalists, martial artists.

36:05Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that would be crazy. Dude. Actually, that's not bad. Like a UFC champion, a Navy SEAL, like a Taekwondo, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, all right, what happens if you put six experts in different fields together and simulate a real zombie apocalypse? You have 50 acres of this abandoned city sealed off. We set decked it all. And every day a wave of zombie that gets bigger and bigger until the big crescendo at the end hits. And if you survive it all, you split a million dollars. I think the really difficult challenge is figuring out a way to kill zombies that's not lame. Exactly.

36:39and doesn't hurt anybody actually doesn't kill people i don't know that's your your second thought process but of course yeah but it has to because if you're hitting them even with the gel soft look kind of cool but it's like pew pew pew exactly pew pew pew no it's got to be but bang and i could add those sounds and pose but we're big fans of practical so i'd have my team take apart the guns and see if there's some way they can make it even though it's shooting the gel like make a bang bang and then add like the effects and and we'd have to reskin the guns to look like real guns and it would have to be some it doesn't have to look like real guns because it could be a gun from the future.

37:11Yeah, but that's lame. When you think of zombie apocalypse, it has to look like a gun that they grabbed from some dude's tape that they found in a house, right? That's what a zombie apocalypse is to me. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So it would have to look like a real gun. So that's why I like the shotguns with the beanbags. And also, with a shotgun, you're only going to get so many shells. As long as you don't have one of those big Terran tactical ones that has actually a magazine that can hold like 15 rounds I think a regular shotgun like a Benelli how many shells can you put in one of those? I think six.

37:45I think maybe six. Something like that is good too. You have a limited amount of bullets and reloading is hard. We just gotta find out maybe if it was like 20 gauge maybe it was like 20 gauge shotgun like birdshot with a beanbag maybe that wouldn't fuck people up but it would make a big bang and you'd be hitting them and if you could find a way to light up wherever they got hit, like if you could put them in some sort of a suit where when they get hit, there's like gel packs. There's no way you can shoot shotguns at people. Yeah. There's just not possible. Not a real one. You're so wrong. He's living in his utopia.

38:26I haven't seen his eyes light up like this in years. Let him have fun. No, no, no, no, no. The stunt guy's like a gun, not a person. Okay, well, I don't know a lot about shotguns, so let's find out. I'm never going to have someone point a real shotgun at someone else, but yeah. Yeah, you will. Trust me, we're going to work this out. Oh, you want to help co-direct it? I'm going to help. Yeah, you'll actually see in the background one shot, Joe. Just be like this? He's like, yeah! It's like the Navy SEALs are fighting off a zombie apocalypse. I want to be one zombie one night. I'll sneak in. Everyone's like, who's that bald guy over there?

38:56That's just like, oh, fuck yeah. Shotgun damage on a zombie, you have to blow their head off, right? How would you? Oh, God. Don't even get him started. He's gonna be talking about hit damage for 20 minutes. But it depends on what kind of zombie. Like, Walking Dead zombies are so stupid, you can stab them in the head with a pencil and they die. Remember, it was just going through the head. Because they would shoot them with those crossbows. And, like, crossbows wouldn't even kill a person. Like, with those field tips, they're using field tips. This is basically like a pencil going through you.

39:23It's not like a broadhead. Like, if you shot an animal with a crossbow, you would use a broadhead, which is a big sharp blade that cuts a giant channel through an animal. What those things are using is target points. Like that dude in The Walking Dead, it would drive me nuts because he would shoot him in the hand and it would just stick in their head and then they'd be dead. It's so funny because I watch the same thing and I'm like, oh, that's cool. Different audience. All it takes is like one arrow to go into your head and you're dead if you're a zombie. Yeah, totally. One arrow. This is nonsense.

39:56Yeah, right guys watching? Yeah, one arrow in the head, you'd be, yeah, you wouldn't die. The thing is people have lived, humans have lived through arrows through the head like that, accidentally gotten shot in the head with a bow and arrow, with a field tip, and lived. Because it basically just, it's like a pencil going through your head. Really? The way people die from an arrow is hemorrhage. You die from massive hemorrhage. And it's usually because there's a blade. So like this. Like this is what the Native Americans used to use. But that's wide. This is actually, yes. Okay. That's an actual arrowhead.

40:27But the thing about this is when it's attached to a stick, this is cutting. So it's causing hemorrhage inside the body. The little field tip doesn't do that. And the field tip wouldn't puncture enough veins where you just bleed to death? Maybe, but most likely not. I mean, if it went through your heart, yeah, you'd be dead. But if it just goes through like this side of your lungs and pokes out your back, you'll live. Wow. Yeah. Would you want to live? You would be in pain. It would suck. Yeah. It would certainly suck. But it's not like getting hit with a broadhead. My point is, I don't remember my point.

40:56But if I had a point, it would be there's got to be a level of shotgun. What is the lowest powered shotgun available? It's not a – I know 20 gauge is light. I've used those before for, like, shooting clay pigeons, and I've used 12 gauges. You don't want to get hit with a 12 gauge, even if it's a beanbag. 410 bore?

41:24Smallest gauge? equivalent to a 67 gauge shotgun. Oh, here we go. Now we're talking. That's a bitch ass round. Oh God. Let's see what that looks like. You're so funny. Shoot a, let's see what a 410 gauge shotgun or a 67 gauge shotgun looks like when they shoot it. Looks like a bullshit gun. It looks like it's going to still hurt. No, no, no. You'll be fine. Okay. Can I test it on you? Yeah. Yeah. Just give me a plate carrier. And if you're going to use a bean bag. Yeah. Because that's what I'm thinking. Like if you have a chest plate, you know, so a plate carrier is bulletproof. Yeah, but what are you going to hit?

42:01Everything you'll cover up. You'll cover up the shoulders and the arms. You give them like military style armor, like body armor. Because none of this is going to penetrate. So if it's a beanbag round, what it is is just like it's basically a bag that's going to like shoot out of the shotgun and blast you. But I don't – they're not lethal. Let me see what it looks like. I don't know which one I'm looking for. Just go to a video. Just go to a video of lowest powered shotgun. That's weird looking. That's cool. That one looks cool. That's a revolver shotgun. Yeah, that's dope. I've never seen one of those before.

42:38Huge power it says. Interesting. Yeah, the title is Smallest but Deadliest Shotgun. Yeah, I think it's smallest in terms of like the size of it, not the round itself. Yeah, this isn't I did ask for lowest power, but it's that's not what people want to click on video I know so I feel like most people who buy shotguns are looking for shotguns that don't well How about this look up 67 gauge shotgun? And does it show you a video of that? Okay, let's see what it says let me see what it looks like when it's shooting This is a 12 gauge. Oh, that's a big yeah, that's yeah, they're like modified 12 gauges That's a lot I just don't The point the shotgun isn't going to kill a zombie Yeah but it could in this game Jamie I know but you have to get so close to get a fucking headshot It's more fun to like Get snipers and grenades I don't know if you have to use headshots This little kid's going to shoot a shotgun Yes Okay let me see Can you give me some volume Let me hear this Back that up a little bit Yeah, that's what we need.

43:48We need that kind of shotgun with like a beanbag round or rock salt. I got it. The team, they're listening. They're on it. Yeah. Something where it makes an impact. There's a sound like a gun going off, but you can't really kill anybody with it. Yeah. This is totally possible, dude. You'd have to have like very strict safety protocols in the set, though, because one One of the things, when I first moved to L.A. in 1994, there was a guy that a friend of mine actually knew who was an actor who was on a set who took a gun that had a blank in it and thought it'd be funny to just put the thing to his head and pull the trigger.

44:27And he didn't realize that just the actual air coming out of the gun, if you put it right to your head, is lethal. And he blew his brains out. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, with a blank. He just didn't. Or like the Alec Baldwin situation. Yeah, that was actually probably negligence because it seems like there was an error where they were using real rounds and then they would take the same guns. They would use real rounds on a range and then take the same guns and bring them to set and they didn't clear everything. So I don't know who's responsible for that. I don't know what ultimately came out of that. But you're never supposed to point a gun even if it's not loaded.

45:07You're never supposed to point a gun at someone ever. In movies now, like if you and I were doing a movie. Which is why I'm like so hesitant to this whole shotgun thing. Welcome back to reality, Joe. We're going to be fine. In movies, you're supposed to like if I was shooting at you in a movie, I'm really supposed to shoot over here. Yeah. And I think that came out of the movie The Crow because Bruce Lee's son died because there was something that was in the gun itself. It wasn't even a bullet that killed him. It was like there was a particle or something that hit him from the blank. Well, there's effects in CG and everything so good now, too.

45:42Like, you probably don't even have to put a blank in there. You just overlay the sound effect and, I mean, put the effect in. No one would even be able to tell sometimes, too. That's true, but you want something that's scary for the actual people. And the recoil and stuff. Yeah. So it's more real. Like a really light shotgun. And I guess even if you know it's a blank, like having a gun pointed at you as an actor makes you, you know, feel more in this situation, too, probably. Well, just rock salt. If you have a really light shotgun, even if it's a 20-gauge with rock salt, it would suck. It would sting.

46:13But if you've got these guys all protected and you could find a way where when it hits them, like you have gel packs on them or something. So if you have them all, they're in like these like tattered-looking white outfits, right? And when you hit them, there's red gel packs underneath and they splatter. Yeah. And you could, you know, if you get a direct hit. We did something similar when we recreated Squid Games. We put like squibs on them when they got eliminated and blew up. And so, yeah, you'd put like little squibs. And then when the sensors went off, it would just, and the liquid would go across their body.

46:47Yeah. Yeah. So you could do that. So if you do that, actually, you could have blanks and maybe a laser sight. Exactly. That's where we went with the Hunger Games stuff is laser tag. And then it would just trigger squibs if you pointed at them. And then maybe in post, like, we'd have a track where the trajectory of where the bullets were. And we could just overlay, like, the lasers or whatever in post so you could visually see it. But obviously in the time that you were actually filming, practically, it would just be, you know, invisible. You just know if you got hit, if your suit lit up. And it seems like you could sync up a laser tag with an actual blank round.

47:27so you can make the boom and then the laser actually hits the person at the same time. Okay. Right? Yeah. That wouldn't be hard to do because if you have lasers, you have guns that shoot lasers, that's what laser tag is, that's a pretty simple mechanism. All you would do is have like sort of a dual trigger setup where you have, as you pull the trigger back, you get the explosion from the round going off and you also get the laser at the same time. And so the squibs go off You see the boom and then the squibs go off and you have it all coordinated together and then it looks wild. And so then you have these zombies.

48:04Boom! You shoot them. You see splatter all over their chest. The only other thing we have to figure out is where is this going? Because if it's going on my YouTube channel, we don't usually show gore and blood. So we might have to hit up where we use to put fear factor and stuff. Because that definitely seems like a more. It's going from like we're usually family friendly to now this is very rated R. It's not family friendly because you're killing zombies. Yeah. You know if something's family friendly or not, if you say eliminated instead of killing? Yes. If you're eliminating zombies, that's family friendly.

48:37If you're killing zombies, that's rated R. Well, they're already dead, so you're eliminating them. There you go. See, now we're back. See, they're already dead. And you can tell if a show is for 18 plus or 13 plus before they shoot the person or whatever, if it cuts away. right and like there's all these little things not that we even this could be wild i mean this could be if someone's streaming platform was like yo here's whatever whatever a blank check just make it happen oh my god should do it they need people over there anyway yeah or i mean really even netflix anyone yeah like it's it's the biggest no-brainer in the history of ever like actually the fact that no one's recreated this is kind of absurd when you think about it but it's also like if traditional you know independent of like the shock and stuff you're talking about if like a traditional people with traditional worldviews did this, it'd be so stringent and structured and stuff like that.

49:24Whereas like if we did it with like the Beast Games mindset where it's just like there's cameras everywhere, they can truly do whatever the hell they want. And it's not like this like guarded thing and it's an actual abandoned city. Oh my gosh. It would go crazy. Now we need a task. We need a goal. The goal would be survival. Right. But maybe survival while you're trying to accomplish something. Okay. Well, then this is like a mechanism that usually would work well is the tasks every day will grow the prize pool. And if it's on a streaming platform, then the prize pool could be crazy, right? It doesn't have to be a million dollars.

49:57It could grow to 10 million theoretically if they weren't being cheap. And so then it could be like every day if you complete the task, I put a million dollars in the prize pool. Each episode is one whole day. It's 10 episodes, 10 days. And so they could technically grow the prize pool to$10 million. You put some, like, you know, the UFC people and, like, Navy SEALs and, like, these hardcore people, and you tell them, like, they could potentially share$10 million? Bro, they would be trying their butts off those 10 days. The footage would be crazy. I mean, they would probably be, like, practicing during the day, like, their rotations and everything on, like, holding off zombies.

50:27That would be really cool. Yeah, they would run training routes. Exactly. You know, it's really interesting we'd have to figure out how the zombies get them. because you don't want physical conflict between the stunt people, the zombie people, and the contestants. You don't want them to actually fight. Exactly. So you would have to have rules as to what. It would probably be, in my default intuition, is if the zombie just purely touches you, then you're just dead. We wouldn't be able to take it any further than that. Right, like 28 days later zombies. All they have to do is scratch you. Yeah, or breathe in front of you.

50:59Yeah, exactly. But in this case, if they touch you, that way it's not like the Navy SEAL pushing and flipping them off because if you went to push them or touch them then you'd be out so people would be keeping their distance but even then it'd get pretty crazy because obviously they would run and there'd be chase scenes and stuff so honestly I know some great stunt choreographers like Ken and a bunch of other people I would just call them and be like yo, how do I do this? and they'd probably be like oh, here's how I would do it or whatever Dude, this could be mad Yeah This could be a mad show To set the stage it's like abandoned city dozens of acres sealed off.

51:31I could literally build a wall around it so the seals and whoever the contestants know, this is the edge. They're walled in. They're walking around. We have some of the best set designers in the world come in. Basically, we'd pick a time in the future. We'd say this is 50 years in the future. They would match exactly what all these buildings would look like 50 years from now. They'd put vines on this. If there's a gas station, they'd go through. This is what would happen to Doritos 50 years from now. They'd literally mirror it identically across 100 buildings. And then we'd have a helicopter fly in, drop them off, and then it's like every day we could have an eagle fly over and drop their task of the day.

52:09And in the middle of the city is a million. Oh, that's what we could do. The prize pool in the middle, if the zombies touch it as well, then they lose the money. So they're not only defending themselves but also the prize pool. So in the middle of the city, so that's why they have to build a fort around it. And then every day if they complete their crazy task, which is distracting them from building their fort, then a helicopter will drop another million dollars on their prize pool. So then it's like, so episode one, they complete the task before the zombies come at night. And then it's like, I come in on a helicopter.

52:35We have a rope lowered down a million dollars. It's massive in ones, right? And then it unhooks. And now they have$2 million there. Like, good luck, guys. And if there's six of them, then it's like, you're now, if you survive, are all winning over$300 ,000. And then, you know, but if you grow the prize pool to$6 million without getting eliminated, you're all millionaires in nine days. Bro, that would be crazy. And then, yeah, the zombies come in. we figure out the practical guns with the right sound effects. Yeah, practical guns, right sound effects, and what entails you getting killed by a zombie.

53:06Yeah. Like, how do they work? And the other thing, too, to make it fun is if a zombie eliminates one of you, they get one-sixth of the prize pool or whatever, so now the zombies are incentivized, right, to try to. So then it's like if a zombie touches the Navy SEAL, whatever the way is, it's like, congrats, now you're a millionaire if it's later on. So then, like, as it goes on, things are going to get really tense on both sides and it'll be really cool. Yeah. Ah, dude. Because that's how you take it where people don't want to be zombies to now they're like excited to be zombies. They're like, ooh.

53:34I actually sneak up behind them and I get a million bucks. People are going to want to be zombies anyway. True, because it's going to look sick. It's going to be sick. Honestly, I would want to be a zombie. Just imagine walking in a horde and role-playing being a zombie. That'd actually be a pretty cool afternoon. Dude, it'd be so sick. It's total pitch black. There's no power, no electricity. You just see red eyes in the woods. Oh, my gosh. While these dudes are sneaking in. And you'd have to have some sort of rules, like how the zombies can move, whether they can run, whether they can, you know what I mean?

54:01Yeah. Because, like, we have to decide, are these 28 Days Later zombies that run at you? Or are these, like, Walking Dead zombies that are, like, kind of, like. We'd probably start off that way, but they evolve with time. And I'm a big fan of, like, usually when you have, like, people who are playing certain roles, they usually end up going rogue. It's really hard to get hundreds of people to do, like, certain things, like, you know, in an unscripted sandbox environment. So we'd have to constrict them in a way where, like, if we didn't want them to move past a certain speed, we'd probably have to figure out some way to put, like, a chain around their feet or something that physically wouldn't allow them to do it.

54:33Or, like, if you have 300 zombies going, right, you can't redo it, right? Like, if one of those zombies goes rogue and scratch, it's like, I can't reshoot the shell, right? That's what's so high stakes about the things we do in a super world. So we'd have to physically make it where they couldn't do things they're not supposed to do in a perfect world. or if you have 300 people, if 2 % go rogue, that's still six zombies going rogue, which is brutal. This episode is brought to you by Blue Chew. I'm sure you've heard of Blue Chew by now, but let me tell you what they've been up to. They've been on a mission to get you bricked up for years and now the number one brand for better sex.

55:08Over 5 million happy men have bought Blue Chew for better sex. And you know what? Girls love the results too. Their new 4-in-1 chewable Blue Chew Gold is for performance and passion. Two ingredients maximize blood flow for stronger, longer-lasting boners, and two get you in the mood. It's designed to dissolve under your tongue for fast results. They are number one for a reason, and we have a special deal for our listeners right now. Buy two months of Blue Chew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You also receive free overnight shipping. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information.

55:50This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Yeah, it is brutal. But I think with proper planning, if you really sit down and plan out what the zombie's task is, what it means, and what these people are doing, and what goals are they trying to achieve while they're there and while they're defending against zombies, You got to give them stuff to do during the day so that they're fully occupied so they can't sleep. Okay. It's really important. Like, the more they do during the day, it optimizes the amount of money they can win. Like, as they complete tasks, if they stay alive, they have a higher threshold.

56:33Whereas if someone just fucking sleeps all day and doesn't get anything done, even if they survive, they can't make any money. Yeah. I get what you're saying. You know what I'm saying? And that works that these are, you know, hardcore like people. So it's good. Like if I had normal contestants, they'd be like, oh, this is horrible. You want that though. You want people to bitch out. You want a few people to quit because there's always going to be people that won't quit. Me and you are hold to different standards. And if I did that, there would be maybe 10 trillion articles written about how I'm the most evil man on the planet.

57:02What? If I made it too hard where people couldn't sleep or whatever. No, listen, you can't read those articles. Fuck those people. You just got to make an awesome show. The awesome show is you keep these motherfuckers awake. And you make it so that they can choose to sleep if they want. But there are tasks to achieve. And if you can complete these tasks, you have the potential to make a lot of money. But if you don't complete the tasks, you can't make any money even if you survive. Bro, I'm sold. Amazon, Netflix, whoever wants it, let us know. Right? You've got to keep these motherfuckers awake so that nighttime is terrifying.

57:35Can you imagine seeing people sitting there with their shotgun? Exactly. They're like nodding out and then opening their eyes and looking out and seeing red eyes in the woods like, fuck! We get a tight shot of their faces as they're asleep. And then one of the other guys goes, zombies! And you hear bang, bang. And then they wake up and they grab their gun. Well, that was the problem of people randomly shooting wild while there's other people around them. So it kind of would have to be blanks and lasers. Because now that I'm thinking about it, like people are going to spaz out and accidentally shoot someone in the face.

58:03This is where... Especially if they're tired. I've done... I mean, obviously you did unscripted with Free Prider, but I've done lots of unscripted stuff with lots of people. And exactly. When you're talking about the shotgun stuff, I'm like, you know, there's just no shot in hell that we'd ever be able to. It would have to be like. But I love the gel rounds. And we could do it in a way where we set the guns where it looks really cool and we can recreate the sound effect. But then gel rounds like those is essentially like the Nerf ones. Now I'm remembering them. Like they're like water that explodes on impact.

58:28Those would be perfect. Yeah, but you want blanks because you want the bang. You want the bang for the people, for the psychological effect, the fear. It's in the middle of the night. It's dark. You're making a bang go off, the flash of the bang going off. And then maybe to avoid people being able to shoot each other, maybe at nighttime they're completely separated. Maybe at nighttime. No, you want them together. I'm telling you, if they built a fort around the money, what you want in the shots is you always want people to be able to tell what they're competing for and their why. and you usually but you don't want to have to say it right you don't want to have to say oh i'm competing for this money but if you have the money in the background the shot intuitively viewers will be like that's what they're competing for so like a fort built around it where they have walls and they're standing on it and you see the money behind them in the shots like intuitively to a viewer you're going to instantly understand the motivation and it's going to be uh like i mean it'll just be so crazy the shots maybe it's like a super advanced game of hide and seek at night where the people can't talk, they have to be very quiet because the zombies have hyper-hearing.

59:33You give the zombies walker game ears. You know what those things are? No. Do you ever go to a gun range? Yeah. You have those headphones. Oh, and they amplify. You can hear everything else way louder, but when guns go off, it kills volume above a certain amount of decibels. Yeah. So they can hear everything. So if you hear someone whisper like that, The zombies will be able to key in on it. They'll know where the people are. And these people have to hide from the zombies at night. True. Because I guess the other thing is if they built a fort around it, how would the zombies even get to them? Right.

1:00:09Because now they're going to have elevated walls. So instead of that, you have people that are trying to hide. So you've got these zombies slowly creeping through these abandoned buildings looking for people. Yeah. We'd have to get it to them where the seals and stuff couldn't lock doors or anything. Right. Right. No locks. No doors have locks. That's what makes the hide-and-go-seek so good. All the handles or all the doors are removed. There's no locks. So every night, maybe, we would brainstorm it more, but theoretically, they all have to hide in a different building or something. They couldn't be in the same building.

1:00:38And then the zombies scatter across the city. And then wherever you are in the building, people have to be able to get to you. The zombies have to be able to get to you unrestricted. And so maybe before we release the zombies, we'd have a producer just go in and walk a path. Like, alright, there's a factual path where you could die to a zombie this is good and then we let him loose that makes there's no cheating there's something this could be wild this could honestly this is one of those things where i say this to my team quite a bit it's either going to be like the worst show imaginable that people clown on or it's going to be like the number one show ever and there's no in between like you don't do this like kind of all right where people are like i like it it's either like cringe we failed this sucks or it's like this is the greatest thing ever why did this not exist before like the walking dead or what's the hbo show called uh the one with the last of us yeah the last of us in real life like how has no one done this you know what i mean like like actual true simulation and like if we executed it properly i really could see it be like a number one show in the world type thing that people would like because also you have to think like the world is ran by clips these days i don't you know on like tiktok feeds instagram reels and youtube shorts and like it is arguably the most clippable thing ever like any 10 second scene of that you could just throw on youtube shorts and go viral because it's freaking zombies getting shot at and you know how cool they can make those masks look yeah i mean you get a real special effects guy to work on those masks yeah like one of those experts can you search up mr b's zombies uh we have a video on our channel from like i mean god knows how long ago seven years ago where we we did like make like a mini zombie horde but not like in a simulation like this just for fun to see how people in public are to react and like the it looks disgusting the things they were able to do it's pretty crazy yeah special modern special effects and makeup artists they could do amazing stuff man wait uh if you can find like a close-up of my face or like it was like crazy we we just brought in people yeah like like that kind of stuff like look at my face right there like pause it it's freaking wild dude you could totally do something like that on the outside of one of those masks yeah 100 100 exactly 100 yeah that was really all that's the look you the what yours looks like with like the teeth and everything and fucked up flesh that is the mask exactly so you take that hard airsoft mask and you put that shit on it joe the problem is i want to go work on this now we like so it's it's funny i have this thing where uh this might sound like crazy to some people but when i you can you know when you feel your heart rate get elevated when i talk about an idea and I can feel my heart rate get all the way down, I'm usually like, that's a good indicator that it's like a good idea because it means I'm getting like, dude, this is a good idea.

1:03:11Yeah, I know. I can literally feel or not anymore, but like a couple of minutes ago, I could feel my heart beating because I was getting excited. And that's like, that usually almost always correlates with people because if I'm getting excited talking about it, you have to think like a lot of things right now are because of TikTok and reels and stuff. They, they go viral because of word of mouth. And so like, if just talking about the idea gets someone excited, then that usually means A lot of people are just going to talk about it, and if a lot of people are talking about it, obviously a lot of people watch it.

1:03:37And so that's why I call it kind of like the heart rate effect. That's like my number one signal that people are going to talk about this and freaking love it. I can see it. I can see scenes. I can see darkness starting to settle in on the town. And I can see the people trying to figure out where to hide and what to do. And the eyes at night, that was genius, too. Yeah, dude, I can see the eyes. And it's interesting because it's like combining the Venn diagram of us, right? You're kind of representative of the very, like, I don't know, your, like, just ability to really think deeply of, like, what makes it fucking cool.

1:04:09And you're really hyper fixating on what makes the zombies cool and, like, the realistic nature of it. And I'm hyper fixating on just kind of the overall set design and things. There's, like, a Venn diagram in the middle where we combine, like, the two, like, obsessions. And it really, like, merges together and makes something beautiful. Yeah, man. And you could also have like. And not just zombies, you could have some other things that are out there too that can get people that you don't know about. Yeah, Jamie, can we get 10 days on his schedule? Can he do one of the... Actually, no, because you don't need the money.

1:04:40But it would be cool if you were competing in it, because then that would be insane. Yeah, it's too much time. Exactly, I know. Just cancel some podcasts. I like the idea of it, though. How about we... Oh, never mind. You pick him up in the car to take him to a podcast, and they're like, oh, whoops, we're in an abandoned city. Oh, here's your shotgun. and you talked about a year ago, Joe. Wow, anyway, zombies are coming tonight. What, he's going to leave and not shoot zombies? Come on. Have you ever done sandbox VR? Is that the one where it's like you just go in and there's random worlds and you can walk around on them?

1:05:11Uh-huh. It's a warehouse. You go in there and they have fans and stuff, so it simulates the wind. And you go in there and you put on a headset and you put on a haptic feedback vest. And one of them is called Deadwood Mansion. That's my favorite one. And you go in there and you shoot zombies. You're in a mansion. You're in this abandoned mansion, and rats come out, and zombies, and there's guys in the ceiling. It's fucking awesome. You would love it. But you might get some ideas if you do that. You mean we? We're co-producing this now. You're too invested. You just spent 34 minutes on a whatever podcast ripping on it.

1:05:45Well, there's something to it, man. I see it in my head. I'm like, that would be an amazing show. I just see these people in a parking structure setting up, getting ready, and the sun's coming down. And they're like, look, we have about 20 minutes of daylight left. And you realize, like, God, I'm so fucking tired. I haven't slept. They're like, there's still$200 ,000 left we could earn today, but we need to start prepping this. And one guy's just greedy as hell, and another guy's like, we're going to lose if you do that. And they're infighting and stuff as we're getting dramatic B-roll of it from wide shots.

1:06:20Because everything, too, could be shot really far away. So it's like lenses are punching in, so it's not like there's a camera crew on them. And you could have each day when it's tasks, right? So you have to accomplish something, and the more you accomplish, the more money you could potentially make. Each day is an escape room. So every day, there's new puzzles to solve, and then you're getting fucking tired because you're not sleeping. Actually, the escape room is a good through way to do the tasks. It's not like some goofy stuff like move this rock from one side to the other. But like an actual escape room and maybe the million dollars that win each day is inside.

1:06:53So it could be like I drop a volt every day in the middle. And then you have to do a series of things to figure out the combination that are hard. And then when you solve it, then it goes on the money pile. Have you done many escape rooms? I live in Greenville, North Carolina. There's not many there. Me and my family, we do them everywhere we go. They're fucking awesome. And the best ones are in Vegas. They have an It one in Vegas, It one and It two. you're in this it's fucking incredible it's so good and it's huge it's like 30 000 square feet this place and they actually have pennywise the clown they have an actor who wears the fucking suit and looks just like pennywise and scares the shit out of you yeah it's amazing but those kind of people you could recruit those kind of people to design puzzles and things where people have to do every day and then you're dealing with sleep deprivation and people having to work together and oh my god dude and i know the perfect people for it we uh did uh for salesforce we did their super bowl commercial this year and in the commercial uh i hit a million dollars uh in it like basically if you watch the commercial just with your computer in the commercial you can win a million dollars and there's like a bunch of random clues and puzzles hidden through it and uh over and so the first thing it did it took you to a website that just like loosely explained it over 60 million people visited that site and attempted it but it still took weeks for for people to find the million dollars and it's like one of the craziest internet like puzzle hunts ever because it would like take you to this website which would then would take you to this other one where you'd have to call a number and like it's a four-hour voicemail but like at the very end i would like say like one two three four eight blah blah blah and if you weren't recording this you're gonna have to listen to all four hours again hang up and then it's just like sending you everywhere and uh it's basically like a hundred of the most complex puzzles on on the internet and like it took this like group of like really high level puzzle solvers almost an entire month to solve it with a million dollars on the line and millions of people were trying and there's a whole subreddit dedicated to it and so i just uh i just basically went on red and i got all the like the most cracked out like uh puzzle solvers in the world i was like if you had unlimited budget how would you make the most insane puzzle ever and then that's what they came up with and it was like it's like hard to even articulate the the steps on it like some of it was uh uh how do i even i don't even know how to describe it it was like so complicated like sometimes there's like a page with like a bunch of buttons on it like a million buttons but only one works and like you have to go through and click it all and so some of them were mundane and then other stuff is like you know paragraph attacks and you have to like use some old language like decipher the text to figure out what the words were and so like each puzzle required like a different skill set to like get through it wow yeah i could i could think of all sorts of different things you could have these people do like during the day these different tasks different puzzles that they have to solve.

1:09:33Yeah. There's like languages I didn't even know exist. So like in the commercial, I'm wearing a belt that just had different colors on it. But if you put the colors in order, it like translates to this thing. And like, I mean, I don't even understand what half the things were, but people were able to figure it out eventually. Like they're just showing me like, oh, this represents Braille, these dots. And so we put them in this wave. And then if you combine it with these colors and it got like pretty insane. And so it all ties back to like the Super Bowl commercial and like all every little thing in there.

1:10:00And one part of the puzzle is you have to find locations on a map. And in the commercial, I've holed up a grenade, and it's like one plus question mark equals whatever. And it ends up being like, but the text is yellow. And it's like a stone was drawing on it. And it basically meant yellow stone. And then you put in yellow stone in this location thing on a different website, and then it unlocks this. And you had to draw a circle on a globe. It got pretty crazy. Wow. Yeah, I know. Which is why tens of millions of people attempted it, but it took almost a month for someone to win a million dollars.

1:10:31And there's a million dollars online, and all you needed to win it was your computer. So it was pretty cool to see communities form, and people were doing daily podcasts and updates on it of what the next step of the puzzle were. Because what you'll see in these puzzles, too, is like, because we also did one years ago. I love doing these online scavenger hunts that with just your computer, you can win a bunch of money. and you'll see like one person will solve a thing and then hundreds of people will solve it right afterwards because they'll go post it on Reddit or they're working in groups. And so it'll be like stand still at like step 42, you know, no one's there.

1:11:04And then you'll just see one person goes on this website that's step 42 and then tens of thousands of people will go there. But then as you get closer to the end, you stop seeing that effect. They start being more secretive and quiet about it. And so it's pretty cool to see like the psychology of how they do it. You could have these people completely unarmed in the beginning. and the only way they can get guns is to solve puzzles. Yeah, or just find them, right? Because if it's a big enough city, we just go hide them. Well, maybe that's the puzzle. The puzzle is finding guns. Like if there's some sort of a puzzle, and if you unlock that, it'll give you the location of where guns are.

1:11:37Yeah, and maybe, you know, I also think of like fun stuff too. Like we could give them, like there could be a gun safe or armory in this city, but it's like they have to like break into it, right? And that could just be a thing that takes a ton of time. So you have to go find, you know, maybe one of the contestants we make sure is certified in explosives and stuff. And they have to like, oh, no, no shot of Shereen Plath. We'd be okay with this. But it would be cool if we let them like, there's like mixtures and stuff to make a bomb hidden throughout the thing. And they have to go find it. And he makes like a mock C4 and puts it on it.

1:12:09And, you know, and then that's how they get in the gun safe. But maybe it's more like a, what's that, hacksaw or whatever. And it's like you get a safe where if you hack solid for like 10 hours, you can like break the lock on it and get in. So then someone just has to stand there and hold it. Or you give people a stethoscope and a book on how to crack safes. True. And you have like click, click, click, click, click. You have to try to figure it out. Yeah. And someone's just like there for like two days straight. But then if he gets in, it's just straight loaded with ammo and stuff. So it's like a risk reward.

1:12:38There are old school safes that you can do that to. I don't know if they can do that with the new ones. But if you have like an old school safe where you can actually hear the tumblers turning. Exactly. Well, we could also just build the lock. I mean, the beauty with a team like ours is like it's possible. Just like get the safe that looks aesthetically how you want and then just replace the lock. Yeah. Just make it so that it's fix. It's solvable. Exactly. Complicated. Yeah. Yeah. That would be cool. Because then it's like, well, I'm a big fan of when they have agency. And so it's like, you know, it's like we could even lay it out there like this will take days to solve.

1:13:12Yeah. And so you could spend days going collecting guns or days making money to grow the prize pool. Or you could spend days trying to get lucky on this, like, safe that is doable, but there's no guarantee you figure it out. And having tons of stuff like that, that's what, like, makes it interesting, too, for the viewer. Because you're like, I love in these kind of reality shows where a viewer can ask, what would I do? Right? Yes. And that's what tends to be what, like, people and families, when they watch together, they love, like, in Beast Games, when I offer someone a million dollars, but you have to eliminate your friends.

1:13:39You know, sometimes people turn down the million dollars. sometimes people take the million dollars and eliminate their friends and like that's an interesting thing to go well if i was in their spot i don't care like it's a million dollars the point is to make money that's why i'm on the show take the right but other people see that and they're like no like my integrity is worth you know i wouldn't take a billion dollars over my integrity right and for you know and some people you know even though it's a game show they're like no i i care you know and so but giving them like these kind of dilemmas all throughout it too so then as a viewer i can be like yeah why i wouldn't do that i would just go scavenge you know it'd be cool also you could make it so that ammo and certain supplies are only available at night so so they're incentivized to move you have to go out you have to decide whether or not it's worth getting caught whether or not you can sneak around and grab the ammo and then you also have to find it you have to find the ammo maybe find food find supplies like supplies are left in duffel bags at night.

1:14:38You know, bro, there's so many ways we could take this. Something that would be cool is every night we move their pile of money into a random building that they don't know. Right. But it's all pre-selected so it's not worth screwing them. So like we as producers know the 10 buildings each episode. So then night comes, come in, lift up the money and we put like a helicopter literally lifts it up, puts it on top of a different building. So now they have to get set up in this building to defend it but they weren't planned on it. So that's why, because also yeah, that's the other thing you have to make where every episode is not the same.

1:15:05So then now every nighttime would be different because they're in a different building. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. And finding like – having like random ammo caches. Maybe during the day they have to solve the puzzle that lets them acquire a map. And then they have to figure out where these random ammo dumps are and supply dumps are and food dumps are. So they're already hidden. Well, actually, you know what – But you have to go out at night to find them. What would be really cool is if we could find an abandoned city that had, like, miles away, like some other little location that we could, like, so they find a map.

1:15:44And it's, like, yeah, on the other side of those woods. But it's, like, a 10-mile hike. You know what I mean? And so could you get there, go grab tons of ammo, and then get back before nighttime? Right. And so then that's also, like, I'm a big fan of, like, scene diversity and biodiversity so things don't feel repetitive. So then they're going to a different city. But their million or whatever, the price pool is still in the other one. So you have to go and then come back to defend it at night. and so it's like now you get like you can like dual cut because you can have the people in the city you have the people journeying through the woods and it's like interesting to cut back and forth and then if they go out to that city and they make the journey and they realize this is going to take us 10 hours to solve this by that time it'll be two in the morning it's already going to be dark we should go back now look no fuck it we're here exactly and then agency right do they do they stay and spend the night there and trust their friends and they have no maybe no walkie-talkie so they can't communicate and their friends are like holding down a fort with the million dollars on top and they're like where the heck are they as they're like and we get so many cool shots like that you know this so i mean we've only done this in an hour right an hour or so there's so many different possibilities if you just sat down and worked it must be so fun to do what you do dude exactly well this is see what we're uh doing right now is we're what i would call blue sky and we're we're not thinking about for the most part restrictions we're just thinking about what's great content and a lot of that's lost like people in a lot of writers room they instantly be like you can't do that or that's not possible or whatever and it's like we're right now we're just figuring out what is the best show possible and then i'll just have people go figure out what is possible or not and in reality everything we've said is possible it's just certain things will require a little bit of time like the safe you know using a modern safe but changing a lot that's possible what does it cost and how long does it take right you just go through and you attach all that to everything and you do a very first principles way of going about it and it's just objective it would take x amount of time it would cost as much money and then like you know And then you just go through and figure out what's worth it, what's not, as opposed to, you know, every step away, people be like, no, you can't do that.

1:17:34Go ahead and redo it. And it's just like a – it seems obvious, but I'm not really sure of many media companies that approach it like we do, which is – No. Well, the thing about what you've done is you've built it from the ground up with yourself and with your team, right? So you've never had a bunch of executives telling you what you should be or shouldn't be doing. And that's why it's so great. It's like these – you have creative people and then you have the business people. And the business people, they think they're creative, but they're generally not. And they want to tell the creative people what to do so that they can say, that was my idea.

1:18:04And so then you get a bunch of people in meetings that give you terrible advice and terrible ideas. And then they also want to compare it to shows that have already been successful. Exactly. Well, we've already done this, and why don't we do it this way? And then you don't get the purple cow effect, which everyone knows. What's the purple cow effect? So if you're driving down the road and you see a cow, who cares? You'll never think of it. But if you're driving down the road and you see a purple cow, you're going to think about it. Like, why was that cow purple? And it'll stick in your brain. It's the same thing with content.

1:18:30If it's a show you've seen multiple times or a format that's similar, you won't think twice. But if it's a purple cow, if it's something you've never seen, then you'll think about it again. And that's what's counterintuitive to how, like you were saying, most execs think. They think, well, we did this before. It did well. Repeat it. But it's actually the inverse of how you should look at it. And thankfully, that's why with Beast Games, I've worked with Prime Video because they just give us creative control. And they're like, you know what you're doing. You can do it. But everyone sees that creators are growing bigger and bigger audiences.

1:18:55and so a lot of, you know, every platform on earth is trying to work with them. And I can't count the amount of times like a creator's worked with this streaming platform and then, you know, what they have is great, but then the execs start giving notes and it starts to lose a little bit of the soul, a little bit of the funny. And then it goes from this like amazing thing to like, it's all right. And it's like, it's just so frustrating because it's like you're paying them because they get millions of views of video because they have a core audience and then you're stripping the thing away that got them that core audience.

1:19:20And it's like, why are you even working with them at that point? And more and more platforms are like waking up to it, But it's just, like, comical how slow they are to it. And, like, they should just trust them more. Well, it's hard for them because they have to put up so much money and not everybody's Mr. Beast. You know, that's the problem. It's like you have a great vision and you're really good at executing. But some people aren't. And so if you're going to dump a bunch of money into something and you see them making a disaster, like the Joker 2 or something like that. You're like, hey, hey, hey, what the fuck are you doing?

1:19:48Of course. And that's where it's like, well, an exec might be a disaster to, like, a creator might be a masterpiece. And so that's obviously where, but it's evolving. I mean, I think obviously with Obsession, I mean, they just gross$400 million. Isn't that crazy? I still haven't seen it, but I heard it's amazing. Oh, what? You would love it. I know. I just don't go to movie theaters anymore. I don't either. But like that one, as with how well people are talking about, I had to see it. It'll be streaming soon. I think it'll be streaming in July or something like that. Yeah. Obsession, Backrooms, which was made by a creator, Amazing Digital Circus, they've been crushing it, Iron Lake.

1:20:19So it's like Hollywood seeing it more and more. But the writing's been there for years. But now that, I mean, we just had essentially four hit films made by creators back to back to back to back. Well, did you see Talk to Me? No. Talk to Me, the horror movie? No. It was great. These two guys from Australia, they were hilarious. These two brothers, they came in and they talked to me about it. But they were making YouTube videos. Yeah. What's their name again? It's called Talk to Me, right? No. What's the creator's name? Jamie, I'll pull it up. Both brothers, Michael and Danny Philippou. Okay. So they're so funny.

1:20:49They're on the podcast. Both of them speak like a million miles an hour. Yeah. I can't think of their channel. The Racka Racka. Racka Racka. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That movie is great. Have you seen it? No, I haven't seen it. No. It's really good. It's really scary. And it's very original. Wait, when did you have the Racka Racka Brothers on? A couple years ago. Oh, really? Two years ago? Yeah, they talk fast as hell. Dude, they're just... I'm trying to corral them. It's like, hey. I don't know what the fuck you said. They're super cool, guys. Because last time I hung out with them, weirdly enough, they're really into Uno.

1:21:23And I, whatever, I like competitive games. And I played a$1 ,000 game of Uno against some of them. And so we filmed it for like a little short for them. And I lost. And I was like, okay, well, at least this will be funny. And then after they leave to go back to our show, they're like, fuck, the SD card's corrupt. And I was like, oh, what? So we didn't even get to upload it. Oh, no. It was just funny because it was like we had this mini set. and we were playing like a really intense game of Uno where we were like slapping cards down. SD cards corrupt, that's crazy. I know, it was like wild. And like, we were like flipping desk and like going, like we were just the most batshit game of Uno you've ever seen.

1:21:58And it's just funny, the kids came like, like taking over top. Yeah, those guys are super cool. Well, they made a movie about a hand. And so it's like this ancient hand that it looks like a sculpture and it's got all this weird cryptic writing on it. And if you put your hand on it, you hold onto it and you say, talk to me. Like, all of a sudden, you get possessed by something. And you're supposed to let go within a certain amount of seconds. And if you let go within a certain amount of seconds, you're okay. But somebody doesn't. Somebody doesn't let go. I don't want to say anything more. It's really good.

1:22:33Is it like scary, scary? Yes. It's a horror movie. It's fun. It's really good. My fiancé loves horror films. You'll love it. It's really well made. And it was like, when I saw it, I was like, this is crazy. These guys are like super young guys, just energetic, enthusiastic, creative guys, just figured out how to make a horror movie. And it's all done in Australia. So it's like everyone's driving on the wrong side of the road and they're all Australian people. So it's like you don't have to have famous actors to make these amazing movies. It's like it's not really necessary. Well, like the back rooms, I think the director, I think, is like 20 years old or whatever.

1:23:06I mean, very, very young. And I think it just crossed 100 million. And Obsession, same thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think they're a little older, but yeah, in their 20s, YouTubers. And they make, like, Curry, like, just the silliest, goofiest, like, skits on TikTok and Instagram reels. And now, you know, and then you watch Obsession. It really is, like, one of the best movies I've seen in a while. And it's just, like, hilarious to see, like, the jump. But when you look backwards, it's kind of like Steve Jobs says, it's hard to connect the dots going forward, but you can connect them looking backwards.

1:23:31When you look back at his skits, they were very well shot and very, you know, like, beautiful. And you can, like, kind of connect in your dots. I can see how this person made hundreds upon hundreds of these like little scenes on TikTok and Instagram. And then that led to, you know, to compile a bunch. And it was like essentially practice for the movie. And it's just cool to see the progression of so many directors going over. And what's interesting, though, is when you see these things happen, there's obviously a delay. Right. Because producing films takes sometimes years. And so, like, now that you see all these hits, bang, bang, bang, coming out of the creator space over in traditional Hollywood, then it's not you're not going to see the fact six months from now.

1:24:05but 18 months from now, I would bet money you're going to see dozens of other movies made by creators and obviously these people are going to get more funding because now everyone's eyes are being opened to what should have been open a while ago but this is what people are watching now especially people under the age of 30 they grow up watching YouTube and they're spending two hours a day flipping through sub-60 second vertical feeds of TikTok, Reels, and Shorts and this is culture for them this is their world besides Christopher Nolan I'm not really going to a movie theater for anything But when a creator drops a movie, I'm like, okay, I want to see what they did.

1:24:38I always want to see what new innovators are coming up with. People that are just thinking outside the box. They're not trapped in that sort of a weird world of how to make a successful film. They have a creative vision. They're just trying to follow it out. And people are not limited to whatever genre you know them from. Just because someone makes funny TikTok reels doesn't mean they can't make a great horror film. Exactly. But think about like Jordan Peele, right? Keenan Peele made this comedy sketch show and then all of a sudden he makes these, you know, like Get Out. And you're like, what the fuck?

1:25:13It seems like comedy sketches is the gateway to great horror films. I mean I'm sure people have connected that dots and I'm probably like two years late to saying that. But I never even realized that. But yeah, Keenan Peele, Curry, Baker, a bunch of other people. It's so funny. Well, it seems like if you're creative, you can be – like most people have a variety of things that are interesting to them. You know, you like comedy movies, you like horror movies. And just because you make comedies doesn't mean you don't have some good ideas about something that's absolutely terrifying. Yeah, and I wonder, too, I feel like horror films, it's a little easier to do on a smaller budget because it's like a lot of it is like the unknown.

1:25:46And you're not necessarily having to show it and suspense and stuff. Whereas, like, you know, you don't really see, like, I can't really think of, like, a sub, like, couple million dollar action film that, like, really crushed. Because, like, obviously those are very expensive. So it seems like also a good place where you can make something like the difference between a hundred million dollar horror film and like a ten million dollar horror film, I would argue, honestly, really isn't that big. Right. Because it depends on what you're doing. Right. But it's like what makes it good is is the the premise behind it.

1:26:14Right. Like the tension and like if the the the thing that's scary, it like makes you feel that way. But like feelings aren't directly correlated to money spent. And like, you know, you could have like this monster that doesn't appear to the end and you don't need to like CGI it throughout the whole thing. But if you tell the story in the right way and the constant tension, you can feel like phenomenal throughout the whole thing. Yeah. And a lot of the older films that didn't have the kind of special effects that they have today in terms of like CGI, like there was something better about not seeing the monster.

1:26:45Like American Werewolf in London is the best example. You barely see it. You see it for like literally half a second, a few times in the early parts of the movie. I haven't seen the movie. Oh, you haven't seen it? Oh, my God. It's amazing. Speaking of not seeing a movie, I did watch Ex Machina after the last podcast. How good is it? Yeah. Oh, it was really good. Really good. You know, honestly, I was like, it's probably silly, but I'll watch it because, you know, Joe told me it years ago. I loved it. I didn't realize it was that good. It's one of my top 10 all-time favorite movies. It's so good.

1:27:12Also because it's coming. That's coming. Oh, now, yeah. It's more relevant than ever. Did you see the computer electronics show from Vegas this year? Computer electronics? With the drones? CES. Well, they have everything. And one of the things they had was an AI companion. And this AI companion is a hot Asian lady with big boobs. And the lips don't sync up with the mouth, which is with the way the sound's coming out. But it's talking to you in AI. Yeah. So it literally can have a back and forth conversation with you just like perplexity can. Yeah. Or chat GPT or Gemini. And it's doing it with a voice.

1:27:45so with a hot voice. That's common, dude. Of course. The language model is already there. You can open up Gemini right now and talk to it like a normal human. If you just tell it to respond quick, it will talk to you. And it'll talk to you with slang. It'll talk to you and say that part. One thing that's funny, I play this board game a lot called Dune. Whatever. I'm a big nerd. It's called Dune? Dune the movies? Yeah, it's a recreation. What's funny, I hadn't even seen the movies when I started playing the game. I didn't realize there was movies. I didn't even know there was books. I just was looking for like fun strategy board games that I used to play a lot of Catan, but promise Catan, it's like dice roll.

1:28:25And you know, if you get unlucky, you don't really win. There's like games where, you know, there's a skill ceiling where, you know, the best player always wins, which is chess is a perfect example of that. But then it gets to the point of like, well, if you want to be really great at that, it's who spends the most time doing it. So I don't want one that's a hundred percent skill, but I don't want something that's too much randomness. I'm board games a little serious because I love strategy games and like because if it's too much dice roll like theoretically Monopoly or Catan then it's like who cares it's just whether or not you got lucky so that it's like I did a lot of research into like finding a game where there's like a little bit of randomness so it's not just devote all your life but there like is an infinite skill ceiling and that's where I kind of landed on this game called Dune and I started playing it and it also had to be a game where enough people played it where I could actually find people play it and I got really hooked into it but it's ironic because then I saw like the movies are dropping I was like oh And then all the characters started to make sense after I watched the movies.

1:29:15I've been probably 1 ,000 hours into the game. I was totally backwards on the IP. But anyways, because we were talking about talking to one of the top players, makes YouTube videos on it. And I was kind of curious what he would do if he was in certain positions as me. So I just took all the transcripts of 100 of his YouTube videos, and I just put it into Jimny. And I was just like, hey, respond to me based on how this person would, and talk to me like this person would and like, what would this person say in this scenario? And then when I was like playing a game, I would just ask the questions like, the player's name is Dino, whatever.

1:29:49But, and so I called it Dino.io and I'd be like, what would Dino.io do here? And it was pretty funny because it would respond just like him because it had so many like words from all his videos, like dozens of hours. And it was, and like, I know one of Dino's friends, his name is Che. And I was like, would you take a bullet for Che? And Dino's like a very analytical guy and like the AI was like, well, it depends. Is it in the foot? Is it in the chest? And it responded exactly how my friend would. To a T, with his same mannerisms and everything. I was like, this is crazy. This is absolutely insane.

1:30:21And then I would put it where it was on a Discord call. And Dino, we would be playing. And then I'd ask questions. And I'd be like, no, actually, Dino, don't say anything. And I'd ask Dino.io. And it would respond exactly how he would respond in most of these situations. Because it had so much contextual relevance from all his live streams on his YouTube channel. And it was pretty crazy. And, yeah, and so it was just so surreal. So talking about, like, the robot thing, I just wondered, too, if, like, if you put, like, a pendant around someone's neck and you just recorded them talking for, like, a week or two and then you just fed that into an LLM and then you were like, hey, talk to me like this person talks.

1:30:54Like, you could have that, you know, whatever Asian robot you're talking about, you could have it literally talk to you like some other human, right? Because it's interesting, too, because I was like, hey, give me a breakdown of Dino's speech. and it was like, hey, 0.15 % of his words are um, around 0.3 % of what he says is like. It gave me like a full breakdown of like the last 100 ,000 words he said, what percentage they are, how he typically structures his things. Like if you put him in a stressful situation, he'll like kind of respond more like this. But if it's more chill, he'll use this vocabulary.

1:31:22It was like really cool. But also scary because I was like, man, I have a lot of me talking, right? Like this podcast, theoretically, people could just take dozens of hours of this and just make like a little jimmy.io. And it's enough where it can pick up on my speech patterns and how I would respond to certain situations. 100%. They can do that easily. And then just put you in a robot and now Jimmy lives forever. Exactly. Or you can just have your robot be whoever, which is like kind of weird. Like, ew. That would be very weird. You living with you. Imagine you have a robot and you get the robot to do stuff around your house.

1:31:54Instead of hiring a housekeeper, you come home and Jimmy's vacuuming. Oh, God. Or more cynically, or not even cynically, just sad. It's like, you know, if you lost a loved one or something. Yeah, I know. That's pet cemetery talk. Yeah, but if someone's really grieving, they might do it because they want some normalcy back or something. I'll probably feel empty and hollow and even creepier. You have a robot that's pretending to be your husband. Yeah. Yeah, fuck off. That's crazy. I know. But it's just, I don't know, these next few years are going to be crazy, man. Everything's developing so rapidly.

1:32:24Yeah. It's just, yeah. 2036 is going to be completely different than 2026. I know, isn't that? There's never been a time where the future is so uncertain, where no one can give you a really accurate map of what 10 years from now looks like. The difference between 1930 and 1940, not much other than world events. you know yeah the difference between like 1600 and 1700 not much not much different maybe better boats you know maybe better muskets yeah the difference between 2026 and 2036 is gonna be who fucking knows i know man full-on blade runner i mean it's just like the some of the people i see working on like you know augmented reality glasses and like we're you know like there's animes where people get trapped in video games and stuff like that and i could really see like Like, you know, with AI advancing with more and more compute where you could just, you know, put on a headset and live in a video game.

1:33:20And you could literally just generate whatever the world is you want in. Literally, like, you know, 10 years from now, potentially just real-time generate the video game you want to be in and cater to what you like. And just so many possibilities. And obviously with humanoid robots, it's skyrocketing. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to see, well, with intelligence, you know, computer intelligence getting better and humanoid robots, all these just tens of billions of dollars pouring into it. There are obviously someone's going to figure out how to merge them together. and yeah I mean 10 years from now we're definitely gonna just there's gonna be humanoid robots and so many things that now would seem weird as hell but 10 years from now we'd be like oh it's normal.

1:33:5210 years from now you're gonna have a show where people have to figure out whether or not someone's a robot or a real person. I would say 10 years from now that would be 5 years from now probably 10 years from now I feel like that would just be like you know is this a rock or an iPhone or whatever like no one they're just gonna be normalized to especially like younger people like younger kids who grow up with chat gpt and ai and stuff like that it's like it's just intuitive to them you know to go use these things or um as opposed to other means and so it's just like as that generation you know grow once they become a thing then give it a couple years for people to get used to it and normalize to it and then you know it's not going to take that long yeah it's going to be very very very weird yeah it is it's like and it's also like scary because you don't know the implications like whether it'll be negative positive you know some people will be negative for other people it would probably be positive right you know um like if you're a vfx artist in media you'll probably be able to spend more time doing cool stuff and creative work and and less time like going frame by frame and like you know like no one actually enjoys like rotoscoping someone's hair and like you know so you can you know remove a background shot or whatever so like for certain people like that ideally you know it allow them to you know instead of you just you know draw a circle around them and then it just collapses on them and ai just figures it out so You're not going frame by frame and drawing around their body, and it does that, and you can spend more time doing actual creative fun work.

1:35:15Hopefully, that's where it goes and not to the point where you just don't even need the person entirely. But it's like anyone's guess where the puck ends up stopping. Yeah, it's going to be real weird, man. Real weird. It's going to be interesting. Hopefully, we'll survive. I mean, I'm an optimist. I think we'll survive, but yeah. I'm an optimist too, but I have a feeling that we'll have a different role in society. That's for sure. I don't think we'll be the leaders anymore. Oh, that far. Okay. Yeah, I think AI is going to take over most things. Yeah. Including government. Including allocation of resources.

1:35:51It's going to probably restrict people's ability to make decisions because we're so destructive. I listened to your podcast with Mark Andreessen, and I do like what he said. or not like, but it's just interesting when you pointed out that like, you know, AI is the smartest doctor in the world, is the smartest blank in the world, is the smartest of everything, right? And typically, you know, billionaires like him would be only have limited access to these high level professionals in each industry. But now it's essentially democratized that and everyone has access to the smartest person in the world in each of these industries.

1:36:20And so it is pretty interesting because if it is, not omnipotent, but all knowing and knows all these things, like, it's like scary because it's like, we don't want, as a human, I'm like, no, I don't want to make those decisions but if you like purely take emotion out of it logically it's like well would you rather a human with flaws that could do something fairly bad or this thing that has a lot more context and you know knowledge and experience right you say you want an experienced person making a decision well technically this has the experience of everyone ever in history on the internet right so yeah but it's also i don't even know man it's crazy but hopefully for the most part right now at least it seems like it's allowing people to do less like busy work and less things that they don't enjoy and focus more, at least in media, what I'm seeing, focus more on things they do enjoy.

1:37:03Like I was saying, like the example of not having to roto every single frame on a body or being able to pre-visualize scenes or whatever. So it's like it seems in everything I'm seeing, and maybe I live in a bubble on Twitter, it seems like it's not killing that many jobs yet. Not yet. But it could. But the idea is that it could also provide so much wealth for everybody that we no longer have to think about money in terms of like you need food you need shelter like yeah like this is universal high income is elon's concept yeah he thinks that literally people are not going to have to work anymore but then the problem with that is like then you run into human nature problems and so we have to teach children how to pursue their interests rather than how to just worry about having a job to feed themselves yeah and so then you have to give them motivation so you have to explain to them at an early age that going after tasks, completing tasks, doing things that are difficult and challenging is actually exciting and fun.

1:38:00And that's what you should generate. And then we're going to have to reward people based on that. And it's just to figure out what incentivizes people to do things. Because if they don't get incentivized, and then we also have VR and AR and games that you can play all day long that are way more exciting than real life. that you don't want to just take your government on and play Call of Duty all day. Especially if it becomes VR Call of Duty. Exactly. That's where it's going to get hard. Because I think of how addicted to video games I was when I was a kid. I mean, still to some degree now. But if it was in a headset and a completely different world, oh my gosh, my poor mom, good luck getting me out of that.

1:38:40She struggled to get me to stop staring at a screen and making Call of Duty YouTube videos and playing Call of Duty when I was younger. But if I was actually in a headset and all my friends are on it, And then you take it off and now you have freaking homework and real life stuff. And you went up in the most overstimulating, beautiful, different utopia world where everything's amazing and you're with your friends and you're having fun. And then you take it off and you're back in real life, which sucks. That's a whole different level of addiction than current video games would have. I don't know what the timeline is on that stuff, but it's clear that that's going to happen in our lifetimes.

1:39:15That's the Matrix. And that's coming. And there's going to be multiple levels of that. and it's also going to exponentially get better and better with each iteration. Exactly. There's no way to stop it. It's going to happen. And that's sandbox VR but times a million. If you go and play those games, you're in a small room that's like a part of a giant warehouse where they have these things set up and your room is, you know, like 50 feet by 50 feet and you move around in there and you do a bunch of stuff. But this is an actual fucking warehouse. You have physical boundaries that exist. And then you're in a virtual space where as you're walking, it looks like the actual ground that you're walking on.

1:39:52And you're involved. You won't be able to tell what's real and what's not real. And with those omnidirectional treadmills and stuff, when someone cracks the code, you've probably never heard of it, but there's a popular anime called Sword Art Online. It's just a guy gets trapped in a video game, and he lives his life through there. And I remember watching that when I was younger. And I remember when I was really young, fresh off of watching that anime, I was like, man i hope they figure this out my lifetime so i'm like 80 years old i could just put one of those on and just live in the video game and it's like at first he's scared but then he ends up loving it because it's just like everything's great and um uh and yeah so i think uh yeah there's just well the problem is like what's real and what's not real you know is it really important for things to happen physically in in the real air quotes real world or will it be just is fulfilling to exist in these virtual worlds.

1:40:44I remember when I was younger, I would play this game called Wizard 101. It's like World of Warcraft, like an MMORPG. And there are definitely times in my life, maybe there are short periods, where when I was a young kid, my character in that game definitely mattered pretty similar to me in real life. I was really hooked on that game. And so I could see it. Look at people who've dedicated their entire lives to World of Warcraft. There's probably hundreds of thousands or at least tens of thousands. And it's like, you know, if you could recreate that same effect, people would feel that same way.

1:41:14Well, if I'm 90 years old and I'm better and like, I don't care. Put that headset on me. Like, I'm done. Let me just live it out in here. You know, someone come in, stretch my limbs every couple of days. Like, you know, put an IV in me. I don't even want to take the headset off to eat. Well, then there's a question of, is that already happening right now? So if a simulation exists and it's so good that it's impossible to differentiate between the simulation and real life. And there's a lot of people that are very intelligent people that believe we are inside of some sort of a simulation currently.

1:41:48Elon's one of them. He said the odds of us not being in a simulation are in billions. Really? Yeah. So something akin to a simulation he believes is running right now. So maybe we are in Beast Games. Some me, a thousand years in the future. Yeah, the hundredth version of Beast Games. Yeah, with compute growing and growing. If someone figured out how to harvest the energy of a single star. Maybe that's what this is about. As we grow older, technology becomes crazier and crazier, and it reaches some sort of a tipping point while we're alive, and this is the end of the game. That would be crazy. Right?

1:42:25It reaches some sort of an event horizon. Some actual civilization similar to us, but then they just wanted to – they lost – like how we lost a lot of our ancient history, they did too. So this is a simulation to see how did we come to be with all this stuff. And so, yeah. I mean, yeah, if you're harvesting the energy of a sun and you have all that compute, I mean, look at what we're currently able to do with just data centers on the planet. Like it's not far-fetched to think you could have someone put a headset on or whatever and simulate trillions of things. Not just that, but then there's the reality of the structure of the universe itself.

1:42:57like subatomic particles acting differently when they're observed versus not observed. Yeah, the double-slid experiment. Yeah, so it's like, okay, what effect is consciousness having on reality itself? And are we limited in our senses and our ability to recognize the impact of it? And do we live in a siloed version of reality that we're imprisoned by our limited senses of sight, smell, touch? Exactly. Like there could be way more weird shit going on around us all the time. We just don't have the ability. And that's what the simulation is. But it's not as simple as like you show up with your lunch pail and you go to work.

1:43:35No, there might be some weird shit that's going on all along with consciousness. It's, you know, we did a video where we helped a thousand, you know, blind people or people who couldn't CC again with cataract surgeries. And I did think about that. It's fascinating because if they didn't have other humans around them, they just would have never known that site was a thing. Right. If we, as other humans, didn't tell them, they just couldn't see. And so it is like, is there a sense that we might not be aware of that? A bunch of them, I bet. Yeah. Who knows? I mean, but that is an interesting thought experiment.

1:44:08Because to those people, it was actually a random memory I just got, too. We also did a video where we helped 1 ,000 deaf people here again. And a lot of them, it was just giving them like really, really advanced hearing aids and they just hadn't heard in years. And there's this one scene we did where a guy had a newborn child that was like a couple years old, but was deaf since the child was born and had never heard his child. And so we put it in and it like really, really amplified sound where he could actually hear. He hadn't heard sound in God knows how long. And then the first thing he heard is we had his child just say daddy and he like lost it.

1:44:44That was the first word he heard in years and it was the first time he ever heard her. and I don't even know why that memory popped in my head. That's incredible. That was like one of the most special things we've ever filmed was like that moment right there. I was like, wow, that's crazy. Yeah, we assume that the senses that we have detect everything that's around us, but we know that's really not true because they're so limited just in terms of our ability to see things, right? We see more things with a microscope than you can with the naked eye. And we have no idea what the senses are missing.

1:45:14And all you have to do is ask yourself, If you were those people and you didn't have other people around you telling you, you wouldn't have known. You would have thought that was reality. Right. It's just, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if we'll ever know. Well, just think about the sense of smell and where that is. There's an invisible thing. And when someone farts, you go, oh. Exactly. Yeah. And like, yeah, this is kind of crazy. You'd have no idea. If you didn't have a sense of smell, you would just be existing just like everybody else. And then without a sense of smell, life is not that much different.

1:45:45It's different, but not that much different. Everything looks exactly the same, but no one can smell anything. But think of gases and all sorts of gas leak in your house or weird shit that you smell, skunks. All that stuff you'd be missing out on. I guess if you had to get rid of one of the five senses. That would be the one. Yeah, exactly. I feel like that's the least necessary to survive. It would suck. Food wouldn't taste as good. You wouldn't know if you had BO. Yeah. But for the most part, your odds of living don't really drop that much. and like your overall happiness wouldn't change dramatically.

1:46:16Yeah, the only thing that would be a problem is impact by chemicals. Like you wouldn't be able to smell like horrible chemicals that your body is like rejecting. You know, there are certain things you smell. You go, oh, what the fuck is this? I got to get away from that. Because your body is letting you know like this is toxic. Whatever you're breathing in is not normal air. You would – environmental poisons would be a problem. But other than that, regular life, if you lived in a contained, safe environment like most cities, most offices most places that people work you're it's not that big of a deal to lose your sense of smell yeah you know what's uh it's funny because uh on the car ride over here i was listening to podcasts we did whatever four years ago and it's like uh it's actually like the entire podcast uh i was way younger back then was all about like youtube data and analytics i don't know if you remember that and it's like i do uh like one thing i've noticed it's interesting because like i i I started making videos when I was 11.

1:47:09So my entire life is on the internet, right? And like my puberty, every development and stuff. And I look at that, our old podcast, and like it is so like brutal. Like I have borderline like autism on like this one subject. And it's like, I was so one dimensional back then because I was just young and I'd only ever done one thing. It's just so interesting because it's like, if someone were to theoretically search Mr. V's Joe Rogan and they, you know, if they clicked on either one of these podcasts, it'd be two completely different experiences. Right. Well, you look differently. Yeah. I mean, you look great, man.

1:47:42I was saying before the podcast, you look fantastic. You lost weight. You look really healthy. Thank you. Yeah, I was telling Joe before the podcast I lost 50 pounds between the last one and this one. That's awesome, man. Yeah, and last time when you had asked me about movies or you asked me about self-help, all these things, because I was listening to it on 3XP in my car right here. Every single thing I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I was like, one thing and one thing only. I know YouTube. It was like I know nothing else, and I blocked everything else out of my world, which is interesting because I actually think that wasn't a positive, right?

1:48:12I think if I consumed more other media and culture, it would have been better inspiration. I would have been a better storyteller. So I actually don't think it was a good thing, which is why I've since then opened up and I let more things into my mind. If I could push back on that, though, I think it allowed you to be hyper-successful because you were so focused on it that I think it really worked out to your benefit. I don't think it's a bad thing. Yeah, no, I think the hours put in, yes. But it's like instead of consuming four hours of YouTube a day, allowing myself to occasionally watch a movie, I think I would have been more tapped in and understood how to tell stories.

1:48:44Well, you were younger. And that's part of the process. I know. It's just so funny listening to that podcast. Because even I, as myself, I watched that. I was on the car. I was like, wow. I seem like borderline like a freak on certain things here. You would change the subject on certain things. And then I'd instantly bring it back to the one thing I knew, like YouTube data. And I could tell that I didn't even know. And I would just be like, oh, yeah, that thing. Anyways, retention. And it was just so funny listening to it. But it's just interesting, though, because I'm sure you see a lot of your podcasts.

1:49:16You do. Most people consume it through clips on social media, right? That's their exposure to it. Most people consume most things through clips. Yeah. And what's fascinating, though, is clips don't have context on the time range, right? Right. So whatever, a clip from the podcast we did years ago, I'll see on my feed. or it'll just randomly start going viral, one of them now. And sometimes there'll be things that I've grown up or I don't necessarily agree with or whatever. I speak differently. But because they're not timestamped, it's interesting because a clip from something you did years ago can randomly go viral now, and people won't even know that it's years ago.

1:49:50And it's so fascinating because they just pop off. And it's like more people are going to listen to this podcast through random clips, probably 10, 15 times folds, than actually going on Spotify or wherever you post it. Yeah, probably. And it's so interesting because that's the new form of culture, especially for younger people, is sub-one-minute-ish vertical content that they swipe through the feed. But it does inspire people to listen to the whole thing. And only a certain percentage of them will do that. But that's a thing with sporting clips. You see the game-winning touchdown. you watch that probably gets watched more than the actual full game I saw a survey of like 56 % of people now prefer to watch a sporting event through clips as opposed to like the actual thing like they'll just get it on their feed I guarantee you that's the case with like the UFC because I know for the UFC when they analyze the performance of a show like how many people watched it on Paramount Plus versus how many people consumed it on TikTok Instagram oh my gosh yeah it's many many fold it's like you know They get hundreds of millions of views on social media of different fights.

1:51:03I haven't watched the fight live in a while, but the White House one, I saw everything on my TikTok feed. I probably saw 150 clips of it, so I have a relatively good grasp of what it looked like and what happened, but I didn't watch it live. If you wanted to watch that one live, really you should have been there. That was when you really absorbed how bizarre it was to actually be at the White House. It was very bizarre. The whole thing was very surreal. Like me and Daniel Cormier and John Anik, there were so many moments like the day before the event where we're rehearsing. So we're standing by the octagon.

1:51:36I made a video of it where I put it on DC. It's like the White House. And like I'm showing the White House. There's the cage. And then the White House is right there. Yeah. And the flyover and everything. Nuts. But see, that's how – when I was talking about the Roman Coliseum before, that's how I felt. Yes. But I didn't get the – Well, you know, they were going to do Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg in the Roman Coliseum, but it was going to cost$150 million just to secure the venue and set everything up. I mean, I could have hooked him up. Also, it would have been a terrible fight. Elon would have been destroyed.

1:52:08It would have just been a con show. He thinks he's big, and so that's going to be enough. But Mark knows how to fight. Mark is, like, really into it. He trains all the time. I mean, he's obsessed. He brought this guy that I know, Dave Camarillo, who's a world-class coach, who's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, judo black belt. He's been training him. He's training with hardcore people. Well, because I don't think he'd care if I told the story. The first time I talked to him years ago, we were just shooting the shit, chatting. And then at the end of it, he's like, yeah, you want to come train MMA or whatever at my lake?

1:52:43And I was like, oh, no, but I appreciate the offer. but it's just like instantly like that I can tell that's like his way of like bonding and building friendships and like yeah he just like he was being very serious like he wanted to roll and I've never done that in my life and I was like yeah he invited me to go bow hunting with him so it's definitely not fake like that was a one-on-one conversation oh no no no I know you know that but a lot of people think he's just like puts on the facade or stuff but like oh and ironically like our first time meeting he's just like yeah let's hang out let's do like go roll on some mats and stuff like he was being dead serious well the way you could tell that it's not fake is watching him train because there's no way he could be that good if he's not actually putting in the time.

1:53:22Because even his striking, his jujitsu, all that stuff is like, it's clear. There's many hours been spent working on technique to achieve this level of proficiency. I mean, he doesn't look like a world champion or anything like that, but he looks like a guy who's training a lot. There's no way you can't be enthusiastic about it and be doing that. So he's definitely really into it. Every time I listen to whenever you have a podcast and you talk about the UFC and stuff like that, it always makes me like I feel that masculine urge to go train and do it. But it's like I wish I could like I wish I could fork my life and have like one where I keep going down this path of just grinding 18 hours a day and building all these companies.

1:54:01And then another where I could like pursue fun stuff like that. And like because that would be fun. Well, how old are you, Jimmy? 28. Yeah, you're still so young. You could just do this for another 10 years and amass so much money that you could never spend it. And then 10 years from now, you know, just slack off a little bit on that and just go do a bunch of stuff. And not only that, you could create content doing a bunch of stuff. Like Mr. Beast discovers the world. Like you could do anything, man. Yeah. You're so young. You have so much time ahead of you. Yeah. It's hard to even – I think you like – as humans, we like build the patterns and stuff.

1:54:36And I've been working so many hours every day for so long that it's like literally like ingrained in me that it's hard to ever really imagine a world where it shuts off. Because you have to think, I started when I was 11, so basically now all I really do is just work, whether it's building companies or making content. And another 10 years from now, that would be essentially 20 years straight of training my nervous system of this is what you do all day, every day, constantly being war mode, obsessed with it. So it's hard to envision a world where I could ever shut it off. You know what's interesting?

1:55:03You and I have been doing it about the same time. We started this podcast around 17 years ago. Holy crap. Yeah, it'll be, 17 years in December? I think so, right? I think in this December it's 17 years. So it's basically we've been on these parallel paths. Which is crazy. You know what would be funny? Like envision like 17 years ago you had 11-year-old me sitting here and then you sitting there and like comped it to today. That would be amazing. Someone with AI is not going to do that. So what are you going to do? You're going to do a show on YouTube? Where'd you get this idea? YouTube. Did your mom know about this?

1:55:41Should you be in school? I'd be like, I don't know, it was such a like. How many hours a day do you spend waking up on content? Hey, man, go outside. Go talk to a woman. I mean, back then, too, I was so like introverted and self-conscious. Like I probably wouldn't have said anything. I would have been like, uh-huh. You know, because you have to kind of be a little. It's interesting, too, because it's like very accepted to be a content creator. It's like cool. People love it. It's like even parents now, like, you know, they're like, do it. And they realized that while being a content creator, you learn a lot of different skill sets and it teaches self-agency, et cetera.

1:56:14But back then, I mean, it was like you're batshit crazy, very frowned upon. So it's so funny to see how that changes because it's the number one most coveted job in America right now. If you were to go survey like 100 random teenagers, a lot of them, a good chunk of them would say they want to be a content creator. Maybe not specifically a YouTuber, but between TikTok, Instagram, influencer. It's probably the number one job that kids want. It is, factually, yes. And so, but you know, when I was coming up, heck no. It's like, what are you, a weirdo? That's not a job. Like YouTubers don't even make money.

1:56:47How are you going to make money? You're going to be homeless. And so it's so funny to see how it changes. Well, the same thing with podcasts. Back then I would tell people I'm doing a podcast and they would be sad. Like, oh, poor guy. Like, what the fuck's wrong with you? You used to be on TV. You're like, oh, I'm having fun. Yeah, you've fallen from grace. And it's so interesting too to see like, you know, as like YouTubers and stuff first started are getting big like they all use those launch pads to jump to hollywood and then it's like the ones like me who are just like who really cares you know like just stay over here and focus on youtube are the ones that are the biggest and like just believed in the future this is the same as podcast as well because there's a lot of people that started off podcasts and then their podcast got a little bit of popularity and they went and did a show somewhere yeah and they got and it sort of stalled them out in the podcast world exactly because now you're working for the man air quotes and you're working for some studio or something like that and split time and you're not as passionate and stuff.

1:57:37Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something I think about too, which is a message I feel like a lot of people need to hear because a lot of people don't realize that, you know, not everyone can make tens of millions of dollars or maybe be as successful as like you or I can, but I do believe most people, if they, you know, find something they like, put in a lot of hours, like a ridiculous amount of hours, consume, you know, basically everything's available on the internet now. Consume all knowledge available on how to be good at certain things and then, you know, do a thousand iterations on it um then they can come out the other side and do it for a living you know what i mean like i feel like they're but most people aren't exposed to that kind of i mean to be honest rhetoric like they they think still you know their parents went to college goddrey that's how you get a job and so a lot of people today because obviously your parents educate you and teach a lot of these things and i'm not saying college is bad just think it's the same pathway and then they get in a lot of debt and they don't fully realize that you know if you just like So there are like, you know, certain content creators that might blow up in two years.

1:58:34And there are others like me that take 10 years. And it's just like a distribution chart. And, you know, probably the average somewhere in the middle. And you just have to like, there's no like set timeframe you can give yourself. But if you're surrounded with other people obsessed with the certain thing you're obsessed over, whatever it is, you put in 10 ,000 hours. And in those 10 ,000 hours, you do 1000 iterations and you consume all knowledge available on it. It's like, you know, the better you do it, the further to the right, like the two year mark, you'd be of being able to do it for a career.

1:58:57But you know, it's sometimes it will take longer. And you just have to give yourself enough time in it, but eventually you can make it happen. And I think that just more young people need to hear that, really, because they just don't even really – the dots don't connect in their mind that that's really even an option, right? Well, it's a completely new career path, right? And the only way that people really can get a map of the territory is from someone like you who's gone through the very early days of it. And they can show, hey, not only is this guy successful, he's fucking hyper successful.

1:59:25Like this is not a dream. Like this is a possibility. You just have to figure out your version of what he did. Yeah. And it's a process. But I would argue it's not even just for content creation. Like if you wanted to be an accountant or really anything, it's like just put in a lot of hours, do a lot of iterations, surround yourself with great people and obsess over it. Stay focused. Stay focused, consume it. And then recognize like you might be like, oh, well, this person did it in 10 months. Why is it taking me so long? It's just it's average and statistics and just give yourself enough time frame.

1:59:52And like it's hard to again, I'm not saying you'll make tens of millions of dollars. But if you want to do that thing for a living, if you follow those traits, it's going to happen eventually. Well, you have to be process-oriented, not goal-oriented. The process is getting better at stuff. The goal of being financially secure comes with it eventually. But if you think, I want X amount of money, well, that's what you're going to think about. You're not going to think about the actual thing you're making, so it won't be as good, so you'll probably never get there. Bingo. Yeah, and this is, you know, one of the cool things about owning a comedy club is that we've set up the club so there's a real path.

2:00:28Like these people understand how you can become a professional. Because becoming a professional when I first started was this very vague, weird thing. Like no one knew how it was done. Like you went to open mic nights. You did open mic nights. How do I get paid? How do I ever be a professional? Someone has to ask you to go with them on the road. and then you wind up getting mentored by another comedian, which is nice because they usually need opening acts, and that's kind of how we did it. But what we set up at the comedy club, we have a real creative director, this guy Adam Eagid, who is the creative director at the Comedy Store, the talent coordinator.

2:01:00He watches all the open micers, and he finds people that are good. We have two nights of open mic nights, and then we have Kill Tony. So we have Kill Tony, the show, which is every Monday, where these people pull a random name out of a bucket, and you have a chance to go up. It's a phenomenal show if people don't watch it. It's hilarious. Best fucking show ever. Yeah. And these people get to do one minute of stand-up. And if it blows up and they do well, they get to come back. And if they get to come back, then all of a sudden millions of people have seen them do stand-up. And now they're selling out comedy clubs and they have real careers.

2:01:31And some of these people were just grinding it out. And, you know, my friend Dedrick Flynn, he was out in Atlanta doing it. And my friend Ari Matty was in Estonia. And he went to Australia for 10 years. Just grinding, trying to make it in comedy. Gets on Kill Tony. Boom. Now he has a career. It's incredible. And I don't recognize those names, but as me, a case study, if they're doing stuff in Estonia or other, I never would see it. But if they're on Kill Tony, I'll see it. Exactly. And there are millions of people like me. We're casual comedy watchers. Maybe I'll watch a Netflix special here or there, and I watch Kill Tony.

2:02:03And so if you don't exist in one of those two things, you just don't exist in my world. And there's so many people like me. There's a lot of people now like that, particularly. And we wanted to set up a network. We wanted to set up like a real pathway where these people can you can see, hey, other people like Cam Patterson. He was a doorman at the Comedy Store. And now he's on Saturday Night Live or doorman at the Mothership, rather. And now he's on Saturday Night Live. He started out at the Mothership. And he's working there as an employee. And he's funny. And I know who he is. He's amazing. Because of Kill Tony.

2:02:35Yes, because of Kill Tony. Exactly. But there's multiple versions of that now that are coming out of the club. And so we wanted to set it up like that. So you still have to do all the work, but we want to, like, illuminate the pathway. Exactly. Like, there's a clear pathway. Well, because it's different skill sets, right? Like, being able to get attention and get in front of people might be a different skill set than being funny and being able to make them laugh and, you know, the things that make a great comic. And so it also makes it a little straightforward for people who might be just world-class 101 comics, but they don't know how to scrounge up enough money to travel the world and do all these things and smart enough to figure it out.

2:03:09And so handling that part, because at the end of the day, as a viewer, I just want to watch funny people. There's also you have to be able to see other people who have done it already and how they did it. So because of a guy like Cam Patterson goes from being a doorman at the mothership to now being on SNL, people see it. And they go, oh, it can be done. What did he do? Well, he kept killing every time he got on stage. So that's what I got to do. I got to work on my set, really grind it out. And I was with this guy three years ago, and now this guy is rich and he's famous. Like, this is amazing.

2:03:39He was poor just like me, like literally working for, you know. I'm sure you pay well. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean doing road gigs and doing whatever you can. Guys are barely getting by. But that's the key. It's like you got to know that it's possible. And before someone like you became, you know, a real content creator, imagine just trying to explain to someone what your YouTube show, what your goal was. Imagine this. imagine 15 years ago you sitting down with someone when you're 13 years old and trying to explain i want this show to have hundreds of millions of subscribers i want billions of hours consumed worldwide i want it to be like one of the biggest shows in human history and i'm gonna do it on youtube they're like you're out of your fucking mind yeah right yeah and when back then like viral videos back then were like two million views right and so like if you would have said back then i want to get a hundred million views a video like i mean people would call you the the lunatic like you're just delusional not even delusional like a certified like lunatic like you're not even living in reality but now that you've paved the path and then you've shown people that it can be done now you see everyone's it has a lot more confidence to reinvest it's a real career path it's a real career path if you pursue it the way someone pursues learning how to play guitar and being in a band like do it the right way i want to be a pilot what i have to do i got to go to pilot school i'm going to do the work put in the go through the process like factually or i mean i don't know if it's factually but it's like millions of people over the next 10 years that will you know find a job you know being a creator or working for creators right i know yes i mean dozens upon dozens of creators who are hiring dozens of people each i have 150 open racks in my business i mean they're you know these creators hundreds of thousands of people are going to become creators themselves full-time and those creators are going to hire millions of employees over the next you know decade or so so even if you which is what i've seen a lot of people who try to become a creator who end up failing they end up being phenomenal you know partners or employees for uh other creators right and they're the space is growing so big and there's just so much demand for it because not everyone who did stuff in traditional hollywood you know acclimates as well over here so there's just so much like everyone i know just needs like five or six people so it's like it's pretty useful thing and it's like almost like the equivalent of getting a college degree right if you're a teenager now and you put in 5 000 hours 500 iterations you You obsess over this thing, blah, blah.

2:05:59You come out the other end. Even if you don't make it as a YouTuber, now you know how to edit. Now you know how to tell a story. Now you have all these character traits, and, yeah, some other YouTuber will pick you up in a heartbeat. Yeah, for sure. And it's also – this is the new Hollywood. I mean, this is really – I mean, literally now, four of the biggest films came from creators. It's like not even like – it is like a factual thing now. Some of the biggest new IVs are coming out of them. It's where all the viewership is going. I mean, when I was on this podcast last time, it was probably like, whatever, 1.8 billion people use YouTube every month.

2:06:29Now it's over 3 billion. That's nuts. It's growing, and it's not slowing down. It's growing more and more and more, which is what I said would happen last time I was on here. And what I still believe, I don't think these things have peaked. I think they're going to keep growing. And it's just what younger people use. They never watch television, which is obvious to me and you. But to some older people who still watch news and get it through there, it still blows their mind that they're like, they never use cable. And it's like a 15-year-old right now, outside of watching an NBA game or an NFL game, has never used cable television.

2:06:59They've never even seen it. They don't even fully understand. They're like – sometimes when I'm talking to a younger person, if I'm trying to get a gauge of, what do you think of our new video? I'll just ask, have you ever watched cable television to see what they say? And they're like, no. And I'll explain to them that there's like two to three minutes of commercial breaks kind of like when you watch NBA. But instead of a sporting event, it's like entertainment. And they'll be like, why would you do that? Why would you put three minutes of ads every four minutes? And I'm like, well, that's just how things were.

2:07:29And they're like, why? It's so dumb that they still do it that way. It really is so dumb. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. You don't have to do it that way. They could probably make as much money through product placement and having an ad at the beginning and doing it. And you'd probably get more retention. You'd probably get more views. No one is going to sit and watch CBS. What's even crazier is you would have to pay money. You'd have to pay like$50 a month for cable to then have like 33 % of what you consume be ads, which is a higher ratio than when you watch YouTube, which is free. It's crazy.

2:08:03Wow. And then you wonder why people are moving in hundreds of millions of droves over to this new forum. Yeah. And then there's podcasts, which is like – how many podcasts are there now? Millions, obviously. But how many successful ones? Yeah, obviously there's millions. But I mean, the barrier to entry is the lowest. At least what you're doing is complex. I mean, you've created a show. You have game shows. You have charity shows. You're giving away stuff. You have a bunch of crazy things you guys do. You have tasks. You have to plan it out. Podcasts, you're just sitting down. We talked for five minutes before we started this podcast.

2:08:38We said, hi. Hey, you look great. What's up? Good to see you. Give me a hug. You gave me some caffeine to get me cracked out. Let's go. And that's it. So there's zero preparation. Other than, you know, the preparation that the host does beforehand. But the difference between that kind of preparation, the kind of preparation involved in one of your shows is fucking immense. And so the barrier to entry just to be someone who's a content creator, like a podcaster, is – how many podcasts are there? Let's guess. How many do you think there are, Jamie? Active podcast. How many have been uploaded this week?

2:09:12Active, yeah. Still posting on them. Yeah, let's say – Seven million or something like that. That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. I would guess two. Active, probably one million. Please put this. This is what I want to know. How many podcasts were active in 2009? Ooh. Oh. Let's guess that. Okay. Put that in our AI sponsor, Perplexity. Perplexity probably has the answer to that. Wait, they sponsor you guys? Yeah. Is that why you had the founder on recently? Yeah, well, also because he's cool. I talked to him and we started talking about ancient Hindu mythology. I was like, dude, this guy would be a cool guest.

2:09:50I have a download. I haven't listened yet. It's really interesting. He's a fascinating guy. We were talking about these temples in India. And I've been down these multiple rabbit holes about these temples that they carved out of a single – 2009, there were 69 ,000 podcasts. Holy shit. But that's not active. That just means 69 – in Apple's directory. So that means roughly 70 ,000 people had done one at some point. But then, yeah, I would wager a small percentage were actually active at the time. Still, that's a lot. So that's when I started. Now, what is it now? I'm curious. Now, in 2026, how many podcasts are there?

2:10:25I bet 7 million. Yeah, actually, I'm going to up my guess. I'm going to up mine to 10 million. Worldwide. I'm upping mine to 10. What does it say? So since 2009, there were 69 ,000 versus several million shows today, depending on the database you look at. Okay. But what is the number, though? 4.5 to 4.7 million podcast shows globally as of 2026. You know what I'd be curious of? How many people do content creation full time? I wonder what it says to that. Oh, that's a good question. Okay, let's figure that out. Yeah, and compare that at the same time frame. Let's guess. How many people make a living doing content creation?

2:11:00In 2009 versus now. I'd say 2009, maybe. Zero. Yeah, or a thousand or something. You? No, I was a little kid. I'll say 5 ,000. Okay, maybe. content creation is like a very online content creation. Yeah. But the problem is that's like bloggers and... Yeah, through social media. Yeah. 2009, social media is just coming out, right? Oh, true. You're right. 5 ,000 is probably coming out. So let's just think... Let's just not even think about that. Let's just think about today. How many people are professional content creators today? Let's guess. I say 25 million. Move. I would say lower. Probably eight.

2:11:37Let's see what I say. Eight million? Yeah. That's probably more likely. The barrier to entry you're making me look up here is also tough. In the U.S., like taxpayers, people who are filing or just kids who have made five bucks. How many people do content creation full-time, right? Yeah. Just how many content creators, how many professional content creators are there worldwide? Just let Perplexity try to figure it out. I will, but I'm just like, I know what it's going to do. What do you think it's going to do? It's going to freak out and it's going to say, there's a lot. Let's see what it says though.

2:12:11That's going to say the same sort of thing. What does professional mean? Okay, people that make a living. They pay their bills off of content creation. It's not a... I know, it's not a great question. But let's just see what it says. Just out of curiosity, it might have an answer. How would it know, really? If you don't file your taxes as content creator. Because it guessed there, 4.5 to 4.7 million. It's probably just going to look for any database online. 8 to 12 million professional content creators worldwide, depending upon how professional is defined. Roughly 200 to 300 million people identify as content creators globally in 2026.

2:12:49Holy shit, man. Holy shit. Are they making money? Are they not? Yeah, this seems relatively like it got the gist, though. Yeah, it got it. It wasn't a problem, Jamie. You were pessimistic. We don't have an answer. It's given us rough data. The rough data is 8 to 12 million professional content creators, 200, 300 million people identify as content creators. So out of those, which kind of makes sense that a small percentage of them are going to be able to figure out how to make a living entirely off of it. One analyst estimates that about 4 % of creators are professional, meaning they treat content creation as their main job and earn a full-time living.

2:13:30So that makes sense. That seems about right. And that's about right with kind of a lot of things. Yeah. There's a bunch of people try it and a small amount of people actually. Like if you think about how many people, if you go to an open mic night in stand-up comedy and how many people are actively participating in open mic nights where they visit one or two open mics a week. And how many will eventually become professional stand-up comedians and make a living off of it. You're probably in the same range of like 4 % or something like that. Probably less. Yeah, it makes sense. But the interesting part is that number is going to keep skyrocketing year over year.

2:14:08I don't see any signs that any of this stuff is slowing down. Especially if people see that this is a real path. This isn't a pie-in-the-sky dream. There's a lot of— I mean, at this point, if they don't see it, then I don't know what to tell you. I'm literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year or investing hundreds of millions of dollars a year into content. And so, I mean, it shows what the upper bounds look like. Well, you're really wise in that regard is that you spend so much money dumping it back into the business. And by doing that, your content is just so much more advanced than anybody else's.

2:14:41And that's such a big risk because a lot of people would say, I'm making all this money. Who knows when this is going to end? Let me squirrel this away and make sure that I've got money saved up forever. You're just like, fuck it. Let's just spend it. Let's go hard. Well, it's what I used to call the creators would back in the day reach like 5 million subscribers. And then it was a real inflection point that I would notice where they'd either keep growing or that's where they'd start to teeter off. Because it's around the time where they'd start to make good money. And it's either like, okay, now they have a house.

2:15:09They have a car paid off. And like the ones that are really money motivated, they kind of got that security. And so that burning fire that was pushing them to do crazy things like kind of started to die off. And like it's like the Fermi paradox. Like for quite a few people, it's around that range is where you see like your favorite creators start to get lazy, upload less, not put as much effort and not care as much. And so, yeah, I never really had any of that. I just like, you know, I mean, like I probably talked about last time we were on here. I used to live in an apartment that I would share that was$720 a month.

2:15:37So like 360 rent. And I drove a 2006 Dodge Durango that cost a couple thousand bucks and I just didn't have any liability. So I was just like, screw it. I'll just keep my lifestyle cheap so I can just reinvest it all. And, you know, that's so wise. Most people don't do that. And most people don't have the discipline to work as much as you do. Well, yeah. And the harder part, too, is when you have the pressure of your parents and stuff. And I don't know. I'm weird. Like, when my mom would, I mean, as sad as it sounds, like, she would literally cry sometimes and be like, man, I'm just so worried you're going to lose everything.

2:16:04Like, what if these videos stop getting views? And I don't know what would come over me, but I'd be like, it'll be fine, Mom. Don't worry. And I'd just, like, very calmly just say it to her. I wouldn't argue with her. I'd be like, just have faith. Well, you were right. I know. And we're great now. But it's up to parents. Parents always worry about their kids. Exactly. So I don't think it's like she was doing anything wrong. By all purposes, she was doing the right thing. So you also have to overcome that pressure as well because there's so many forces around you where even if you believe in yourself, all it takes is one person saying something that puts self-doubt in you and then you're like, okay.

2:16:34But that's where I'm a big believer if you really want it. Just keep your liabilities low. Live below your means and that way it's a little easier to be riskier if you have all these things you got to afford because what really changes if you fail? That's definitely smart. But there's something happens also to people where just the constant grind of work, it diminishes their enthusiasm and they lose their perspective. They lose this perspective of, God, you're so fortunate to be able to do this. You're so fortunate. And people just get really complacent. It's so easy for people to just forget how fortunate they are to be able to do what they're doing.

2:17:13yeah and i'll admit it sometimes i i get hit with that where you know it'll be a late day of shooting and i'm in an airport and you know a bunch of people are following me around and filming me and i'm like ah you know and you get those thoughts in your head where it's like this is really the life i wanted and you like start to like be like ah you kind of regret your decisions but then you got to like snap out of and you're like okay like the small subset of time yeah it might be brutal but for the most part i'm doing dope stuff like i'm in the pyramids i'm in the roman coliseum i'm doing like beautiful amazing things i get to entertain and and help people and it's like and you just have to i think it's very important you're around people who like you if you have a group of people around you who when you get in those negative thought loops encourage it and help you spiral then it's bad but if you have people who are in which you know not everyone in my spot position has like people who are you know willing to tell them how it is right who are just like bro grow up like it's fine you know this will be done in 20 minutes and then you know your life's pretty good like you you know it's it's like a it's a weird thing like you really because like i've had some of those conversations with people where i give them the perspective and i can tell like they haven't had that perspective fed to them in a very long time and you can like see it in their eyes they'll be like yeah you're right and it's like yeah you really need some like better people around you because you feel like you're you're like spiraling in these like really weird thoughts but like if you look at it objectively it's not as bad as you think that's the really difficult resource resource to acquire is being around positive people powerful people people that really get things done and people that are motivating and people that are really exciting.

2:18:36That's because so many people have asked things. So many people do just enough, just barely enough. You're supposed to go all the way. You go three quarters of the way. So many people just don't. But if you're around someone who really gets after it and really is enthusiastic and really is powerful and very positive, then it's contagious. It literally is. It's infectious and it makes something mundane honestly fun too. And especially if you respect each other then it just like it really compounds and so so important like even at this stage like i say for newer younger entrepreneurs or people trying to be content creators or friend groups everything even at the stage i'm at it really is because you are like you think speak talk act like the people you're around and like they say show me the five people you're on the most i'll show you what your future is and it it applies at every level you know yeah so my friend brian simpson has a great saying he says you can't be your own boss and be a shitty employee.

2:19:30Wait, elaborate on that. So if you work for yourself, if like you're the one who's out there doing it, like so you don't work for anybody, but you also can't be a fucking lazy half-ass employee. He's like, you can't be both things. He goes, if you're going to be your own boss, you better be a great employee. And I was like, oh shit. Like you can't be your own boss and a shitty employee. Like if you are going to work for yourself, you got to get some shit done because that's a very rare position to be a person that works for themselves. Yeah. Do the thing you actually love to do. Yeah. And I think one of the things that's really powerful about this time, as opposed to any other time in history, is that there's so many conversations like this, where you get to hear from a guy like you, who is doing that.

2:20:13So people, young people who are listening to this right now, they listen to you like, fucking Mr. Beast is just getting after it, man. I want to do that. And instead of like hanging out with your friend and just get stoned and plays Call duty all day and is always complaining about everything in his life. But meanwhile, he doesn't do anything. They're like, that's not how I want to think and behave. But that guy is. And so you get examples outside of your own personal social circle, because maybe they don't know a Mr. Beast. Maybe they don't know someone who's out there doing whatever they want to do with their life, but they get examples of it online and they can listen to these people talk and they get inspired.

2:20:49Exactly. And I would assume you have a lot of parents who watch these that have kids. And I I would encourage the parents to like the last three minutes of what he just said there, like maybe play that for your kids. And I can like go on top of it to say, because I agree. I don't think enough young people get exposure to this kind of mindset that, you know, you, it really is time, friend group, you know, iterations on certain thing and consuming all knowledge available. It's those four things. And do those four things and like you'll make it further than you can imagine. And like, you know, there's outliers.

2:21:18Like you, this is what like skews a lot of people's perceptions. is they'll find an outlier of like, well, this person became very hyper successful in this thing, but they didn't do those four things. And there's outliers everywhere. But if you look at statistically the average, right? The person listening to this, you're not gonna be this one in a million freak outlier. Statistically, you know, if you wanna make a good income doing something you're not currently doing and you're not currently very knowledgeable in it or have much experience, it's just those four things. Find those people, put in the time, but it's like if you just listen to every Joe Rogan podcast, you're not gonna be a great podcaster.

2:21:47So it's time plus iterations, right? You would have to go do, An example of that would be do 500 mock podcasts while also consuming all of Joe Rogan's podcasts, right? So you're doing both while also consuming all knowledge available about podcasts while also surrounding yourself with other people who want to be podcast. And then, yes, this podcast might have blown up in a year, but statistically that's not going to happen, right? You have to give yourself like the average might be four or five years. And some people like me take 10 years. And you just have to be so in love with the journey that you're cool with it.

2:22:11You're just like, I'm just going to do it until it works out. And, you know, it could be as soon as this. More than likely it'll be here, but there's a chance it could be there. And if that freaks you out and then scares you, then you probably don't love it enough. But if you're like, well, I'll have fun while I'm doing it, then yeah, do those four things over the long horizon. And, you know, again, you probably won't make$100 million. But if you want to make$100 ,000 a year or whatever, it's not out of the realm of possibility. And just those sentences alone, for a young person, they hear it, it opens like a third eye in their mind where they've just been told their whole life, go to college, get a job.

2:22:43This doesn't even exist to them. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's like you have to be concerned about the process and doing a thing that you love to do and trying to get better at it. And, you know, it's like if you say let's say you want a million dollars. Well, you could win the lottery. You might win the lottery, but the odds are very low. Or you could find a bunch of people that work really hard. And what do they do? Well, they just kept working hard and they figured out what it is they do and they made money. Like, yeah, that's probably more likely. Yeah. So just go in the general direction. And who knows, along the way, you might hit it quick.

2:23:16Something might happen really quick or you might figure something out and you might be an outlier. But the point is the process is available and the process is available to anybody. You just keep doing something. You'll get better at it. Be objective. Be self-analytical. Like recognize what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right and get better at it and constantly try to improve. And just because something doesn't exist as what is your occupation, you know, in a form from 2001 doesn't mean it's not a real job. You know, and just because you can't tell people, you know, if I told people at a cocktail party in 2009 that, oh, I'm a podcaster, like that means zero.

2:23:55You tell them today, they go, oh, amazing. Yeah. How long have you been doing that? You know, like it's a job now. Right. So how did it become a job? A job because people figured out how to make it a job. And they did it and it worked. And so there's a process. So that process exists with virtually anything you want to do that somebody does for a living. I don't care if it's a rock and roll star, stand-up comedian, novelist. There's a thing out there that you want to do that someone is making a living. But meanwhile, there's going to be people who are like, oh, the odds are you making it and that.

2:24:22Like, okay. Is that what we're doing? Are we just fucking playing odds? The odds you're dying are 100%. 100%. Once you adopt this mindset, though, then the naysayers go from being brutal to actually being good because now the naysayers are what stop other people from doing the thing you're doing, which actually increases your odds. So once you get over the hump where you reach a certain point where someone, as you're going on the climb, where someone going, this is stupid, this is unrealistic or whatever, where it starts to feel like it goes from something that makes you nervous and keeps you up at night to you don't even really care anymore because you've just heard it.

2:24:57so many times and then it's like but there are people who hear it and they quit and so it's technically a benefit for you so i like to always not always but on a lot of things i like to try to spin it as like a positive too like what this thing that's annoying well what's the positive side of it and the positive is technically it'll make less people do the thing you're doing which makes it easier for you but i guess it does but i don't ever think that way i just think if someone can do it you can do it and the problem is you have to make sure that you're not spending too much time doing it the wrong way.

2:25:25And so that's where it helps that someone's already paved the path. Oh yeah, I mean if you can get a mentor. Here's the real question. So 2009, content creators, there's fucking very few of them, right? What are we missing? What is going to be a job that no one sees coming that's going to be like a content creator or a YouTube creator 10, 15 years from now? You know? Gosh, I mean it would have to be something with AI that you couldn't even see now. So what could it even be? Like, what would it be that people are missing that other people are going to? It's changing so quick. Like, my brain can't even comprehend it.

2:26:03Like, nobody even thought OnlyFans would be a possibility. That there'd be a large amount of girls that just show their naked body for a living. Yeah. I mean, and not even for a living. Most of them don't even get paid very much. But a lot of them have OnlyFans pages. Some crazy number. It's like 10 % of girls 18 to whatever have OnlyFans. Is that in the U.S.? Yeah. Wow. It's a nutty number. It's crazy. Yeah, and an enormous number of people subscribe. Yeah, I think it's like literally half of American males have at one point in time subscribed to OnlyFans. That can't be real. I think it's like 150 million.

2:26:42Holy crap. Yeah, I think it's crazy. I think the numbers are crazy high. I mean, where my head's going, if we're trying to predict the future, maybe it would be like AI filmmakers or something like that. But I don't even know. But I mean, what are you doing there? You're doing prompts and making things. Like, yeah. It's lame. But what are we missing? Because the YouTube thing, nobody saw that coming. The podcast thing, nobody saw that coming either. The OnlyFans stuff's not new, though. It's just changed the money. Yeah, it's just from ads to subscription. Playboy. What also centralized it, like where Playboy was always a thing where you had to get picked by Playboy.

2:27:21Now all you have to do is just take a photo of your box and put some. There's always the local. Yeah, I mean, but it's not centralized like OnlyFans is where you go there and there's like thousands and I don't know how many more than that content creators. You know? Yeah, I don't know. Time will tell. Yeah, time will tell. but uh it's just such a fascinating world that we live in where the number one most watched show in the world is yours like you have the number one well if it's on youtube then it's the number one most watched show period yeah it's in the known universe well right now you're the most watched person in the known universe i i opened it up on the the way in because i figured we'd talk about the size of the show uh in the last 90 days on just just our main channel it's like around 850 million unique people have watched a video in the last quarter.

2:28:12That's so crazy. Yeah, so we're doing around 4 billion views on one. 850 million people is so crazy. Unique too, because we did around 12 billion views in the last 90 days on just the main channel. Of those 12 billion views, like whatever, 8 % of them are different humans. So it's like factually like 850 million. When I say that, people are like, oh, that's 850 million views, so like 80 million. But no, it's 12 billion views, 850 million unique. So it's just like – it's crazy, man. And it's like what's fascinating is like 10 years ago, like even with cable or whatever, 20 years ago, 850 million people didn't use the same platform, right?

2:28:49It's like you wouldn't have even been able to reach that many people even if you were the biggest in anything. It's like a very interesting time where essentially as internet usage grows worldwide outside of China, so does YouTube usage. because if you Google something, YouTube pops up. Or now if you're Jim Nying something, they'll eventually have YouTube. Or if you buy an Android phone, which most phones have their operating system, YouTube's there. So everyone just, as you use the internet, you end up on YouTube. And so that's why, even though it's, whatever, theoretically 3.2 billion monthly active users, I would be shocked if they didn't hit 4 billion in a couple of years and keep growing.

2:29:20It shows no signs of stopping as the internet's growing. And so it's like, to be number one on this platform that is basically mirrored to the internet, it's crazy. It's a really wild opportunity. And because it's a platform where anyone can upload, the variety of content is extraordinary. Because there's no gatekeepers, like a lot of it's trash and nonsense, but there's so many interesting shows. There's so many interesting shows on science, on cosmology, on history, on fill in the blank. There's so many people that just have a passion for a certain thing, and they made a channel, and now that channel all of a sudden has millions.

2:30:03Our homepages are very similar, probably. I have so many, like, old history videos where it's, like, some old guy that's just breaking down World War II battle scenes or whatever. Agreed. And, like, they go as niche as possible down to, like, this is, like, the most, you know, largest fights in history and, like, a ranking of, like, the 10, you know, deadliest fights. Yeah. Like, I would say, like, a third of my homepage is, like, just history videos. What does it say here? YouTube uploads, users upload roughly 500 hours of video every minute. Okay, not to be that guy. That's very outdated, I believe.

2:30:36Or actually, no, no. Sorry. So people watch a billion hours a day on YouTube, I believe. So this is uploaded. Never mind. This might be accurate. So 500 hours of video every minute, 30 ,000 hours per hour uploaded, 720 ,000 hours are uploaded per day. watching just one day's new uploads would take over 82 years. Day. Whoa. YouTube, well, this is the 20 million videos uploaded a day. That's quoting. That was probably before shorts. I bet you now that so many people are posting, you know, shorts, it's probably like way higher now. That's nuts. But, I mean, what we're talking about, like, Having a platform like that where anybody can upload anything, it just makes the variety so intense.

2:31:29There's anything you want to watch, any video you want to watch on nature, any video you want to watch on you have a question about science, just put it in there. And there's some guy who's got a fucking one and a half hour lecture on it. Exactly. It's nuts. And that's the beauty to tie everything together as like a bow. That's why you can learn anything and you can do anything you want for a living for the most part if you allocate the time because it's all there. There's literally on YouTube Harvard classes that are recorded. The same thing you would go into crippling debt to attend is literally there for free.

2:31:59It's all there. All knowledge is available there. And if you – it's not easy. No one's laying out like how you're doing with the mothership. Here's A to Z on how you could become a Cam Patterson. It's not necessarily there, which is why it's hard. But you can – all the ingredients are there. You just have to go collect it, put them together, and put in the work to get A to Z. Z being the career you want to do because all the knowledge is there. ever like even i've literally gone on podcasts countless times and said everything i know about youtube with no gatekeeping whatsoever i've literally had people where was it i was in some gym this uh i think it was in la or whatever in between shoots just working out and a guy literally came up to me and i have no idea who he is but he's like i have three million subscribers on youtube i started like 18 months ago and like i just listened to one of your podcasts and i just did like exactly what you said and i got a friend group i started obsessing over it and um you know and I did like these analytical things and I just like quit my job a couple months ago.

2:32:53And I was like, no shot. This is like a coincidence. You were like, you're like tracking me or anything. He's like, no. And he's in gym clothes sweaty. He's like, I was just running on the treadmill and I just wanted to tell you that. Like I literally just quit my job and I'm making more money because I just listened to one of your podcasts. And I was like, whoa. And it was crazy. But I've had experiences like that countless times where like these things, which is why I'm so passionate about sharing it, like opens people's minds. And he's like, yeah, I just, I didn't realize that was a possibility in life.

2:33:17You know? Well, you're coming from life with a perspective of feast, not famine. And that's the good thing about it, that there's enough opportunity for everybody. And I have a contrarian view on that because a lot of creators do see other creators as competitors. But I've always been like, if someone's doing well, I don't get threatened. I'm like, yo, let's just film together. Collaborators, not competitors. There's literally trillions of views going around. If you think this person getting an extra, even if they crush a billion views a year, has any impact on me, like you're crazy. It has no impact.

2:33:52I mean, people are sometimes spending four or five hours a day consuming content, right? They watch their little 20-minute video that they upload every two weeks. No impact whatsoever. And so I think I was really the first person to kind of adopt that mindset, and more people are doing it now. But, yeah, that's why I go and share everything, like literally to a T. And like I'll help people make – some people end up making millions of dollars that I've helped mentored. And I'm just like, yeah, it's just fun. Because they always ask me like, why are you doing it? I'm like, why not? You know what I mean?

2:34:19What's the downside? It's only positive. It's an abundance mindset. And that – I think the internet encourages that, fortunately. Because television is the opposite of that. So television, the problem was there was only a certain amount of slots. So if the Mr. Beast show was on NBC and then there was another guy who was on CBS, he might also be at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. You're like, fuck that guy. Yeah, true. I'm not going to give them my secrets. Yes, you would never. But because the fact that YouTube is available literally to anybody and the amount of people that are viewing it is so immense, it's an abundance.

2:34:49And you treat it like that, and it actually just makes you grow. Exactly. So it's awesome. It's also if you share with people, they'll share with you. And there's no one who will, at this point in my career, be able to go tell me something that will make me 10 % better. But there are infinite amounts of people that can make me a better storyteller or better leader or better communicator or better at set design. And it's like, it's more about grabbing those 0.1 % here and there and like adding them together. And so like, you know, sometimes I'll give someone something that, you know, might fundamentally change everything for them.

2:35:16But then they'll teach me something very small. And I'm like, oh, that's actually very useful. And if I retain it, I can see how, you know, that'd be really cool on like on the set design on how we could do a background or like, hey, after X amount of feet, you don't need as much detail. So now we can put more time into like the detailed stuff up front. But, you know, and sometimes it's being too particular and things really far. Like it's all these little things that you just accumulate over being around different people with different expertise. And you just have to like – yeah, you just have to like – some people don't see the value in that kind of stuff.

2:35:43But you can learn anything or you can learn something from almost anyone. And I do believe that because everyone has like different things and different experiences and stuff like that, especially as a content creator because you're also making content for millions of people. So even just learning what a normal person is going through or what their life is like is helpful for being able to relate with them and through the content or make something that is interesting to them. So if you approach people like that where it's like I can learn something from you no matter who it is, it's also – I feel like not many people take that approach either.

2:36:12Fuck yeah, dude. I think your approach is very valuable for a lot of people to hear, very valuable for young people to hear. because if they just follow those principles and just follow your passion and really be disciplined and focused, you could do a lot of things in this life. Exactly. You could be like Jimmy. You could. Probably not. Statistically not. Statistically not. Could you be a person with a couple less zeros and all the numbers? Of course. Yeah, and also just be enjoying your life because you're doing something you want. You're actually creating something. Yeah. And something you'd be proud of and something that people enjoy.

2:36:45And that makes you feel good, that people are enjoying your work. Yeah. And speaking of something you're proud of, so since the last time I was on here, a big thing I've been working on is, are you aware of how many kids are working illegal child labor on cacao farms? I think last time I was on here, we talked about how I sell chocolate. Yes. Yeah. Do you know that there's over a million kids that work in illegal child labor on cacao farms? Wow. Yeah. Where? In West Africa. So Cote d 'Avare in Ghana, which is where the majority of the world's cacao comes from. There's rampant child labor. You can ask perplexity.

2:37:14I'd love for you to pull up data so we can see it, that I'm not just making it up. And I think when I last came on here was right after I started a chocolate company. And I had no idea how bad it was. In the last few years, I've been trying to figure out how we can build our own supply chain where we can actually get kids out of illegal child labor. And it's like, I don't know if you're interested in it, but there's a lot of stuff I'd love to share on that. No, that's very cool. Yeah, so basically, just ask perplexity, how many kids work in child labor in West Africa, in cacao farms? uh and uh right here uh 1.5 to 1.8 million people or children yeah it's uh it's pretty wild and i had no idea and like it's like been like this for decades and so it's so normalized in the chocolate industry that you know when i would talk to other people who work at chocolate companies or execs they're just like yeah it just kind of is what it is that's how it works and that's just how they get their chocolate period yeah i mean it's not all the labor it's around whatever 46 of the labor You know, so if you were to work with how it works is like there's well over a million farms in those areas and you don't buy from farms because they have no leverage.

2:38:16So farms form cooperatives. It's like these hundred farms will gather, aggregate their beans. So they have a little leverage and they'll sell it to you. So you buy it from a cooperative and statistically, you know, 46 percent of those farms will have child labor. Some won't. Some will. And so you're buying at a cooperative level. And so when I went to all the biggest distributors and everyone that does all the sourcing for Kakao, and I was like, so is there any way I can pay a premium and not have little kids work on my farms? And it literally didn't exist. I was just so mind blown. And it really was frustrating because it's not even did it not exist.

2:38:47No one really seemed to even think it needed to exist. I was like, you guys, these are kids. You have no issue making billions of dollars in profit on little kids working on the farms. It was like a very weird thing. That's crazy. So that's most chocolate? Well, majority of the world's cacao, as you saw, comes from West Africa. Holy shit, man. Yeah, I know. And so that's what I mean. I'm thousands of hours deep into this. And so I met a different company called Tony's Chocoloni, who is like a reporter who started talking about this. Wait a minute. His name is Chocoloni? Tony. But the chocolate brand is Tony's Chocoloni.

2:39:22They did ethical sourcing. And I spent a lot of time learning from them. And I've just been on this journey with Feastables. is how can we ethically source, you know, feastables cacao? And so we actually, this is a fun thing I've never said publicly. So we started doing, working with certain farms, but then I started around seven months ago, a big case study where we went to five villages that the average child labor there was like 45%. So 45 % of the labor on the farms in these villages was illegal child labor. And we went on the doors and we collected every single data point. We knocked on every door.

2:39:52We got, there's around 10 ,000 people that live in those five communities. We knew everything from the child labor rates to school attendance to everything. And then throughout the last few years, we've just been collecting tons of data on why kids work in child labor, how you get kids out of child labor, which most of it comes back to poverty. Big Choco pays farmers so little that they just can't afford to not use children. So part of it is there's this thing called a living income reference price, which looks at the cost to actually live there. And you just guarantee your – so we guarantee 100 percent of our farmers that we'll pay a living income reference price.

2:40:20And then we work with fair trade, which the cooperatives I was explaining to you, sometimes they're not democratically elected. So you can pay more money, but if the cooperative is like someone skimming off money or taking it, it doesn't flow through to the farmers. So we go through, we make sure it's complicated. It's like I thought this would be an easier problem to solve. This is a multi-year journey for me. But we go to the cooperatives, which, again, is just a collection of farms that pool their cacao so they have more leverage. So you can't take advantage of them. And we make sure through fair trade that they're democratically elected cooperatives so the farmers actually get the money.

2:40:49We pay a living income reference price. And in exchange for doing those things, they have to let us audit and remediate the child labor on the farms. And so in this five-village case study that we did, there's around 10 ,000 people living in there. And about seven months ago, there was around 550 kids that were in illegal child labor in those communities. And so then we started taking over sourcing from there. So we started doing our sourcing principles and paying the farmers living income reference price. Fairtrade came in, come in, started paying the premium. and now seven months later, we just got the initial results after we did our check-ins and some of the communities, we were getting so many kids out of child labor, there literally wasn't a school because kids just worked on the farm.

2:41:28So like some of these, we literally built a school so they could go to school because the goal isn't just to get the kids out of child labor, it's also to get them an education. So they're not, you know, because if you grow up only working on a cacao farm, you have no education. So then you're basically doomed to working on it your whole life, you know, because you don't know anything else, right? And so we just did our recent wave of check-ins where we knocked on all the doors, check school attendance and everything. And so seven months ago, it was 550 kids-ish, roughly, in illegal child labor.

2:41:53What do you think it was now, basically six, seven months later? I don't know. How many? We were able to get a 90 % reduction and get it to where there's only around 50 still in child labor with our first check-in. And now we constitute a kid remediated out of child labor with two check-ins. So that was just the first one. So technically, by our books, they wouldn't be fully remediated because there might have been an accident or whatever, so we like to double-check it to make sure things are accurate. So we'll do another check-in in the future so they're not technically officially remediated, but it just shows that it's possible to reduce the child labor in these areas dramatically.

2:42:24If you were to apply the things we did there, but macroly across the whole country, you're talking you could get swerves of hundreds of thousands of kids out of illegal child labor. And so the big way I've been on is step one is I have to prove it's possible so then we can start. you know I like most people like you they just have no idea that there's this much rampant child labor in chocolate I had no idea until you brought it up I know which is like crazy and it's like it honestly it really frustrates me because no one has any idea and like everyone's just kind of cool with it and I think part of the problem too is if you were to google it they use like confusing language or they're like yeah this is our ethical sourcing strategy but at the end of the day obviously most cows go into big chocolate and you know they can say they're doing all these things but factually there's all these kids in illegal child labor so it's like I mean no one's put in the effort that you're doing when you just said that yeah and so that's amazing man yeah and well that's what i'm uh really excited about and i just wanted to mention it a because obviously your biggest podcast in the world i just want to educate people on it that it's fucking crazy when you're buying chocolate and uh bm i'm really excited though with what we're doing because i we're essentially with feastables building one of the most effective like systems for getting kids out of illegal child labor in the world like by the more cacao we're sourcing the more we're able to pay a living income reference price and then audit the farms and then get the kids into schools And it's like, it's pretty interesting.

2:43:38Like with that village, you know, right now, you know, it went, it was a 90 % reduction. It went from over 500 kids in illegal child labor down to 50. And obviously we're not done. We're going to keep over time trying to get those 50 out of child labor. But now imagine that if we can keep sourcing more cacao as we keep growing and we could keep getting more and more kids out of illegal child labor. And then eventually, because, you know, I have over a billion followers across all my platforms, you know, I can show these case studies and then just like, you know, berate big chocolate into switching over because they make billions of dollars a year in profit.

2:44:04They don't have to use child labor. And I think step one is showing that it's actually possible to not use it because right now technically there's not really a way you could like – I think what's really important is getting people to understand that that's happening. Exactly. And you talking about it right now, now people will be aware of it because I think the vast majority of people, me included, were not aware. I know. So then they hear – they go, wait, hold on. What about this company that I'm buying chocolate from? Are they using child labor and then – know and technically i can never like feastables i can't say it's child labor free because you know it's not like i have security cameras on the farm a kid could just walk on it and then you know well he lied right so i'll never be able to say making we're doing everything we can to make it as ethically sourced as possible and that's why i'm doing these case studies where i can literally factually show like people knocking on the doors show like without it because obviously i know as i start to talk about this more there's no doubt in my mind they're going to sue me because obviously big chocolate doesn't like the idea that people are learning that there's so many kids in illegal child labor.

2:45:00And because my microphone is so big, they're going to want me to be quiet. But in a perfect world, they'd hear these messages and they would have a soul and be like, you're right. We shouldn't make billions of dollars in profit off the back of little kids. Let's just put a little bit of the money towards getting the kids into school and putting people that aren't kids on the farms. And so ideally, that's what comes of it. We'll see in the long run. But right now, I'm just really focused on building these case studies and really showing in depth exactly how they could do it. So then hopefully they just come around to give them the avenue to go, oh, we just didn't know.

2:45:31This is cool. Cool. We'll start doing it. All these shopping companies are so old. Technically, the people who built and grew it, the founders, they're dead. These are third, fourth generation people. Some of these people have never built a business from ground up. So maybe you could give them a little slack and be like, they just don't know any better. It's a problem they don't know how to solve. Fuck them. They know. I mean, they know. They have to know. I'm trying to be cooperative because in a perfect world, if we could get them all to switch, I mean, I don't— Well, maybe force their hand.

2:45:59I mean, maybe just making people aware of it will help force their hand. If I wasn't the biggest YouTuber in the world, if I were—here's a crazy sentence that I do believe to be true. If I stopped caring about this issue and did nothing, then 1.5 million kids in illegal child labor, I guarantee you it wouldn't change at all. Like, it wouldn't change at all in the next 5, 10 years. Like, who else? Look at how many kids are in illegal child labor in West Africa on cacao farms. Okay, we're back. All right, we're back. Big chocolate scented an attack. Yeah, we've had this issue. You're good. But listen, man, it's just another example that you're an awesome guy.

2:46:31And the fact that you don't just care about money and you really care about doing the right thing and that you've decided to do this is just another example of why you're great. Thank you. Well, and I wanted to educate people on that. And another thing I'd also, I think, is a thing that people should hear is, especially in America, do you know that, I mean, it's probably not going to surprise you, but 40 % of food that's produced in America ends up getting thrown away? I have heard that. Yeah. And so a lot of what we've been doing is working with nonprofits and setting up, essentially, like, you know, so many stores and restaurants just throw away perfectly good food.

2:47:03Or, like, they'll have things, like, if something's, like, within a week of being expired, they just toss it out because whatever. but it's like it's perfectly edible there's literally nothing wrong with the food and we've been uh just setting up like many uh there's a 501c non-profit called sharing excess who crushes at this and we've been funding and building like these uh small logistics hubs like one in new york um you know and we've been through them and then also our food banks we've been able to distribute over uh 40 million meals to people in need across america and uh instead of like buying food and taking and storing and distribute it just taking food that would have been thrown away but it's perfectly fine and perfectly healthy and just do you know figuring out how in a couple days to just get it to food drives or people in need.

2:47:40And that's another thing too. Illegal child labor and cacao and that are like two things that I feel like people should just be aware of because it's a very solvable thing. You know what I mean? Like if you work at a retailer, I'm sure a lot of people here do, that throws away perfectly good food because they're like, you know, you never, they never want to run a risk of something being bad on the shelf. So they'll preemptively throw it away. Just call a local nonprofit and be like, Hey, we're every week we tend to throw away food around this time. Come pick it up. Like little tweaks like that is like so simple, but would feeds so many people in need and save us so much money.

2:48:09And I feel like it's kind of a no-brainer. And I've literally seen it in effect. Like, we're opening up another facility that, you know, over the next 12 months should be able to distribute around 10 million pounds of food. So whatever that is, maybe like 7 million meals. And it's like just taking food that would have been thrown away. And it's kind of like mind-blowing that in America, like, more people aren't aware of that because it's a very solvable thing, to be honest. I think there's so many people that are only concentrating on what's going to make them money. Of course. You know, it's very rare that someone like you thinks about greater good and actually puts a lot of effort.

2:48:43But in this case, that one doesn't even cost you money. We're just talking about instead of putting in a dumpster, put it in a truck. But the effort to enact greater good. Well, maybe one of you, if you're a Walmart or I don't even know, some random store owner listening to this, just consider it. Don't throw the food away. You're an awesome guy, Jimmy. Thank you. Thank you for being here, man. It was really fun. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on everything. And we got to make this zombie show. We'll do it. We're doing it. Yeah, I think we should do it. I'll handle all the work and stuff, but you've got to cover this.

2:49:08I'll think about it some more, too. Yeah. I'm going to bounce this around because I got excited. Yeah. I think there's something to it. Next time you see me and Joe together, it's going to be fighting off some zombies. All right. Sounds good. Thank you. It was awesome. Thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

2:49:35passive