#2527 - MrBeast

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is a YouTuber, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the founder of Beast Industries and Beast Philanthropy, and the creator and host of the Prime Video competition series “Beast Games.”www.beastgames.comwww.beastphilanthropy.orgwww.youtube.com/@MrBeast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  It must be very easy to get people to do your show.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, yeah, seeing how we give away millions of dollars. It's, yeah, usually people are very excited about it. The actual, the only hard part for us is, you know, if it's a longer one, just the time off work. So, because sometimes when we shoot like Beast Games or stuff, you know, it can go for a month, but besides the work stuff, of course.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Does, are there people that haven't been able to do the show because they couldn't get a month off work?

• 0:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, tons, of course. So, we always have like, even like the day before, you know, sometimes people get cold feet. So, if we're doing something with 100 people, we'll usually have 10 backups, just because, you know, the-

• 0:48Speaker 02

  I would imagine that the type of person that would do your show would have a job that they could quit.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Well, uh, yeah, I mean, I guess it depends, right? Whether it's the YouTube channel where we're, you know, doing, um, you know, 100 families compete for $250,000, or it's Beast Games where they're competing for $5 million. The $5 million, people are way more excited for. Some of the, you know, the YouTube videos, it's not as like grandiose, where they're like, ah, I don't know if I want to lose my job for a 1% chance of winning 250K, so.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Well, how many people, when you do Beast Games, how many people are competing?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Uh, so the newest season we just shot, we grabbed one person from every country on earth, so it was around 200.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, which was actually pretty cool, because you would put them in these like crazy games, and you'd see how someone from like the Asian, you know, Pacific countries would react versus to like someone in South America, and they play and think so differently because they have such different upbringing, so it was really cool.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Did you have to, I mean, you must have had to thoroughly vet these people, right? Make sure they're not insane?

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, obviously, we do the-

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Make sure you don't have a serial killer?

• 1:45Speaker 03

  We do the psych and background checks, of course, no serial killers.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  How do you get that information if you're going, I mean, if you have, how many countries are there, first of all? It's 190?

• 1:55Speaker 03

  We went off of whatever the Olympics do, so it's like 100, something around 200, yeah, plus or minus a couple.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  So, some of them have to have some shitty infrastructure.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, I think one of them has literally 40,000 people living in it. Like, it was, uh, what is it? Not the, uh, something sea islands, not the Cayman Islands, it was, but some island country. And yeah, I was like, wow, like, my town, which has 100,000 people, is two and a half times the population of your country. Well, I was joking with the contestant, because I was like, if you win the $5 million, you could technically give a $200 dividend to every single person in your country. It's like, it's that crazy, that's that little people living there.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  That's the kind of country where you're like, I wonder if you could buy that country.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Hmm. I mean, the GDP is probably, you know, a couple hundred million dollars, if I were to guess.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Right, like someone like Elon or something like that could buy a country.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Not even Elon, there's probably thousands of people in America that could. I mean, I feel bad, people from that country listening, us just talking about-

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Well, we didn't say the country.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Okay, true, true.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  We're good, we're good, we didn't say it.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's not yours.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  But look, they should know what they are.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  They're a country of 40,000 people, that's just what it is, nothing wrong with that. But it's, uh, it is weird how many countries there are, and if you've got a person from every country, what are the odds you're going to get good data as to whether or not they're a criminal?

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Uh, well, that's why, I mean, if you saw like our budgets on what I have to spend on casting those people, it was ridiculous to be able to get them all, because basically what we did is, we grabbed multiple options for each country, and what I was worried about is that, like, the contestant from blank country would suck, and then the country would be like, Jimmy, you hate us, and you purposely picked this, you know, absolute moron. So, we would pick two or three from each country, and then we let people from those countries vote on who should compete.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Oh, smart.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  So, it wasn't even one, I had to get multiple from each, so I think I ended up spending over a million dollars just on, you know, aggregating and casting and background checks and everything, and then putting it out there so people could vote on it. But that way, you know, whatever, like Georgia and Europe, if that guy's an absolute moron, it's on them, they picked him, you know?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Right, that's actually very smart.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  How did you come up with the concept for this show? Like, what, first of all, how the fuck do you have time to do that show as well as do your YouTube show?

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just don't sleep much during those, because like Beast Games basically is 30 days of just, you know, 18 hours a day filming, and so, and for people who might not have heard of it, it's essentially the largest cash prize of any show in the world. Uh, season one, we had the most contestants of any show in the world, and the largest sets of any show ever to exist, and I was just like, what if you take like a reality show, but you just ramp everything up to the absolute maximum, and like, uh, like season one, we gave away $22 million, just in one season.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Right, and, you know, some of the biggest game shows in the world right now give away $250,000, like, we're giving away $2 million every episode, yeah, like-

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Look at that, that's wild, all those people, that's so crazy, that set's amazing, dude.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yep, and then we build a city, and so also-

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  My, my whole thesis behind it with, uh, this is, you know, you, when you watch these, you know, game shows or reality shows, there's a lot of takeaways, and like, after the show, they'll put people in a room, and they'll be like, hey, talk about what happened here, and it's like intercut, and I was like, well, what if we just have 1,000 cameras, and we just let people be themselves, and we kind of just show it in real time? So, we also, like, in season one, we broke the world record of most cameras ever used in any production of any movie show, anything, ever. So, like, this set right here, there's over 1,200 cameras in there.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  And the most-

• 5:18Speaker 02

  That room is so big.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's bigger than the football field, and so, there's 1,000 contestants, we have to have an A cam on all of them, so there's like a pole on each of the platforms on them, plus there's hundreds of cameras in the roof and blah blah, there's over 1,200 here, which, outside of this, the most ever used in a production was 400. So, like, I, I literally had to, and, and this might seem insane, but this is why I think the show appeals to quite a few people, because normally in a show, they would have a story producer walk up to you, hold a camera, and be like, all right, you got three minutes, you're kind of the bad guy, say roughly along these lines, almost basically put words in your mouth, and then they'd go like person to person with like one camera, whereas I go on the microphone, I go, say whatever the hell you want, we're recording you for the next 10 hours, I don't care, right? And you all have a dedicated camera on you, so then instead of like putting words in

• 6:03Speaker 03

  people's mouths, they can just do whatever they want.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  So, do you have someone who actually has to go back and watch all that footage and edit it, and then put it all out as a show?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, well, this is why-

• 6:12Speaker 02

  How many people do you have doing your editing?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Uh, that season, over 150 editors worked on it, yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Holy shit, man.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  It's crazy, and that's obviously why people don't do it, because it's, it's like, basically, we had to spend millions of dollars in cameras, it was the world record for most cameras ever used, which then we also broke the world record for most camera cables used, because it's 27 miles of camera cables, broke the world record for largest control, and each of these is millions of dollars, and you have to bring in millions of dollars of extra editors, and so, next thing you know, you know, to take it from 10 cameras, where you just essentially put words in people's mouths, to unlimited cameras, and they can do whatever you want, you can show who they actually are, as opposed to what you think they should be, right, with a story producer, it costs a lot of money, it's a lot of effort and time, but it shows through in the final product, because now, you know, you get more natural, like, less scripted things, when people are just themselves.

• 6:58Speaker 02

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• 9:28Speaker 02

  You have a great ability to like see the big picture, and a great ability to put together things regardless of what the budget is, like regardless of how much money you're going to make to do the best product. Like, I always thought that about you when you were doing, when you first started doing your YouTube show, I'm like, the amount of money and time and effort involved in this is like above and beyond what most people are willing to do.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And it's, it's way more than a traditional television network would ever do, because a traditional television network would look at the upside, they would look at the money, and they would go, we're going to spend X amount of money to make it this much better, but if we just take it down a couple notches, we save 80%.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  And they would do that, but you're like, can we make it even cooler? Let's put all the money back into the show.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Which is very risky, man, because, not just very risky, um-

• 10:24Speaker 02

  It's just very, you have great foresight, like you really see the big picture of it. Obviously, you have the number one show in the world. Like, you have the most-watched show on Earth. You know, your YouTube show is the most-watched show on Planet Earth. So, it's obviously working, but it's like that ability to take, like, to make that set must have been bananas. That is a fucking enormous building. Did you have to build the building?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Uh, no, so that, that's in Toronto, but it's basically an airport hangar. I mean, we spent months trying to figure out how we could make this. That also is like a thousand trapdoors, because every single one of those, the trapdoors open when they get eliminated, so that set alone was like fifteen million dollars. I mean, it was crazy.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  And thousands of people's time and stuff like that. It's actually, where we film Beast Games is actually a pretty big deal, because it creates so many local jobs for people, so...

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, there, it was like, pretty wild.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Can you say where you filmed it, or are you keeping it under wraps?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Uh, that one was Toronto, Canada.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Okay, cool.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Um, and every time I'd walk around on set, people were loving it, because even though we filmed for thirty days, there's months leading up to it and months after, so...

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  It gives people, like, consistent work for six months, whereas like, before, they're going project to project every week. But, yeah, back on the going above and beyond, that's kind of my, my whole thing, is like, why make content that isn't great? And we just ask ourselves, how do we make the best content possible, as opposed to, you know, how do we make the most money possible? Um, and when you're just, shockingly, going with that approach, you just kind of...

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Make a lot of money.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, uh, well, and also, it's, uh, I tell my team all the time, too, like, a big difference between us and other media companies is, you know, um, usually, like, people at the top will always shoot down crazy ideas or tell you it's not possible, like, whenever you have, like, these crazy brainstorming sessions. And I tell the team, technically, anything's possible. If, as humans, we really wanted to, we could technically blow up the moon with enough nukes. Now, we're not gonna do it, because it's not worth the time, and it's not worth spending the money, but you have to have that frame of mind. Everything's, for the most part, possible, if you're willing to spend the time and spend the money. So, before you do the work and just figure out what time it takes and how much money it costs, you can't say no to something, because almost all the time, like, we, we filmed in the pyramids, and I spent a hundred hours living in the pyramids of Egypt. It was fucking awesome. And, uh, you know, for years, everyone's like, they're not gonna let you, you know,

• 12:35Speaker 03

  live in the pyramids for a couple of days, like, that's crazy. And I'm like, why not? Like, did you get a no from the, you know, the leader of Egypt? No? Then I'm like, well, technically, it's possible, you know? And, and after years of, of talking with them and helping them understand that, you know, it's gonna be more of an educational-type video, and it's not like, I'm not gonna run up the pyramids and take my shirt off and be like a lunatic, it'll be really cool. Um, eventually, they came around to it, and they loved the video, and it worked really well. And it's literally, like, I could go anywhere in the pyramids for a hundred hours, I went all the way up to the top of the, the middle pyramid, we went underneath it, it was, it was really cool. And I, like, tell my team, it's like, you know, even some of my most veteran people, when we get these crazier ideas, their default reaction always is to go, I just don't think it's possible. And I, I go, look, it is! Sometimes, it's, it's just time and money, you know?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And is it worth the effort?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  The pyramid one must have been nuts.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Oh, it was crazy. It was one of my favorite videos.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Is that your first time ever being there?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, actually, it was. And so, that made it even more special, because I was, like, learning things at the, the same time, as I was just walking around, and, um, I'm, I'm gonna be honest, it was like a year and a half ago, and it's like, all a little fuzzy, because I was like, so tired, I was just walking around all night, but it was pretty crazy and surreal. And then going down into, what's that tomb called, where you go down the ladder and, um, like, a couple hundred feet, uh, underneath the pyramid?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Hmm, I don't know. Is that Osiris's?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, Osiris's, yeah. And then, uh, it was like flooded and swimming around under there. It was pretty wild.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  I feel like you should do something like that.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. I, I need to go there. I've been talking about going there for years, I just, for me, it's just a time thing. My time, I, I did so many different jobs, it's not like one all-consuming job like you have. With me, it's like, commentary for the UFC, doing stand-up comedy, doing the podcast, and also, married with children, it's like, I have a lot of responsibilities. So, it's tough to just jet off for a mu, uh, what, really, ideally, if you're gonna go to Egypt, I feel like you should go for like, ten days.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  I feel like at least ten days.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Do you think the, yeah, I feel like they, maybe honestly, realistically, like, five days, you could do it?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  And like, I'm curious, though, if they'd let you just like, do a video where you walk around and go everywhere, because...

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I wonder.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, you, 'cause...

• 14:45Speaker 02

  I've talked a lot of shit.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Exactly, so, without saying it, I'm kind of implying, I don't even know if they'd want you there.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'd never have said anything bad about it. About, I just think that the people that run it have a very, uh, narrow-minded perspective of how all that stuff was made. And I don't, I think, I don't think they really know. And I think there's, uh, a lot of gatekeeping, in terms of, you know, what the official narrative is. It's like, how it was all made, and who made it, and what, what it's all about. That's why they're really, um, hesitant to accept any alternative perspectives, because they have a timeline, uh, and they attribute all this construction, and there's a lot of evidence that that timeline doesn't make any sense.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Like, did you check out the Sphinx?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, and you can, you know, you can go underneath it and go in that little room.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, did you do that?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, that's the stuff, I, I feel like it would mean even more if you did. You've talked to Dr. Zahi, right?

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Did you have him on the show?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I have him on the show.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, good, yeah. And, so, yeah, he's obviously the guy, so you should just call him and see.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd rather go with somebody else.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  I didn't listen to that episode, did I?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  I'd rather go hang out with one of the historians that I know.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Graham Hancock?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, Graham Hancock would be the perfect guy to go with.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  You and Graham Hancock walking around? Oh, boy, that, there'd be some crazy stuff, so...

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, whatever happened in that part of the world during that timeframe is pretty spectacular. And it's kind of amazing that no one has ever achieved anything remotely similar to it since. And it's at least forty-five hundred years old, and that's just a guess, though, they really don't know.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's a crazy place. The fact that you got to film a show there is nuts.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love how you call it a show, and to me, it's just a YouTube video, but it's just funny.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  It's a show.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, of course, and, and it makes sense, because you do stuff with the UFC, and in your world, a lot of it's called shows, but...

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I mean, whatever it is, is people are watching it, and it's a show.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, it's just, it's just funny, it's, to me. I haven't heard it called that in years. But, yeah, that, that one was crazy, and, I mean, one thing that I'm really proud of that we did, uh, for season three of Beast Games, which, uh, like, in hindsight, I'm not even sure how we, this one, we pulled off. So, I, I wanna see your reaction to this.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Basically, the finale, where we have the five million dollars, we have the final contestants, we, uh, filmed it in the Roman Colosseum.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Whoa!

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we crowned the winner of season three with the five million dollar cash prize in the middle of the Roman Colosseum. Played, played the first game there in over a thousand years.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Wow, that's crazy!

• 17:20Speaker 03

  I know, I'm, I'm so grateful, I, I, like, we just filmed that, too, so I'm like, coming off the high, and I just like, like, it almost makes, like, brings, gives me tears, like, what we shot was so cool, we had like, a, a live orchestra, like, the top ring up there, too, so like, as the game got dramatic, we'd have them like, play louder music and stuff. It was like, so surreal, like, there's multiple, because I've done really crazy things in my life, but there's multiple moments during that, where I'm just like, looking around in the middle of the Colosseum, as we're like, filming the show, and I'm like, like, this doesn't feel real. It was pretty wild.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  It doesn't feel, I, I mean, I went just to visit a few years back, and it didn't feel real. It's so strange to imagine, like, what, what that was like. You know, how many thousand years ago? Two, what, when, what year were they doing the games in the Roman Colosseum?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Uh, I would guess nineteen hundred years ago.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So, I mean, what the fuck was it like, being in there while that was happening?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And imagine when they flooded, and they'd have the ships in there, it's like, whoa!

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Crazy!

• 18:21Speaker 03

  I know.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  It's just, it's nuts that you could go walk around it and just try to understand, like, this used to be a place where people used to go, to see people die. They used to see, see people get hacked to death by swords, to see people get killed by lions, like, what the fuck was...

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Well, it's also interesting, too, because I did a lot of research, you know, before we filmed there, and it also did a good job of, you know, back then, they had like, the hierarchy, and like, the nobles, people would sit at the bottom, and the poor people would be at the top, and it also played like, a good role of like, showcasing unity, even though there are all these different people from all these different, you know, economic statuses, they would all be in the arena there, but also remind them where they are, and there's like, so many political implications of it, too.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  And so, just everything about it is crazy.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Like basketball games. Right? Who gets courtside tickets?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  I didn't even, I didn't even think about that, yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Jack Nicholson, courtside tickets.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Or Jay-Z, or whoever.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, courtside tickets.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  True.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. I, I think in the Colosseum, though, that was the most dangerous seats, because like, there was a couple of incidents, I believe, when either a lion or a tiger leapt up and got a hold of some people?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I, I didn't hear about that, but when I was walking around, you know, they would have the, you know, uh, emperor, like, seat right there, and I was like, man, if I was a warrior, I could throw a spear at him, like, this is like, this is a killer view, but like, how did no one ever just kill this guy, you know?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  It was, I was like, that's all I could think about, it's like, this is a little too close to the battlefield.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  How close is it?

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Uh, it was like, whatever, four rows up, it wasn't like, anything too crazy. Uh, but like, there's like, obviously, walls, when you're walking around, like, little walls, so you can't just, you know, walk into the stands, so, so they're like, kind of trapped in the arena, but it was definitely within spear-throwing distance.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I wonder how long it took to build that place? Because when you're walking around, like, this is an epic!

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Piece of real estate like you guys built like an insane structure and they did it. You know, almost 2000 years ago or whatever it was.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  So it took eight years to build.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  From AD 72 to AD 80.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

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• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fascinating too, because I like to think of like something equivalent now would be like maybe SoFi Stadium. Like that's such a beautiful massive stadium. And I wonder if like 2000 years from now, would that still be there?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Like Roman Colosseum is like relatively still intact. It's pretty crazy.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  That's what's crazy. Well, it's because it's made out of stone. All of our stuff like cement will rot out. There's no way cement lasts a thousand years. All the glass, all the, everything will just get absorbed back into the earth.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Dang.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Do you ever see that show? They had a show like, what was it on the History Channel or something like that? Where it was after humans, I think it was called. And it essentially showed how long it would take for cities to completely be absorbed back into the earth. It's not that long.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  It's not that long. No, it's like a few hundred years and there's nothing left.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Actually seems like a good show.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was kind of interesting. You know, it was a while ago, so it was probably like shitty AI. It was shitty CGI. They could probably do it really good now.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  But I mean, if you go to Detroit, there's houses in Detroit now that have trees growing out of the basement of the house through the roof.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Like they've, they've taken over the house and nature is slowly but surely absorbing the building. And then skyscrapers are a bigger endeavor, but they could still, nature could still do it. It just takes enough time.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  That makes me, where my brain goes to is it makes me want to do a video where it's like, I bet you there's like a abandoned village or city that's been overgrown. And like doing a video titled like last human on earth simulation and then like living there for a month or so and seeing what it's like. That'd be kind of cool. Kind of like the Will Smith movie back in the day.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  That'd be so fascinating like to, or maybe do it like with a contestant. Like, hey, if you spend one month, you know, in this like isolated civilization, like I'll give you a million dollars or something. And then seeing how they like, you know, use, you know, 100 year old buildings or something. I don't know. It's got my, my brain churning.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  It's not a bad idea, like an I am legend type deal.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, but real unscripted, exactly.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Right, real unscripted, but then also hire people to be zombies and haunt these people while they're sleeping.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Brain goes.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Hire, hire people, like CGI them up, scare the fuck out of people.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I've been wanting to do that for a while, but I always get like hung up on like, okay, we, I can make some real zombies. But the problem is like, how do they kill them and then, you know?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Well, the other problem is what happens if you, if you're not telling these contestants that zombies are coming? You're just trying to get a reaction out of them. What if this guy thinks it's a real zombie and kills one of the people?

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I, we would tell them, I would have to say it's a zombie simulation and, you know, and then I'd have to set rules on here's how you kill a zombie. You don't use a sword, you use this, and it's lame, which is why we never gone around to it. But if there ever was a way, I do think that would be cool to like recreate a actual zombie apocalypse and, and like let someone try to live in for a week. Cause it'd just be cool, because everyone's exposure to this is through scripted shows.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  But to see someone like truly live in an unscripted one where we build rundown gas stations and there's like food that like, we would say this is set in the year 2060. So I'd have set designers and everything design it where it like only Laffy Taffy is still edible and stuff. And it was like a true recreation of it. I've always wanted to do stuff like that.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  You could totally do that. There's a bunch of abandoned towns.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  No, it's just the one thing we could never figure out is how does someone kill a zombie and it's not lame, right? Cause imagine someone with a Nerf sword hitting a zombie. Oh, now it's like, okay, this is fucking lame, you know?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Maybe a paintball type deal?

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's where our head goes, because we're, we have a different video, similar thing. But the problem with paintball and airsoft is then you have to wear a mask, right? Cause you don't want people to get shot in the face, obviously. And then it's kind of kills it.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Or, yeah, unless the zombie masks. Were, was the protection.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we put it over top of the paintball mask. That's, that's true. Poor, poor actors, they're gonna.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Or you just have, instead of like a regular paintball mask, have something that's just a hard structure that is like your, the shape of your face.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  So you make an informed fist to your face and then, you know, you give them goggles, something clear so their eyes are protected. And then you do all the makeup on top of it.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know what? I should hit you up for these zombie things.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  That actually would, there you go.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Exactly that, yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  That's perfect. That's an airsoft mask.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  That, that, that'd be pretty cool. I mean.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Oh dude, that's actually dope. Look at those masks, the half face zombie ones.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  That's fucking dope. Like you could, that would be terrifying coming at you in the middle of the night.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I mean, hey, if anyone listening wants to live in an abandoned town for 10 days while zombies try to kill you.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  I think we're on to something now. Now that I saw those masks, I'm like, okay, I like it, because that could be the zombies.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Well, where my head goes, because the videos are so big, right? This is probably a five, 10 million dollar project. I probably would build this abandoned city, do I am the last man on the planet? And it's like me there for some time. And then afterwards, like a couple of months, like filmed then right after, filmed 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 could reuse the set location. Cause if I'm gonna completely set deck a, basically a whole city, oh my gosh, that's gonna be a monster. But yeah, if I did both those back to back, that'd actually be pretty, pretty gnarly and worth the effort.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  I think I like the idea now.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Now that I see those masks and I think about like paintball or something along those lines.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Well, what I'm picturing too is like ideally we can find a city with a skyscraper. Cause I want like someone with the long lens pointed down of like someone, picture them on a street. It's pitch black and they have like a fire and it's them and their three friends. And, you know, then they hear noise and zombies and stuff like those shots would be so beautiful. Like, I mean, that would probably be one of the most beautiful videos ever. And I'm picturing we put like vines like on all the buildings and stuff too, so.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Well, if you wanted no one around, it's gonna be hard because you're gonna have to do it in an abandoned place.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  And you're not gonna get an abandoned skyscraper.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Maybe, so.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Unless you're in Detroit.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Well, we also, it doesn't have to be in the US. 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, pretty wild, so.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Really?

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  And there's no one in it now?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  No, no one in it. Like tourists go there or whatever, but they, they let us close it off for a week. It was pretty crazy.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's the place then.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  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, but.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  And also paintball everything.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  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 trust system. You don't know if they got hit, so paintball is probably more effective.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need paintball.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  You need paintball and it needs to look good when it splatters against them.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Is there another way to kill a zombie other than paintball that would be wild? Like, is there something else?

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Well, one thing we've been working on, because we're, we, I've always wanted to like do Hunger Games in real life as well. So like these like suits where you could, you know, electronic like laser tag where you could just shoot and, and then it just like lights up, so.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  What about shotguns with bean bags? You know, because they use those for people to like take out like when they're non-lethal loads, you know? They have like bean bags that they shoot out of a shotgun.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  The question I would need is like, if I shot you with it like three feet away, would you still be fine? If I guess you could probably adjust the pressure and stuff where it's not.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Okay, well.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I mean, you could, but you couldn't bury it.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  See, this isn't Fear Factor. This is Mr. Beast.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  I understand, but it's the gray, it's a gray line.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Could you pull up the seven days abandoned city video? And just skip to some random part. I'd love for him to see like the, like how it looks because that with what you're picturing? And that really would be something you can't find anywhere else. And that's what like gets me excited is when it's content you can't find anywhere else. That's typically, you know, a huge indicator that if it's done well, people like it.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Have you seen the show From?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  From? I don't think so, no.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  It's great. Great show, but it's about these people.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Wait, look at that shot. Pause it right there. Like, or, 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, like, look at these buildings.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Oh my God, this is perfect.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then like, yeah, if you pause it there, those are all the buildings in the city of, I mean.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Oh dude, this is the spot. Listen, the show starts at sundown every night.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  As soon as the sun goes down, that's when the games begin. It does, nothing happens until it gets dark out. Everything is in the dark. And these people have no idea when it's gonna happen, when they're gonna 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 awake. So during the day, they, they have all sorts of materials. They 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. They give them, yeah, give them time to like figure out stuff to do to keep the zombies away.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  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 that they'll be busy during the day, so they're not gonna be able to sleep. So at nighttime, when it gets dark out, then they don't know when it's gonna hit. So you have these people sitting around and it might be 7:00 PM, 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM, and then 3:00 in the morning shit starts happening.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  30 zombies come in and they gotta shoot them all with pain poles.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  And they're creeping in, like they're creeping in.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Bro, you're getting me excited. I mean, it would be so fucking cool to like let them build a, 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. And 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.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And you know, you don't have to tell them that the zombies are only gonna come out at night. Just have it that way.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I'm excited. We need to stop talking about this because I'm gonna leave and go film it right now.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  And then.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  I'm fighting the urge to go call my team. This is.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  You also with the zombies, they can come out in the daytime. These, these people don't know because they never do it.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  True, like the first five days it's only at night.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  And then day six, boom.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  So, so people get snatched up in the middle of their house.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  This company we used before as Gel Blaster, it's almost like aerosoft, but it doesn't hurt as bad.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Oh, it shoots water?

• 33:07Speaker 04

  And these vests that they have set up are sensors so you can, almost like what you're saying, it's like VR laser tag.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  So it lights up when you hit it?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's like a whole talking system that says like you have this many shots left, you have this much energy left.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Can we see a video?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Is this a video?

• 33:22Speaker 04

  We did this at night at somebody's house.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Oh, you did?

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  When did you do this?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  A couple of months ago.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  I don't, oh, oh shit.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Ah, wait, actually now that you.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  It's bad music, but.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  You pointed out, I have seen like Nerf Gel Blasters. I actually never thought of that.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  So that, I mean, you could just redo the set, the suits that it makes sense for your video.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  And then reskin the guns because those look a little lame, but yeah, that would be.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  It's kinda lame. I kinda like shotguns with bean bags. Let's fuck people up.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  We all 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.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  It's very doable. You just have to figure out a way to make it exciting, but still not hurt anybody.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  You know, not hurt the zombies. You'd have to like armor these people up somehow.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  I mean, well, the, the thing too is like, you know, um, one way, one thing that would help is like if the zombies were ex-Navy SEALs or something. Then it's a little different than if they're like typical Hollywood actors and things like that, which, so I've learned for like some of these other things, like it's also who you cast to do it, like, you know, the Navy, if it was like Navy SEALs dressed up as zombies and I paid them all, you know, they wouldn't care.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  But also it could, wow, it could be like a zombie army, like an army.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Some, some army somewhere got taken over and turned into zombies. And those are the people you're fighting against. So you could, you could put them with like plate carriers on and, you know, you, you could armor them up a little bit so they could take some hits.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Have some lore behind it.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would, it would make sense too.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, bro, I'm sold. I just gotta find an abandoned city.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Give them glowing eyes. And that's the only way you know they're out there.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  This whole podcast is gonna be Joe helping me figure out how to do zombies.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Dude, it would be fucking terrifying. Imagine there's people that are in like 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 like one hour of battery life. And so you have to like judiciously use that flashlight throughout the evening.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  To shine it around.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Shut it off, you know, so you give like a little extra tension that the flashlight's gonna die because you only have one hour of flashlight battery. And then you see these red eyes, like you give them like a slightly glowing red eye.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  And that's how you can find the zombies.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  True, that would be cool.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  So you just look out into the woods, like I can see the fucking eyes, man, you see the eyes.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  That would be crazy. And the other thing too would be, because I, I go to like, how do we execute it? We could do it too where like there's like a, 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, I can have recreated versions of them there. So there's like actual zombie bodies like piling up and things like that. 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 to building and that'd be crazy.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  That would be crazy.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  You know, and actually, because if I put a million dollars.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  And you can chalk outlines around the zombies? So you can identify the fact that this one's a dead zombie?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Uh, or no, don't, screw it. You know, let, let that be the fun part. But then we, if we put like 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 like 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, it's, what if like every day more and more came, so day one it was 10, day two was 20, and then 50. And then I'm like, you know, we're gonna have 400 zombies come on the final day. So the whole video, they're prepping for this like Game of Thrones type invasion.

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  Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better, H E L P, dot com. Not 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've 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.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they know you're four. You know what would actually be even crazier is if, 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.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Just get the most badass people that you can get for this zombie thing, like survivalists, martial artists, like, yes.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be crazy.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Dude.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Actually, that's not bad, like, you know, a UFC champion, a Navy SEAL, like 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.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  I think the, the really difficult challenge is figuring out a way to kill zombies that's not lame.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  And doesn't hurt anybody. Actually doesn't kill people.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I love how that's your, your second thought process, but of course.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  But it has to, because if you're hitting them, even with the gel soft, it'll look kinda cool, but it's like pew, pew, pew.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Pew, pew, pew. No, it's gotta be, ba-bang, ba-bang.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  And I could add those sounds in post, 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 it go bang, bang, and then add like the effects and, and we'd have to reskin the guns to look like real guns and.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  It would have to be some, it doesn't have to look like real guns because it could look, be a gun from the future, you know?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, but nah, that's lame. When you think of zombie apocalypse, you think, it has to look like a gun that they grabbed from some dude's safe that they found in a house, right? That's what a zombie apocalypse is to me.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  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, like, you're only gonna get so many shells, like, you, like, as long as you don't have one of those big, like, Terran tactical ones that has actually a magazine, it can hold like fifteen rounds. If you can, I think a regular shotgun, like a Benelli, what can you put, how many shells can you put in one of those? I think six? I 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, like, maybe if it was like twenty gauge, maybe it was like twenty gauge shotgun, like, birdshot with, with a beanbag. Maybe that wouldn't fuck people up, but it would make a big bang.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  No way you can shoot shotguns at people.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  There's just not possible.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  You're so wrong.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  But here, he's living in his utopia. I haven't seen his eyes light up like this in years. Let him have fun.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  The stuff isn't like a gun on a person.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I don't know a lot about shotguns, so let's, um, find out.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  I'm never gonna have someone point a real shotgun at someone else, but, yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you will. Trust me, we're gonna, we're gonna work this out.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Oh, you wanna, you wanna help co-direct it?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  I'm gonna help.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll see, you'll actually see in, like, the back of a one-shot, Joe.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Just like this?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  He's like, "Yeah!" It's like the Navy SEALs are fighting off a zombie apocalypse.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  I wanna be one zombie one night. I'll sneak in.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Everyone's like, "Who's that bald guy over there that's just like, 'Oh, fuck, yeah.'"

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Shotgun damage on a zombie, you have to blow their head off, right? How would you?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Oh, god.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Don't even get him started. He's gonna be talking about hit damage for twenty minutes.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what kinda zombie. Like, Walking Dead zombies are so stupid, you can stab in the head with a pencil and they die. Remember, it was just going through the head, 'cause they would shoot them with those crossbows. And, like, crossbow 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. It's not like a broadhead. Like, if you shot an animal with a, 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 Walking Dead, it would drive me nuts. 'Cause he would shoot them in the head, and it would just stick in their head, and then they'd be dead.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  It's so funny, 'cause.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Get the fuck outta here.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  I, I watched the same thing, and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." Different audience.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's just, all it takes is, like, one arrow to go into your head, and you're dead if you're a zombie.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. One arrow.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  The fuck is, this is nonsense.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, guys watching? Yeah, one arrow in the head, you'd be, yeah, you wouldn't die.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  The thing is, people have lived, humans have lived through arrows through the head like that, accidentally, gotten shot in the head, with a, with a bow and arrow, with a, a field tip, and lived. 'Cause it basically just, it's like a pencil going through your head.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Really?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  The way people die from an arrow is hemorrhage. You die from massive hemorrhage, and it's usually 'cause there's a blade. So like this, like, this is what the Native Americans used to use.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  But that, that's wild.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  This is, this is actu-, yes. That's, that's an actual arrowhead. But 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.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  And the field tip wouldn't puncture enough veins where you just bleed to death?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Would you wanna live?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  You would be in pain. It would suck.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  It would certainly suck, but it's not like getting hit with a broadhead. My point is, I don't remember my point, but if I had a point, it would be, there's gotta be a level of shotgun that's the, what is the lowest powered shotgun available? It's not a, I, I know twenty gauge is light. I've used those before for, like, shooting clay pigeons, and I've used twelve gauges.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  You don't wanna get hit with a twelve gauge, even if it's a beanbag.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Uh...

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Smallest gauge, equivalent to a sixty-seven gauge shotgun?

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Oh, here we go. Now we're talking. That's a bitch-ass round.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Oh, god.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Let's see what that looks like.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  You're so funny.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Shoot a, let's, let's see what a four-ten gauge shotgun, or sixty-seven gauge shotgun, looks like when they shoot it.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Looks like a bullshit gun. That looks like it's gonna still hurt.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  No, no, no, you'll be fine.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Okay, can I test it on you?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, just give me a plate carrier, and if you're gonna use a beanbag, yeah. 'Cause 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 gonna hit? Everything you'll cover up. You'll cover up the shoulders and the arms. You give them, like, military-style armor, like, body armor. 'Cause it's not, it's not, none of this is gonna penetrate, so if it's a beanbag round, what it is, is just like, it's basically a bag. It's gonna, like, shoot out of the shotgun and blast you. But I don't, they're not lethal.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Um, let me see what it looks like.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  I don't know which one I'm...

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Uh, just go to a video. Just go to a video of, uh, lowest-powered shotgun. That's weird looking. That's cool. That one looks cool.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  That one does not exactly what you're...

• 45:43Speaker 04

  That's a revolver shotgun.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's dope. I've never seen one of those before.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Huge power, it says.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the title is smallest but deadliest shotgun.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's smallest in terms of, like, the size of it, not, uh, not the round itself.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, this isn't, I did ask for lowest-powered, but it's, that's not what people want to click on videos for.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I know, psychos.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  I feel like most people who buy shotguns are looking for shotguns that don't.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Well, how about this? Look up sixty-seven gauge shotgun.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  I haven't done that here.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  It says it's a twelve gauge.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a big.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, I'm trying to, they're like, modified twelve gauges.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a lot.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  I just don't, but the point, the shotgun isn't gonna kill a zombie.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it could in this game, Jamie.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  I know, but you have to get so close to get a fucking headshot or whatever, so it's more fun to, like, get snipers and grenades and...

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if you have to use headshots. This little kid's gonna shoot a shotgun?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  I guess.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  So that, okay, let me see. Can you give me some volume? Let me hear this. Back that up a little bit.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what we need. We need that kinda shotgun with, like, a beanbag round, or a rock salt.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  I got it. The team, they're listening, they're on it.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  This is totally possible, dude. You'd have to have, like, very strict safety protocols on the set, though, because one of the things, when I was in, uh, when I first moved to LA in, like, nineteen ninety-four, there was a guy that a friend of mine actually knew, who was an actor, who was on a set, who, uh, 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, and 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.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, with a blank. He just didn't.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  I mean, or like the Alec Baldwin situation and...

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was actually probably negligence, 'cause it seems like,

• 47:55Speaker 02

  it seems like there was an error where they were using, like, real rounds, and, uh, then they would take the same guns, they would use, like, real rounds on a range, then take the same guns and bring them to set, and they didn't clear everything. So, I, 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, you're never supposed to point a gun at someone, ever. In movies now, like, if you were, you and I were doing a movie...

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Which is why I'm like, so hesitant to this whole shotgun thing. Welcome back to reality, Joe.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  We're gonna 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.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And I think that came out of the movie The Crow, because, uh, 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.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Well, and there's effects and CG and everything's so good now, too, like, 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.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  That's true, but you want something that's scary for the actual people.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  And the recoil and stuff, yeah, so it's, it's more real.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Like a really light shotgun.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Well, just rock salt. If you have a really light shotgun, even if it's a twenty gauge with rock salt, it would suck, it would sting, but 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.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And you could, you know, if you get a direct hit.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  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, yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you could do that. So if you do that, actually, you could have blanks, and maybe a laser sight.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. That, 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 a, 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, uh, 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'd just know if you got hit, if your suit lit up.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  And it seems like you could sync up, uh, a laser tag with an actual blank round.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  So you can make the boom and then the laser actually hits the person at the same time.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Right?

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  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 say 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, boom, you shoot them, you see splatter all over their chest.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  The only other thing we have to figure out is where's this going? Because if it's going on my YouTube channel, we don't usually show gore and hip hop. Um, so we might have to hit up, uh,

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Amazon.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, wherever you used to put Fear Factor and stuff. Cause that definitely seems like a more, it's going from like, we're usually family friendly to now this is very rated R. But it is sick.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Family friendly because you're killing zombies.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Well, we, yeah, you, you know if something's family friendly or not, if you say eliminated instead of killing, so.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  If you're eliminating zombies, that's family friendly. If you're killing zombies, that's rated R.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Well, they're already dead, so you're eliminating them.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Exactly, there you go. See, now we're back.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  See, they're already dead.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  And like you can tell if like a show's like for 18 plus or like 13 plus of like before they, they shoot the person or whatever. If it cuts away, right? And like there's all these little things, not that we even do it.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  This could be wild.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  I mean, if some streaming platform was like, yo, here's whatever, whatever, a blank check, just make it happen.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Amazon should do it. They need people over there anyway.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, or I mean, really even Netflix, anyone, really. Like it's, it's the biggest no brainer in the history of ever. Like the, 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 shocking stuff you're talking about, like a traditional people with traditional world views did this, it'd be so stringent and structured and stuff like that. Whereas like we, 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.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Now we need a task. We need a goal.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  The goal would be survival.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Right, but maybe survival while you're trying to accomplish something.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Okay, well, then this is like a mechanism that usually would work well is the, 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. It 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's one whole day. It's 10 episodes, 10 days. And so they could technically grow the prize pool to 10 million dollars. You put some like, you know, the UFC people and like, you know, Navy SEALs and like these hardcore people and you tell them like, they could potentially share 10 million dollars, bro, they would be trying their butts off those 10 days. The footage would be crazy. I mean, they would, they would probably be like practicing during the day, like their rotations and everything on like holding off zombies. It would, that would be really cool.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they would run training routes.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  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 to actually fight.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  So like, yeah, we'd have to have rules as to what.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  It would probably be, it might default intuition is if the zombie just purely touches you, then you're just dead. Like we wouldn't be able to take it any further than that, you know? But if they like.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Right, like 28 days later zombies, all they have to do is like scratch you.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, or breathe in front of you, yeah, exactly. But in this case, if they touch you, that way it's not like the Navy SEAL like pushing and flipping them off. Like, cause if you would to push them or touch them, then you'd be out. So people be keeping their distance, but even then it'd get pretty crazy if they're like, cause they're, obviously they would run and there'd be chase scenes and stuff. So, uh, honestly, like 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.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Dude, this could be mad.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  This could be a mad show.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  To set the stage, it's like abandoned city, dozens of acres sealed off. Like we, I could literally build like a, a wall around it. So the SEALs and whoever the contestants know, like this is the edge, they're walled in. And then, uh, yeah, they're walking around and then we have some of the best set designers in the like world come in. And like basically we'd pick a time in the future, we'd say this is 50 years in the future. And 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 and like, this is what would happen to Doritos 50 years from now. They'd literally mirror it identically across, you know, a hundred buildings. And then we'd drop, we'd have a helicopter fly in, drop them off. And then it's like, you know, every day, like we could have like an eagle fly over and drop their task of the day. And then in the middle of the city is a million, oh, that's what we could do.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  The prize pool in the middle, if the zombies touch it as well, then they, 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, right? Which is distracting them from building their fort, then I, 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, we have a rope lowered down, a million dollars is massive in ones, right? And then it unhooks and now they have two million dollars 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 six million dollars without getting eliminated, you're all millionaires in nine days. Bro, that would be crazy.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  And then, yeah, the zombies come in, we figure out the practical guns with the right sound effects and.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, practical guns, right sound effects and what, what entails you getting killed by a zombie?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Like, how do they?

• 56:16Speaker 03

  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 then 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.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Cause 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, I, I actually sneak up behind them and I get a million bucks.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  People are gonna want to be zombies anyway.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  True, cause it's gonna look sick.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  It's gonna be sick.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Honestly, I would want to be a zombie. That just like, imagine walking in a horde and role playing being a zombie, that'd actually be a pretty cool afternoon.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  It'd be so sick, you're, it's total pitch black. There's no power, no electricity, you just see red eyes in the woods.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Where 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?

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Cause like we have to decide are these 28 days later zombies that run at you, ah, or these like walking dead zombies that are like, kind of like.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  We'd probably start off that way, but they evolve with time. And, and I'm a big fan of like, usually when you have like, uh, 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, a chain around their feet or something that physically wouldn't allow them to do it. Or like if you have 300 zombies going, right? You, you can't redo it, right? Like if one of those zombies goes rogue and, and scratch, it's like, I can't reshoot the show, right? That's what, that's what's so high stakes about the things we do in a unscripted 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.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Or when if you have 300 people, if 2% go rogue, that's still six zombies going rogue, which is brutal.

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  Buy two months of BlueChew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGEN. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Yeah, it is brutal, but I think, I think with, with proper planning, if you really sit down and plan out what the, what the zombies task is, what it means and like what these people are doing and what, what, what goals are they trying to achieve while they're there and while they're defending against zombies? You gotta give them stuff to do during the day so that they're fully occupied, so they can't sleep.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  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. Whereas if someone just fucking sleeps all day.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  And doesn't get anything done, even if they survive, they can't make any money.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get what you're saying.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  And that, that works if these are, you know, hardcore like people, so it's good. Like if I, normal contestants, they'd be like, oh, this is horrible.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  You want that though, you want people to bitch out. You want a few people to quit, cause that, there's always gonna be people that won't quit.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Me and you are held to different standards and I, that, if I did that, that would be maybe 10 trillion articles written about how I'm the most evil man on the planet. But if I made it too hard where people couldn't sleep or whatever.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Listen, you can't read those articles, fuck those people. You just gotta 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 a 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.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Sold, Amazon, Netflix, whoever wants it, let us know, like.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Right, you gotta keep these motherfuckers awake so that nighttime is terrifying. Can you imagine seeing, seeing people sitting there with their shotgun?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Just nodding out and then opening their eyes and looking out and seeing red eyes in the woods like fuck.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Well, that's 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. Cause now that I'm thinking about it, like people are gonna spaz out and accidentally shoot someone in the face.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  This is where.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Especially if they're tired.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  I've done, uh, I mean, obviously you did on scripted with, with Free Fighter, 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, I, you know, there's just no shot in hell that you would, 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 that the guns where it looks really cool and we can recreate the sound effect. But then gel rounds, like those, it's essentially like the Nerf ones. Now I'm remembering them, like they're like water that explodes on impact. Those would be perfect, honestly.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you want blanks, cause 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.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  And then maybe to avoid people being able to shoot each other, maybe at nighttime, they're completely separated. Maybe at nighttime.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  No, you want them together. I'm telling you, like if they built a fort around the money, what you want in the shots is you always wanna people to be able to tell what they're competing for and like their why. And you usually, but you don't wanna have to say it, right? You don't wanna have to say, oh, I'm competing for this money. But if you have the money in the background of 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 gonna instantly understand the motivation and it's gonna be, uh, like, I mean, it would just be so crazy, the shots.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  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 are like, have like hyper hearing. Like you give the zombies like Walker game ears. You know what those things are?

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Uh, no.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  It's like, uh, do you ever go to a gun range?

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Cause you know, you have those headphones.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Oh, and they amplify.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  You can hear everything else way louder, but when guns go off, it kills volume above a certain amount of decibels.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  So they can hear everything. So if you hear someone whispering like that, the zombies like will be able to key in on it.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  They'll know where the people are and these people have to hide from the zombies at night.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  True. Cause I guess the other thing is if they built a fort around it, how would the zombies even get to them, right?

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Cause now they're gonna have elevated walls.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  So instead of that, you have people that are trying to hide. So you got these zombies slowly creeping through these abandoned buildings, looking for people.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'd have to get it too with them where the, the seals and stuff couldn't like lock doors or anything, right?

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. No locks.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  So basically like.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  No doors have locks. That's what makes the hide and go seek so good. All the handles or all the doors are removed.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  There's no locks.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  So every, every night, maybe we, 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.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  And 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, right?

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  And so maybe before we release the zombies, we'd have a producer just go in and, and walk a path like, all right, there's a factual path where you could dive to the zombie. This is good. And then we'd let them loose. That means there's no cheating.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  There's something, this would be wild.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  This would honestly, this is one of those things where I say this to my team, cause it, it's either gonna be like the worst show imaginable that people clown on. Or it's gonna 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.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  The Last of Us?

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  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 execute it properly, I really could see it be like a number one show in the world type thing that people would like. Cause 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 it'd go viral. Cause it's freaking zombies getting shot at.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  And you know how cool they could make those masks look?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  I mean, you get a real special effects guy to work on those masks.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Like one of those experts from the movies.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  Can you search up Mr. Beast Zombies? Uh, we have a video on our channel from like, I mean, God knows, only 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 could react. And like the, it looks disgusting, the things they were able to do. It's pretty crazy.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, special, modern special effects and makeup artists, they could do amazing stuff, man.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Wait, uh, if you could find like a close up of my face or like, it was like crazy. We, we just brought in people for.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Is this where they come in?

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, like that kind of stuff. Like look at my face right there. Like pause it. It's freaking wild.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Dude, you could totally do something like that on the outside of one of those masks.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that, that was really all.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  That's the look, you, the, what yours looks like with like the teeth and everything and fucked up flesh, that is the mask.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  So you take that hard airsoft mask and you put that shit on it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Joe, the problem is I wanna go work on this now. We, like, you're gonna be, 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 elevated, I'm usually like, that's a good indicator that it's like a good idea. Cause it means I'm getting like.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Dude, this is a good idea.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I can literally feel, or not anymore, but like a couple of minutes ago, I could feel my heart beating. Cause I was getting excited. And it'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 like a lot of people are just gonna talk about it. And if a lot of people are talking about, obviously a lot of people watch it. And so that's why I call it kind of like the heart rate effect. Like that, that's like my number one signal that like people are gonna talk about this and freaking love it if we do it right.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  I can see it. I can see scenes. I can see darkness starting to settle in on the town.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  And I can see the people like trying to figure out where to hide and what to do.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  And the eyes at night, that was genius too.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, I could see the eyes.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  And it's interesting, cause it's like, uh, combining the Venn diagram of us, right? You're kind of representative of the very like, uh, I don't know, you're like, uh, just ability to really think deeply of like what makes it fucking cool. And, and you're really hyper fixating on what makes the zombies cool and like the realistic nature of it. And I'm hyper fixating on, uh, 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.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. And you, you could also have like, not just zombies, you could have like some other things that are out there too, that can get people.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Yo, Jamie, can we get 10 days on his schedule? Can he do one of the, oh, well, the, actually no, because you wouldn't, you don't need the money, but it would be cool if you were competing in it. Cause then that would be insane.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, it's too much time.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Exactly, I know. Just cancel some podcasts.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  I like the idea of it though.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  How about we, or nevermind. You, you pick them up in the car to take them to a podcast and they're like, oh whoops, we're in an abandoned city. Oh, here's your shotgun you talked about a year ago, Joe. Wow. Anyway, zombies are coming tonight. What? He's gonna leave and not shoot zombies? Come on.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Have you ever done, uh, Sandbox VR?

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Uh, is that the one where it's like the, you just go in and there's random worlds and you can walk around on them?

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Uh huh. It's, it's a warehouse. You go in there and they have fans and stuff. So like simulates like 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.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  And you go in there and you shoot zombies. You're in a mansion. You're in this like abandoned mansion and rats come out and zombies and there's guys on the ceiling. It's fucking awesome.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  You would love it, but you might get some ideas if you do that because.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  You mean, we, we're co-producing this now. You're, you're too invested. You just spent 34 minutes on a whatever podcast, like ripping on it.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Well, there's something to it, man. I, I just, I see it in my head. I'm like, that would be an amazing show. I just see these people like in the, like in a, a parking structure. Like setting up, getting ready and the sun's coming down. And they're like, look, we gotta, we have about 20 minutes of daylight left.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  And you realize like, God, I'm so fucking tired. I haven't slept.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  They're like, ah, 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 gonna lose if you do that. And they're like infighting and stuff as we're getting like dramatic, like, you know, B-roll of it from like wide shots. Cause everything too could be shot really far away. So like, it's like lenses are punching in and so it's not like there's a camera crew on them.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, the escape room's a good, a good throughway to do the task. 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 they win each day is inside like, like, so it could be like I drop a vault every day in the middle. And then like 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.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Have you done many escape rooms?

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Uh, like, I live in Greenville, North Carolina. There's not like many there.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Dude, me and my family, we do them everywhere we go. They're fucking awesome. And the best ones are in Vegas. They have insane, 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. 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 not, oh my god, dude.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  And I know the perfect people for it. We did, for Salesforce, we did their Super Bowl commercial this year. And in the commercial, I hid a million dollars in it. Like basically, if you watch the commercial, just with your computer and the commercial, you can win a million dollars. And there's like a bunch of random clues and puzzles hidden through it. And 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 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

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  again, hang up. And then it's just like sending you everywhere. And it's basically like 100 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 it. And there's a whole subreddit dedicated to it. And so I just, I just basically went on Reddit and I got all the like the most cracked out like puzzle solvers in the world. And 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, I don't 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.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  And then other stuff is like, you know, paragraph of text, 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.

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• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's like languages I didn't even know it exists. 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, they're just showing me like, oh, this represents Braille, these dots. And so we put them in this way. 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. And like, one part of the puzzles, you have to find locations on a map. And like, in the commercial, I've held up a grenade. And it's like a one plus question mark equals is like whatever. And it ends up being like, but the text is yellow. And like, it's like a stone was drawing on it. And like, it basically

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  meant Yellowstone. And then you, you put in Yellowstone in like this location thing on a different website, and then it unlocks this. And you had to draw like a circle on a globe. It got like pretty crazy.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Which is why like, tens of millions of people attempted it, but it took almost a month for someone to win a million dollars. And like, there's a million dollars on the line, and all you needed to win it was your computer. So it was like pretty cool to see like communities form. And like, people are doing like daily like podcasts and updates on it of like, what, what the next like step of the puzzle were. Because what you'll see in these puzzles too is like, uh, because we also did one years ago. I love doing these like online scavenger hunts that with just your computer, you can win a bunch of money. And you'll see like, when some, like one person will, 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, like step 42, you know, no one's there. And then you'll just see one person goes on this website, that's step 42. And then tens of thousands of people would go there. And, but

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  then as you get closer to the end, you, you stop seeing that effect. They start being more secretive and, and quiet about it. And so it's pretty cool to see like the psychology of how they do it.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  You could have these people completely unarmed in the beginning. And the only way they can get guns is to solve puzzles.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, or just find them, right? Because if it's a big enough city, we just go.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Well, maybe that's the puzzle. The puzzle is finding guns. Like, if there's some sort of a, some sort of a puzzle, and if you unlock that, it'll give you the location of where guns are.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And maybe, uh, you know, I, I also think of like fun stuff too. Like, we could give them, like, there could be a gun safe or armory in the city, but it's like, they have to like break into it, right? And that, that could just be a thing that takes like a ton of time. Like, so you have to like go find, you know, maybe one of the contestants, we make sure it's like certified in like explosives and stuff. And then there's, they have to like, oh no, no shot of stream platform would 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. And, you know, and then that's how they get in the gun safe. But maybe it's more like, uh, what's that, hack solve or whatever? And it's like, we make, you get a safe where if you hack solve it for like 10 hours, you, you can like break the lock on it and get in. So then someone just has to stand there and hold it.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Or you give people a stethoscope and a book on how to crack safes.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  And you have like click, click, click, click, click. And try to figure it out.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And someone's just like there for like two days straight. But then if he gets in, it's just, just straight loaded with ammo and stuff. So it's like a risk reward.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  There are old school safes that you can do that to. I don't know if they could do that with the new ones. But if you have like an old school safe, where you can actually hear the tumblers turning.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. Well, we could also just build the, the lock. I mean, the beauty of what the 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, right?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, just make it so that it's fix, it's solvable, but complicated.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that would be cool. Because then it's like, well, I'm a big fan of, 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. 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, uh, I love in these kind of reality shows where a viewer can ask, what would I do? Right? And, and that's why it tends to be what like, uh, people and families when they watch together, they love like, like in Beast Games, when I offer someone a million dollars, but you have to eliminate your friends. You 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,

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  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 million. 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, well, I wouldn't do that. I would just go scavenge, you know. It'd be cool.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Also, you could make it so that ammo and certain supplies are only available at night. So.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  So they're incentivized to move at night.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  You 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. But it's all pre-selected, so it's not like we're 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, they weren't planned on it. So that's why, because also, yeah, that's the other thing. You have to make sure every episode's not the same. So then now every nighttime would be different because they're in a different building and they don't know. Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Well, actually, you know.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  But you have to go out at night to find them.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  What would be really cool is if we can find an abandoned city that had like miles away, like some other little location that we could like, so they find a map and 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?

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  And then if they go out to that city and they make the journey and they realize it's gonna take us 10 hours to solve this. By that time it'll be two in the morning. It's already gonna be dark. We should go back now. Look, fuck it. We're here.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  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 talkies, so they can't communicate? And their friends are like, holding down a fort with a 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?

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  There's 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.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. Well, this is, see, what we're doing right now is we're what I would call blue skying. 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' rooms, they'd 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 or changing the lock. That's possible. What does it cost and how long does it take? Right? And you just go through and you attach all that to everything and you do a very first principles way of going about it. And then it's just objective. It would take X amount of time and it would cost us much money. And then like, you know, and then you just go through and figure out what's worth it, what's not.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  As opposed to, you know, every step away, people be like, no, you can't do that. Go 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.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  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 a bunch, 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. And so then you get a bunch of people in meetings that give you terrible advice and terrible ideas. And then they also wanna compare it to shows that have already been successful.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Well, we've already done this and why don't we do it this way?

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  And then you don't get the purple cow effect, which everyone knows and you.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  What's the purple cow effect?

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  So if, 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 around, down the world of road and you see a purple cow, you're gonna think about it like, why was that cow purple? And it'll stick in your brain. It's the same thing with content. If 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, but 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 well, it's a lot, everyone sees that creators are growing bigger and bigger audiences. And 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.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  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 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. And 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.

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  Well, it's hard for them because they have to put up so much money and not everybody's Mr. Beast.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  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 gonna dump a bunch of money into something and you see them making a disaster, you know, like the Joker 2 or something like that. You're like, hey, hey, hey, what the fuck are you doing?

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Of course. And that's where it's like, well, what to, an exec might be a disaster to like a creator might be a masterpiece. And so that's obviously where, but it, it's evolving. I mean, I think obviously with obsession, I mean, they just grossed $400 million.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  I still haven't seen it, but I heard it's amazing.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  You would love it.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  I know. I just don't go to movie theaters anymore.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  I don't either, but like that one, as with how well people were talking about, I had to see it.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  It'll be streaming soon. I think it'll be streaming in July or something like that.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Obsession, Backrooms, which is made by a creator, Amazing Digital Circus, they've been crushing it, Iron Like. So 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.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Well, did you see Talk To Me?

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Talk To Me, the horror movie?

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  It, it was great. These two guys from Australia, they were hilarious. These two brothers, they came in and they, they talked to me about it. But they were making YouTube videos.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's their name again?

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  It's called Talk To Me, right?

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  No, what's the creator's names?

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Jamie, I'll pull it up.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  So they're so funny. They, they were on the podcast. Both of them speak like a million miles an hour.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm, I, I can't think of their channel. They're, the. Racker Racker. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I've.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  That movie is great. Have you seen it?

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  I know. I haven't seen it. No.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  It's really good. It's really scary and it's very original.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Wait, when did you have the Racker Racker Brothers on?

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  Couple of years ago.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  Two years ago?

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, they talk fast as hell.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Dude, they're just, I'm like trying to corral them. It's like, hey, I don't know what the fuck.

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  They're, they're super cool guys. I, last time I hung out with them, I, weirdly enough, I, they're really into Uno. And I, whatever, I like competitive games and I played a thousand dollar game of Uno against some of them. And so we filmed it for like a little short for them and, and I lost. And I was like, okay, well, at least this will be funny. And then after they leave to like go back to our show, they're like, fuck, the SD card's corrupt. And I was like, oh, what?

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  It was just funny because it was like, we had this like mini set and we were playing like a really intense game of Uno. We were like slapping cards down.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  SD cards corrupt? That's crazy.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  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. And it's just funny, the kids came like, like taking over top. Yeah, those guys are super cool.

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  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 on to it and you say, talk to me. Like all of a sudden you get possessed by something. And you're, 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. And the, it's, I don't wanna say anything more. It's really good.

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  Is it like Scary Scare or just media?

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a horror movie.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  It's fun.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  It's really good.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  My, my fiance loves horror films, so.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  You'll love it. It's really well, my, 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 doesn't, you don't have to have famous actors to make these amazing movies.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  It's like, it's not really necessary.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Well, like the Backrooms, I think the, the director, I think is like 20 years old or whatever. I mean, very, very young. And I think it just crossed 100 million.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  And Obsession, same thing, right?

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I think they're a little older, but yeah, in their twenties, YouTubers. And they make like Curry, they 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, the jump. But when you look backwards, it's kinda like Steve Jobs says, it's hard to connect the dots going forward, but you can connect them really backwards. When you look back at his skits, they were very well shot and very, you know, like beautiful. And you could, you can like kinda 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, and it was like essentially practice for the movie. And it's just cool to, 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?

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  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 gonna see the fact six months from now, but 18 months from now, I bet, I would bet money, you're gonna see dozens of other movies, you know, made by creators. And obviously these people are gonna get more funding and because now everyone's eyes are being opened to like what should have been open a while ago, but that this is what people are watching now, like especially people under the age of 30. They grow up watching YouTube and they're spending, you know, two hours a day flipping through sub 60 second vertical feeds of TikTok reels and Insta, you know, shorts. And this is, this is culture for them. This is their world, you know?

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  I don't watch, besides Christopher Nolan, like I'm not really going to a movie theater for anything. But when a creator drops a movie, I'm like, okay, like I wanna see what they did, you know?

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  I always wanna see what new innovators are coming up with, like people that are just like thinking outside the box. That aren't, they're not trapped in that sort of a weird world of like how to make a successful film. They just, they're just, 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 like funny TikTok reels, doesn't mean they can't make a great horror film.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  But think about like. Jordan Peele, right? Make Keem Pill, 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?

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  It 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, Keem and Peele, Curry, Baker, a bunch of other people. It's so funny.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  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. And 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 a 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 10 million dollar horror film. I would argue honestly, really isn't that big, right?

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what you're doing, right?

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  But it's like, what makes it good is the premise behind it, right? Like the tension and like, if 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.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  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, like American Werewolf in London is the best example. You barely see it. You see it for like literally a half a second, a few times in the early parts of the movie.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  I haven't seen the movie, but.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Oh, you haven't seen it? Oh, my God, it's amazing.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Speaking of not seeing a movie, I did watch Ex Machina after the last podcast.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  How good is it?

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really good. You know, honestly, I was like, ah, 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.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  It's one of my top 10 all time favorite movies. Also because it's coming. That's coming.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Oh, now, yeah, it's more relevant than ever.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  Did you see the computer electronics show from Vegas this year?

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  Computer like with the drones?

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  CES on, 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.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  So it literally can have a back and forth conversation with you, just like perplexity can.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, or chat GPT or Gemini.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  And it's doing it with a voice, so with a hot voice. And it's like, that's common, dude.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Well, of course, I mean, the language model is already there, right? You can open up Gemini right now and talk to it like a normal human.

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  And if you just tell it to respond quick, it will talk to you.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  And it'll talk to you with slang. It'll talk to you and say, that part, like it'll say, it'll.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Well, one thing that's, it's funny, I play this board game a lot called Dune, whatever, like a big nerd, but there's like this one.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  It's called Dune? Like Dune the movies?

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  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 problem is Catan, it's like dice roll and, 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 sorry, I take board games a little seriously 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.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  So it's not just devote all your life, but there like is an infinite skill ceiling. And so 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 after I've been like probably a thousand hours into the game. I was totally backwards on the IP. But anyways, because we were talking about talking to AI, one of the top players like makes YouTube videos on it. And I was like, kind of curious, like what he would do if he was like in certain move like positions as me. So I just took all the transcripts of like a hundred of his YouTube videos and I just put it into Gemini. And I was just like, hey, you know, respond to me based how this person would and talk to me like this person would.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  And like, what would this person say in this scenario? And then when I was like playing a game, I just asked the questions like, the player's name is Dino, whatever. But 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 like my friend would, like to a T, like with his same mannerisms and everything. I was like, this is crazy. Like this is absolutely insane. And then so I would put it where it was on a Discord call and like Dino, we would be playing.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  And then I'd ask questions and I'd be like, no, actually, Dino, don't say anything. And then I'd ask dino.io and it'd respond exactly how he would respond in most of these situations. Because it had so much like contextual relevance from all his live streams on his YouTube channel. And it was, it was pretty crazy. And yeah, and so it's, 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. Like 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, point one five percent of his words are um.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  Around point three percent of what he says is like, it gave me like a full breakdown of like the last hundred thousand 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. It 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.

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. They could do that easily. And then just put you in a robot and now Jimmy lives forever.

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  Exactly. Or you could just have your robot be whoever, which is like, kind of weird, like, ill.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  That'd be very weird, you living with you. Imagine you have a robot and you get the robot to do stuff around your house instead of hiring a housekeeper. You come home and Jimmy's vacuuming.

• 1:36:35Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

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• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  More, more cynic, or not even cynically, just sad. It's like, you know, if you lost a loved one or something and then, yeah, I know, but.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  That's pet cemetery talk.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but if someone's like really grieving, they might, you know, do it because they want some normalcy back or something.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  I'd probably feel empty and hollow and even creepier. You have a robot that's pretending to be your husband.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, fuck off. That's crazy.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  I know, but it's just, I don't know, these next few years are gonna be crazy, man. Everything's developing so rapidly and it's just, I. Yeah, it's uh, twenty thirty six is gonna be completely different than twenty twenty six.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  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 ten years from now looks like. The difference between nineteen thirty and nineteen forty, not much, other than world events. You know, yeah, the difference between like sixteen hundred and seventeen hundred, not much, not much different, maybe better boats, you know, maybe better muskets.

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  The difference between twenty twenty six and twenty thirty six is gonna be, who fucking knows, man? Full on Blade Runner.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I, it's just like the, some of the people I see working on like, you know, augmented reality glasses and like where, you know, like there's animes where people get trapped in video games and stuff like that. And I could really see like, you know, with AI advancing and with more and more computer, you could just, you know, put on a headset and live in a video game. And you, it could literally just gender or generate whatever the, the world is you want. And literally like, you know, ten years from now, potentially just real time generate the video game you wanna be in and cater to what you like and just so many possibilities. And obviously with humanoid robots just 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 gonna figure out how to merge them together. And yeah, I mean, ten years from now, we're definitely gonna just, there's gonna be humanoid robots in so many things

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  that now would seem weird as hell, but ten years from now, we'd be like, oh, it's normal.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  Ten 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.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  I would say ten years from now, that would be five years from now, probably, ten years from now. I, I feel like that would just be like, you know, is this a Rock or an iPhone or whatever? Like no one would, they're just gonna be normalized to, especially like younger people, like younger kids who grow up with ChatGPT 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 of years for people to get used to it and normalize to it. And then, you know, it's not gonna take that long.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be very, very, very weird.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  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 will 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, and like, you know, so you can, you know, remove a background shot or, or whatever. So like, for certain people like that, ideally, you know, it'd 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, you know, frame by frame and drawing around their body. And it does that and you can spend more time doing actual like creative fun work, you know?

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  And hopefully 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 like the puck ends up stopping, you know?

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be real weird, man, real weird. It's gonna be interesting, you know, hopefully we'll survive, but.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm an optimist, I think we'll survive, but yeah.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  I'm an optimist too, but I have a feeling that, uh, we'll have a different role in society.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  That's for sure.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  I don't think we'll be the leaders anymore.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  Oh, that far, okay.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think AI is gonna take over most things.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Including government, including allocation of resources. It's gonna probably restrict people's ability to make decisions because we're so destructive.

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  I did, I listened to your podcast with, uh, Mark and Dreeson and, and I do like what he said, or not like, but it's just interesting when he 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. And so it is pretty interesting because if it is omn, uh, not omnipotent, but all knowing and knows all these things, like, it's like scary because it's like, we don't want, I, as a human, I'm like, no, I don't wanna 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 inexperienced person making a decision.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  Well, technically this has the experience of everyone ever in history on the internet, right? So, 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, they do enjoy. Like I was saying, like the example of not having to roto every single frame on a body or, you know, being able to pre-visualize scenes or, or whatever. So I, it's like, it seems, and everything I'm, I'm seeing, and maybe I live in a bubble on Twitter, it seems like it's, it's not killing that many jobs yet, but.

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  Like this is uni, universal high income is Elon's concept.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  He thinks that literally people are not gonna have to work anymore. 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.

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  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. And that's what you should generate to, and then we're gonna have to reward people based on that. And it's just to figure out like 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 wanna just take your government money and play Call of Duty all day.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Especially if it becomes VR Call of Duty.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Exactly, that's where it's gonna get hard because I think of like how addicted to video games I was when I was a kid. I mean, still to some degree now, but like, and if it was in a headset and like a completely different world, like, oh my gosh, like, my poor mom, like good luck getting me out of that. Like she 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. And you know, uh, but if I was like actually in a headset, oh, and all my friends are on it.

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  You know, and then you take it off and now you, you have freaking homework and like real life stuff. And like, you went from 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 like real life, which sucks. Like, that's like a whole different level of addiction than like current video games would have. And I mean, I don't know what the timeline is on that stuff, but it's, uh, it's clear that that's gonna happen in our lifetimes.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  That's the matrix and that's coming. And there's gonna be multiple levels of that. And it's also gonna exponentially get in better and better with each iteration.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  There's no way to stop it, it's gonna happen. And that's Sandbox VR, but times a million. If you go to 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 fifty feet by fifty feet and you move around and there you do a bunch of stuff. But if, this is an actual fucking warehouse, you have physical boundaries that exist, like, and then you're in a virtual space where as you're walking, it looks like the actual ground that you're walking on.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  And you're, you're involved, you won't be able to tell what's real and what's not real.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  And with those omnidirectional treadmills and stuff, when someone cracks the code, it's a, I, you've probably never heard of it, but there's a popular anime called Sword Art Online. It's where, don't, it's just a, a guy gets, uh, trapped in a video game and he lives his life through there. And I remember watching that when I was younger. And, uh, I remember like when I was really young, we're fresh off of watching that anime. I was like, man, I hope they figure this out in my lifetime. So I'm like eighty 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.

• 1:47:04Speaker 02

  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 as fulfilling to exist in these virtual worlds?

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, there, I remember when I was younger, I'd play like this game called Wizard One on One. It's like World of Warcraft, like an MMORPG. And like, there are definitely times in my life, maybe there were short periods where like when I was a young kid, like my character in that game definitely mattered, like pretty similar to like me in real life. Like I was really hooked, you know, on that game.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  And so like, I could see it, like, you know, where people, like, look at people who've dedicated their entire lives to World of Warcraft. There's, you know, 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. Like, if I'm ninety years old and I'm better than 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, my limbs every couple of days, like, you know, put an IV in me, I don't even wanna take the headset off to eat.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Between the simulation and real life. And, you know, there's a lot of people that are very intelligent people that believe we are inside of some sort of a simulation currently. Elon's one of them. He said the odds of us not being in a simulation are in billions.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So something akin to a simulation, he believes is running right now. So maybe, maybe we are in Beast Games, you know?

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Some me a thousand years in the future.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  The hundredth version of Beast Games.

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, yeah, with compute growing and growing, it's, if someone figured out how to harvest the energy of a, a single star.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  That would be crazy.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Right, it reaches some sort of event horizon.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Or some actual civilization similar to us, but then they just wanted to, they lost, you know, like how we lost a lot of our ancient history, they did too. So there, this is a simulation to see, how did we come to be with all this stuff?

• 1:49:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  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 farfetched to think you could put, have someone put a headset on or whatever and simulate, you know, trillions of things, so.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  Not just that, but then there's the reality of the structure of the universe itself. Like, subatomic particles acting differently when they're observed versus not observed.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the double slit experiment, yeah.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like, okay, what, 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's, we're imprisoned by our sight, there are limited senses of sight, smell, touch.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  And it's not as simple as like, you show up with your lunch pail and you go to work. No, there might be some weird shit that's going on.

• 1:50:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  All along with consciousness.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  It's a, you know, we did a video where we helped a thousand, you know, blind people or people who couldn't see see again with cataract surgeries, and I did think about that. It's like fascinating because, you know, if they didn't have other humans around them, they, they just would have never known that sight was a thing.

• 1:50:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:30Speaker 03

  You know, if we, as other humans, didn't tell them, I mean, they couldn't see, and so it is like, is there a sense that we might not be aware of that?

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  A bunch of them, I bet.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, who knows? I mean, but, that, that is like an interesting thought experiment, and like, because like, to those people, it was, you know, actually a random memory I just got too. We, we also did a video where we helped a thousand deaf people hear again, and a lot of them, it was just giving them like really, really advanced hearing aids and that, you know, 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 of years old, but was deaf since the, the child was born, and had never heard his child. And so we, 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, we had his child just say daddy, and he like lost it. That was the first word he heard in years, and it was the first time he ever heard her.

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  And, I don't even know why that memory popped in my head, but yeah, that was a, that was a, like, one of the most special things we've, we've ever filmed was like, that moment right there. I was like, wow, that's crazy.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we assume that the senses that we have detect everything that's around us, but we, 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.

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  And we have no idea what the senses are missing.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  And 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. Like, you would have thought that was reality.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  It's just, yeah.

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  You, I don't know if we'll ever know, but.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Well, just think about the sense of smell, how, where that is. There's an invisible thing, and when someone farts, you go, whoa.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah, and like, yeah, this is kinda crazy.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  You'd have no idea. If you didn't have a sense of smell.

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  You would just be existing, just like everybody else, and then without a sense of smell, life is not that much different, you know? It's different, but not that much different. Like, everything looks exactly the same.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  But no one could smell anything.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  You know, but think of like gases and all sorts of like, a gas leak in your house, or weird, weird shit that you smell, skunks, all that stuff you'd be missing out on.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  I guess, if you had to get rid of one of the five senses.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  That would be the one.

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, I feel like that's the least necessary to survival.

• 1:52:40Speaker 02

  It would suck, food wouldn't taste as good.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  You, you wouldn't know if you had BO.

• 1:52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, but for the most part, your, your odds of living are, don't really drop that much, and like, your overall happiness wouldn't change dramatically.

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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's like rejecting. You know, there's certain things you smell, you go, oh, what the fuck is this? I gotta get away from that. Because your body's letting you know, like, this is toxic, whatever you're breathing in is not normal air. You would, you'd, 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.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know what's, it's funny because on the car ride over here, I was listening to a podcast we did, whatever, four years ago, and it's like, essentially like the entire podcast, 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, like, one thing I, I've noticed, it's interesting because like, I, I started making videos when I was 11, so my entire life is on the internet, right? And like, my puberty, every development and stuff, and I, 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.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Beast Joe Rogan, and they, you know, if they clicked on either one of these podcasts, it'd be two completely different experiences.

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  Right. Well, you look differently.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  I mean, you look great, man.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  I was saying before the podcast, you look fantastic. You lost weight, you look really healthy.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah, I, I was telling you before the podcast, I lost 50 pounds between the last one and this one.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  That's awesome, man.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and last time when you would ask me about movies, or you asked me about telepathy, all these things, every, because I was listening to it on 3X, being like, car right here, every single thing I was like, I don't know. I was like, one thing and one thing only, I know YouTube. And I was like, I know nothing else, and I, I blocked everything else out of my like, my world, which is interesting because I actually think that wasn't a positive, right? I think if I consumed more other mediums 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 like, since then, opened up and like, I let more things into my mind.

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  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, I think it really worked out to your benefit. I don't, I don't think it's a bad thing.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think that the hours put in, yes, but it's like, instead of consuming four hours of YouTube a day, allowing, like, allowing myself to occasionally watch a movie, I think I would have been more tapped in and understood how to tell stories.

• 1:55:19Speaker 02

  Well, you were younger, and you, that's a part of the process.

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  I know. It's just so funny, listening to that podcast, because I, even I, as myself, I watched that, I was on the car, I was like, wow. I like seemed like borderline like a freak on certain things here. It was like, you were like, you would like change the subject on certain things, and then I'd instantly bring it back to the one thing I knew, like YouTube data. And like, I, I could like 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, you know, I'm sure you see like a lot of your, your podcasts, you do, most people consume it through clips on social media, right? That's like their exposure to it.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Most people consume most things through clips.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and what's fascinating though is clips don't have context on the, the time range, right? And like, you know, so like, 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 like, and like, sometimes there'll be things that like, you know, I've grown up or I don't like necessarily agree with, or, or whatever, I, I speak differently. But because they're not like time stamped, it's like interesting because a clip from something you did years ago can randomly go viral now, and people won't even know that it's like years ago. And it's so fascinating because they, they just like pop off. And it's like, more people are gonna listen to this podcast through like random clips, probably 10, 15 times folds than like actually going on Spotify or wherever you post it, iTunes.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  And it's so interesting because that's like the new form of culture, especially for younger people, is sub one minute-ish vertical content, you know, that they swipe through the feed.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  But it does inspire people to listen to the whole thing, and only a certain percentage of them will do that. But it's like, that's a, a thing with sporting clips, like, you see the game winning touchdown, you, you watch that, probably gets watched more than the actual full game.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:57:14Speaker 02

  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+ versus how many people consumed it on TikTok.

• 1:57:27Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, yeah.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  It's many, many fold. It's like, you know, they, they're, they, they get hundreds of millions of views on social media.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  Of different, you know, different fights, different.

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  I haven't watched the fight live in a while, but like, you know, the, the White House one, I mean, I, I saw everything on my TikTok feed, I mean, I probably saw 150 clips of it, so I have like a relatively good grasp of what it looked like and what happened, but I didn't watch it live, you know?

• 1:57:52Speaker 02

  If you wanted to watch that one live, really you should have been there. Like, that was when you really absorbed how bizarre it was.

• 1:57:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  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, we're rehearsing, so we're standing by the octagon, I made a video of it where I put it on DC, it's like, the White House, what the fuck? And like, I'm showing the White House, there's the cage, and then the White House is right there.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the flyover and everything, nuts. But see, that's how, when I was talking about the Roman Colosseum before, that's how I felt.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  But I didn't get the, like.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  Well, you know, they were gonna do Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg in the Roman Colosseum, but it was gonna cost $150 million just to secure the venue and, and set everything up.

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I could have hooked him up.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Also would have been a terrible fight.

• 1:58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, Elon would have been destroyed. It would have just been a clown show.

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  He thinks he's big, and so that's gonna 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, this guy that I know, Dave Camarillo, who's a world-class coach, who's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, Judo black belt, been training him, like, he's training with like hardcore people.

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  Well, because I, I don't think he'd care if I told the story, like, the first time I talked to him years ago, like, you know, we're just shooting the shit, chatting, and then like, at the end of it, he's like, yeah, you wanna come train MMA or whatever at, at my, my lake? And I was like, oh, um, no, but I appreciate the offer. But it's just like, instantly, like that, I could tell that's like his way of like bonding and, and building friendships, and it, 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, ah, I'm good.

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, he invited me to go bow hunting with him.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  So, it's definitely not fake, like, that was a one-on-one conversation.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  I know you know that, but a lot of people think he's just like, puts on the facade or stuff, but like, unironically, like our first time meeting, he was just like, yeah, let's hang out, let's do, like, go roll on some mats and stuff, like, he was being dead serious.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  Because I, even his striking, his Jiu-Jitsu, 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.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 02

  You know, there's no way you can't be enthusiastic about it and be doing that. So he's, he's definitely really into it.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  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 like go train and do it, but it's like, ah. 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 eighteen hours a day and building all these companies, and then another where I could like pursue fun stuff like that and like, because that would be fun like to-

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Well, how old are you, Jimmy?

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  Twenty-eight.

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're still so young. You could just do this for another ten years and amass so much money that you could never spend it. And then ten 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, you could do anything, man.

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think-

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  You're so young. You have so much time ahead of you.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hard to even, I, I think you, you like, as humans, you like build the patterns and stuff. And I've been working so many hours every day for so long that it's like, like literally like ingrained in, in me that it, it's hard to ever really imagine a world where like it shuts off, because you have to think like I started when I was eleven. So basically, now all I really do is just, you know, work, whether it's building companies or making content. And like, another ten years from now, that would be essentially twenty years straight of like training my nervous system of like, this is what you do all day, every day, like constantly being in war mode, obsessed with it. So it's hard to envision a world where I could ever shut it off, but uh-

• 2:01:38Speaker 02

  You know what's interesting? You and I have been doing it about the same time. Like, uh, we started this podcast around seventeen years ago.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  Holy crap.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be, won't be seventeen years in December? I think so, right? I think in this December, it's seventeen years. So it's basically, we've been on these parallel paths.

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  Which is crazy. You know what would be funny? Um, is if like envision like seventeen years ago, you had eleven-year-old me sitting here, and then you sitting there, and like comped it to today.

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  That would be amazing.

• 2:02:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Someone with AIs now gonna do that.

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  So what are you gonna do? You're gonna do a, a show on YouTube? Where'd you get this idea?

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  YouTube.

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  Did your mom know about this?

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  Shouldn't you be in school? I'd be like, I was such a like-

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  How many hours a day do you spend waking up on content? Hey, man, go outside.

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

  Go talk to a woman. I, I mean, back then too, I was so like introverted and self-conscious. Like, I probably wouldn't have said anything. I would've been like,

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  you know, because you have to kind of be a little, it's, it's interesting too, because uh, it's like, very accepted to be a content creator. It's like, cool. People love it. It's like, even parents now are like, you know, they're like, do it. And they realize that while being a content creator, you learn a lot of different skillsets and it teaches self-agency, et cetera. But back then, I mean, it was like, you're batshit crazy, very frowned upon. And like, so it's so funny to see how that changes, because like, you know, it's the number one most coveted job in, in America right now. Like, if you were to go survey like a hundred 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, like, you know, like, and so-

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  It's probably the number one job that kids want.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  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. How are you gonna make money? You're gonna be homeless. And so it's so funny to, to see how it, it changes. Um-

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  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 used to be on TV. Like, oh, I'm having fun.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've fallen from grace. And it's so interesting too, to see like, you know, as like YouTubers and stuff first got, started getting big, like, they all use it as launchpads 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.

• 2:03:54Speaker 02

  This is the same as podcasts 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. And they got, and it, it sort of stalled them out in the podcast world.

• 2:04:04Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:04:05Speaker 02

  Because now you're working for the man, air quotes, and you're working for some studio or something like that.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  And split time, and you're not as passionate and stuff. Yeah.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  Well, it, 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, um, 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, 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 thing, and then, you know, do a thousand iterations on it. Then they can come out the other side and do it for a living. You know what I mean?

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  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, that's how you get a job. And so, a lot of people today, because obviously your parents educate you and teach you 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, and there are others like me that take ten years, and it's just like a distribution chart, and you know, probably the average is 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're, you put in ten thousand hours, and in those ten thousand hours, you do a thousand 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.

• 2:05:32Speaker 03

  But, 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, to hear that, really. Because they, they just don't even really, the dots don't connect in their mind that that's really even an option, right?

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  Well, it's a completely new career path, right? And the only re, 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 could show, hey, not only is this guy successful, he's fucking hyper-successful. Like, this is not a dream. Like, this is a possibility. You just have to figure out your version of what he did.

• 2:06:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  And it's a process.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  But I would argue, it's not even just for content creation. Like, if you wanted to be an accountant or really anything, real, it's like, just put in a lot of hours, do a lot of iterations, surround yourself with great people and obsess over it.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  Stay focused.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  Stay focused, consume it, and then recognize like, you might be like, oh, well, this person did it in ten months. Why is it taking me so long? It's just, it's average and statistics. And just give yourself enough timeframe and like, it's, 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, it's, if you follow those, those, you know, traits, like, it's, it's gonna happen eventually, um, because-

• 2:06:38Speaker 02

  Well, you have to be process-oriented, not goal-oriented. You know, the process is getting better at stuff. The, 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 gonna think about. You're not gonna think about the actual thing you're making, so it won't be as good, so you'll probably never get there.

• 2:06:54Speaker 03

  Bingo. Yeah.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  And this is the, you know, one of the cool things about owning a comedy club, is that we've, uh, set up the club so there's a real path. Like, these people understand how you can become a professional.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  Because becoming a professional, when I first started, was this very vague of weird thing. Like, you never, no one knew how it was done.

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15Speaker 02

  Like, you went to open mic nights, you did open mic nights. How do I get paid? How's, how do I ever be a professional?

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  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 Egan, who is the creative director at the Comedy Store, the talent coordinator. He watches all the open micers, he, 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-

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  Phenomenal show, if people don't watch it. It's hilarious.

• 2:07:52Speaker 02

  The best fucking show ever.

• 2:07:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  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. And 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, uh, Ari Matty was in Estonia, and they went to Australia for ten years, just grinding, trying to make it in comedy. Gets on Kill Tony, boom, now he has a career. It's incredible.

• 2:08:23Speaker 03

  And, and I don't recognize those names, but like, as me, a case study, right? If they're doing stuff in Estonia or other, I'd never would see it, but if they're on Kill Tony, I'll see it, right?

• 2:08:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  And there are millions of people like me that, we're not, like, we're casual comedy watchers, right? I don't, you know, maybe I'll watch a Netflix special here or there, and I watch Kill Tony. And so like, 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.

• 2:08:43Speaker 02

  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, like, like Cam Patterson, he was a doorman at the Comedy Store, and now he's on Saturday Night Live, or doorman at the mothership, brother. And now he's on Saturday Night Live. He started out at the mothership, and he was working there as an employee.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  And he's funny, and I know who he is.

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  He's amazing.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Because of Kill Tony.

• 2:09:11Speaker 02

  Yes, because of Kill Tony.

• 2:09:12Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  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, like illuminate the pathway.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  Like, there's a clear pathway.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  Well, because uh, it's a different skillsets, right? Like, being able to get attention and get in front of people might be a different skillset 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 in a one comics, but they, 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. And so like, handling that part, because at the end of the day, like, as a viewer, I just want to watch funny people, right?

• 2:09:49Speaker 02

  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 gotta do. I gotta 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. He was poor, just like me, like literally working for, you know, uh-

• 2:10:20Speaker 03

  I'm sure you pay well, but yeah.

• 2:10:21Speaker 02

  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 gotta know that it's possible.

• 2:10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 02

  And before someone like you became, you know, a real content creator, like, imagine just trying to explain to someone what your YouTube show, what your goal was. Imagine this. Imagine-

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  Fifteen years ago, you sitting down with someone when you're thirteen 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'll be like, you're out of your fucking mind, right?

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and back then, like viral videos back then were like two million views. 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 lunatic. Like, you're just like, not even delusional, like a certified lunatic, like you're not even living in reality.

• 2:11:23Speaker 02

  But now that you've paved the path and then you've shown people that it can be done, now you see.

• 2:11:29Speaker 03

  Everyone's, it has a lot more confidence to reenact.

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

  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 do I have to do? I gotta go pilot school. I gotta do the work, put in, go through the process.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  Like, factually, or I mean, I don't know if it's factually, but it's like millions of people over the next ten years that will, you know, find a job, you know, being a creator or working for creators. I know, I mean, dozens upon dozens of creators who are hiring dozens of people each. I have a hundred and fifty open racks in my business. I mean, they're, you know, these creators, hundreds of thousands of people are gonna become creators themselves full-time, and those creators are gonna 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 other creators, right? And 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 a pretty useful thing, and it's like, almost like the equivalent of getting a college degree, right?

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  If you're a teenager now and you put in five thousand hours, five hundred iterations, you obsess over this thing, blah, blah, you 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, um, yeah, some other YouTuber will peak you up in a heartbeat.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And it's also, it's, this is the new Hollywood. I mean, this is really.

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  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 IPs 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, one point eight billion people use YouTube every month. Now it's over three billion, you know what I mean? It's growing and it's not slowing down. It's growing more and more and more, which is what I said would happen, you know, last time I was on here. And what I still believe, like, I don't think these things have peaked. I think they're gonna keep growing. And, um, you know, it's just what younger people use. They never watch television, which is obvious to me and you. But, you know, but to some older people who still watch, you know, news and get it through there, it still blows their mind that they're like, they never use cable. And it's like, like a fifteen-year-old right now, outside of like, you know, watching an NBA game or an NFL game,

• 2:13:33Speaker 03

  has never used cable television. They've never even seen it. They don't even fully understand. Like, they're like, like, sometimes when I'm talking to like a younger person, like, um, if I'm like, trying to get a gauge of, what'd you think of our new video? Like, I'll just ask, like, 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 like a sporting event, it's like entertainment. And they'll be like, why, why would you do that? Why would you, like, why would you put like three minutes of ads every four minutes? Like, and I'm like, well, that's just how things were. And they're like, why?

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• 2:15:54Speaker 02

  It's so dumb that they still do it that way.

• 2:15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 02

  It really is so dumb.

• 2:15:57Speaker 03

  It makes no sense, yeah.

• 2:15:58Speaker 02

  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'll probably get more retention, you'll probably get more views. Like, no one is gonna sit and watch CBS.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  What's even crazier is you would have to pay money to, like, you'd have to pay like fifty dollars a month for cable to then have like thirty-three percent of what you consume be ads, which is a higher ratio than when you watch YouTube, which is free. It's like, it's like, kind of, wow. And then you wonder why people are moving in hundreds of millions of droves over to this new forum that's just like, yeah.

• 2:16:31Speaker 02

  And then there's podcasts, which is like, how many podcasts are there now?

• 2:16:36Speaker 03

  Oh, millions, obviously, but how many successful ones? Yeah, obviously, there's millions, but.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  But I mean, the barrier to entry is the lowest. Like, at least what you're doing is complex. You know, it's, 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, you have to plan it out. Podcasts, you're just sitting down. Like, we talked for five minutes before we started this podcast. We said, hi, hey, you look great. What's up? Good to see you. Give me a hug.

• 2:17:05Speaker 03

  You gave me some caffeine to get me cracked out.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Let's go. And that's it. Like, so there's zero preparation, other than, you know, the preparation that the host does beforehand. But if, 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.

• 2:17:27Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 2:17:28Speaker 02

  How many do you think there are, Jamie? Active podcasts?

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to, how many have been uploaded this week? How, like, that's what, you know? Active, yeah. Still posting on them.

• 2:17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's say.

• 2:17:38Speaker 03

  Seven million or something like that?

• 2:17:40Speaker 02

  That's crazy. That's crazy.

• 2:17:44Speaker 03

  I would guess two, well, active, probably one million.

• 2:17:47Speaker 02

  Please, please put this, this is what I want to know. How many podcasts were active in two thousand and nine?

• 2:17:54Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  Let's guess that.

• 2:17:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  Put that in our AI sponsor, Perplexity. Perplexity probably has the answer to that.

• 2:18:03Speaker 03

  What, they sponsor you guys?

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  Is that why you had the founder on recently?

• 2:18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, also because he's cool. I talked to him and we started talking about ancient Hindu mythology. I was like, dude, this gotta be a cool guest.

• 2:18:13Speaker 03

  I have a download. I haven't listened yet.

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  Is really, 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, two thousand and nine, there were sixty-nine thousand podcasts. Holy shit.

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  But that's not active. That just means sixty-nine in the Apple's directory. So that means roughly seventy thousand people had done one at some point. But then, yeah, I would wager a small percentage were actually active at the time.

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  Still, that's a lot. So that's when I started.

• 2:18:41Speaker 03

  Now, what is it now? That, I'm curious. Now, in twenty twenty-six, how many podcasts are there?

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  I bet seven million.

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, I'm gonna up my guess. I'm gonna up mine to ten million.

• 2:18:53Speaker 02

  Worldwide?

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  I'm upping mine to ten. What does it say?

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  So since two thousand and nine, there were sixty-nine thousand versus several million shows today, depending on the database you look at. But what is the number, though? Four point five to four point seven million podcast shows globally as of twenty twenty-six.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  You know what I'd be curious of? How many people do content creation full-time? I'm wondering what it says.

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  That's a good question. Okay, let's figure that out.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and compare that to the same timeframe.

• 2:19:20Speaker 02

  Let's guess. How many people make a living doing content creation?

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  In two thousand and nine versus now? I'd say two thousand and nine, maybe.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 2:19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, or a thousand or something, five thousand. No, I was, I was a little kid. I was, I'll say five thousand.

• 2:19:33Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe five. Content creation is like a very online content creation. But the problem is, that's like bloggers and.

• 2:19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, through social media, uh, yeah.

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  Two thousand and nine, social media's just coming out, right?

• 2:19:46Speaker 03

  You're right, five thousand's probably.

• 2:19:47Speaker 02

  So let's, 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 twenty-five million.

• 2:19:57Speaker 03

  Oof, I would say lower, probably eight. Let's see what it says.

• 2:20:02Speaker 02

  Eight million?

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:02Speaker 02

  That's probably more likely.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  The barrier to entry you're making me look up here is also tough. In the US, like taxpayers, people who are like profiling or just like kids who don't make five bucks. Worldwide, how many people do content creation full-time, right?

• 2:20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, just, just, how many content creators, how many professional content creators are there worldwide? Just let Perplexity try to figure it out.

• 2:20:23Speaker 03

  I will, but I'm just like, uh, it's, I know what it's gonna do, so it's not, it's.

• 2:20:28Speaker 02

  What do you think it's gonna do?

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  It's gonna freak out and it's gonna say, there's a lot.

• 2:20:33Speaker 02

  Let's see what it says, though.

• 2:20:34Speaker 03

  That's gonna say the same sort of thing. What does professional mean?

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  Okay, people that make a living. They pay their bills off of content creation.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  It's not a.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you don't file your like taxes as content creator.

• 2:20:54Speaker 02

  Because it guessed there, four point five, four point seven million.

• 2:20:57Speaker 03

  It's probably just gonna look for any database online.

• 2:21:00Speaker 02

  Eight to twelve million professional content creators worldwide, depending upon how professional is defined. Roughly two hundred, three hundred million people identify as content creators globally in twenty twenty six. Holy shit, man. Holy shit.

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  Are they making money, or are they not?

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, this seems relatively like it got the gist though.

• 2:21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it got it. It wasn't a problem, Jamie, you were pessimistic.

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  But we don't have an answer.

• 2:21:24Speaker 02

  Well, it's given us rough, rough data. The rough data is eight to twelve million professional content creators, two hundred, three hundred million people identify as content creators. So out of those, which kind of makes sense that, you know, a small percentage of them are gonna be able to figure out how to make a living entirely off of it. One analyst estimates that about four percent of creators are professional, meaning they treat content creation as their main job and earn a full-time living. So that, that's, that makes sense.

• 2:21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:56Speaker 02

  That seems about right, and that's about right with kind of a lot of things.

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:01Speaker 02

  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 four percent or something like that, probably less.

• 2:22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it makes sense, but the interesting part is that number's gonna keep skyrocketing year over year. I don't see any signs that any of this stuff is slowing down, and so.

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  Especially if people see that this is a real path, this isn't a pie in the sky dream, there's a lot of.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  I mean, at this point, if they don't see it, then I mean, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, 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.

• 2:22:52Speaker 02

  Well, you're really wise in that regard, is that you spent so much money dumping it back into the, the business. And by doing that, your content is just so much more advanced than anybody else's. And that's such a big risk, because a lot of people would say, I'm making all this money, who knows when this is gonna 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.

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  Go hard. Well, it's, it's what I used to call the, um, creators would, uh, back in the day, reach like five 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, they have a car paid off, and like the ones that are really money motivated, they kind of got that security. And so that, 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, um, but yeah, I never really had any of that. I just like, you know, I mean, like I probably talked about last time we're on here. I used to live in an apartment that I would share that was seven hundred and twenty dollars a month, so like three sixty rent.

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  And, um, I drove a two thousand and six Dodge Durango, that cost a couple thousand bucks, and I just didn't have any liabilities. So I was just like, screw it, I'll just keep my lifestyle cheap, so I can just reinvest it all, and you know.

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  God, 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.

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  Well, and 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 gonna lose everything, like 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, just have faith.

• 2:24:37Speaker 02

  Well, you were right.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  I know, and we're great now.

• 2:24:40Speaker 02

  But it's up to parents, parents always worry about their kids.

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  Exactly, so I don't think it's like, uh, she was doing anything wrong, by all purposes, like she was doing the right thing. It's just, uh, 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 like saying something like that puts self-doubt in you, and then you're like, okay, you know. But that's where I'm a big believer, if you really want it, just keep your liabilities low, like live below your means, and that way it's like, you know, it's, it's a little easier to be riskier if you aren't, you know, have all these things you gotta afford. Because what really changes if you fail?

• 2:25:10Speaker 02

  That's definitely smart, but there's something happens also to people where, um, 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.

• 2:25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  You're so fortunate.

• 2:25:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:25:27Speaker 02

  And people just get really complacent. It's, it's so easy for people to just forget how fortunate they are to be able to do what they're doing.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  And.

• 2:25:38Speaker 03

  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, is this really the life I wanted? And you like start to like, be like, ah, you kind of regret your decisions, but then you gotta like snap out of it, 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 Colosseum, 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, if you have a, 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, and which, you know, not everyone in my spot, position has like people who are, you know, willing to tell them how it is, right?

• 2:26:22Speaker 03

  Who are just like, bro, grow up, like, it's fine, you know, this will be done in twenty minutes, and then, you know, your life's pretty good. Like, you know, it's, it's like, 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.

• 2:26:48Speaker 02

  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. That's, because so many people have ass things, so many people do just enough, just barely enough.

• 2:27:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:27:06Speaker 02

  You're supposed to go all the way, you go three quarters of the way, you know, so many people, so many people just, they don't, they, and 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.

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  It's, it literally is, it's infectious, and it makes something mundane, honestly, fun too.

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:27:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:27:41Speaker 03

  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, and so.

• 2:27:47Speaker 02

  My friend Brian Simpson has a great saying, he says, you can't be your own boss and be a shitty employee.

• 2:27:54Speaker 03

  Wait, elaborate on that.

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  So if you work for yourself, if like you're the one who's out there doing it, you're the, like, so you don't work for anybody, but you also can't be a fucking lazy, half-ass employee. It's like you can't be both things. He goes, if you're gonna 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.

• 2:28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14Speaker 02

  Like if you are gonna work for yourself, you gotta get some shit done, because that's a very rare position to be a person that works for themselves.

• 2:28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:22Speaker 02

  Do the thing you actually love to do.

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Speaker 02

  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. So people, young people who are listening to this right now, they listen to you like, this fucking Mr. Beast is just getting after it, man. I wanna do that, and instead of like hanging out with your friend and just get stoned and plays Call of Duty all day, and is always complaining about everything in his life, and but meanwhile he doesn't do anything. They're like, uh, that's not how I wanna 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 wanna do with their life, but they get examples of it online,

• 2:29:09Speaker 02

  and they can listen to these people talk, and they can get inspired.

• 2:29:12Speaker 03

  Exactly, and I would assume you have a lot of parents who watch these that, you know, have kids, and, and I would encourage the, 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, then do those four things, and like, you'll make it further than you can imagine. And like, you know, there's outliers, like you, this is what like skews a lot of people's perceptions, 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, 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.

• 2:29:56Speaker 03

  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, do, but it's like, if, if you just listen to every Joe Rogan podcast, you're not gonna be a great podcaster. So it's time plus iterations, right? You would have to go do, an example of that would be do five hundred 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 wanna be podcasts. And then, yes, this podcast might have blown up in a year, but statistically, that's not gonna happen, right? You have to give yourself like, the average might be four or five years, and some people like me take ten years, and you just have to be so in love with the journey that you're cool with it.

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  You're just like, I'm just gonna do it till it works out, and, um, 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, 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, I, you probably won't make a hundred million dollars, but if you wanna make a hundred thousand dollars 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, this, this doesn't even exist to them, you know?

• 2:31:08Speaker 02

  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, 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 did they do? Well, they just kept working hard and they figured out what it is they do, and they made money. Like, yeah, dude, that's probably more likely.

• 2:31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:34Speaker 02

  So just go in the general direction, and who knows, along the way, you might hit it quick, something 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, what you're doing right, and get better at it, and constantly try to improve, and just because something doesn't exist as, um. Um, what is your occupation, you know, in a form from two thousand and one? 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 two thousand nine that, oh, I'm a podcaster.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  Like, that means zero. You tell them today, they go, oh, amazing.

• 2:32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  How long 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 gonna be people who's like, oh, the odds you're making it and that. Like, okay.

• 2:32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Speaker 02

  Is that what we're doing?

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:47Speaker 02

  Are we just fucking playing odds? The odds you're dying are a hundred percent, so.

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  Once you adopt this mindset, though, then the the naysayers go from being um, uh, 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, right? So once you get over the hump where, you know, you reach a certain point where, you know, someone, as you're going on the climb, like where someone going, this is stupid, this is unrealistic or whatever, where you're just like, it starts to feel like, it goes from like, something that makes you nervous and keeps you up at night to like, you don't even really care anymore because you've just heard it so 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

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  makes it easier for you, but.

• 2:33:37Speaker 02

  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. And so that's where it helps that someone's already paved the path.

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I mean, if you can get a mentor.

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  Here's the real question. So two thousand nine, content creators, there's fucking very few of them, right? What is, what are we missing? Like, what is, what is going to be a job that no one sees coming? That's going to be like a content creator or YouTube creator ten, fifteen years from now, you know?

• 2:34:12Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, I mean, it would have to be something with AI that you couldn't even see now.

• 2:34:16Speaker 02

  So what could it even be? Like, what would it be that people are missing that other people are gonna?

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  Hmm, it's changing so quick, like, my brain can't even comprehend it.

• 2:34:26Speaker 02

  Like, 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.

• 2:34:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:35Speaker 02

  I mean, and not even for a living, like, most of them don't even get paid very much, but a lot of them have OnlyFans pages. Something, some crazy number, it's like ten percent of girls, eighteen to whatever, have OnlyFans.

• 2:34:47Speaker 03

  Is that in the US?

• 2:34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:34:49Speaker 02

  It's a nutty number.

• 2:34:50Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:35:02Speaker 03

  That can't be real, that's.

• 2:35:03Speaker 02

  I think it's like a hundred and fifty million.

• 2:35:05Speaker 03

  Holy crap.

• 2:35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's crazy. I think the numbers are crazy high.

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I mean, where my head's going, if we're trying to predict the future, maybe it would be like AI filmmakers or like something like that, but I don't even know.

• 2:35:18Speaker 02

  But I mean, what are you doing there? You're doing.

• 2:35:20Speaker 03

  Just recreating the shots.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  Proms and making thing, like, yeah.

• 2:35:23Speaker 03

  It's lame.

• 2:35:23Speaker 02

  But what are we missing? Because the YouTube thing, nobody saw that coming. The podcast thing, nobody saw that coming either.

• 2:35:30Speaker 03

  OnlyFans stuff's not new, though. It's just changed the money.

• 2:35:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:35:34Speaker 03

  Who got the money?

• 2:35:34Speaker 02

  From a normal ads to subscription. What also centralized it in the, like, where Playboy was always a thing where you had to get picked by Playboy. You know, now all you have to do is just take a photo of your box and.

• 2:35:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:35:47Speaker 02

  Put it.

• 2:35:48Speaker 03

  There's always the local.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:36:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. Time will tell.

• 2:36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, time will tell. But uh, it's ju- 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 wa- well, if it's on YouTube, then it's the number one wa- most watched show, period.

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's.

• 2:36:21Speaker 02

  In the known universe.

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  Well, right now.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  You're the most watched person in the known universe.

• 2:36:24Speaker 03

  I, I, I opened it up on the, the way, because I, I figured we'd talk about the size of the show. Uh, in the last ninety days on just, just our main channel, it's like around eight hundred and fifty million unique people have watched a, a video in the last quarter.

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  That's so crazy.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're, we're doing around four billion views on that.

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  Eight hundred and fifty million people is so crazy.

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  Unique too, because we do, we did around twelve billion views the last ninety days on just the main channel. And of those twelve billion views, like, whatever, eight percent of them are different humans, so it's like factually like eight hundred and fifty million. Like, when I say that, people are like, oh, that's eight hundred and fifty million views, so like, you know, eighty million. But no, it's twelve billion views, eight hundred and fifty million unique, so it's just like, it's crazy, man. And it's like, what's fascinating is you, like, ten years ago, like, even with cable or whatever, twenty years ago, eight hundred and fifty million people didn't use the same platform, right?

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:37:12Speaker 03

  It's like, you wouldn't have even been able to reach that many people, even if you're 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, you know, now if you're gym nying something, you know, they'll eventually have YouTube or if you buy an Android phone, which most phones have their operating system, YouTube's there, so like, everyone just, as you use the internet, you end up on YouTube. And so that's why, you know, even though it's whatever theoretically three point two billion monthly active users, I would be shocked if they didn't hit four billion in a couple of years and keep growing. Like, it, it 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 is like, it's, it's like, uh, it's crazy. It's, it's, it's a really wild um, opportunity.

• 2:37:57Speaker 02

  And because it's a platform where anyone can upload, the, 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.

• 2:38:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  Our 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, or down to like, this is like the most, you know, largest fights in history and it like a ranking of like the ten, ten, you know, deadliest fights or, yeah, like, I would say like a third of my homepage is like just history videos.

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  What does it say here? Uh, YouTube uploads, uh, users upload roughly five hundred hours of video every minute.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Okay, not to be that guy, that's, that's uh, very outdated, I believe, but maybe, or, or actually, no, no. Uh, you, sorry, so people watch a billion hours a day on YouTube, I believe. So this is upload, nevermind, this might be accurate.

• 2:39:08Speaker 02

  So five hundred hours of video every minute, three, thirty thousand hours per hour uploaded, seven hundred and twenty thousand hours are uploaded per day. Watching just one day's new uploads would take over eighty-two years.

• 2:39:23Speaker 03

  Day.

• 2:39:24Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:39:27Speaker 03

  YouTube, YouTube, well, this is uh, the twenty 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.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  That's nuts. But I mean, uh, the, but what's, what we're talking about, like, having a platform like that where anybody can upload anything.

• 2:39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  It just makes the variety so intense.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Speaker 02

  Like, there'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.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:40:05Speaker 02

  It's nuts.

• 2:40:05Speaker 03

  And that's the, 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.

• 2:40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  The same thing you would go into crippling debt to wa- like, to attend, is literally there for free, right? It's all there, all knowledge is available there. And if you, you know, it's, it's not easy, right? No one's laying out like, 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, you know, the career you want to do. Um, it's 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

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  like, I have three million subscribers on YouTube, I started like eighteen 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 of months ago. And 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, it's crazy, but I've had experiences like that countless times where like these, 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, you know?

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's, you, you're, you're coming from life with a, with a perspective of feast, not famine. And that's the, the good thing about it, that there's, there's enough opportunity for everybody.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  And I have a contrary in view on that, because a lot of creators do see other creators as competitors, but I've always been like. Like if someone's doing well, I don't get threatened. I'm like, yo, let's just film together, like collaborators, not competitors. Like, what, there's literally trillions of views going on. If you think this person getting an extra, even if they crush it billion views a year, has any impact on me, like, you're crazy. It has no impact. You know what I mean? There's, I mean, people are sometimes spending four or five hours, you know, a day consuming content, right? They watch their little 20 minute video, you know, that they upload every two weeks. No impact whatsoever. And so I think it, and 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, you know, some people end up making millions of dollars that I've helped mentored.

• 2:42:38Speaker 03

  And I'm just like, yeah, it's just fun, you know, because they always ask me like, why are you doing it? I'm like, why not? You know what I mean? What's, what's the downside?

• 2:42:43Speaker 02

  It's only positive. It's an abundance mindset and that I think the internet encourages that fortunately. Cause 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 8:00 PM on Wednesdays. You're like, fuck that guy.

• 2:43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, true. I'm not gonna give him my secrets.

• 2:43:03Speaker 02

  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 and you treat it like that and it actually just makes you grow.

• 2:43:15Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  It's awesome, man.

• 2:43:16Speaker 03

  But also if you share with people, they'll share with you. And there's no one who will, at this point in my career, you know, be able to go tell me something that'll make me 10% better, but there are infinite amounts of people that can make me a better storyteller or better, you know, at like, you know, leader, better communicator, 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, but 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 upfront, but you know, and sometimes I've been too particular on things really far. Like it's all these little things that you just accumulate over being around different people with different expertise.

• 2:44:01Speaker 03

  And you just have to like, yeah, you just have to like, um, some people don't see the value in that kind of stuff, but there, you can learn anything or you can learn something from almost anyone. And I, 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, you know, 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, I feel like not many people take that approach either.

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  Fuck yeah, dude. I think, uh, your approach is very valuable for a lot of people to hear, very valuable for young people to hear. Cause 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.

• 2:44:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  You'd be like Jimmy.

• 2:44:53Speaker 03

  You could, probably not, statistically not, but could you be, could you be a person with a couple less zeros in all the numbers? Of course.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also just be enjoying your life because you're doing something you want, you're actually creating something.

• 2:45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:06Speaker 02

  And something you'd be proud of and something that people enjoy. And that makes you feel good, that people are enjoying your work.

• 2:45:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, 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 like working illegal child labor on cacao farms? I think last time I was on here, we talked that about how I sell chocolate.

• 2:45:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you know that there's over a million kids that work in illegal child labor on cacao farms?

• 2:45:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:29Speaker 02

  Where?

• 2:45:30Speaker 03

  Uh, in West Africa. So Kotevar in Ghana, which is where like majority of the world's cacao comes from. That's a, there's rampant child labor. You can ask perplexity, I'd love for you to pull up data so we could see it, that I'm not just making it up. And when, um, I think when I last came on here was right after I started a chocolate company and I had no idea like how bad it was. And 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 there's, it's like, really, I don't know if you're interested in it, but there's like a lot of stuff I'd love to share on that.

• 2:45:57Speaker 02

  No, that's very cool.

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, basically if, if it just ask perplexity, how many kids work in child labor in West Africa on cacao farms? Uh, and, uh, right here, uh, 1.5 to 1.8 million people or children.

• 2:46:10Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a, 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 child companies or execs, they're just like, yeah, it just kind of is what it is. It's how it works.

• 2:46:25Speaker 02

  And that's just how they get their chocolate, period.

• 2:46:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's not all the labor, it's around whatever, 46% of, of the labor, you know? So if you were to work with, uh, 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. So 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% of those farms will have child labor, some won't, some will. And so you're, you're buying at a cooperative level. And so when I went to all the biggest distributors and everyone, you know, that does all the sourcing for cacao, and I was like, so is there any way I can pay a premium and not have little kids work on my farms? And, uh, it literally didn't exist. And I was just so mind blown and it, it really was frustrating because there, it just like, it's not even, did it not exist?

• 2:47:10Speaker 03

  Like no one really seemed to like even think it needed to exist. I was like, you guys, like, these are kids, like you, you have no issue making billions of dollars in profit on little kids working on the farms. It was like a, a very weird thing, so.

• 2:47:23Speaker 02

  That's crazy. So that's most chocolate?

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  Uh, well, majority of the world's cacao, as you saw, comes from West Africa. So, I mean.

• 2:47:29Speaker 02

  Holy shit, man.

• 2:47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. And so that's what I, I mean, I'm thousands of hours deep into this. And so, uh, I met a different company called Tony Chocoloni, who is like a reporter who, you know, started talking about this, uh, and.

• 2:47:41Speaker 02

  Wait a minute, his name is Chocoloni?

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

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

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  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 chocolate pays farmers so little that they just can't afford to not use children. So part of it is you, you, there's this thing called a living income reference price, which looks at like the cost to actually live there and you just guarantee your, so we guarantee a hundred percent of our farmers that will pay a living income reference price. And then we work with fair trade, which, uh, the cooperatives I was explaining to you, sometimes they're not democratically elected, right? So you can pay more money, but if the cooperative is like someone's skimming off money or taking it, it doesn't flow through to the farmer. 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.

• 2:49:07Speaker 03

  And we make sure through fair trade that they're democratically elected cooperatives. So the farmers actually get the money. We 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, uh, in this five, uh, village case study that we did, there's around 10,000 people living in there. And, um, about seven months ago, there's 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. Fair trade came in, come in, started paying the premium. And now seven months later, uh, we, we just got the initial results after we did our, our check-ins and, 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.

• 2:49:51Speaker 03

  So like some of these, we literally built a school so they could go to school. Cause the goal isn't just to get the kids out of child labor, it's also to get them in 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, you don't know anything else, right? And so we just did our, our recent wave of check-ins where we knocked on all the doors, checked school attendance and everything. And so seven months ago was 550 kids ish roughly in illegal child labor. What do you think it was now, basically six, seven months later?

• 2:50:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. How many?

• 2:50:20Speaker 03

  We, we were able to get a 90% reduction and get it to where there's only, uh, it's like around 50 still on child labor with our first check-in. And now we, we constitute, uh, a kid remediate 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, you know, there might've 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 like, it's possible to reduce the child labor in, in these areas, like dramatically, right? Like if you were to apply the things we did there, but macroly across the whole country, I mean, you're talking, you could get swarms of hundreds of thousands of kids out of illegal child labor. And so my, the big way I've been doing or been on is like, step one is have to prove it's possible. So then we can start, um, you know, I, like most people like you, they, they just have

• 2:51:05Speaker 03

  no idea that there's this much rampant child labor in chocolate.

• 2:51:07Speaker 02

  I had no idea until you brought it up.

• 2:51:09Speaker 03

  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 cacao is going to 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.

• 2:51:31Speaker 02

  And no one's put in the effort that you're doing, when you just said that.

• 2:51:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so.

• 2:51:35Speaker 02

  That's amazing, man.

• 2:51:36Speaker 03

  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. And I just want to educate people on it, that it's fucking crazy when you're buying chocolate. And, uh, B, I'm, 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. Like with that village, you know, right now, you know, it went, it was a 90% reduction. It went from over 500 kids in legal 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 legal child labor. And then eventually, because, you know, I have over a billion followers across all my

• 2:52:20Speaker 03

  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. They don't have to use child labor. And then, you know, 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, you know.

• 2:52:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think what's really important is getting people to understand that that's happening.

• 2:52:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:52:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:52:47Speaker 03

  I know.

• 2:52:47Speaker 02

  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, you know?

• 2:52:55Speaker 03

  And technically, I can never, like, peaceables, I can't say it's child labor free because, you know, it's not like I have security cameras on the farm. My kid could just walk on it and then, you know, well, he lied, right? So I'll never be able to say that. 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 a, 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 and illegal child labor. And because my microphone's 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

• 2:53:38Speaker 03

  and putting people that, you know, 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 like in depth, exactly how they could do it. So then hopefully they just come around to, you know, give them the avenue to go, oh, we just didn't know. This is cool, cool, we'll start doing it. I mean, because technically there, there isn't really, like, all these chocolate companies are so old. Like technically, the people who built and grew it, like the founders, they're dead, right? This is third, fourth generation people. Like, 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. And it's a problem they don't know how to solve.

• 2:54:14Speaker 02

  Fuck them, they know.

• 2:54:15Speaker 03

  I mean, you know.

• 2:54:16Speaker 02

  They know, they have to know.

• 2:54:18Speaker 03

  I'm trying to be cooperative because in a perfect world, if we could get them all to switch, I mean, I don't.

• 2:54:21Speaker 02

  Well, maybe force their hand. I mean, maybe, maybe just making people aware of it will help force their hand.

• 2:54:26Speaker 03

  If I was in 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 the 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 five, 10 years. Like, who else, it's been, like, look at, how many kids are in illegal child labor in West Africa on cacao farms? Okay, we're back. Big Chocolate sent in an attack.

• 2:54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've had this issue.

• 2:54:49Speaker 03

  You're good.

• 2:54:50Speaker 02

  But listen, man, it's just another example of the, you're an awesome guy. And 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, this is another example of why you're great.

• 2:55:02Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:55:16Speaker 02

  I have heard that.

• 2:55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's, and so a lot of what we've been doing is working with, is like, working with nonprofits and setting up essentially like, you know, so many stores and restaurants, just throw away perfectly good food. Or 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 just setting up like many, there's a 501(c) nonprofit called Sharing Excess who crushes at this. And we've been funding and building like these small logistics hubs, like one in New York. You know, and we've been through them and then also our food banks. We've been able to distribute over 40 million meals to people in need across America. And instead of like buying food and taking it and storing it and distributing it, just taking food that would have been thrown away, but is perfectly fine and perfectly healthy,

• 2:55:59Speaker 03

  and just, you know, figuring out how in a couple of days to just get it to food drives or people in need. And 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 feed so many people in need and save us so much money. You know, and 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.

• 2:56:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:56:53Speaker 02

  I think there's so many people that are only concentrating on what's going to make them money and.

• 2:56:58Speaker 03

  Of course, yeah.

• 2:56:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's very rare that someone like you thinks about greater good and actually puts a lot of effort.

• 2:57:07Speaker 03

  But in this case, it doesn't even, that one doesn't even cost you money. We're just talking about, instead of putting it in a dumpster, put it in a truck.

• 2:57:12Speaker 02

  But the effort to.

• 2:57:14Speaker 03

  Well, maybe one of you, if you're a Walmart or, I don't even know, but some random store owner listening to this, just consider it, don't throw the food away.

• 2:57:20Speaker 02

  You're an awesome guy, Jimmy. Thank you, thank you for being here, man. It was really fun, I really appreciate it.

• 2:57:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57:25Speaker 02

  Congratulations and everything.

• 2:57:26Speaker 03

  And we got to make this zombie show.

• 2:57:27Speaker 02

  We'll do it.

• 2:57:28Speaker 03

  We're doing it.

• 2:57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we should do it.

• 2:57:29Speaker 03

  I'll handle all the work and stuff, but you got to co-produce it.

• 2:57:31Speaker 02

  I'll think about it some more too.

• 2:57:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57:32Speaker 02

  I'm going to, I'm going to bounce this around because I got excited.

• 2:57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57:36Speaker 02

  I think there's something to it.

• 2:57:37Speaker 03

  Next time, next time you see me and Joe together, it's going to be fighting off some zombies.

• 2:57:40Speaker 02

  All right, sounds good. Thank you.

• 2:57:42Speaker 03

  It was awesome, thanks for having me.

• 2:57:43Speaker 02

  Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody.