Transcript of #2527 - MrBeast New

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

Uh, well, I mean, yeah, seeing how we give away millions of dollars, it's, uh, 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.

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

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.

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

Well, uh. Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends, right? Whether it's the YouTube channel where we're, you know, doing, 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. They're like, I don't know if I want to lose my job for a 1% chance of winning $250K.

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

So the newest season we just shot, we grabbed one person from every country on earth. So it was around 200. Wow. 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 like someone in South America and they play and think so differently because they have such different upbringings. So it was really cool.

Did you have to, I mean, you must have had to thoroughly vet these people, right? Make sure they're not insane. Make sure you don't have a serial killer.

We do the psych and background checks, of course. No.

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

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

So some of them have to have some shitty infrastructure.

Oh, I mean, I think one of them has literally 40,000 people living in it. Like, it was, what is it, not the, something sea islands, not the Cayman Islands, but some island country, and yeah, I was like, Wow, like my town, which has 100,000 people, is 2.5 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. Wow.

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

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

Someone like Elon or something like that could buy it.

Not Elon. There's probably thousands of people in America that could. I mean, I feel bad people from that country listening that us say Starbuck.

Well, we didn't say the country.

Okay, true, true.

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

Exactly. It's all yours.

They should know what they are. Yeah. They're a country of 40,000 people. That's just what it is. Nothing wrong with that. But 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?

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 2 or 3 from each country and then we let people from those countries vote on who should compete. Oh, smart. So it wasn't even one, I had to get multiple from each, so I think I ended up spending over $1 million just on 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.

Right, that's actually very smart.

Exactly.

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

Yeah. I just don't sleep much during those 'cause 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. Season 1, 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 Season 1, we gave away $22 million just in one season. Wow. Great. 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—

Look at that, that's wild. All those people, that's so crazy. That set's amazing.

Yep, and then we build a city. And so also—

Holy shit.

My whole thesis behind it with this is, you know, 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 1, 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. Whoa. And, and the most—

that room is so big.

Yeah, it's, it's bigger than a football field. And so there's 1,000 contestants. We have to have an A cam on all of 'em. So there's like a, a pole on on each of their platforms on them. Plus there's hundreds of cameras in the roof and blah, blah. I think there's over 1,200 here, which outside of this, the most ever used for production was 400. So like I literally had to, 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 3 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 people's mouths, they can just do whatever they want.

So do you have someone who actually has to go back and watch all that footage and edit it?

Yeah.

And then put it all out as a show?

Yeah, exactly, well this is why—

How many people do you have doing your editing?

That season, over 150 editors worked on it, yeah.

Holy shit.

It's crazy. And that's obviously why people don't do it because 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 'cause it's 27 miles of camera cables. Broke the world record for largest control room. 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.

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Yep.

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 gonna spend X amount of money to make it this much better, but if we just take it down a couple notches, we save 80%. Yeah. 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, which is very risky, man, because— not just very risky, 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— to make that set must have been bananas. That is a fucking enormous building. Did you have to build the building?

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 1,000 trapdoors because every single one of those, the trapdoors open when they get eliminated. So That set alone was like $15 million. I mean, it was crazy.

Oh my God.

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

Oh, I'm sure.

Yeah, like there, it was like pretty wild.

Every time I— Can you say where you film it or you keep it under wraps?

That one was Toronto, Canada. Oh, okay, cool. And every time I'd walk around on set, people were loving it because even though we filmed for 30 days, there's months leading up to it and months after.

Sure.

It gives people like, consistent work for 6 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, uh, 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 just shockingly go on with that approach, you just kind of make a lot of money. 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, 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, say no to something, 'cause almost all the time, like we filmed in the pyramids and I spent 100 hours living in the pyramids of Egypt. It was fucking awesome. And you know, for years everyone's like, they're not gonna let you, you know, live in the pyramids for a couple days. Like, that's crazy. And I'm like, well, 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 after years 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. 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 100 hours. I went all the way up to the top of the middle pyramid. We went underneath it.

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 go, look, it is. Sometimes it's, it's just time and money, you know? And is it worth the effort?

The pyramid one must have been nuts.

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

Is that your first time ever being there?

Yeah, actually it was. And so that made it even more special 'cause I was like learning things at the same time as I was just walking around. And I'm gonna be honest, it was like a year and a half ago and it's like all a little fuzzy 'cause 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— like a couple hundred feet underneath the pyramid.

Mm, I don't know. Is that Osiris?

Yes, yes, Osiris. Yeah, and then it was like flooded and swimming around under there. It was pretty wild. Yeah. Wow. I feel like you should do something like that.

100%. I need to go there. I've been talking about going there for years. I just— to me, it's just a time thing. My time is— I've so many different jobs. It's not like one all-consuming job like you have. Yeah, me, it's like commentary for the UFC, doing stand-up comedy, doing the podcast, and all I'm also married with children. So like I have a lot of responsibilities. So it's tough to just jet off for a month. Really, ideally, if you're gonna go to Egypt, I feel like you should go for like 10 days.

Yeah.

I feel like at least 10 days.

Do you think the, yeah, I feel like they maybe honestly realistic, like 5 days you could do it. And like, I'm curious though, if they'd let you just like do a video where you walk around and go everywhere because I wonder. Yeah.

I've talked a lot of shit.

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

Well, I never said anything bad about it.

Yeah.

About it. I just think that the people that run it have a very 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 a lot of gatekeeping in terms of, you know, what the official narrative is. Yeah, it's like how it was all made and who made it and what it's all about. That's why they're really hesitant to accept any alternative perspectives because they have a timeline and they attribute all this construction. And there's a lot of evidence that that timeline doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

Did you check out the Sphinx?

Yeah. And you can, you know, you can go underneath it and go in that little room. Yeah.

Did you do that? Yeah.

Which, that's the stuff I feel like it would mean even more if you did. You've talked to Dr. Zahi, right? Yeah. Did you have him on the show?

Yeah, yeah, I had him on the show.

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

Yeah, I'd rather go with somebody else.

I didn't listen to that episode.

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

Graham Hancock?

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

Yeah, you and Graham Hancock walking around. Oh boy, there'd be some crazy stuff. Said.

Yeah, well, whatever happened in that part of the world during that time frame is pretty spectacular, and it's kind of amazing that no one has ever achieved anything even remotely similar to it since. Yeah, and it's at least 4,500 years old, and that's just a guess though. They really don't know. Yeah, you know, it's, it's crazy place. The fact that you got to film a show there is nuts.

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

It's a show.

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

I mean, whatever it is, people are watching it.

Yeah, I know. It's just funny to me. I haven't heard it called that in years. But yeah, that one was crazy. And I mean, one thing that I'm really proud of that we did for season 3 of Beast Games, which I like in hindsight, I'm not even sure how we— this one we pulled off. So I want to see your reaction to this. Okay. Basically the finale where we have the $5 million, we have the final contestants. We filmed it in the Roman Colosseum. Whoa. Yeah. We crowned the winner of season 3 with the $5 million cash prize in the middle of the Roman Colosseum. Played, played the first game there in over 1,000 years. Wow.

That's crazy.

I know. I'm so grateful. I like, we just filmed that too. So I'm like coming off the high and I just like, Like, it almost makes— like, gives me tears. Like, what we shot was so cool. We had, like, a live orchestra, like, the top ring of there too. So, like, as the game got dramatic, we would 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 Coliseum as we're, like, filming this show, and I'm like, like, this doesn't feel real. It was pretty wild.

It doesn't feel— 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. Yeah, you know, how many thousand years ago to that? What, when, what year were they doing the games in the Roman Colosseum?

I would guess 1900 years ago.

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

And imagine when they flooded and they'd have to shift the boats. Like, whoa, I know, crazy.

I know, 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 was to go to see people die. Yeah, they used to see people get hacked to death by swords, to see people get killed by lions. Like, what the fuck was—

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 noble people would sit at the bottom and the poor people 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.

Yeah.

And so just everything about it, like basketball games, right?

Who gets courtside tickets?

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

Yeah. Jack Nicholson, courtside tickets. Or Jay-Z. Yeah. Courtside tickets.

True.

Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing. I think in the Coliseum 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 ahold of some people.

Yeah. Well, I didn't hear about that, but when I was walking around, you know, they would have the, you know, 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?

Right.

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

How close is it?

Uh, it was like, whatever, 4 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.

I wonder how long it took to build that place, because when you're walking around like, this is an epic piece of real estate. Like, you guys built like an insane structure, and they did it, you know, almost 2,000 years ago or whatever it was.

Yeah.

So it took 8 years to build.

Wow.

From AD 72 to AD 80.

Yeah.

Wow. Construction started under, uh, Vespasian between AD 70 and 72. It was completed and inaugurated under Emperor Titus around AD 79 to 80. So the main build phase lasted roughly 6 to 8 years. The cup is down to its final matches. One trophy, one champion. DraftKings has you covered for every single one. The DraftKings app is now available in all 50 states and includes all markets, bringing the game straight to your fingertips wherever you are. From Florida to Texas to California, you're in on the excitement at the speed of sports. No matter where you're watching, you're always connected and in the game with one app. New DraftKings customers sign up with code ROGAN, spend $5 to get $200 in rewards within 21 days. That's code ROGAN in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. Bet with DK Sportsbook.

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Terms at dkng.com. 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 2,000 years from now, would that still be there? Yeah. Like the Roman Colosseum is like relatively still intact. It's pretty crazy.

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 1,000 years. All the glass, all the everything will just get absorbed back into the earth. Dang. 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, uh, 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. Yeah, it's not that long. No, it's like a few hundred years and there's nothing left.

Wow. Yeah, actually seems like a good show.

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. Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

Like 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.

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 an 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, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 $1 million 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 brain churning.

It's not a bad idea, like an I Am Legend type deal.

Yeah, but real, unscripted? Exactly.

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

I love where your brain goes.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

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

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

Well, the other problem is what happens if What 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?

Yeah, well, we would tell them. I would have to say this is a zombie simulation, 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 foam thing, and it's lame, which is why we've never gotten around to it. But if there ever was a way, I do think that would be cool to recreate an actual zombie apocalypse and let someone try to live in it for a week. 'Cause it'd just be cool, 'cause everyone's exposure to this is through scripted shows. Right. 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's 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.

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

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? Because imagine someone with a Nerf sword hitting a zombie. Oh, now it's like, okay, this is fucking lame. Yeah.

Uh, maybe a paintball type deal.

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

Or, yeah, unless the zombie masks.

Mm.

Where, what was the protection?

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

Or you just have, instead of like a regular paintball mask, have something that's just a hard structure that is like the shape of your face. Exactly, and then you paint over top of it. So you make it form fits 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.

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

That actually would work, there you go.

Yes, exactly that, yeah. That's perfect.

Perfect. That's an airsoft mask.

That, that, that'd be pretty cool.

I mean, oh dude, that's actually dope. Look at those masks, the half-face zombie ones. Yeah, that's fucking dope. Like, you could— that would be terrifying coming at you in the middle of the night.

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

Well, where my head goes, because the videos are so big, right? This is probably a $5, $10 million project, probably would build this abandoned city, do I'm the Last Man on the Planet, and it's like me there for some time. And then afterwards, like a couple months, like film then right afterwards, film a video where I give someone $1 million, they live there for 10 days, but they have to fend off zombies with their friends. So then we can reuse the set location. Because if I'm going to completely set deck up basically a whole city, oh my gosh, that's going to be a monster. But yeah, if I did both those back to back, that'd actually be pretty gnarly and worth the effort.

I think I like the idea now. Yeah, now that I see those masks and I think about like paintball or something along those lines.

What I'm picturing too is like ideally we can find a city with a skyscraper because 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 3 friends and you know, then they hear noise and zombies and stuff. Like those shots would be so beautiful. Like that, 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, well, if you wanted no one around, it's gonna be hard because you're gonna have to do it in an abandoned place. Exactly. And you're not gonna get an abandoned skyscraper.

Maybe.

So unless you're in Detroit.

Well, we also, it doesn't have to be in the US. We did a video, 7 Days in an Abandoned City, where there's like someplace 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 really?

Yeah.

And there's no one in it now?

No, no one in it. But like tourists go there. But they let us close it off for a week. It was pretty crazy.

Well, that's the place then.

Yeah, I just wonder if they'll, you know, it's a little bit of history there, so I doubt they'll let me go in and like set deck everything like crazy, but—

and also paintball everything.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, with those masks, we could do airsoft, which would be maybe even easier. Well, actually, no, the problem with airsoft then is the truss system. You don't know if they got hit, so paintball is probably more effective.

Yeah, you need paintball. Yeah, you need paintball, and it needs to look good when it splatters against them.

Just, you know, if someone on my team is watching this, just clip the last 10 minutes of this and send it to the creative team. I got you guys. I believe in you.

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

Um, 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, uh, laser tag where you could just shoot and then it just like lights up.

So What about shotguns with beanbags? You know, because they use those for people to like take out like when the non-lethal loads, you know, they have like beanbags that they shoot out of a shotgun.

The question I would need is like if I shot you with it like 3 feet away, would you still be fine? I guess you could probably adjust the pressure and stuff where it's not.

Not really. Okay, well, I mean, you could, but you couldn't vary it.

See, this isn't Fear Factor. This is MrBeast.

I understand, but it's a gray line.

You know, it's so funny. I need to give you a blunt and let you just help me cook on this video. I can see there's something interesting there.

There's something there. You just have to figure out an exciting way to kill them where it doesn't actually hurt the stunt people or whoever's wearing the masks, whoever pretends to be a zombie. It would have to be something. I was thinking light them on fire, but that's—

Could you pull up the 7 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.

Have you seen the show From?

From? I don't think so. No.

It's great. Great show. But it's about these two people.

Wait, wait, look at that shot. Pause it right there. Like, like, our, 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.

Oh my God, this is perfect.

Yeah. And then like, yeah, if you pause it there, those are all the buildings in the city.

I mean, oh dude, this is the spot. Listen, the show starts at sundown every night.

Okay.

As soon as the sun goes down, that's when the games begin. 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 away. 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—

Oh, really?

Yeah, give them time to like figure out stuff to do to keep the zombies away, and a limited amount of materials that they can work with, and just let these people get creative in their ingenuity. But then you keep it 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 PM, 8 PM, 9 PM, and then 3 in the morning, shit starts happening.

30 zombies come in and they gotta shoot 'em all with paintballs.

And they're creeping in. Like, they're creeping in, bro.

You're getting me excited. I mean, it would be so fucking cool to like let them build a structure or something, and then like in I Am Legend where he has to point the lights because they hate lights, but like at nighttime, like they'll have to— we can, uh, 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 at 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 5 hidden around the city. So that day while they're walking around, they're like on edge, and the tension throughout the day would be phenomenal. Yeah, there's so many cool ways to do it.

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

I'm excited. We need to stop talking about this because I'm gonna leave and go film it right now. And then I'm fighting the urge to go call my team.

This is You also, with the zombies, they can come out in the daytime. They just— these people don't know because they never do it.

True. Like the first 5 days, it's only at night.

Yeah.

And then day 6.

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

Oh my god. We used before as a gel blaster. These are— it's almost like airsoft, but it doesn't hurt as bad. Oh, it shoots water? And these vests that they have set up are sensors, so you can almost like what you're saying. It's like VR laser tag.

So it lights up when you hit it.

Yeah, and there's like a whole talking system that says like you have this many shots left, you have this much energy left. Can we see a video? Yeah, wait, is this a video? We did this at night at somebody's house.

Oh, you did?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When did you do this?

A couple months ago.

Oh, nice. I don't—

oh shit. Ah, wait, actually, now that you've got music— but you pointed out, I have seen like Nerf gel blasters. I actually never thought of that. So that's— I mean, you could just redo the set, the suits, so that makes sense. Yeah, and then reskin the guns because those look a little lame. But yeah, that would be It's kind of lame.

Yeah, I kind of like shotguns with beanbags.

I think I—

let's fuck with both.

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.

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

Exactly.

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

I mean, well, the thing too is like, you know, one way, one thing that would help is like if the zombies were ex-Navy SEALs or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it's a little different than if they were 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 well, you know, they wouldn't care.

But also it could, well, it could be like a zombie army, like an army some army somewhere got taken over and turned into zombies. Yeah, those are the people you're fighting against. So you could put them with like plate carriers on and, you know, yeah, you could armor them up a little bit so they could take some hits, have some lore behind it. Yeah, well, you could— it would make sense too.

I'm sold. I just got to find an abandoned city.

Give them glowing eyes. That's the only way you know that they're dead.

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

Dude, it would be fucking terrifying. Imagine just 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 1 hour of battery life. And so you have to like judiciously use that flashlight throughout the evening.

To shine it around.

Shut it off, you know, so you give like a little extra tension. The flashlight's gonna die because you only have 1 hour of flashlight battery. Yeah, and then you see these red eyes, like you give them like a slightly glowing red eye. Yeah, and that's how you can find the zombies.

That would be cool.

Yeah, and you just look out into the woods.

Yeah, I can see the fucking eyes, man. You see the eyes. That would be crazy. Yeah, and the other thing too would be, because I go to like, how do we execute it? We could do it too where like there's like a Every day, like, a certain period, we pull off all the dead zombies, which are humans, and we just swap them with, like, uh, I can have recreated versions of them there. So there's, like, actual zombie bodies, like, piling up.

Right.

So as the video progresses, they're, like, literally stepping over, like, mannequins that are set identically how the people were. So when they die, and then they're just, like, literally stepping on zombies as they go building to building. That'd be crazy.

That would be crazy.

You know, and actually, because if I put a million—

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

Or no, don't. Screw it. You know, let that be the fun part. But then 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 1 it was 10. Day 2 is 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.

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 won at the end, yeah, now the final game is you're competing against the zombies. The zombies who can't win because they're already dead, but they know you're— make you lose.

Yeah, and they know you're for it. You know what would actually be even crazier is if instead of— well, you know, maybe we have Navy SEALs as the zombies, but also what if the contestants are like ex-Navy SEALs too? So they have like real strategy and stuff like that. That would be cool.

Just get the most badass people that you can get for this zombie thing, like survivalists, martial artists. Yeah, yeah, that would be crazy, dude.

Actually, that's not bad. Like, uh, you know, a UFC champion, uh, Navy SEAL, uh, like taekwondo, blah blah blah. And it's like, all right, what happens if you put 6 experts in different fields together and simulate a real zombie apocalypse.

Right.

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. Yeah. And if you survive it all, you split a million dollars.

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

Exactly.

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

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

But it has to, 'cause it's— If you're hitting them even with the gel soft, look kind of cool, but it's like pew pew pew. Exactly. Pew pew pew. No, it's got to be ba-bang ba-bang.

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 we'd have to reskin the guns to look like real guns.

And it would have to be some— it doesn't have to look like real guns because it could look be a gun from the future, you know, because that's lame.

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

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah. So 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, Taran Tactical ones that has actually a magazine, you can hold like 15 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 6. I think maybe 6. Something like that is good too. You have a limited amount of bullets and reloading is hard. We just got to find out, like, maybe if it was like 20-gauge, maybe it was like 20-gauge shotgun, like birdshot with, with a beanbag. Maybe that wouldn't fuck people up, but it would make a big bang. Yeah. And you'd be hitting them, and if you could find a way to light up wherever they got hit, like if you could put them in some sort of a suit where when they get hit, there's like gel packs.

There's no way you can shoot shotguns at people. Yeah. There's just not possible. Not a real one. You're so wrong. But here, he's living in his utopia. I haven't seen his eyes light up like this in years. Let him talk about the stunkies of like a gun at a person going like this.

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

I'm gonna have someone point a real shotgun at someone else, but yeah, you will.

Trust me, we're gonna work this out.

You wanna help co-direct?

I'm gonna help.

Yeah, you'll accidentally see in like the background of one shot Joe. Just like this. He's like, yeah. It's like the Navy SEALs are fighting off the zombie apocalypse.

I'm gonna be one zombie one night. Yeah, he's like, sneak in.

Everyone's like, who's that bald guy over there? That's just like, holy fuck, yeah. Shotgun damage on a zombie, you have to blow their head off, right? How would you? Oh God. Don't let me get him started. He's gonna be talking about hit damage for 20 minutes.

Well, it depends on what kind of zombie. Like Walking Dead zombies are so stupid, you could stab in the head with a pencil and they die. Remember, it was just going through the head because they would shoot them with those crossbows. And like, 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. Got what those things are using is target points. Like, that That dude in The Walking Dead would drive me nuts because he would shoot him in the head and it would just stick in their head and then they'd be dead.

It's so funny because—

Get the fuck out of here.

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

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.

Yeah, totally. One arrow.

The fuck is— this is nonsense.

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

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

Really?

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

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

Maybe, but most likely not. I mean, if it went through your heart, yeah, you'd be dead. But if it just goes through like this side of your lungs and pokes out your back, you'll live. Wow. Yeah.

Would you want to live?

You would be in pain. It would suck. Yeah, it would certainly suck, but it's not like getting hit with a broadhead. My point is— I don't remember my point, but if I had a point, it would be zombie shows. There's gotta be a level of shotgun that's the What is the lowest powered shotgun available? It's not a— I know 20-gauge is light. I've used those before for like shooting clay pigeons, and I've used 12-gauges. You don't want to get hit with a 12-gauge, even if it's a beanbag. 410 bore? Uh.

Smallest gauge? Equivalent to a 67-gauge shotgun?

Oh, here we go. Now we're talking. That's a bitch-ass round. Oh God, let's see what that looks like.

You're so—

shoot, uh, let's, let's see what a 410-gauge shotgun or 67-gauge shotgun looks like when they shoot a bullshit gun.

It looks like it's gonna still hurt.

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

Okay, can I test it on you?

Yeah, yeah, just give me a plate carrier. And if you're gonna use a beanbag, yeah, because that's what I'm thinking. Like, if you have a chest plate You know, so a plate carrier is what they mean.

Yes.

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, because it's not a— 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 that's gonna like, yeah, shoot out the shotgun and blast you. But I don't— they're not lethal. Um, let me see what it looks like.

I don't know which one.

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.

That's not exactly— that's a revolver shot.

Yeah, that's dope. I've never seen one of those before. Much power, it says. Interesting.

Yeah, the title is Smallest but Deadliest Shotgun.

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

Yeah, this This isn't— I did ask for lowest powered, but it's— that's not what people want to click on videos. I know, I feel like most people who buy shotguns are looking for shotguns that don't—

well, how about this? Look up 67-gauge shotgun.

I had done that here.

And does it show you a video of that? Okay, let's see what it says. Let me see what it looks like when it's shooting.

This says it's 12-gauge.

Oh, that's a big— yeah, that's—

I'm trying to— yeah, so they're like modified 12- That's a lot. I just don't get what the point— the shotgun isn't gonna kill a zombie.

Yeah, but it could in this game, Jamie.

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

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

Yes.

So that— okay, let me see. Can you give me some volume? Let me hear this. Put back that up a little bit. Yeah, that's what we need. We need that kind of shotgun with like a beanbag round or rock salt.

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

Yeah, something where it makes an impact, there's a sound like a gun going off, but you can't really kill anybody with it. Yeah, this is totally possible, dude. You'd have to have like very strict safety protocols on the set though, because one of the things When I was in— when I first moved to LA in like 1994, there was a guy that a friend of mine actually knew who was an actor who was on a set who took a gun that had a blank in it and thought it'd be funny to just put the thing to his head and pull the trigger. 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.

Oh my gosh.

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

I mean, or like the Alec Baldwin situation.

Yeah, that was actually probably negligence because it seems like, it seems like there was an error where they were using like real rounds and then they would take the same guns that would use like real rounds on a range and then take the same guns and bring them to set and they didn't clear everything. So I don't know who's responsible for that. I don't know what ultimately came out of that, but 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 know how you're in a movie? Which is why I'm like so hesitant to this whole shotgun thing. Welcome back to reality, Joe. 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. Yeah. And I think that came out of the movie The Crow, because Bruce Lee's son died because there was something that was in the gun itself. It wasn't even a bullet that killed him. It was like there was a particle or something that hit him from the blank.

When 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.

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

And the recoil and stuff. Yeah. So it's more real.

Like a really light shotgun.

And I guess even if you know it's a blank, like having a gun pointed at you, As an actor, it makes you, you know, feel more in the situation too, probably.

Well, just rock salt. If you have a really light shotgun, even if it's a 20-gauge, with rock salt, it would suck, it would sting, 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. Yeah, and you could, you know, if you get it—

we did something similar when we recreated Squid Games. We put like squibs on them when they got eliminated. Yeah, 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, so you could do that. So if you do that, actually you could have blanks and maybe a laser sight.

Exactly, that's where we went with the Hunger Games stuff is laser tag., and then it would just trigger squibs if you pointed at them. And then maybe in 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 just know if you got hit if your suit lit up.

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

To make—

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

Okay, right?

Yeah, that wouldn't be hard to do because if you have lasers, you have guns that shoot lasers. That's what laser tag is. That's a pretty simple mechanism. All you 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. 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 the chest.

The other thing we have to figure out is where is this going, because if it's going on my YouTube channel, we don't usually show gore. So we might have to hit up Amazon. Yeah, where we used to put Fear Factor and stuff, because that definitely seems like a more It's going from like, we're usually family-friendly, to now this is very rated R. But it is family-friendly because you're killing zombies. Yeah, well, we— yeah, you, you know if something's family-friendly or not if you say eliminated instead of killing. So yeah, if you're eliminating zombies, that's family-friendly. If you're killing zombies, no, no, that's rated R.

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

There you go. See, now we're back.

See, they're already dead.

And like, you can tell if like a shows like for 18+ or like 13+ of like before they shoot the person or whatever, if it cuts away, right? And like there's all these little things. Not that we even—

Dude, this could be wild.

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

Oh my God. Amazon should do it. They need people over there anyway.

Yeah. Or I mean, really even Netflix, anyone really.

Yeah.

Like it's the biggest no-brainer in the history of ever. Like actually the fact that no one's recreated this is kind of absurd when you think about it. But it's also like, if traditional, you know, independent of like the shotgun stuff you're talking about, like traditional people with traditional worldviews did this, it'd be so stringent and structured and stuff like that. Whereas like, if we did it with like the Beast Games mindset, where it's just like, there's cameras everywhere, they can truly do whatever the hell they want, and it's not like this like guarded thing, and it's an actual abandoned city, oh my gosh, it would go crazy.

Now we need a task. We need a goal.

The goal would be survival, right?

But maybe survival while you're trying to accomplish something.

Okay, well then this is like a mechanism that usually would work well, is the, the task 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 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. 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, but 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— yeah, really cool.

Yeah, they would run training routes.

Exactly.

You know, it's really interesting. We'd have to figure out how the zombies get them. 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.

Exactly right.

So like, yep, would have to have rules as to what 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—

right, like 28 Days Later zombies, all they have to do is like scratch you.

Yeah. Or breathe in front of you. Yeah, exactly. But in this If they touch you, that way it's not like the Navy SEAL, like, pushing and flipping them off. Like, because if you were 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— because 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.

Dude, this could be mad. Yeah, this could be a mad—

to set the stage, it's like 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, 100 buildings. And then we 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. 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 a helicopter will drop another million dollars on their prize pool. So then it's like, so episode 1, 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 lower down a million dollars, it's massive, in ones, right? And then it unhooked, and now they have $2 million there. Like, good luck guys! And if there's 6 of them, then it's like you're now, if you survive, are all winning over $300,000. And then, you know, but if you grow the prize pool to $6 million without getting eliminated, you're all millionaires in 9 days. Bro, that would be crazy.

Wow.

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

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

Yeah.

Like, how do they—

And the other thing too, to make it fun, is if a zombie eliminates one of you, they get 1/6 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, And then you're like, congrats, now you're a millionaire if it's later on. So then, like, as it goes on, things are gonna get really tense on both sides, and it'll be really cool.

Yeah, dude.

'Cause that's how you take it where people don't wanna be zombies to now they're like excited to be zombies. They're like, ooh, I actually sneak up behind them and I get a million bucks.

People are gonna wanna be zombies anyway.

True, 'cause it's gonna look sick.

It's gonna be sick.

Honestly, I would wanna be a zombie. Just like, imagine walking in a horde and role-playing being a zombie. That'd actually be a pretty cool afternoon.

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

Oh my gosh.

Well, 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.

Yeah.

Whether they can— you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because like, we have to decide, are these 28 Days Later zombies that run at you?

Yeah.

Or these like Walking Dead zombies that are like kind of like—

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 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 would have to constrict them in a way where like if we didn't want 'em to move past a certain speed, we'd probably have to figure out some way to put like a chain around their feet or something that physically wouldn't allow them to do it.

Right.

Or like if you have 300 zombies going, right, you can't redo it, right? Right. Like if one of those zombies goes rogue and, and scrap, 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 an unscripted world. Yeah. So we'd have to, to physically make it where they couldn't do things they're not supposed to do in a perfect world. Or when, if you have 300 people, if 2% go rogue, that's still 6 zombies going rogue, which is brutal.

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You got to give them stuff to do during the day so that they're fully occupied, so they can't sleep. Okay, it's really important. Like, the more they do during the day, it optimizes the amount of money they can win. Like, as they complete tasks, if they stay alive, they have a higher threshold, whereas someone just fucking sleeps all day game.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

You know what I'm saying?

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

You want that though. You want people to bitch out. You want a few people to quit because that— there's always going to be people that won't quit.

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

No, listen, you can't read those articles. Fuck those people. Yeah, you just got to make an awesome show. You know what the awesome show is? You keep these motherfuckers awake and you make it so that they can choose to sleep if they want. Yeah, but there are tasks to achieve, and if you can complete these tasks, you have the potential to make a lot of money. But if you don't complete the tasks, you can't make any money, even if you survive.

I'm sold. Amazon, Netflix, whoever wants it, let us know.

Like, right, you got to keep these motherfuckers awake so that nighttime is terrifying. Can you imagine seeing people sitting there with their shotgun?

Exactly.

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

We get a tight shot of their faces as they're asleep, and then one of the other guys would go, zombies! And you hear bang bang, and then they wake up and they grab their gun.

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

This is where—

Especially if they're tired.

I've done, uh, I mean, obviously you did them. Unscripted with Speed Paddler, 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.

Yeah, but you want blanks because you want the bang. You want the bang for the people, for the psychological effect, the fear. It's in the middle of the night, it's dark. You're making a bang go off, the flash of the bang going off. Yeah, and then maybe to avoid people being able to shoot each other, maybe at nighttime they're completely separated. Maybe at night—

now 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 want people to be able to tell what they're competing for and like their why.

And you usually—

but you don't want to have to say it, right? You don't want to have to say, oh, I'm competing for this money. 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 going to instantly understand the motivation and it's going to be, uh, like, I mean, it'll just be so crazy, the shots.

Maybe it's like a super advanced game of hide and seek at night where the people can't talk. They have to be very quiet because the zombies are, have like hyper hearing. You give the zombies like Walker game ears. You know what those things are? No, it's like, do you ever go to a gun range? Yeah, because you know you have those headphones, and then you can hear everything else way louder, but when guns go off, it kills volume above a certain amount of decibels. Yeah, so they can hear everything. So if you hear somebody whispering like that, the zombies like will be able to key in on it. Yeah, they'll know where the people are. And these people have to hide from the zombies at night.

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

Right, right.

They're gonna have elevators.

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.

We'd have to get it to them where the, the SEALs and stuff couldn't like lock doors or anything, right?

Because no locks, so basically no doors have locks. That's what makes the hide-and-go-seek so good. All the handles or all the doors are removed. Yeah, there's no locks.

So every, every night, maybe we would brainstorm it more, but it would— theoretically, they all have to hide in a different building or something. They couldn't be in the same building. Yeah, 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?

Yeah.

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 die to a zombie. This is good. And then we'd let them live videos to make sure there's no cheating.

There's something— this could be wild.

This could honestly— this is one of those things where I say this to my team quite a bit. It's either going to be like the worst show imaginable that people clown on, or it's going to be like the number one show ever, and there's no in between. Like, you don't do this like kind of all right where people are like, I like it. It's either like cringe, we failed, this sucks, or it's like, this is the greatest thing ever, why did this not exist before? Like The Walking Dead, or what's the HBO show called? The one with The Last of Us. Yeah, The Last of Us in real life. Like, how has no one done this? You know what I mean? Like, like actual true simulation. And like, if we execute it properly, I really could see it being 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.

As freaking zombies getting shot at.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Like one of those experts.

Can you search up MrBeast zombies? Uh, we have a video on our channel from like, I mean, God knows how long ago, 7 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 would react. And like the, it looks disgusting, the things they were able to do. It's pretty crazy.

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

Wait, uh, if you can find like a close-up of my face, or like— it was like crazy. We just brought in people to come in. Yeah, like, like that kind of stuff. Like, look at my face right there. Like, pause it. It's freaking wild, dude.

You could totally do something like that on the outside of one of those masks. Yeah, 100%.

Exactly.

100%.

Oh yeah, that was really all bad.

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

Exactly.

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

Joe, the problem is I want to go work on this now. You're kidding me? It's funny, I have this thing where, this might sound like crazy to some people, but when I, 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 it's like a good idea because it means I'm getting like, dude, this is a good idea. Yeah, I know. I can literally feel— or not anymore, but like a couple of minutes ago I could feel my heart beating because I was getting excited. And 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 going to talk about it. And if a lot of people are talking about, obviously a lot of people watch it.

Shit. 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 going to talk about this and freaking love it if we turn it in.

I can see it. I can see scenes. I can see darkness starting to settle in on the town, and I can see the people like trying to figure out where to hide and what to do.

And the eyes at night, that was genius too.

Yeah, dude, I could see the eyes.

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

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.

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

Yeah, it's too much time.

Exactly. I know. Just cancel some podcasts.

I like the idea of it though.

How about we— or never mind. 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.

Have you ever done sandbox VR?

Is that the one where it's like the— you just go in and there's random worlds you can walk around on?

Uh-huh. Yeah, it's a warehouse. You go in there and they have fans and stuff, so it 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. Okay, 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. There's guys in the ceiling. It's fucking awesome. Yeah, you would love it. But you might get some ideas if you do that because you mean we were co-producing.

Yeah, you're invested. You just spent 34 minutes on a whatever podcast like ripping on it.

Well, there's something to it, man. 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 parking structure, like setting up, getting ready, and the sun's coming down. And they're like, look, we got it. We have about 20 minutes of daylight left.

Yeah.

And you realize like, God, I'm so fucking tired.

Well, and 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 shot, because 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.

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. There's— and then you're getting fucking tired because you're not sleeping.

Actually, the escape room's a good, uh, a good throughway afraid 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 that we need stays inside, like, uh, 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.

Have you done many escape rooms?

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

Me and my family, we do them everywhere we go. They're fucking awesome. And the best ones are in Vegas. They have insane— they have an It 1 in Vegas, It 1 and It 2. Yeah, and this— it's fucking incredible. It's so good, and it's huge. It's like 30,000 square feet, this place. Yeah, and they actually have Pennywise the Clown. They have an actor who wears the fucking suit and looks just like Pennywise and scares the shit out of you. Yeah, it's amazing. But those kind of people, you could recruit those kind of people to design puzzles and things where people have to do every day, and then you're dealing with sleep deprivation and people having to work together. And now, yeah, oh my god, dude.

Dude, and I know the perfect people for it. We, uh, did, uh, for Salesforce, we did their Super Bowl commercial this year, and in the commercial, uh, I hid a million dollars, uh, in it. Like, basically, if you watch the commercial just with your computer in the commercial, you can win a million dollars, and there's like a bunch of random clues and puzzles hidden through it. And, uh, over— and so the first thing it did, it took you to a website that just like loosely explained it. Over 60 million people visited that site and attempted it, but it still took weeks for, for people to find the million dollars, and it was It's like one of the craziest internet, like puzzle hunts ever because it would like take you to this website, which would then would take you to this other one where you'd have to call a number and like, it's a 4-hour voicemail. But like at the very end I would like say like 1, 2, 3, 4, blah, blah, blah. And if you weren't recording this, you're gonna have to listen to all 4 hours again, hang up. And then it's just like sending you everywhere.

And, uh, 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, to solve it. Wow. Even 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 steps on it. Like, some of it was, how do I even, I don't even know how to describe it. It was like so complicated. Like sometimes there's like a page with like a bunch of buttons on it, like a million buttons, but only one works. And like you have to go through and click it all. And so some of them were mundane. Brain. 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. Wow. Yeah.

I could, I could think of all sorts of different things you could have these people do, like during the day, these different tasks, different puzzles that they have to solve.

Yeah. There's like languages I didn't even know exist. So like in the commercial, I'm wearing a belt that just had different colors on of, 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 'em 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 puzzle is you have to find locations on a map and like in the commercial I hold up a grenade. And it's like a 1 plus question mark equals 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 meant Yellowstone, and then 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. Wow. Yeah, I know, which is why like tens of millions of people attempted it, but it took almost a month for someone to win $1 million, like there's $1 million online 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. 'Cause what you'll see in these puzzles too is like, 'cause 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 standstill at 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. But then as you get closer to the end, you stop seeing that effect.

They start being more secretive and quiet about it. And so it's pretty cool to see like the psychology of how they do it.

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

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

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.

Yeah. Yeah. And maybe, uh, you know, I also think of like fun stuff too. Like we could give them, like there could be a gun safe or armory in the city, but it's like, they have to like break into it. Right. And that could just be a thing that takes like a ton of time. Like, uh, so they have to go find, you know, I'm maybe one of the contestants we make sure is like, uh, certified in like explosives and stuff. And there's— they have to like, oh no, no shot of Streamplanner 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 a, what's that, hacksaw or whatever? And it's like, we make— we get a safe where if you hacksaw 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.

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

True.

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

And someone's just like there for like 2 days straight, but then if he gets in, it's just, just straight loaded with ammo, right? So it's like a risk-reward.

There are old-school safes that you can do that too. I don't know if they can do that with the new ones. Yeah, but if you have like an old-school safe where you can actually hear the tumblers turning—

exactly. Well, we could also just build the, the lock. I mean, the beauty of what the team like ours is like, it, it's possible. Just like get the safe that looks aesthetically how you want and then just replace the lock, right?

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

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, I love in these kind of reality shows where a viewer can ask, what would I do, right?

Yes.

And that's why it tends to be what like people and families when they watch together, they love like, like in Beast Games when I offer someone $1 million, but you have to eliminate your friends. You know, sometimes people turn down the $1 million. Sometimes people take the $1 million, eliminate their friends. And like, that's an interesting thing to go, well, Well, if I was in their spot, I don't care. Like, it's $1 million. The point is to make money. That's why I'm on the show.

Take the money.

But other people see that and they're like, no, like, my integrity's worth, you know, I wouldn't take $1 billion 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 care, you know? And so, but giving them like these kind of dilemmas all throughout it too. So then as a viewer, I can be like, yeah, why I wouldn't do that. I would just go scavenge, you know? It'd be cool.

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

So they're incentivized to move.

You have to go out. You have to decide whether or not it's worth getting caught, whether or not you can sneak around and grab the ammo. And then you also have to find it. You have to find the ammo, maybe find food, find supplies. Like, supplies are left in duffel bags at night.

You know, bro, there's so many ways we could take take this. Something that would be cool is every night we move their pile of money into a random building that they don't know, right? But it's all pre-selected, so it's not— 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 where 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 Yeah, and finding like— having like random ammo caches. Maybe during the day they have to solve the puzzle that lets them acquire a map, and then they have to figure out where these random ammo dumps are and supply dumps are and food dumps are. So they're already hidden, actually, you know what, you have to go out at night to find them.

You would be really cool is if we can find an abandoned city 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, right? And so then that's also like, I'm a big fan of like scene diversity and biodiversity so things don't feel repetitive. So then they're going to a different city, but their million or whatever the prize pool is still in the other one. So you have to go and then come back to defend it at night. And so it's like now you get like you can like dual cut because you can have the people in the city, you have the people journeying through the woods, and it's like interesting to cut back and forth.

And then if they go out to that city and they make the journey and they realize it's gonna take us 10 hours to solve this, by that time it'll be 2 in the morning, it's already gonna be dark, we should go back now. Look, don't fuck it, we're here.

Exactly. And agency, right? Do they, do they stay and spend the night there and trust their friends? And they have no, maybe no walkie-talkies, they can't communicate, and their friends are like holding down a fort with the million dollars on top, and they're like, where the heck are they? As they're like— and we get so many cool shots like that, you know.

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.

Exactly. Well, this is— see, what we're, uh, doing right now is we're what I would call blue-skying, and 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 but 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 very first principles way of going about it. And it's just objective. It would take X amount of time, 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, as opposed to, you know, every step of the way 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—

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 want to compare it to shows that have already been successful.

Exactly.

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

And then you don't get the purple cow effect, which everyone knows. And you— what's the purple cow effect? So if you're driving down the road and you see a cow, who cares? You'll never think of it. But if you're driving around down the world, the 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, right? You won't think twice. But if it's a purple cow, if it's something you've never seen, then you'll think about it again. And that's what's counterintuitive to how, like you were saying, most execs think. They think, well, we did this before, it did well, repeat it. But it's actually the inverse of how you should look at it. And thankfully that's why with Beast Games, I, 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 it's a lot of, 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 and then, you know, what they have is great, but then the execs start giving notes and it starts to lose a little bit of the soul, a little bit of the funny. And then it goes from this like amazing thing to like, it's all right. And it's like, uh, it's just so frustrating cuz it's like you're paying them because they get millions of views of video cuz 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.

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

Yeah.

You know, that's the problem. It's like you have a great vision and you're really good at executing, but some people aren't. And so if you're going to dump a bunch of money into something, you see them making a disaster, like the Joker 2 or something like that. Yeah. Like, hey, hey, hey.

Yeah.

The fuck are you doing?

Of course. And that's where it's like, well, Well, what to an exec might be a disaster, to like a creator might be a masterpiece. And so that's obviously where, uh, but it's evolving. I mean, I think obviously with Obsession, I mean, they just grossed $400 million. Isn't that crazy?

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

Oh, what? You would love it.

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

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

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

Yeah, Obsession, Backrooms, which made by a creator, Mazing Digital Circus, they've been crushing it. Iron Lung. 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 4 hit films made by creators back to back to back.

Well, did you see Talk to Me?

No.

Talk to Me, the horror movie?

No.

It was great. These 2 guys from Australia, they were hilarious. These 2 brothers, they came in and they talked to me about it, but they were making YouTube videos.

Yeah. What was the name again?

It's called Talk to Me, right?

No, what's the creator's name?

Names? Um, Jamie, pull it up. Okay, so they're so funny. They're on the podcast.

What's their YouTube channel?

Like a million miles an hour.

Yeah, I'm— why I can't think of their channel. They're, uh, the Racka Racka. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I've, uh—

that movie is great. Have you seen it?

No, I haven't seen it.

No, it's really good. It's really scary and it's very original.

Wait, when did you have the Racka Racka Brothers on a couple years ago. Oh really?

2 years ago?

Yeah, they talk fast as hell, dude.

They're just like trying to corral them.

It's like, hey, they're super cool guys. I— last time I hung out with them, I, uh, weirdly enough, I— they're really into Uno, and I, whatever, I like competitive games, and I played a $1,000 game of Uno against them. And, uh, uh, so we filmed it for like a little short for them, and, um, and I lost, and I was like, okay, well, at least this will be fun. 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? So we didn't even get to upload it. So, but 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 where we were like slapping cards down. SD card's corrupt? That's crazy. I know, it was like wild. And like we were like flipping desks 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.

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 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 that it's— I don't want to say anything more. Okay, it's really good.

Is it like scary scary? Yes.

Okay, it's a horror movie. All right, it's fun. Okay, it's really good.

My fiancée loves horror films, so you'll love it.

It's really well made, and it was like when I saw it, I was like, this is crazy. These guys, like super young guys, just energetic, enthusiastic, creative guys, just figured out how to make a horror movie. Yeah, and it's all done in Australia, so it's like everyone's driving on the wrong side of the road, and they're all Australian people. So it's like, you don't have to have famous actors to make these amazing movies. Movies. Yeah, it's like it's not really necessary.

Like The Backrooms, I think the, the director, I think he's like 20 years old or whatever. I mean, very, very young. And I think it just crossed $100 million.

And Obsession, same thing, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think they're a little older, but yeah, in their 20s, YouTubers. And they make like, uh, curry, like just the silliest, goofiest like skits on TikTok and Instagram Reels. And now, you know, and then you watch Obsession, it really is like one of the best movies I've seen in a while. And it's just like hilarious to see like the, the jump. But when you look back backwards. It's kind of like Steve Jobs says, it's hard to connect the dots going forward, but you can connect them looking backwards. When you look back at his skits, they were very well shot and very, you know, like, uh, beautiful. And you could, you can like kind of connect in your dots. I can see how this person made hundreds upon hundreds of these like little scenes on TikTok and Instagram. And then that led to being able to compile a bunch and, and it was like essentially practice for the movie. And, uh, 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? Because producing films takes sometimes 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 6 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, 2 hours a day flipping through sub-60-second vertical feeds of TikTok Reels and Insta, you know, Shorts. This is culture for them. This is their world, you know? Yeah, 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 want to see what they did, you know?

I always want to 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 just try to follow it out. 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.

Exactly.

But think about like Jordan Peele, right? Made Key Peele, made this comedy sketch show, and then all of a sudden he, he makes these, you know, like Get Out, and you're like, what the fuck?

It seems like, uh, comedy sketches is the gateway to great horror films. Uh, I mean, I'm sure people have connected that dots. I'm probably like 2 years late to saying that, But I never even realized that, but yeah, Key Peele, Curry, Baker, a bunch of the other people, so funny.

Well, it seems like if you're creative, you can be, like most people have a variety of things that are interesting to them. You know, you like comedy movies, you like horror movies, and just because you make comedies doesn't mean you don't have some good ideas about something that's absolutely terrifying.

Yeah, and I wonder too, I feel like horror films, it's a little easier to do on a smaller budget because it's like a lot of it is like the unknown 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, um, sub, like, couple million dollar action film that like really crushed because like obviously those are very expensive. So it seems like also a good place where you can make something— like the difference between a $100 million horror film and like a $10 million horror film, I would argue honestly really isn't that big. Like, because it's—

depends on what you're doing, right?

But it's like what makes it good is, is the, the premise behind it, right? Like the, the tension. And like if the the thing that's scary, it like makes you feel that way. But like feelings aren't directly correlated to money spent. And like, you know, you could have like this monster that doesn't appear to the end and you don't need to like CGI 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. Sure. Yeah.

And a lot of the older films that didn't have the kind of special effects that they have today in terms of like CGI, like there was something better about not seeing the monster. Like American Werewolf in London is the best example. For example, you barely see it. You see it for like literally half a second a few times in the early parts of the movie.

I haven't seen the movie, but—

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

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

How good is it?

Yeah, oh, it was really good. Really good. You know, honestly, I was like, uh, it's probably silly, but I'll watch it because, you know, Joe told me years ago. I loved it. I didn't realize it was that good.

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

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

Did you see the Computer Electronics Show from Vegas this year?

Computer Electronics with the drones?

CES. Well, they have everything. And one of the things they had was an AI companion. And this AI companion is a hot Asian lady with big boobs. And the lips don't sync up with the mouth, which is with the way the sound's coming out, but it's talking to you in AI.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. Or ChatGPT or Gemini.

Yeah. And it's doing it. With a voice. So with a hot voice. I mean, and it's like, that's coming, dude.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

It's called Dune? Yeah, Dune. Dune the movie?

Yeah, it's a recreation. What's funny 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 with 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, 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 wanna be really great at that, it's who spends the most time doing it. So I don't want one that's 100% skill ceiling. 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 it's like, I did a lot of research into like finding a game where there's like a little bit of randomness.

So it's not just devote all your life, but there like is an infinite skill ceiling. And that's where I kind of landed on this game called Dune. And I started playing it. And it also had to be a game where enough people played it where I could actually find people play it. And I got really hooked into it. But it's ironic because then I saw like the movies are dropping. I was like, oh, that. And then all the characters started to make sense after I watched the movies. After I've been like probably 1,000 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 100 of his YouTube videos and I just put it into Gemini and, and I was just like, hey, you know, respond to me based how this person would and talk to me like this person would. And like, what would this person say in this scenario?

And then when I was like playing a game, I 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. It was like dozens of hours. And it, it was, and like, I know one of Dino's friends, his name is Shay. And I was like, would you take a bullet for Shay? 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, my friend would, like to a T, like with the same mannerisms and everything. I was like, this is crazy. Like this is absolutely insane. And, and then so I would put it where it was on a Discord call and like Dino, we would be playing playing, and then I'd ask questions and I'd be like, no, actually, Dino, don't say anything. And I'd ask Dino.io and it would respond exactly how he would respond in most of these situations because it had so much 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? Um, because it's interesting too, because I was like, hey, give me a breakdown of Dino's speech. And it was like, hey, 0.15% of his words are um, uh, around 0.3% of what he says is like— it gave me like a full breakdown of like the last 100,000 words he said, what percentage they are, how he typically structures his things. Like, if you put him in a stressful situation, he'll like kind of respond more like this, but if it's more chill, he'll use this vocabulary. 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 respond to certain situations.

100%. They can do that easily and then just put you in a robot and now Jimmy lives forever.

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

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

Oh God. Or 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 that's Pet Sematary talk. Yeah, but if someone's like really grieving, they might, you know, do it because they want some normalcy back or something.

It'll probably feel empty and hollow and even creepier you have a robot that's pretending to be your husband?

Yeah.

Yeah, fuck off. That's crazy.

I know, but it just, I don't know, these next few years are gonna be crazy, man. Everything's developing so rapidly and it's just, yeah, it's 2036 is gonna be completely different than 2026.

I know, isn't that, there's never been a time where the future's so uncertain where no one can give you a really accurate map of what 10 years from now looks like. Like the difference between like 1930 and 1940, not much other than world events, you know. Yeah, the difference between like 1600 and 1700, not much, not much different. Maybe better boats, you know, maybe better muskets. Yeah, the difference between 2026 and 2036 is gonna be who fucking knows. I know, man, full-on Blade Runner.

I mean, it's I 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 compute where 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 in literally like, you know, 10 years from now, potentially just real-time generate the video game you want to be in and, and cater it 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, they're obviously— someone's going to figure out how to merge them together. And yeah, I mean, 10 years from now, we're definitely going to just— there's going to be humanoid robots and so many things that now would seem weird as hell.

But 10 years from now, we'd be like, oh, it's normal.

10 years from now, you're going to have a show where people have to figure out whether or not someone's a robot or a real person.

Person? I would say 10 years from now, that would be 5 years from now, probably 10 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 care. 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, and as opposed to other means. And so it's just like as that generation, you know, grow, once they become a thing, then give it a couple years for people to get used to it and normalize to it. And then, you know, it's not gonna take that long. Yeah.

It's gonna be very, very, very weird.

Yeah, it is. It's, uh, and it's also like scary because you don't know the implications, like whether it'll be negative, positive, you know, some people will be negative for other people. It'll 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 going frame by frame and like, you know, like no one actually enjoys like rotoscoping someone's hair and like, you know, so you can, you know, remove a background shot or whatever. So like for certain people like that, ideally, you know, it'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, and hopefully that's where it goes. 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.

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

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

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

That's for sure.

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

Oh, that far. Okay.

Yeah, I think AI is going to take over most things.

Yeah.

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

I did, I listened to your podcast with Mark Andreessen 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. Usually, you know, billionaires like him would only have limited access to these high-level professionals in each industry. But now it 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 omniscient— 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 want to make those decisions. But if you like purely take emotion out of it, logically, it's like, well, would you rather a human with flaws that could do something fairly bad, or this thing that has a lot more context and, you know, knowledge and experience, right? You say you want an experienced person making a decision. Well, technically this has the experience of everyone ever in history on the internet, right?

So, yeah, but it's also— I don't even know, man. It's crazy. But hopefully, for the most part, right now at least, it seems like it's allowing people to do less, like, busy work and less things that they don't enjoy and focus more— at least in media, what I'm seeing— focus more on 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 whatever. So it's like, it seems, and everything I'm seeing, and maybe I live in a bubble on Twitter, it seems like it's not killing that many jobs yet, but—

Not yet.

Yeah.

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, or like, yeah, like this is universal high income is Elon's concept.

Yeah.

He thinks that literally people are not going to have to work anymore. But then the problem with that is like, then you run into human nature problems. And so we have to teach children how to pursue their interests rather than how to just worry about having a job to feed themselves.

Yeah.

And so then you have to give them motivation. So you have to explain to them at an early age that going after tasks, completing tasks, doing things that are difficult and challenging is actually exciting and fun. Yeah. And that's what you should generate. 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.

Yeah.

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. Then you don't want to just take your government money and play Call of Duty all day.

Yeah, that's—

especially if it becomes VR Call of Duty.

Exactly. That's where it's gonna get hard because I think I'm 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 in like a completely different world, like, oh my gosh, like my poor mom, like good luck getting me outta 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, but if I was like actually in a headset, oh, and all my friends are on it.

Yeah.

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 overstimulated, creating 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, it's clear that that's going to happen in our lifetimes.

That's The Matrix, and that's coming, and there's going to be multiple levels of that, and it's also going to exponentially get better and better with each iteration.

Exactly.

There's no way to stop it. It's 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 50 feet by 50 feet, and you move around in 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.

Yeah.

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

And with those omnidirectional treadmills and stuff, when someone cracks the code, it's, uh, 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 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, fresh off of watching that anime, I was like, man, I hope they figure this out in my lifetime so I'm like 80 years old, I could just put one of those on and just live in the video game. And it's like at first he's scared, but then he ends up loving it because it's just like everything's great and And yeah, so I think, yeah, there's just—

well, the problem is like what's real and what's not real, you know? Is it really important for things to happen physically in the real, air quotes, real world? Or will it be just as fulfilling to exist in these virtual worlds?

I mean, there are— I remember when I was younger, I'd play like this game called Wizard101. 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. Yeah. 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. Well, if I'm 90 years old and I'm bedridden, like I don't care, put that headset on me. Like I'm done. Let me just live it out. Out in here, you know, someone come in, stretch my limbs every couple of days, like, you know, put an IV in me. I don't even want to take the headset off to eat.

Well, then there's a question of, is that already happening right now? So if a simulation exists and it's so good that it's impossible to differentiate between the simulation and real life, and, 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. Currently. Elon's one of them. He said the odds of us not being in a simulation are in billions. Really? Yeah. So something akin to a simulation, he believes, is running right now.

So maybe, maybe we are in Beast Games, you know, some me 1,000 years in the future.

The 100th version of Beast Games. Yeah. Yeah.

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

As we grow older, technology becomes crazier and crazier. And it reaches some sort of a tipping point while we're alive, and this is the end of the game.

That would be crazy.

Right? It reaches some sort of event horizon.

Or it's 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 this is a simulation to see how did we come to be with all this stuff? And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, if you're harvesting the energy of a sun and you have all that compute, I mean, look at what we're currently able to do with just data centers on the planet. Like, it's it's not far-fetched to think you could put— have someone put a headset on or whatever and simulate, you know, trillions of things.

So 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. 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 ability that's— we're imprisoned by our sight, the limited senses of sight, smell, touch.

Exactly.

Like, there could be way more weird shit going on around us all the time. We just don't have the ability. And that's what the simulation is.

Exactly.

But it's not as simple as like you show up with your lunch pail and you go to work. Now, there might be some weird shit that's going on.

Yeah.

All along with consciousness.

It's, uh, you know, we did a video where we helped, uh, a thousand, you like, you know, blind people or people who can 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 just would've never known that sight was a thing. Like, they—

Right.

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

A bunch of them, I bet.

Yeah. Who knows? I mean, but that is like an interesting thought experiment. And like, 'cause like to those people, It was actually a random memory I just got to. We also did a video where we helped 1,000 deaf people hear again. And a lot of them, it was just giving them like really, really advanced hearing aids so 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 child was born and had never heard his child. And so we put it in and it like really, really amplified sound where he could actually hear a year. He hadn't heard sound in God knows how long. And then the first thing, um, 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. And, um, I don't even know why that memory popped in my head. 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.

Yeah, we, we assumed that the senses that we have detect everything that's around us, but We know that's really not true because they're so limited just in terms of our ability to see things, right? We see more things with a microscope than you can with the naked eye.

Exactly.

And we have no idea what the senses are missing.

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. And it's just, yeah, it's, uh, you—

I don't know if we'll ever know, but we'll just think about the sense of smell, how weird that is. Is. There's an invisible thing, and when someone farts, you go, oh, exactly.

Yeah. And like, yeah, this is kind of crazy.

You'd have no idea if you didn't have a sense of smell. Yeah, 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. Yeah, but no one could smell anything. Yeah, you know. But think of like gases and also like a gas leak in your house or weird, weird shit that you smell. Skunk. All that stuff you'd be missing out on.

I guess if you had to get rid of one of the five senses, that would be the one. Yeah, exactly. I feel like that's the least necessary to survival.

It would suck. Food wouldn't taste as good. Yeah, you wouldn't know if you had B.O.

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.

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 it? I got to 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— that 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.

Yeah. You know what's, uh, it's funny because, uh, on the car ride over here, I was listening to the podcast we did, whatever, 4 years ago. And it's like, uh, essentially like the entire podcast, uh, I was way younger back then, was all about like YouTube data and analytics. I don't know if you remember that. And it's like, I do, uh, like one thing I, 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 the, like my puberty, every development and stuff And I look at that, our old podcast, and like, it is so like brutal. Like I have borderline like autism on like this one subject. And it's like, I was so one-dimensional back then because I was just young and I'd only ever done one thing. It's just so interesting because it's like, if someone were to theoretically search MrBeast Joe Rogan and they, you know, if they clicked on either one of these podcasts, it'd be two completely different experiences. Right.

Well, you look differently.

Yeah.

I mean, you look great, man.

Thank you.

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

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

That's awesome, man.

Yeah, and last time when you had asked me about movies or you asked me about self-help, all these things, every, 'cause I was listening to it on 3x speed in my car ride here, every single thing I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I was like, one thing and one thing only, I know YouTube. It was like, I know nothing else and I blocked everything else out of my world, which is interesting because I actually think that wasn't a positive, right? I think if I consumed more other mediums and culture, it would've been better inspiration. I would've 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.

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. Yeah. I don't, I don't think it's a bad thing.

Yeah. No, I think that the hours put in, yes. But it's like instead of consuming 4 hours of YouTube a day, allowing, like allowing myself to occasionally watch a movie, I think I would've been more tapped in and understood how to tell stories.

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

I know. It's just so funny listening to that podcast cuz I, even I as myself, I watched that. I was on the car. I was like, wow. I like seem like borderline like a freak on certain things here. I 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, 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, uh, 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? Mm-hmm. That's like their exposure to it.

And what's most people consume most things through clips.

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, um, and like sometimes it'll be things that that like, you know, I've grown up or I don't like necessarily agree with or whatever. I speak differently, but because they're not like timestamped, 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 just like pop off and it's like more people are going to 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.

Yeah, probably. And it's so interesting because that's like the new form of culture, especially for younger people, is sub-1-minute-ish vertical content, you know, that they swipe through the feed.

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

I saw a survey about 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 on their feed.

I guarantee you that's the case with like the UFC, because I know for the UFC, when they analyze the performance of a show, like how many people watched it on Paramount Plus versus how many people consumed it on TikTok.

Oh my gosh.

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

I haven't watched a fight live in a while, but like, you know, the White House one, I mean, 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 yeah, I didn't watch it live, you know.

If you wanted to watch that one live, really, you should have been there. Like, that was when you really absorb how bizarre it was. Yeah, to actually be at the White House. It was very bizarre. The whole thing was very surreal.

Real.

Like me and Daniel Cormier and John Anik, there were so many moments like the day before the event where we're rehearsing. So we're standing by the Octagon. I made a video of it where I put it on DC. He's like, the White House. And like I'm showing the White House. There's the cage and then the White House is right there.

Yeah. And the flyover and everything.

Nuts.

But see, that's how what I was telling you about the Roman Colosseum before. That's how I felt. But I didn't get the—

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

I mean, I could have hooked him up.

Also would have been a terrible fight.

Elon would have been destroyed. It would have just been a—

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 guy that I know, Dave Camarillo, who's a world-class coach, who's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, judo Black Belt's been training him like he's training.

I know he's very hardcore people. 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 just shooting the shit, chatting. And then like at the end of it, he's like, yeah, you want to come train MMA or whatever at my lake? And I was like, oh, 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 building friendships. And like, yeah, he just like, he was being very serious. Like he wanted to roll and I've never done that in my life.

And I was like, yeah, I'm going to invite him to go bow hunting with him.

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

Oh no, no, no, no.

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's just like, yeah, let's hang out. Let's do like, go roll on some mats and stuff. Like he was being dead serious.

Well, the way you could tell that it's not fake is watching him train because there's no way he could be that good if he's not actually putting in the time. 'Cause I watch 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. Yeah, you know, there's no way you can't be enthusiastic about it and be doing that. So he's definitely really—

every time I listen to whenever you have a podcast and you talk about the UFC and stuff like that, it always makes me feel 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 18 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, well, how old are you, Jimmy?

28.

Yeah, you're still so young. You could just do this for another 10 years and amass so much money that you could never spend it. And then 10 years from now, you know, 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 MrBeast discovers the world. Like, you could, you could do anything, man. Yeah, I think you're so young, like, you have so much time ahead of you.

Yeah, it's hard to even— I, I think you, you like, as humans, we 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 me that 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 11. So basically now all I really do is just, you know, work, whether it's building companies or making content. And like another 10 years from now, that'll be essentially 20 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, you know, it's interesting, you and I have been doing it about the same time. Like we started this podcast around 17 years ago.

Holy crap.

Yeah, it'll be— won't be 17 years in December? I think so, right? I think in this December, 17 years. So it's basically— wow, they're on these parallel paths, which is crazy.

You know what would be funny? Um, is if like envision like 17 years ago you had 11-year-old me sitting here and then you sitting there and like comped it to today.

That would be amazing.

Yeah.

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

YouTube?

Does your mom know about this?

Shouldn't you be in school? I feel like, I don't know, I was such a like—

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

Go talk to a woman. I mean, back then too, I was so like introverted and self-conscious. Like I probably wouldn't have said anything. I would have been like, uh-huh. You know, because you have to kind of be a little— It's interesting too because It's like very accepted to be a content creator. It's like cool. People love it. It's like, yeah, even parents now, like, you know, they're like, do it. And they realize that while being a content creator, you learn a lot of different skill sets 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 America right now. Like if you were to go survey like 100 random teenagers, a lot of them, a good chunk of them would say they wanna be a content creator. Maybe not specifically a YouTuber, but between TikTok, Instagram, influencer, like, you know, like, and so it's probably the number one job that kids want. It is factually. Yes. And so, but you know, when I was coming up, heck no, it's like, what are you, a weirdo?

That's not a job. Like YouTubers don't even make money. How are you gonna make money? You're gonna be homeless.

Yeah.

And so it's so funny to see how it changes.

And the same thing with podcasts. True. Back then I would tell people I'm doing a podcast and they would be sad. Bad. Like, oh, poor guy. Like, what the fuck's wrong with— you used to be on TV.

Like, oh 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 launch pads to jump to Hollywood. And then it's like the ones like me who are just like, who really cares, you know, like, just stay over here and focus on YouTube, are the ones that are the biggest. And Mike just believed in the future.

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.

Yeah.

And they got— and it sort of stalled them out in the podcast world.

Exactly.

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

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

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's something I think about too, which is a message I feel like a lot of people need to hear because a lot of people don't realize that, you know, not everyone can make tens of millions of dollars or maybe be as successful as like you or I can. But I do believe most people, if they, you know, find something they like like put in a lot of hours, like a ridiculous amount of hours, consume, you know, basically everything's available on the internet now, consume all knowledge available on how to be good at certain thing and then, you know, do 1,000 iterations on it, then they can come out the other side and do it for a living. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like they're, but most people aren't exposed to that kind of, I mean, to be honest, rhetoric, like they think still, you know, their parents went to college, got a degree, that's how you get a job. And so a lot of people today, because obviously your parents educate you and teach a lot of these things, and I'm not saying college is bad, 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 2 years and there are others like me that take 10 years and it's just like a distribution chart and, you know, probably the average somewhere in the middle. And you just have to like, there's no like set timeframe you can give yourself. But if you're surrounded with other people obsessed with the certain thing you're obsessed over, whatever it is, you're, you put in 10,000 hours and in those 10,000 hours you do 1,000 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 2-year mark you'd be of being able to do it for a career. 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 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?

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. Yeah. And it's a process.

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

Stay focused.

Stay focused. Assume it and then recognize like you might be like, oh, well, this person did it in 10 months. Why is it taking me so long? It's just, it's average and statistics and just give yourself enough timeframe. And like, it's hard to, again, I'm not saying you'll make tens of millions of dollars, but if you want to do that thing for a living, it's, if you follow those, those, you know, traits, like it's going to happen eventually because—

Well, you have to be process-oriented, not goal-oriented. You know, the process is getting better at stuff. The goal of being financially secure comes with it eventually. But if you think, I want X amount of money, well, that's what you're going to think about. You're not going to think about the actual thing you're making, so it won't be as good. So you'll probably never get there.

Bingo. Yeah.

And this is 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.

Yeah.

Because becoming a professional when I first started was this very vague, uh, weird thing. Like, you never— no one knew how was done. Yeah, like you went to open mic nights, you did open mic. Now how do I get paid? How do I ever be a professional? Yeah, 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 was 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 work.

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

The best fucking show ever.

Yeah.

And these people get to do 1 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 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 Ari Matti was in Estonia, and he went to Australia for 10 years just grinding, trying to make it in comedy. Gets on Kill Tony, boom, now he has a career. It's incredible.

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

Exactly.

And there are millions of people like me that we're 'Cause 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.

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 could see, hey, other people like Cam Patterson, he was a doorman at The Comedy Store and now he's on Saturday Night Live or doorman at The Mothership brother, and now he's on Saturday Night Live. He started out at the Mothership.

I mean, he's working there as an employee, and he's funny, and I know who he is.

He's amazing.

Because he killed Tony.

Yes, because he killed Tony.

Exactly.

But there's multiple versions of that now that are coming out of the club. And so we wanted to set it up like that. So you still have to do all the work, but we want to like, like illuminate the pathway.

Exactly.

Like there's a clear pathway.

Well, because the— it's, uh, different skill sets, right? Like being able to get attention and get in front of people might be a different skill set than being funny and being able to make them laugh and, you know, the things that make a great comic. And so it also makes it a little straightforward for people who might be just world-class one-on-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?

You know, 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 being a doorman at the mothership to now being on SNL, people see it and they go, oh, it can be done. What did he do? Well, he kept killing every time he got on stage. So that's what I got to do. I got to work on my set, really grind it out. And I was with this guy 3 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, I'm sure you pay well, but yeah, yeah, but I mean doing road gigs and doing whatever you can— guys are barely getting by. But that's the key. It's like you got to know that it's possible.

Yeah.

And before someone like you became, you know, a real content creator— but imagine just trying to explain to someone what your YouTube show, what your goal was. Imagine this. Imagine 15 years ago, you sitting down with someone when you're 13 years old and trying to explain, I want this show to have I want 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'd be like, you're outta your fucking mind. Right?

Yeah, well, and back then, like viral videos back then were like 2 million views. And so like, if you would've said back then, I wanna get 100 million views a video, like, I mean, people would call you a lunatic. Like you're just like— Delusional. Not even delusional, like a certified like lunatic. You're not even living in reality.

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

Everyone has a lot more confidence to reinvest.

It's a real career path. It's a real career path if you pursue it the way someone pursues learning how to play guitar and being in a band. Like, do it the right way. I want to be a pilot. What do I have to do? I gotta go to pilot school, gotta do the work, put in the— go through the process.

Like, factually, or I mean, I don't know if it's factually, but it's like millions of people over the next 10 years that will, you know, find a job, you know, being a creator or working for creators, right? I know, I mean, dozens upon dozens of creators who are hiring dozens of people each. I have 150 open reqs in my business. I mean, there are, 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 see, 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. And so there's just so much like everyone I know just needs like 5 or 6 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?

If you're a teenager now and you put in 5,000 hours, 500 iterations, you obsess over this thing, blah, blah, blah, you come out the other end, even if you don't make it as a YouTuber, you know, you know how to edit. Now you know how to tell a story. Now you have all these character traits and yeah, some other YouTuber will pick you up in a heartbeat.

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

I mean, this is really, I mean, literally now, I mean, 4 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. Yeah. It's where all the viewership is going. I mean, when I was on this podcast last time, it was probably like, whatever, 1.8 billion people use YouTube every month. Now it's over 3 billion.

You know what I mean?

That's nuts. It's growing and it's not slowing down. It's growing more and more 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, you know, it's just what younger people use. They, 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 15-year-old right now outside of like, you know, watching an NBA game or an NFL game has never used cable television. They've never even seen it. They don't, like, they don't they don't even fully understand. Like, they're like, like sometimes when I'm talking to like a younger person, like if I'm like trying to get a gauge of what do 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 2 to 3 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 3 minutes of ads every 4 minutes? Like, and I'm like, well, that's just how things work. And they're like, why?

It's so dumb that they still do it that way. Yeah, well, it really is so dumb.

It makes no sense.

It makes no sense. You don't have to do it that way. They could probably make as much money through product placement and having an ad at the beginning and doing it. And you'd probably get more retention. You'd probably get more views. Like no one is gonna sit and watch CBS.

What's even crazier is you would have to pay money to, like you'd have to pay like $50 a month for cable to then have like 33% of what you consume be ads, which is a higher ratio than when you watch YouTube, which is free.

It's crazy.

It's kind of wild. And then you wonder why people are moving in hundreds of millions of droves over to this new form that's just like, yeah.

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

Millions, obviously, but how many successful ones?

There has to be.

Yeah, obviously there's millions, but I mean, the barrier to entry is the lowest.

Like, at least what you're doing is complex. Yeah. 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 to plan it out. Yeah. Podcast, you're just sitting down. Like, we talked for 5 minutes before we started this podcast.

Yeah.

We said hi. Hey, you look great. What's up? Good to see you.

You gave me some caffeine to get me cracked out.

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.

Yeah.

And so the barrier to entry just to be someone one who's a content creator, like a podcaster, is— how many podcasts are there? Let's guess.

Oh, if you're gonna—

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

How many have been uploaded this week?

How—

like, that's what, you know, active. Yeah, it's still posting on them.

Yeah, let's say 7 million or something like that. That's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.

I would guess 2— active, probably 1 million.

Please, please put this— this is what I want I don't know. How many podcasts were active in 2009?

Ooh.

Let's guess that. Okay. Put that into our AI sponsor Perplexity. Perplexity probably has the answer to that.

Wait, they sponsor you guys?

Yeah.

Is that why you had the founder on recently?

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

I have it downloaded. I haven't listened yet.

He's really interesting. He's a fascinating guy. We were talking about these temples in India and I've been down these multiple rabbit holes about these temples that they carved out of a single— 2009, there were 69,000 podcasts.

But that's not active. That just means 69,000 in Apple's directory. So that means roughly 70,000 people had done one at some point. But then, yeah, I would wager a small percentage were actually active at the time.

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

So now what is it now? That I'm curious. Now in 2026, how many podcasts are there?

Oh, I bet 7 million.

Yeah, actually, I'm gonna up my guess. I'm gonna up mine to 10 million worldwide. I'm upping mine to 10. What does it say?

So since 2009, there were 69,000 versus several million shows today, depending on the database you look at. Okay. Well, what is the number though? 4.5 to 4.7 million podcast shows globally as of 2026.

You know what I'd be curious of? How many people do content creation full-time? Time? I wonder what—

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

Yeah, how many people make a living? Yeah, let's guess how many people make a living doing content creation in 2009 versus now. I'd say 2009, maybe zero. Yeah, or a thousand or something. You know, I was, I was a little kid. I was— I'll say 5,000.

Okay, maybe 5. Content creation is like a very online content creation. Yeah, but the problem is that's like bloggers And yeah, through social media. Yeah, 2009, social media is just coming out.

All right, you're right. 5,000.

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 25 million.

I would say lower, probably 8. Let's see what it says.

8 million. Yeah, that's probably more like it.

The barrier to entry you're making me look up here is also tough in the US, like taxpayers, people who are like filing or just like kids. Oh, worldwide. How many people do content content creation full-time, right?

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

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

it's— what do you think it's gonna do?

It's gonna freak out. It's gonna say there's a lot.

Let's see what it says though.

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

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

It's not a—

I know it's not a great question, but let's just see what it says just out of curiosity. It might have an answer. How would it know, really? Yeah, it could guess because it guessed there 4.5 to 4.7 million.

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

8 to 12 million professional content creators worldwide. Depending upon how professional is defined. Roughly 200 to 300 million people identify as content creators globally in 2026. Holy shit, man. Holy shit.

Are they making money? Are they—

right?

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

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

No, but we don't have an answer.

No, it's given us 300 million rough data. The rough data is 8 to 12 million professional content creators.

Creators.

200, 300 million people identify as content creators. So out of those, which kind of makes sense that, you know, a small percentage of them are going to be able to figure out how to make a living entirely off of it. One analyst estimates that about 4% of creators are professional, meaning they treat content creation as their main job and earn a full-time living. So that, that's, that makes sense.

Yeah.

That seems about right. And that's about right with kind of a lot of things. Yeah, it's— 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 on— in stand-up comedy, and how many people are actively participating in open mic nights where they visit 1 or 2 open mics a week, and how many will eventually become professional stand-up comedians and make a living off of it, you're probably in the same range of like 4% or something like that, probably Yeah, it makes sense.

But the interesting part is that number is going to keep skyrocketing year over year. I don't see any signs that any of this stuff is slowing down.

And so especially if people see that this is a real path, this, this, this isn't a pie in the sky dream. There's a lot of—

I mean, at this point, if they don't see it, then I 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.

Well, you're really wise in that regard is that you spent so much money money, dumping it back into 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 going to end? Let me squirrel this away and make sure that I've got money saved up forever. You just like, fuck it. Let's just spend it.

Go hard. Well, it's what I used to call the creators would back in the day reach like 5 million subscribers. Drivers, 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, but yeah, I never really had any of that. I just like, you know, I mean, like I probably talked about last time we were on here, I used to live in an apartment that I would share that was $720 a month. So like $360 rent.

And I drove a 2006 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, 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.

Well, and yeah, and the, 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 just like very calmly just say it to her. I wouldn't argue with her. I'd be like, just, just have faith.

Like, well, you were right.

I know it worked great now, but it's up to parents.

Parents always worry about their kids.

Exactly. So I don't think it's like, uh, she was doing anything wrong, but all purposes, like she was doing the right thing. It's just, uh, so you also have to overcome that pressure as well, cuz 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.

Yeah.

You know? Um, 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?

That's definitely smart. But is there 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. You're so fortunate." Exactly. And people just get really complacent. It's so easy for people to just forget how fortunate they are to be able to do what they're doing.

Yeah. And I'll admit it, sometimes 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, 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, you kind of regret your decisions, but then you got to like snap out of it and you're like, okay, like this 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 you, if you have a group of people around you who, when you get in those negative thought loops, encourage it and help you spiral, then it's bad. But if you have people who are, and which, you know, not everyone in my position has like people who are, you know, willing to tell 'em how it is, right?

Who are just like, bro, grow up. Like, it's fine. You know, this will be done in 20 minutes and then, you know, your life's pretty good. Like, you, you don't, it's, it's like a, it's a weird thing. Like you really, 'cause like I've had some of those conversations with people where I give 'em the perspective and I can tell like they haven't had that perspective fed to them in a very long time and you can like see it in their eyes. They'll be like, yeah, you're right. And it's like, yeah, you really need some like better people around you because you feel like you're, you're like spiraling in these like really weird thoughts. But like if you look at it objectively, it's not as bad as you think.

That's the really difficult resource, resource to acquire is being around positive people, powerful people, people that really get things done and people that are motivating and people that are really exciting. That's because so many people half-ass things. So many people do just enough enough, just barely enough.

Yep.

You're supposed to go all the way, you go 3/4 of the way. You know, so many people, so many people just, they don't, they, 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.

It's, it literally is. It's infectious. And it makes something mundane honestly fun too. And especially if you respect each other, then it just like, it really compounds— and so, so important, like even at this stage. Like I say, for newer, younger entrepreneurs or people trying to be content creators or friend groups, everything, even at the stage I'm at, it really is because you are like, you think, speak, talk, act like the people you're around. And like they say, show me the 5 people you're around the most, I'll show you what your future is. And it applies at every level, you know? Yeah. And so you just have to watch your friends.

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

Wait, elaborate on that.

So if you work for yourself, if like you're the one who's out there doing it, Like, so you don't work for anybody, but you also can't be a fucking lazy half-ass employee. 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. Yeah, like, if you are gonna work for yourself, you got to get some shit done, because that's a very rare position to be a person that works for themselves. Yeah, do the thing you actually love to do.

Yeah.

And I 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 MrBeast is just getting after it, man. I want to do that. Instead of like hanging out with your friend who just gets 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. You're like, uh, that's not how I want to think and behave, but that guy is. And so you get examples outside of your own personal social circle because maybe they don't know a MrBeast, maybe they don't know someone who's out there doing whatever they want to do with their life, but they get examples of it online and they can listen to these people talk and then get inspired.

Exactly. And if 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 3 minutes of what he just said 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 4 things. Then do those 4 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 this thing, but they didn't do those 4 things. And there's outliers everywhere. But if you look at statistically the average, right? The person listening to this, you're not gonna be this 1 in a million freak outlier. Statistically, you know, if you wanna make a good income doing something you're not currently doing and you're not currently very knowledgeable in it or have much experience, it's just those 4 things.

Find those people, put in the time, do. But it's like 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 500 mock podcast while also consuming all of Joe Rogan's podcasts, right? So you're doing both while also consuming all knowledge available about podcasts while also surrounding yourself with other people who want to be podcasters. And then yes, this podcast might have blown up in a year, but statistically that's not going to happen, right? You have to give yourself— like, the average might be 4 or 5 years, and some people like me take 10 years. And you just have to be so in love with the journey that you're cool with it. 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 here, but there's a chance it could be there. And if that freaks you out and then scares you, then you probably don't love it enough. But if you're like, well, I'll have fun while I'm doing it, then yeah, do those 4 things over the long horizon.

And, you know, again, I— you probably won't make $100 million, but if you want to make $100,000 a year or whatever, it's not out of the realm of possibility. And just those sentences alone for a young person, they hear it, it opens like a third eye in their mind where they've just been told their whole life, go to college, get a job. Yeah, this doesn't even exist to them, you know.

Yeah, again, it's like you have to be concerned about the process and doing a thing that you love to do and trying to get better at it. And, you know, it's like, if you say— let's say you want a million dollars. Well, you could win the lottery. You might win the lottery, but the odds are very low. Or you could find a bunch of people that work really hard, and what 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 quickly. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And the process is available to anybody. You just keep doing something, you'll get better at it. Be objective, be self-analytical, like recognize what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right and get better at it and constantly try to improve. And just because something doesn't exist as, uh, What is your occupation, you know, in a form from 2001 doesn't mean it's not a real job, you know.

And just because you can't tell people, you know, if I told people at a cocktail party in 2009 that, oh, I'm a podcaster, like, that means zero. You tell them today, they go, oh, amazing. Yeah, 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. 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 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 of you making it, nah. Like, okay, yeah, is that what we're doing? Yeah, we just fucking playing odds. But the odds you're dying are 100%.

So once you adopt this mindset it though, then the naysayers go from being brutal to actually being good because now the naysayers are what stop other people from doing the thing you're doing, which actually increases your odds, 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 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 makes it easier for you.

But I guess it does, but I don't ever think that way. I just think if someone can do it, you can do it. And the problem is you have to make sure that you're not spending too much time doing it the wrong way. And so that's where it helps that someone's already paved the path.

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

here's the real question. So 2009, content creators, there's fucking very few of them, right? What 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 a YouTube creator 10, 15 years from now?

You know, I mean, it would have to be something with AI.

That.

Yeah, and even see, like, so what could it even be?

Like, what would it be that people are missing that other people are gonna—

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

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. Yeah, 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 paid ages. Something, some crazy number. It's like 10% of girls 18 to whatever have OnlyFans.

Is that in the US?

Yeah. Wow. It's a nutty number.

It's crazy.

Yeah. And an enormous number of people subscribe. Yeah. I think it's like literally half of American males have at one point in time subscribed to OnlyFans.

That can't be real. That's—

I think it's like 150 million.

Holy crap.

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

I mean, 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—

but I mean, what are you doing there? You're doing just recreating the prompts and making things like—

yeah, it's lame.

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

OnlyFans stuff's not new though. It's just changed the money. Yeah, just got the money from a normal ads to subscription.

What also centralized it in the— oh, 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 now there's always the local— yeah, I mean, but it's not centralized like OnlyFans is, where you go there and there's like thousands and I don't know how many more than that content creators, you know.

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

Yeah, time will tell, but It's just such a fascinating world that we live in where the number one most watched show in the world is yours. Like, you have the number one— what? Well, if it's on YouTube, then it's the number one most watched show, period. Yeah, it's in the known universe. Well, right now, the most watched person in the known universe.

I opened it up on the way in because I figured we'd talk about the size of the show. In the last 90 days on just, just our main channel channel, it's like around 850 million unique people have watched a video in the last quarter.

That's so crazy.

Yeah. So we're, we're doing around 4 billion views a month.

Uh, 850 million people is so crazy.

Unique too, because we do, we did around 12 billion views in the last 90 days on just the main channel. And of those 12 billion views, oh, like whatever, 8% of them are different humans. So it's like factually like 850 million. Like when I say that, people are like, oh, that's 850 million views. To like, you know, 80 million. But no, it's 12 billion views, 850 million uniques. So it's just like, it's crazy, man. And it's like, what's fascinating is you like 10 years ago, like even with cable or whatever, 20 years ago, 850 million people didn't use the same platform, right? 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 Gemini-ing 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 3.2 billion monthly active users, I would be shocked if they didn't hit 4 billion in a couple years and keep growing.

Like 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, like, it's, it's like, it's crazy. It's, it's a really wild opportunity.

And because it's a platform where anyone can upload, the variety of content is extraordinary because there's no gatekeepers. Look, a lot of it's trash and nonsense, but there's so many interesting shows. Yeah, 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 also—

our pages are very similar probably. I have so many like old history videos where it's like some old guy that's just breaking down World War II battle scenes or whatever. Agreed. And like they go as niche as possible down to like, this is like the most, you know, largest fights in history and it's like a ranking of like, yeah, you know, deadliest fights or yeah, like I would say like a third of my home YouTube page is like just history videos.

What does it say here? YouTube uploads— users upload roughly 500 hours of video every minute.

Okay, not to be that guy, that's very outdated, I believe, but maybe— or actually, no, no, sorry. So people watch a billion hours a day on YouTube, I believe. So this is upload— never mind, this might be accurate.

So 500 hours of video every minute. Minute. 30,000 hours per hour uploaded. 720,000 hours are uploaded per day. Watching just one day's new uploads would take over 82 years.

Day.

Whoa. YouTube.

YouTube. Well, this is, uh, the 20 million videos uploaded a day that's quoting. That was probably before Shorts. I bet you now that so many people are posting, you know, shorts, it's probably like way higher now.

That's nuts. But I mean, but what's— what we're talking about, like, having a platform like that where anybody can upload anything, yeah, it just makes the variety so intense. Yeah, 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 1.5-hour lecture on it.

Exactly.

It's nuts.

And that's the beauty, to tie everything together together as like a bow, that's why you can learn anything and you can do anything you want for a living for the most part if you allocate the time, because it's all there. There's literally on YouTube Harvard classes that are recorded. The same thing you would go into crippling debt to, 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, uh, A to Z on how you could become a Cam Patterson. It's not necessarily there, which is why it's It's hard, but you can, all the ingredients are there. You just have to go collect it, put 'em together and put in the work and to get A to Z, Z being, you know, the career you want to do. It's 'cause all the knowledge is there. Every, 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, I think it was in LA or whatever, in between shoots, just working out.

And a guy literally came up to me and I have no idea who he is, but he's like, He's like, I have 3 million subscribers on YouTube. I started like 18 months ago and like, I just listened to one of your podcasts and I just did like exactly what you said. And I got a friend group, I started obsessing over it. And you know, and I did like these analytical things and I just like quit my job a couple 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. —It was 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?

—Well, that's—

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

—And I have a contrarian view on that because a lot of creators do see other creators as competitors, but I've always been like, like if, 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 around. 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 4 or 5 hours, you know, a day consuming content, right? They watch their little 20-minute video. Video, you know, that they upload every 2 weeks. No impact whatsoever. And so I think it, it, and I was really the first person to kind of adopt that mindset and more people are, are doing it now. But yeah, that's why I go and share everything like literally to a T and like I, I'll help people make, you know, some people end up making millions of dollars that I've helped mentored 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?

It's only positive. It's an abundance mindset. And that I think the internet encourages that, fortunately, because television is the opposite of that. So television, the problem was there was only a certain amount of slots. So if the MrBeast show was on NBC and then there was another guy who was on CBS, he might also be at 8 PM on Wednesdays. You're like, fuck that guy.

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

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. Exactly. It's awesome.

It's also, if you share with people, they'll share with you. 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 or better communicator or better at set design. And it's like, it's more about grabbing those 0.1% here and there and like adding 'em 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 could see see how, you know, that'd be really cool on like on the set design, on how we could do a background, or like, hey, after X amount of feet you don't need as much detail, so now we can put more time into like the detailed stuff up front. But, you know, and sometimes I was being 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, and you just have to like— absolutely, 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 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 feel like not many people take that approach either.

Fuck yeah, dude. I think your approach is very valuable for a lot of people to hear, very valuable for young people here, because if they just follow those principles and just follow your passion and really be disciplined and focused, you could do a lot of things in this life. Exactly. You'd be like Jimmy.

You could. Probably not. Statistically not. But statistically not. Could you be a person with a couple less zeros in all the numbers? Of course.

Yeah. And also just be enjoying your life because you're doing something you want. You're actually creating something. Yeah. And something you'd be proud of and something that people enjoy. And that makes you feel good, that people are enjoying your work.

Yeah. And speaking of something you're proud of. So since the last time I was on here, a big thing I've been working on is, are you aware of how many kids are like working illegal child labor on cacao farms? I think last time I was on here, we talked about how I sell chocolate. Yes. Yeah. Do you know that there's over 1 million kids that work in illegal child labor on cacao farms? Wow. Yeah. Where? In West Africa. So Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, which is where like majority of the world's cacao comes from. That's— there's rampant child labor. You can ask for 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.

No, that's very cool. Yeah, so, um, basically, if it just— ask Perplexity how many kids work in child child labor in West Africa on cacao farms. And right here, 1.5 to 1.8 million people or children. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And I had no idea. And like, it's like been like this for decades. And so it's so normalized in the chocolate industry that, you know, when I would talk to other people who work at chocolate companies or execs, they're just like, yeah, it just kind of is what it is. That's how it works.

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

Yeah, I mean, it's not all the labor. It's around whatever, 46% of the labor, you know? So if you were to work with— how it works is like there's well over a million farms in those areas and you don't buy from farms because they have no leverage. So farms form cooperatives. It's like these 100 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 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? 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, uh, that's crazy. So that's most chocolate. Uh, well, majority of the world's cacao, as you saw, comes from West Africa. So, I mean, holy shit, man. Yeah, I know. And so that's what I mean. I'm thousands of hours deep into this. And so I met a different company called Tony's Chocolonely, who is like a reporter who, you know, started talking about this. And wait a minute, his name is Chocolonely?

Tony.

But the chocolate brand is Tony's Chocolonely. They did ethical sourcing, and I spent a lot of time learning from them. And like, I've just been on this journey with Feastables is how can we ethically source stores, you know, Feastables cacao. And so we actually— this is a fun thing I've never said publicly. So we, we started doing, working with certain farms, but then I started around 7 months ago, a big case study where we went to 5 villages that the average child labor there was like 45%. So 45% of the labor on the farms in these villages was illegal child labor. And we, 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 5 communities. Communities, we knew everything from the child labor rates to school attendance to everything. And then we've, throughout the last few years, we've just been collecting tons of data on why kids work in child labor, how you get kids out of child labor, which most of it comes back to poverty. Big 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 100% of our farmers that we'll pay a living income reference price. And then we work with Fairtrade, which 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 skimming off money or taking it, it doesn't flow through to the farmers. So we go through, we make sure— it's complicated. It's like, I thought this would be an easier problem to solve. This is a multi-year journey for me. But we go to the cooperatives, which again is just a collection of farms that pool their cacao so they have more leverage. So you can't take advantage of them. And we make sure through Fairtrade that they're democratically elected cooperatives. 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 5, uh, village case study that we did, there's around 10,000 people living in there.

And, um, about 7 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 Fairtrade came in, come in, started paying the premium. And now 7 months later, we just got the initial results after we did our check-ins and some of the communities, we were getting so many kids out of child labor, there literally wasn't a school because kids just worked on the farm. 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 'em an education so they're not, you know, because if you grow up only working on a cacao farm, you have no education. So then you're basically doomed to working on it your whole life. Whole life, you know, because you don't, you don't know anything else, right? Um, and so we just did our recent wave of check-ins where we knocked on all the doors, checked school attendance and everything. And so 7 months ago was 550 kids-ish roughly in illegal child labor.

What do you think it was now, basically 6, 7 months later? I don't know how many. We were able to get a 90% reduction and get it to where there's only, uh, like around 50 still in child labor with our first check-in. And now we, we constitute, uh, a kid remediated out of child labor with 2 check-ins. So that was just the the first one. So technically, by our books, they wouldn't be fully remediated because, you know, there might have been an accident or whatever. So we like to double-check it to make sure things are accurate. So we'll do another check-in in the future. So they're not technically officially remediated, but it just shows that, 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 wave I've been doing, or been on, is like step one is I have to prove it's possible. So then we can start, you know, I like most people like you, they just have no idea that there's this much rampant child labor in chocolate.

I had no idea until you brought it up.

I know, which is like crazy. And it's like, it honestly, it really frustrates me because no one has any idea and like everyone's just kind of cool with it. And I think part of the problem too is if you were to Google it, they use like confusing language or they're like, yeah, this is our ethical sourcing strategy. But at the end of the day, obviously most cows go into Big Chocolate and, you know, they can say they're doing all these things, but factually there's all these kids in illegal child child labor. So it's like, I mean, no one's putting in the effort that you're doing.

What you just said, that— yeah. And so that's amazing, man.

Yeah. And well, that's what I'm, uh, really excited about. And I just wanted to mention it, A, because obviously your biggest podcast in the world, and I just want to educate people on it, that it's fucking crazy when you're buying chocolate. And, uh, B, 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, right? 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 illegal child labor down to 50. And obviously we're not done. We're gonna keep over time trying to get those 50 outta 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 outta illegal child labor. And then eventually, because, you know, I have over a billion followers across all my platforms, you know, I can show these case studies and then just like, you know, berate Big Chocolate into switching over.

Because they make billions of dollars a year in profit. They don't have to use child labor. And, 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—

I think what's really important is getting people to understand that that's happening. Exactly. And you talking about it right now, now people will be aware of it, because I think the vast majority of people, me included, were not aware. I know. So then they hear, they go, wait, hold on, what about this company that I'm buying chocolate from? Are they using child labor? And And then, you know.

And technically, I can never, like Feastables, I can't say it's child labor free because, you know, it's not like I have security cameras on the farm. A kid could just walk on it and then, you know, well, he lied, right? So I'll never be able to say 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 in 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 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, 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, we'll start doing it. I mean, because technically there, there isn't really like all these shopping companies are so old. Like technically the people who built and grew it, like the, the, 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.

Fuck them.

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

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

If I wasn't the biggest YouTuber in the world, if I were, here's a crazy sentence that I do believe to be true. If I stopped caring about this issue and did nothing, then 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 5, 10 years. Like who else? Like, look at how many kids are in illegal child labor in West Africa on cacao farms. Okay, we're back. We're back.

Big Chocolate sent in an attack. We've had this issue. You're good. But listen, man, it's just another example of that. 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 just another example of why you're great.

Thank you. Well, and I wanted to educate people on that. And another thing I'd also— I think is a thing that people should here is, especially in America, do you know that, I mean, it's probably not going to surprise you, but 40% of food that's produced in America ends up getting thrown away? I have heard that. Yeah. And it's, and so a lot of what we've been doing is working with, it's 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. Food, and we've been just setting up like many— there's a 501 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've been thrown away but is perfectly fine and perfectly healthy, and just, you know, figuring out how in a couple days to just get it to food drives or people a 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 is like so simple, but would feed so many people in need and save us so much money. 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. And it's like just taking food that would've been thrown away. And it's kind of like mind-blowing that in America, like, more people aren't aware of that because it's a very solvable thing, to be honest.

I think there's so many people that are only concentrating on what's gonna make them money. And of course, yeah, you know, it's very rare that someone like you thinks about greater good and actually put in the effort.

It doesn't— that one doesn't even cost you money. We're just talking about instead of putting it up, just put it in a truck.

But the effort—

yeah, 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.

You're an awesome guy, Jim. Thank you. Thank you for being here, man. It was really fun. I really appreciate it. Yeah, congratulations. We gotta make this zombie show.

We'll do it. We're doing it. Yeah, I think we should do it. I'll handle all the work and stuff, but you gotta come up with some—

I'll think about it some more too. Yeah. I'm gonna bounce this around because I got excited. Yeah. I think there's something to it.

Next time you see me and Joe together, it's gonna be fighting off some zombies. All right. Sounds good. Thank you. That was awesome. Thank you for having me.

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