Muse

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 Because sometimes when we shoot like these 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, yeah, I mean, I guess it depends, right? Whether it's the YouTube channel where we're doing 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 YouTube videos, it's not as grandiose. They're like, I don't know if I want to lose my job for a 1% chance of winning $250,000.

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 $200,000. Yeah, which was actually pretty cool because you would put them in these crazy games and you'd see how someone from the Asian Pacific countries would react versus 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 have a serial killer?

We do the psych and background checks, of course.

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

We went off of whatever the Olympics do. So it's like 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 two and a half times the population of your country. 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 that crazy. It'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.

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

Someone like Elon or something like that could buy a country. Not Elon.

There's probably thousands of people in America that could. I mean, I feel bad. People from that country listening.

Well, we didn't say the country. Okay, true, true. We're good. We didn't say it.

Exactly. It's not 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 two or three from each country. And then we let people from those countries vote on who should compete. So it wasn't even one. I had to get multiple from each. So I think I ended up spending over a million dollars just on, you know, aggregating and casting and background checks and everything. And then putting it out there so people could vote on it. But that way, you know, whatever, like Georgia and Europe, if that guy's an absolute moron, it's on them. They picked him. 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 because, like, Beast Games basically is 30 days of just, you know, 18 hours a day filming. And so for people who might not have heard of it, it's essentially the largest cash prize of any show in the world. Season one, we had the most contestants of any show in the world and the largest sets of any show ever to exist. And I was just like, what if you take like a reality show, but you just ramp everything up to the absolute maximum. And like season one, we gave away $22 million just in one season. And, you know, some of the biggest game shows in the world right now give away $250,000. Like we're giving away $2 million every episode.

Look at that. That's wild.

that's so crazy that sets amazing and then we build a city and so also holy shit my my whole thesis behind it with uh this is you know you when you watch these you know game shows or reality shows there's a lot of takeaways and like after the show they'll put people in a room and they'll be like hey talk about what happened here and it's like intercut and i was like well

What if we just have a thousand cameras and we just let people be themselves and we kind of just show it in real time? So we also like in season one, we broke the world record of most cameras ever used in any production of any movie, show, anything ever. So like this set right here, there's over twelve hundred cameras in there. And the most room is so big. Yeah, it's bigger than the football field. And so there's a thousand contestants. We have to have an A-cam on all of them. So there's, like, a poll on each of the platforms on them. Plus, there's hundreds of cameras in the roof and blah, blah. There's over 1,200 here, which, outside of this, the most ever used in 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 three minutes. You're kind of the bad guy. Say roughly along these lines. Almost basically put words in your mouth. And then they'd go, like, person to person with, like, one camera. Whereas I go in 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 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 because it's 27 miles of camera cables brought the world record for the 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 the 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 this episode is

brought to you by zip recruiter we all like to find ways to save ourselves some time like ordering out for dinner or meal prepping so you don't have to cook during the week if you're a business owner looking to hire a great time saving hack is zip recruiter its newest feature lets you meet the most interested qualified candidates first try it out free at ziprecruiter.com slash rogan and it doesn't just let you meet candidates faster you can hear why they're interested in their own words save time and meet great candidates sooner with zip recruiter four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

For the moments that matter, choose Curad Naturals. Infused with aloe vera and vitamin E, Curad Naturals bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts, and burns while also moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life's surprises call for the best, choose Curad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit curad.com to learn more.

You have a great ability to see the big picture and a great ability to put together things regardless of what the budget is, like regardless of how much money you're going to make to do the best product. I always thought that about you when you first started doing your YouTube show. I'm like, the amount of money and time and effort involved in this is above and beyond what most people are willing to do. And it's way more than a traditional television network would ever do. Because a traditional television network would look at the upside. They would look at the money. And they would go, we're going to spend X amount of money to make it this much better. But if we just take it down a couple of 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 uh no so that that's

in toronto but it's basically an airport hangar i mean we spent months trying to figure out how we could make this that also is like a thousand trap doors because every single one of those the trap doors open when they get eliminated so that set alone was like 15 million dollars i mean it was crazy and thousands of

people's time and stuff like that it's actually when where we film beast games is actually a pretty big deal because it creates so many local jobs for people so i'm sure yeah like there it

was like pretty wild every time you say where you film it or you keep it under wraps that one was

toronto canada okay cool um and uh 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 six months whereas like before they're going project to project every week but yeah back on the going above and beyond that's kind of my my whole thing is like why make content that isn't great and 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 going 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 um usually like people at the top will always shoot down crazy ideas or tell you it's not possible like whenever you have like these crazy brainstorming sessions and i tell the team technically anything's possible if as humans we really wanted to we could technically blow up the moon with enough nukes now we're not going to do it because it's not worth the time and it's not worth spending the money but you have to have that frame of mind everything's for the most part possible if you're willing to spend the time and spend the money so before you do the work and just figure out what time it takes and how much money it costs you can't say no to something because almost all the time like we filmed in the pyramids and i spent 100 hours living in the pyramids of egypt it was fucking awesome and uh you know for years everyone's like they're not gonna let you you know live in the pyramids for a couple days like that's crazy and i'm like why not like did you get a no from the you know the leader of egypt no then i'm like well technically it's possible you know and and after years of talking with them and helping them understand that you know it's going to be more of an educational type video and it's not like i'm not going to run up the pyramids and take my shirt off and be like a lunatic it'll be really cool um eventually they came around to it and they loved the video and it worked really well and it's literally like i could go anywhere in the pyramids for 100 hours i went all the way up to the top of the the middle pyramid we went underneath it it was it was really cool and i like tell my team it's like you know even some of my most veteran people when we get these crazy 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 been nuts oh it was crazy it was one of my favorite videos is that your first time ever being there uh yeah actually it was and so that made it even more special because i was like learning things at the the same time as i was just walking around and um i'm gonna be honest it was like a year and a half ago and it's like all a little fuzzy because i was like so tired i was just walking around all night but it was pretty crazy and surreal and then going down into what's that tomb cold where you go down the ladder and um like a couple hundred feet uh underneath the

pyramid i don't know is that osiris's yes yes osiris's yeah and then uh 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 for me it's just a time thing my time is i have 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 also married with children it's like i have a lot of responsibilities so it's tough to just jet off for a really ideally if you're going to 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 five days you could do it and like i'm curious though if they let you just like do a video where you walk around and go everywhere because i wonder yeah you because 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 about it i just think that the people that run it have a very uh narrow-minded perspective of how all that stuff was made and i don't i think i don't think they really know and i think there's 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 what it's all about that's why they're really um 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 like did you check out the sphinx uh 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 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'm 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'd rather 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 now there'd be some crazy stuff so yeah well Thank you. Whatever happened in that part of the world during that time frame is pretty spectacular. It's kind of amazing that no one has ever achieved anything even remotely similar to it since. And it's at least 4,500 years old. That's just a guess, though. They really don't know. It's a crazy place. The fact that you got to film a show there is nuts.

I love how you call it a show, and to me it's just a YouTube video, but it's just funny. It's a show. Yeah, I know, of course. It makes sense because you do stuff with the UFC, and you're 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, like, in hindsight, I'm not even sure how this one we pulled off. So I want to see your reaction to this. Okay. So, basically, the finale, where we have the $5 million, we have the final contestants, we filmed it in the Roman Coliseum.

Whoa.

Yeah. We crowned the winner of season three with the $5 million cash prize in the middle of the Roman Coliseum. Played the first game there in over 1,000 years.

Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. I know.

I'm so grateful. 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 up 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 was multiple moments during that where I'm just, like, looking around in the middle of the Coliseum as we were, like, filming the 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 that was like. You know, how many thousand years ago? What year were they doing the games in the Roman Coliseum?

I would guess 1,900 years ago.

So, I mean, what the fuck was it like being in there while that was happening? And imagine when they flood it and they'd have the ships in there.

It's 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 used to go to see people die. They used to see people get hacked to death by swords, to see people get killed by lions. Like, what the fuck?

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

Like basketball games. Who gets courtside tickets?

I didn't even think about that.

Jack Nicholson, courtside tickets. Or Jay-Z or whoever. 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 a hold 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. 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?

It was like whatever, four rows up. It wasn't like anything too crazy. 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 they're like kind of trapped in the arena. But it was definitely within spirit 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 eight years to build. Wow. From AD 72 to AD 80. Yeah. Wow. Construction started under 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 six to eight years the cup is down to its final matches one trophy one champion draft kings has you covered for every single one the draft kings 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 What? Where you're watching, you're always connected and in the game with one app. New DraftKings customers sign up with code ROGEN. Spend $5 to get $200 in rewards within 21 days. That's code ROGEN in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours.

Bet with DK Sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. 1-800-MY-RESET. Connecticut, call 888-789-7777. Or visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boothill Casino in Kansas, Bet tax pass-through may apply in Illinois. 21 and over. Void in Canada. Event contract trading with DraftKings predictions involves risk of loss. Availability varies. Bet to get bonus bets that expire in seven days. Trade to get $50 in predictions dollars that expire in one year. Issued every seven days via click-to-claim for 21 days. One non-withdrawable reward redeemable. Predictions offer void in New York. Ends July 19th. Terms at dkng.co slash audio.

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? Right. Like, the Roman Coliseum 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, everything will just get absorbed back into the earth.

Dang.

Did you ever see that show? They had a show, like, what was it on the History Channel or something like that, where it was After Humans, I think it was called. And it essentially showed how long it would take for cities to completely be absorbed back into the earth. It's not that long. 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 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 – titled, like, Last Human on Earth Simulation and then, like, living there for a month or so and seeing what it's like. That would be kind of cool. Kind of like the Will Smith movie back in the day.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

i would have to say this is a zombie simulation and you know and then i'd have to set rules on here's how you kill a zombie you don't use a sword you use this phone and it's lame which is why we've never gone around to it but if there ever was a way i do think that would be cool to like recreate a actual zombie apocalypse and and like let someone try to live in for a week because it'd just be cool because 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 still edible and stuff and it's 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 you know yeah uh maybe a paintball type deal

yeah and 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 people get shot

in the face obviously and then it kind of kills it or yeah unless the zombie masks were what was

the protection yeah we put it over top of the paintball mask that's that's yeah poor poor

actors they're gonna or you just have instead of like a regular paintball mask have something that's just a hard structure that is like your the shape of your face exactly so you make it 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. That's perfect. That's an airsoft mask. That'd be pretty cool. I mean. Oh, dude, that's actually dope. Look at those masks. The half-faced zombie ones. Yeah. That's fucking dope. Like, that would be terrifying. Coming at you in the middle of the night.

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

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

Well, if you wanted no one around, it's going to be hard because you're going to have to do it in an abandoned place. Exactly. And you're not going to get an abandoned skyscraper.

Maybe.

Unless you're in Detroit.

Well, it doesn't have to be in the U.S. We did a video seven days in an abandoned city where there's someplace in Europe where there was a city that was war-torn and stuff like that. And it had, like, hotels and tall buildings and everything. It was pretty wild. Yeah. Really? And there's no one in it now? No, no one in it. Like, tourists go there or whatever, but they let us close it off for a week. It was pretty crazy.

Well, that's the place then.

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

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

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

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

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

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, three 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 bury it.

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

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 this is something you're interested in. There's something there.

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

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

Have you seen the show From?

From? I don't think so, no.

It's great. Great show. But it's about these people. Look at that shot. Pause it right there.

So that's just one random building. But you can maybe go to the intro or something if you want to just show them, like, yeah, this whole place. 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.

Oh, dude, this is the spot. Listen, the show starts at sundown every night. Okay. As soon as the sun goes down, that's when the games begin. Nothing happens until it gets dark out. Okay. Everything is in the dark. and these people have no idea when it's going to happen, when they're going to get hit and so they try to get their sleep whenever they can but you keep them awake during the day with tasks. You keep them awake. So during the day they have all sorts of materials. They have...

supplies they have all sorts of things and they have to figure out how to protect themselves how to develop shelter alarm systems for when the zombies are close they give them yeah give them time to like figure out stuff to do to keep the zombies away and a limited amount of materials that they can work with and just let these people get creative and their ingenuity but then you keep so they'll be busy during the day so they're not going to be able to sleep so at night time when it gets dark out, then they don't know when it's going to hit. So you have these people sitting around, and it might be 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m., and then 3 in the morning, shit starts happening.

30 zombies come in, and they've got to shoot them all with paintballs.

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

Bro, you're getting me excited. I mean, it would be so fucking cool to, like, let them build a structure or something. And then, like in I Am Legend, where he has to point the lights because they hate lights, But at nighttime, we can hide lights throughout the city that they'd have to collect and then set up so they have good vision around their fort and everything. And then they have cycles where they take turns watching and stuff. And then we only send the zombies out theoretically at night or whatever the structure would be so they have chill time. Or maybe every night, 40 zombies are unleashed. And then so they shot like 35 of them. But they're like, oh, shit, there's five hidden around the city. So that day while they're walking around, they're like on edge. And the tension throughout the day would be phenomenal.

yeah there's so many cool ways to do it and you know you don't have to tell them that the zombies are only going to come out at night yeah just have it that way i'm excited if we need to stop

talking about this because i'm going to leave and go film it right 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 five days it's only at night yeah and then day six exactly so so people get snatched up in the middle of their house

oh my god we used before as a gel blaster it's almost like airsoft but it doesn't hurt as bad oh it shoots water and these vests that they have set up are sensors so you can almost like what you're saying 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 can we see a video Yeah, wait. Is this the 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... Bad music, but... You pointed out, I have seen, like, Nerf gel blasters. I actually never thought of that.

So, I mean, you could just redo the suits so that it makes sense for you. Yeah, and then reskin the guns because those look a little lame. But, yeah, that would be...

It's kind of lame. It already exists. I kind of like shotguns with beanbags. Let's fuck people up.

easily picture the aesthetic you're looking for i gotta i have to find the blend between joe's like recreation of this video and like what i could actually do but there i actually am more

inspired than ever i think it's very doable it's very doable you just have to figure out a way to make it exciting but still not hurt anybody exactly you know that's not hurt the zombies you'd have to like armor these people up somehow i mean well the the thing too is like you know um

one way the one thing that would help is like if the zombies were ex-navy seals or something then it's a little different than if they 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 all you

know they wouldn't care but also it could well it could be like a zombie army like an army some some army somewhere got taken over and turned into zombies and those are the people you're fighting against so you could you could put them with like plate carriers on and you know yeah you you could armor them up a little bit so they could take some hits have some lore behind it

yeah it would make sense too i'm bro i'm sold i just gotta find an abandoned city give them

glowing eyes and that's the only way you know they're out there this whole podcast is gonna

be joe helping me figure out how to do zombies dude it would be fucking terrifying it would

Imagine there's people that are in, like, this city. There's no lights. There's no electricity. And then at nighttime, it goes dark. And maybe they have flashlights, but each flashlight only has, like, one hour of battery life. And so you have to, like, judiciously use that flashlight throughout the evening. To shine it around. Shut it up. You know, so you give them, like, a little extra tension that the flashlight's going to die because you only have one 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 true that would be cool yeah so 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 i go to like how do we execute it we could do it too where like there's like uh every every day at like a certain period we we pull off all the dead zombies which are humans and we just swap them with, like, a young man.

have recreated versions of them there so there's like actual zombie bodies like piling up right so as the video progresses they're like literally stepping over like mannequins that are set decked identically how the the people were so when they die and then they're just like literally stepping on zombies as they go building ability and that'd be crazy that would be crazy you know and actually

because if i put a million chalk outlines around the zombies so you can identify the fact that this

one's a dead zombie uh or no don't yeah you know let that be the fun part but then we if we put put like a crazy prize on it we could do you only get the prize or maybe the prize is split amongst everyone who survives the whole 10 days or whatever and then it's like to really build up like this crescendo at the end we could have it where the final day there's a massive invasion coming or something so it's like the whole time it's what if like every day more and more came so day one it was 10 day two 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 can make you lose yeah and they know you're for you don't actually even crazier is if if instead of well you know maybe we have navy seals as the zombies but also what if the contestants are like ex-navy seals too so they have like real strategy and stuff like that that would be cool

just get the most badass people that you can get for this zombie thing like survivalists martial artists exactly 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 and it's like all right what happens if you put six experts in different fields together and simulate a real zombie apocalypse right you We have 50 acres of this abandoned city sealed off. We set-decked it all. And every day, a wave of zombie that gets bigger and bigger until the big crescendo at the end hits. And if you survive it all, you split a million dollars.

I think the really difficult challenge is figuring out a way to kill zombies that's not lame. Exactly. And doesn't hurt anybody. Actually doesn't kill people.

I don't know if that's your second thought process, but of course.

But it has to, because if you're hitting them, even with the gels off, it'll 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 can add those sounds and pose, but we're big fans of practical. So I'd have my team take apart the guns and see if there's some way they can make it, even though it's shooting the gel, like make it go bang, bang, and then add like the effects. And then we'd have to reskin the guns to look like real guns.

It would have to be some—it doesn't have to look like real guns because it could be a gun from the future.

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

Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So it would have to look like a real gun. So that's why I like the shotguns with the beanbags. And also with a shotgun, like, you're only going to get so many shells. Like, as long as you don't have one of those big, like, Terran tactical ones that has actually a magazine. It can hold, like, 15 rounds. I think a regular shotgun, like a Benelli, how many shells can you put in one of those? I think six. I think maybe six. Something like that is good, too. you have a limited amount of bullets and reloading is hard we just 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 no way you can shoot shotguns at people yeah there's just not possible 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 have fun no no no no no okay well i don't know a lot

about shotguns so let's um find out i'm never gonna have someone point a real shotgun at someone

else but yeah you will trust me we're gonna we're gonna work this out you want to you want to help Co-directed yeah, you'll actually see in like the back on a one-shot Joe

I'm gonna be one zombie one night. He's like sneak in everyone's like who's that bald guy over there?

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

Well depends on what kind of zombie like walking dead zombies are so stupid you can stab in the head with a pencil They die remember it was just going through the head because they would shoot him with those crossbows and like crossbow Wouldn't even kill a person like the with those field tips. They're using field tips This is basically 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 dude in the walking dead would drive me nuts because he would shoot him in hand it would just stick in their head and then they'd be so funny because the fuck out 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

this is nonsense yeah right guys watch yeah one arrow in the head you'd be yeah you wouldn't die

The thing is people have lived – humans have lived through arrows through the head like that, accidentally gotten shot in the head with a bow and arrow, with a field tip, and lived because it basically just – it's like a pencil going through your head. Really? The way people die from an arrow is hemorrhage. You die from massive hemorrhage, and it's usually because there's a blade. So like this. Like this is what the Native Americans used to use. But that's wide. This is actually – yes. Okay. That's an actual arrowhead. Yeah. 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. But my point is, I don't remember my point, but if I had a point, it would be there's got to 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. 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 a 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 going to use a bean bag, yeah. Because that's what I'm thinking. Like, if you have a chest plate, you know, so a plate carrier is bulletproof. Yeah, but what are you going to hit? 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 none of this is going to penetrate. So if it's a beanbag round, what it is is just, like, it's basically a bag that's going to, like, shoot out of the shotgun and blast you. But I don't—they're not lethal. Let me see what it looks like. I don't know which one I'm— Just go to a video. Just go to a video of lowest-powered shotgun. That's weird looking. That's cool. That one looks cool. That one does not exactly what you're looking for.

That's a revolver shotgun.

Yeah, that's dope. I've never seen one of those before. Huge power, it says. Interesting. Yeah, the title is Smallest But Deadliest Shotgun. Yeah, I think it's smallest in terms of, like, the size of it, not the round itself.

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

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

Well, how about this? Look up 67-gauge shotgun. Oh, I've 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.

it says it's a 12 gauge oh that's a big I'm trying to they're like modified 12 gauges

that's a lot

I just don't the shotgun isn't going to kill a zombie

yeah but it could in this game Jamie I know but you have to get so close to get a fucking headshot it's more fun to get snipers and grenades I don't know if you have to use headshots this little kid's going to shoot a shotgun So that, okay, let me see. Can you give me some volume? Let me hear this. Back that up a little bit. Yeah, that's what we need. We need that kind of shotgun with like a beanbag round or a rock salt.

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

Yeah, something where it makes an impact. There's a sound like a gun going off, but you can't really kill anybody with it. Yeah. This is totally possible, dude. You'd have to have like very strict safety protocols in the set, though, because one of the things when I was in when I first moved to L.A. 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 uh then they would take the same guns they would use like real rounds on a range and take the same guns and bring them to set and they didn't clear everything so i don't know who's responsible for that i don't know what ultimately came out of that but you're never supposed to point a gun even if it's not loaded you're never supposed to point a gun at someone ever in movies now like if you were 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 uh bruce lee's son died because there was something that was in the gun itself it wasn't even a bullet that killed him it was like there was a particle or something that

hit him from the blank 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 yeah so it's more real like a really light shotgun

and i guess even if you know it's a blank like having a gun pointed at you as an actor makes you you know feel more in this situation too probably well just rock salt if you have a really light

shotgun even if it's a 20 gauge with rock salt it would suck it would sting 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 a direct hit we did something similar when we recreated sweet games we put like squibs on them when they got eliminated and grew up and so yeah you'd put like little squibs and then when the sensors went off it would just and the liquid would go across their body yeah 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 game 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 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 would do is have like sort of a dual trigger setup where you have as you pull the trigger back you get the explosion from the round going off and you also get the laser at the same time and so the squibs go off you say the boom and then the squibs go off and you have it all coordinated together and then it looks wild and so then you have these zombies boom you shoot them you see splatter all over

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 uh where 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's not family friendly because you're killing zombies yeah 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, 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 you can tell if shows for 18 plus or 13 plus, before they shoot the person or whatever, if it cuts away. And there's all these little things. Not that we even do anything.

Dude, this could be wild. This could be fun.

If someone's streaming platform was like, yo, here's whatever, whatever, a blank check, just make it happen.

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

Yeah. Or I mean, really, even Netflix, anyone. 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, if, 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. 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 tasks every day will grow the prize pool and if it's on a streaming platform then the prize pool could be crazy right it doesn't have to be a million dollars it could grow to 10 million theoretically if they weren't being cheap and so then it could be like every day if you complete the task i put a million dollars in the prize pool each episode's one whole day it's 10 episodes 10 days and so they could technically grow the prize pool to 10 million dollars you put some like you know the ufc people and like you know navy seals and like these hardcore people and you tell them like they could potentially share 10 million dollars bro they would be trying their butts off those 10 days the footage would be crazy i mean they would they would probably be like practicing during the day like their rotations and everything on like holding off zombies it would 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 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 in my 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 case if they touch you that way it's not like the navy seal like pushing and flipping them off like because if you went 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 show.

To set the stage, it's like abandoned city, dozens of acres, sealed off. I could literally build a wall around it so the seals and whoever the contestants know, this is the edge. They're walled in. And then, yeah, they're walking around. And then we have some of the best set designers in the world come in. And 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 this is what would happen to Doritos 50 years from now. They'd literally mirror it identically across 100 buildings. And then we'd have a helicopter fly in, drop them off, and then it's like every day we could have an eagle fly over and drop their task of the day. And in the middle of the city is a million. Oh, that's what we could do. The prize pool in the middle, if the zombies touch it as well, then they lose the money. So they're not only defending themselves but also the prize pool. So in the middle of the city, so that's why they have to build a fort around it. And then every day, if they complete their crazy task, 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 one, they complete the task before the zombies come at night. And then it's like, I come in on a helicopter. We have a rope lowered down a million dollars. It's massive in ones, right? And then it unhooks. And now they have $2 million there. Like, good luck, guys. And if there's six of them, then it's like, you're now, if you survive, are all winning over $300,000. And then, you know, but if you grow the prize pool to $6 million without getting eliminated, you're all millionaires in nine days. Bro, that would be crazy. And then, yeah, the zombies come in. We figure out the practical guns with the right sound effects.

Yeah, practical guns, right sound effects, and what entails you getting killed by a zombie. Yeah. Like, how do they—

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

People are going to want to be zombies anyway. True, because it's going to look sick. It's going to be sick.

Honestly, I would want to be a zombie. Just, 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 in the woods. Oh, my gosh. While these dudes are sneaking in. And you'd have to have some sort of rules, like how the zombies can move, whether they can run, whether they can, you know what I mean? Yeah. Because, like, we have to decide, are these 28 days later zombies that run at you? Or are these, like, walking dead zombies that are, like, kind of, like...

We'd probably start off that way, but they evolve with time. And I'm a big fan of, like, usually when you have, like, people who are playing certain roles, they usually end up going rogue. It's really hard to get hundreds of people to do, like, certain things, like, you know, in an unscripted sandbox environment. So we would have to constrict them in a way where, like, if we didn't want them to move past a certain speed, we'd probably have to figure out some way to put, like, a chain around. around their feet or something that physically wouldn't allow them to do it or like if you have 300 zombies going right you you can't redo it right like if one of those zombies goes rogue and and scratch it's like i can't reshoot the shell right that's like that's what's so high stakes about the things we do in a super world so we'd have to physically make it where they couldn't do things they're not supposed to do in a perfect world or when if you have 300 people if two percent go rogue that's still six zombies going rogue which is brutal this episode is brought to you

buy blue chew i'm sure you've heard of blue chew by now but let me tell you what they've been up to they've been on a mission to get you bricked up for years and now the number one brand for better sex over five million happy men have bought blue chew for better sex and you know what girls love the results too their new four-in-one chewable blue chew gold is for performance and passion Two ingredients maximize blood flow for stronger, longer-lasting boners, and two, get you in the mood. It's designed to dissolve under your tongue for fast results. They are number one for a reason, and we have a special deal for our listeners right now. Buy two months of Blue Chew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Yeah, it is brutal. But I think with proper planning, if you really sit down and plan out what the zombie's task is, what it means, and like what these people are doing and what goals are they trying to achieve while they're there and while they're defending against zombies. You've 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 if someone just fucking sleeps all day and doesn't get anything done, even if they survive, they can't make any money. Yeah.

I get what you're saying. You know what I'm saying? And that works 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 there's always going to be people that won't quit.

Me and you are hold to different standards. And if I did that, there would be maybe 10 trillion articles written about how I'm the most evil man on the planet. 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. You just got to make an awesome show. The awesome show is you keep these motherfuckers awake. And you make it so that they can choose to sleep if they want. But there are tasks to achieve. And if you can complete these tasks, you have the potential to make a lot of money. But if you don't complete the tasks, you can't make any money even if you survive.

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

You've got to keep these motherfuckers awake so that nighttime is terrifying. 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'd 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 was the problem of people randomly shooting wild while there's other people around them. So it kind of would have to be blanks and lasers. Because now that I'm thinking about it, people are going to spaz out and accidentally shoot someone in the face. This is where... Especially if they're tired.

I've done... I mean obviously you did unscripted with but I've done lots of unscripted stuff with lots of people and exactly when you're talking about the shotgun stuff I'm like you know there's just no shot in hell that we'd ever be able to. It would have to be like but I love the gel rounds and we could do it in a way where we set that the guns where it looks really cool and we can recreate the sound effect but then gel rounds like it's essentially like the nerf ones now I'm remembering them like they're like water that explodes on impact. Those would be perfect honestly. 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 no you want

them together i'm telling you like if they built a fort around the money what you want in the shots is you always want to 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 but if you have the money in the background the shot intuitively viewers will be like that's what they're competing for so like a fort built around it where they have walls and they're standing on it and you see the money behind them in the shots like intuitively to a viewer you're going to instantly understand the motivation and it's going to be uh like i

mean it'll just be so crazy the shots maybe it's like a super advanced game of hide and seek at night where the people can't talk. They have to be very quiet.

it because the zombies have like hyper hearing. Like 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. Oh, and they amplify. You can hear everything else way louder, but when guns go off, it kills volume above a certain amount of decibels. Yeah. So they can hear everything. So if you hear someone whisper like that, the zombies like will be able to key in on it they'll know where the people are and these people have to hide from the zombies

at night true because i guess the other thing is if they built a fort around it how would the

zombies even get to them right 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 yeah

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 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 him loose that makes no cheating there's something this could be wild this could honestly this is one of those things where i say this to my team quite a bit it's either going to be like the worst show imaginable that people clown on or it's going to be like the number one show ever and there's no in between like you don't do this like kind of all right where people are like i like it it's either like cringe we failed this sucks or it's like this is the greatest thing ever why did this not exist before like the walking dead or what's the hbo show called uh the one with the last of us yeah the last of us in real life like how has no one done this you know what i mean like like actual true simulation and like if we executed properly i really could see it be like a number one show in the world type thing that people would like because also you have to think like the world is ran by clips these days i don't you know on like tiktok feeds instagram reels and youtube shorts and like it is arguably the most clippable thing ever like any 10 second scene of that you could just throw on youtube shorts and go viral because it's freaking zombies getting shot at and you know

how cool they can make those masks look yeah i mean you get a real special effects guy to work

on those masks yeah like one of those experts can you search up mr b's zombies uh we have a video on our channel from like i mean god knows how long ago seven years ago where we we did like make like a mini zombie horde but not like in a simulation like this just for fun to see how people in public are to react and like the it looks disgusting the things they were able to do

it's pretty crazy yeah special modern special effects and makeup artists they could do amazing

stuff man wait uh if you could find like a close-up of my face or like it was like crazy we we just brought in people 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 100 100 exactly 100 yeah that was really all that's the look you the what yours looks like with like the teeth and everything and fucked up flesh that is the mask exactly so you take that hard airsoft mask and you put that shit on it joe the problem is i want to go work

on this now we like so it's it's funny i have this thing where uh this might sound like crazy to some people but when i you can you know when you feel your heart rate get elevated when i talk about an idea and i can feel my heart rate get all the way i'm usually like that's a good indicator that it's like a good idea because it means i'm getting like dude this is a good idea yeah i know i can literally feel or not anymore but like a couple minutes ago i could feel my heart beating because i was getting excited and that's like that usually almost always correlates with people because if i'm getting excited talking about it you have to think like a lot of things right now are because of tiktok and reels and stuff they they go viral because of word of mouth and so like if just talking about the idea gets someone excited then that usually means 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 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 can see it yeah i can see scenes i can see darkness starting to settle in on the town yeah and i can see the people like trying to figure out where to hide and what to do and the eyes

that night that was genius 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 uh i don't know you're like uh just ability to really think deeply of like what makes it fucking cool and and you're really hyper fixating on what makes the zombies cool and like the realistic nature of it and i'm hyper fixating on uh just kind of the overall set design and things there's like a venn diagram in the middle where we combine like the two like obsessions and it really like merges together it makes something beautiful yeah man and you could

also have like not just zombies you could have like Thank you. other things that are out there too that can get people yeah jamie can we get 10 days on his

schedule can he do one of the oh well the actually no because you wouldn't you don't need the money but it would be cool if you were competing in it because then that would be insane yeah i just 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 uh sandbox vr uh is that the one where it's like the you just go in and there's random worlds you can walk

around on it uh it's 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 and 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 we're co-producing this now

you're too invested you just spent 34 minutes on a whatever podcast like ripping on it well there's

something to it man i i just i see it in my head i'm like that would be an amazing show i just see these people like in the like in a 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 oh there's still

two hundred thousand dollars 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 then 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 the more you accomplish the more money you could potentially make each day is an escape room so every day there's new puzzles to solve and then

you're getting fucking tired because you're not sleeping the escape room is a good uh a good through way to do the task it's not like some goofy stuff like move this rock from one side together but like an actual escape room and maybe the million dollars that win each day is inside like uh like so it could be like i drop a volt every day in the middle and then like you have to do a series of things to figure out the combination that are yes 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 so i don't me and my family we do them

everywhere we go they're fucking awesome and the best ones are in vegas they have insane they have an it one in vegas it one and it two you're in this it's fucking incredible it's so good and it's huge it's like 30 000 square feet this place 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. Oh, my God, dude.

And I know the perfect people for it. We did, for Salesforce, we did their Super Bowl commercial this year. And in the commercial, I hit a million dollars 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 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 people to find the million dollars. And it's like one of the craziest internet like puzzle hunts ever because it would like take you to this website, which then would take you to this other one where you'd have to call a number and like it's a four-hour voicemail. But like at the very end, I would like say like 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, blah, blah, blah. And if you weren't recording this, you're going to have to listen to all four hours again, hang up. And then it's just like sending you everywhere. And it's basically like 100 of the most complex puzzles on the internet. And like it took this like group of like really high level puzzle solvers almost an entire month to solve it with a million dollars on the line and millions of people were trying and there's a whole subreddit dedicated to it and so i just uh i just basically went on red and i got all the like the most cracked out like uh puzzle solvers in the world i was like if you had unlimited budget how would you make the most insane puzzle ever and then that's what they came up with and it was like it's like hard to even articulate the the steps on it like some of it was uh uh how do i even i don't even know how to describe it it was like so complicated like sometimes there's like a page with like a bunch of buttons on it like a million buttons but only one works and you have to go through and click it all and so some of them were mundane and then other stuff is like you know paragraph attacks and you have to like use some old language like decipher the text to figure out what the words were and so like each puzzle required like a

different skill set to like get through it king of the hill is coming in hot bobby and connie are official we were just warming each other up shut up oh good god Thank you.

Hulu's hit animated series is back for a brand new season of big changes. Our communication skills could be a little better. Peggy, it's against golf etiquette. What does golf etiquette say about jamming this club into your mouth? It's frowned upon. The new season of the Hulu original King of the Hill, premiering July 20th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

Yeah. 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 it exists so like in the commercial i'm wearing a belt that just had different colors on it but if you put the colors in order it like translates to this thing and like i mean i don't even understand what half the things were but people were able to figure it out eventually like they're they're just showing me like oh this represents braille these dots and so we put them in this wave and then if you combine it with these colors and it got like pretty insane and so it all ties back to like the super bowl commercial and like all every little thing in there uh and like one part of the puzzle is you have to find locations on a map and like in the commercial i've hold up a grenade and it's like a one plus question mark equals is like whatever and uh it ends up being like uh but the text is yellow and like uh it's like a stone was drawing on it and like it basically meant yellow stone and then you you put in yellow stone and 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 and 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 a million dollars and like there's a million dollars 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 because what you'll see in these puzzles too is like uh because we also did one years ago i love doing these like online scavenger hunts that with just your computer you can win a bunch of money and you'll see like when so like one person will will solve a thing and then hundreds of people will solve it right afterwards because they'll go post it on reddit or they're working in groups and so it'll be like stand still 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 and but then as you get closer to the end you stop seeing that effect they start being more secretive and quiet about it and so it's pretty cool to see like the

psychology of how they do it you could have these people completely unarmed in the beginning And the only way they can get guns is to solve puzzles.

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

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

Yeah, and maybe, you know, I also think of, like, fun stuff, too. Like, we could give them, like, there could be a gun safe or armory in this city, but it's like they have to, like, break into it, right? and that could just be a thing that takes like a ton of time like uh so you have to like 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 no shot of stream platform would be okay with this but it would be cool if we let them like there's like mixtures and stuff to make a bomb hidden throughout the thing and they have to go find it and he makes like a mock c4 and puts it on it and you know and then that's how they get in the gun safe but maybe it's more like uh what's that hacksaw or whatever and it's like you we make you get a safe where if you hacksaw it for like 10 hours you can like break the lock on it and get in so then someone just has to stand there and

hold it or you give people a stethoscope and a book on how to crack safes true and you have like click click click click yeah try to figure it out yeah and someone's just like there for like two

days straight but then if he gets in it's just 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 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 with the team like ours is like it's possible just like get the safe that looks aesthetically how you want and then just replace the lock right yeah just make it so that it's fix it's solvable exactly complicated yeah yeah that would be cool because then it's like well i'm a big fan of when they have agency and so it's like you know it's like we could even lay it out there like this will take days to solve yeah and so you could spend days going collecting guns or days making money to grow the prize pool or you could spend days trying to get lucky on this like safe that is doable but there's no guarantee you figure it out and having tons of stuff like that that's what like makes it interesting too for the viewer because you're like uh i love in these kind of reality shows where a viewer can ask what would i do right yes and that's what tends to be what like uh people in families when they watch together they love like like in beast games when i offer someone a million dollars but you have to eliminate your friends you know sometimes people turn down the million dollars sometimes people take the million dollars eliminate their friends and like that's an interesting thing to go well if i was in their spot i don't care like it's a million dollars the point is to make money that's why i'm on the show take but other people see that and they're like no like my integrity is worth you know i wouldn't take a billion dollars over my integrity right and for you know and some people you know even though it's a game show

like no i i care you know and so but giving them like these kind of dilemmas all throughout it too so then as a viewer i can be like yeah why i wouldn't do that i would just go scavenge you

know it'd be cool also you could make it so that ammo and certain supplies are only available at night so so they're incentivized to move you have to go out you have to decide whether or not it's worth getting caught whether or not you can sneak around and grab the ammo and then you also have to find it you have to find the ammo maybe find food find supplies like supplies are left in

duffel bags at night you know bro there's so many ways we could take this something that would be cool is every night we move their pile of money into a random building that they don't know 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 night time would be different because they're in a different building and they don't know yeah that's cool yeah and

Finding, like, having, like, random ammo caches. Maybe during the day they have to solve the puzzle that lets them acquire a map. And then they have to figure out where these random ammo dumps are and supply dumps are and food dumps are. So they're already hidden.

Well, actually, you know what?

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

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

And then if they go out to that city and they make the journey and they realize, this is going to take us 10 hours to solve this. By that time, it'll be 2 in the morning. It's already going to be dark. We should go back now.

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

you know this so i mean we've only done this in an hour right an hour or so there's so many different possibilities if you just sat down and worked it must be so fun to do what you do dude

exactly well this is see what we're uh doing right now is we're what i would call blue sky and we're not thinking about for the most part restrictions we're just thinking about what's great content and a lot of that's lost like people in a lot of writers room they'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 figure out what is the best show possible and then i'll just have people go figure out what is possible or not and in reality everything we've said is possible it's just certain things will require a little bit of time like the safe you know using a modern safe but changing a lot that's possible what does it cost and how long does it take right you just go through and you attach all that to everything and you do a very first principles way of going about it and it's just objective it would take x amount of time it would cost as much money and then like you know and then you just go through and figure out what's worth it what's not as opposed to all you know every step away people be like no you can't do that go ahead and redo it and it's just like a it seems obvious but i'm not really sure of many media companies that approach it like we do which is

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 there's 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.

What's the purple cow effect?

So if you're driving down the road and you see a cow, who cares? You'll never think of it. But if you're driving down the road and you see a purple cow, you're going to think about it like, why was that cow purple? And it'll stick in your brain. It's the same thing with content. If it's a show you've seen multiple times or a format that's similar, you won't think twice. But if it's a purple cow, but something you've never seen, then you'll think about it again. And that's what's counterintuitive to how, like you were saying, most execs think. They think, well, we did this before. It did well. Repeat it. But it's actually the inverse of how you should look at it. And thankfully, that's why with Beast Games, I've worked with Prime Video because they just give us creative control. And they're like, you know what you're doing. You can do it. But everyone sees that creators are growing bigger and bigger audiences. 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 time.

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 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 because it's like you're paying them because they get millions of views of video because they have a core audience and then you're stripping the thing away that got them that core audience and it's like why are you even working with them at that point and more and more platforms are like waking up to it but it's just like comical how slow they are to it And, like, they should just trust them more.

Well, it's hard for them because they have to put up so much money and not everybody's Mr. Beast. You know, that's the problem. It's like you have a great vision and you're really good at executing, but some people aren't. And so if you're going to dump a bunch of money into something and you see them making a disaster, you know, like the Joker 2 or something like that. You're like, hey, hey, hey, what the fuck are you doing?

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

I still haven't seen it, but I heard it's amazing. Oh, what? You would love it. I know.

I just don't go to movie theaters anymore. I don't either, but like that one, 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 like that.

Yeah, Obsession, Backrooms, which are made by a creator, Amazing Digital Circus, they've been crushing it, Iron Lake. So it's like Hollywood seeing it more and more. But the writing's been there for years. But now that, I mean, we just had essentially four hit films made by creators back to back to back to back.

Well, did you see Talk to Me? No. Talk to Me, the horror movie? No. It was great. These two guys from Australia, they were hilarious. These two brothers, they came in and they talked to me about it. But they were making YouTube videos. Yeah. What's their name again? It's called Talk to Me, right? No. What's the creator's name? Jamie will pull it up. Both brothers, Michael and Danny Philippou. Okay. So they're so funny. They were on the podcast. What's their YouTube channel? Both of them speak like a million miles an hour.

Yeah. I can't think of their channel. they're uh the raka raka 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 raka raka brothers on a couple years ago oh really two 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 uh 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 thousand dollar game of uno against some of 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 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're like slapping cards down the sd card's corrupt that's crazy i know it was

like wild and like we were like flipping desk and like going like we were just the most batshit game of uno you've ever seen 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 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 it's i don't want to say anything more okay it's really good is it is it like scary scary yeah okay yeah it's a horror movie all right it's fun okay it's really good my my fiancee loves horror films so you'll love it it's really well my and it was like when i saw it i was like this is crazy these guys 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 he doesn't you don't have to have famous actors to make these amazing movies yeah it's like it's not really

necessary like the back rooms i think the the director i think is like 20 years old or whatever i mean very very young and i think it just crossed 100 million 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 backwards it's kind of like steve job says it's hard to connect the dots going forward but you can connect them backwards when you look back at the 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 you know to compile a bunch and it was like essentially practice for the movie and it's just cool to see the progression of so many directors going over and what's interesting though is when you see these things happen there's obviously a delay right because producing films takes sometimes years and so like now that you see all these hits bang bang bang

coming out of the creator space over in traditional Hollywood, then you're not going to see the fact six months from now. But 18 months from now, I would bet money you're going to see dozens of other movies made by creators. And obviously these people are going to get more funding. And because now everyone's eyes are being opened to what should have been open a while ago, but this is what people are watching now. Especially people under the age of 30, they grow up watching YouTube, and they're spending two hours a day flipping through sub-60-second vertical feeds of TikTok reels and shorts. And this is culture for them. this is their world you know like 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're just trying to follow it out and people are not limited to whatever genre you know them from. Just because someone makes, like, funny TikTok reels doesn't mean they can't make a great horror film. Exactly. But think about, like, Jordan Peele, right? Made Keane Peele, made this comedy sketch show, and then all of a sudden he makes these, you know, like, get out. And you're like, what the fuck, man?

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

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

Yeah, and I wonder too – I feel like horror films, it's a little easier to do on a smaller budget because it's like a lot of it is like the unknown 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 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.

Well, it 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 tension and like if the the the thing that's scary, it like makes you feel that way. But like feelings aren't directly correlated to money spent. And like, you know, you you could have like this monster that doesn't appear to the end and you don't need to like CGI it throughout the whole thing. But if you tell the story the right way and the constant tension, you can feel like phenomenal throughout the whole thing.

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

Speaking of not seeing a movie, I did watch Ex Machina after the last podcast. How good is it? Yeah, it was really good. You know, honestly, I was like, it's probably silly, but I'll watch it because, you know, Joe told me it years ago. I loved it. I didn't realize it was that good.

It's one of my top ten all-time favorite movies. It's so good. Also because it's coming. That's coming. Oh, and now, yeah, it's more relevant than ever. Did you see the computer electronics show from Vegas this year? Computer electronics? With the drones? CES. Well, they have everything. And one of the things they had was an AI companion. And this AI companion is a hot Asian lady with big boobs. And the lips don't sync up with the mouth, which is with the way the sound's coming out. But it's talking to you in AI.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. Or chat GPT or Gemini.

And it's doing it with a voice. So with a hot voice.

I mean. And it's like, that's common, dude. Well, of course. I mean, the language model is already there, right? Yeah. 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 normal.

And it'll talk to you with slang. Exactly. It'll talk to you and say that part. Yeah. It'll say it'll.

Well, one thing that's, it's funny. I play this board game a lot called Dune. Whatever. I'm a big nerd. But there's like this one time.

It's called Dune? Yeah, Dune the movies?

Yeah, it's a recreation. What's funny, I hadn't even seen the movies when I started playing the game. I didn't realize there was movies. I didn't even know there was books. I just was looking for fun strategy board games. I used to play a lot of Catan, but the problem was Catan. It's like dice roll, and if you get unlucky, you don't really win. There's games where there's a skill ceiling where the best player always wins, which is chess is a perfect example of that. but then it gets to the point of like well if you want to be really great at that it's who spends the most time doing it so i don't want one that's a hundred percent skill but i don't want something that's too much randomness that's how i take board games a little serious because i love strategy games and like uh because if it's too much dice roll like theoretically monopoly or katan then it's like who cares it's just whether or not you got lucky so that it's like i did a lot of research into like finding a game where there's like a little bit of randomness so it's not just devote all your life but they're like as 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 to play it. And I got really hooked into it. But it's ironic because then I saw the movies were dropping and I was like, oh. And then all the characters started to make sense after I watched the movies. After I've been probably a thousand hours into the game. I was totally backwards on the IP. But anyways, because we were talking about talking to, one of the top players makes YouTube videos on it. And I was kind of curious what he would do if he was like in certain move like positions as me so i just took all the transcripts of like a hundred of his youtube videos and i just put it into gymni and uh and i was just like hey you know uh 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 the player's name is dyno whatever but uh and so i called it dyno.io and i'd be like what would dyno.io do here and it was pretty funny because it would respond just like because it had so many like uh words from all his videos like dozens of hours and it was uh and like uh i know one of dino's friends his name is che and i was like would you take a bullet for che and dino's like a very analytical guy and like the ai was like well it depends is it in the foot is it in the chest and it responded exactly how like my 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 um and And then so I would put it where it was on a Discord call and like, Dino, we would be playing. And then I'd ask a question 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 pretty crazy. And yeah, and so it was just so surreal. So talking about, like, the robot thing, I just wonder, too, if, like, if you put, like, a pendant around someone's neck and you just recorded them talking for, like, a week or two and then you just fed that into an LLM and then you were like, hey, talk to me like this person talks. Like, you could have that, you know, whatever Asian robot you're talking about, you could have it literally talk to you like some other human, right? Because it's interesting, too, because I was like, hey, give me a breakdown of Dino's speech. And it was like, hey, 0.15% of his words are um, around 0.3% of what he says is like. it gave me like a full breakdown of like the last hundred thousand words he said what percentage they are how he typically structures his things like if you put him in a stressful situation he'll like kind of respond more like this but if it's more chill he'll use this vocabulary it was like really cool uh but also scary because i was like man i have a lot of me talking right like this podcast theoretically people could just take dozens of hours of this and just make like a little jimmy.io and it's enough where it can pick up on my speech patterns and how i would respond to

certain situations 100 they can do that easily and then just put you in a robot and now jimmy

lives forever exactly or you can just have your robot be whoever which is like kind of weird like

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 yeah you come home and jimmy's

vacuuming oh god we're 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 cemetery talk yeah but if someone's like really grieving they might you know do it because they want some normalcy back

or something i'll probably feel empty and hollow and even creepier you have a robot that's pretending

to be your husband yeah yeah fuck off that's crazy i know but just i don't know these next few years are gonna be crazy man everything's developing so rapidly and yeah it's just uh Yeah, 2036 is going to be completely different than 2026. I know, isn't that?

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

blade runner i mean it's just like the some of the people i see working on like you know augmented reality glasses and like we're you know like there's animes where people get trapped in video games and stuff like that and i could really see like 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 And you could literally just generate whatever the world is you want in. Literally, like, you know, 10 years from now, potentially just real-time generate the video game you want to be in and cater to what you like and just so many possibilities. And obviously with humanoid robots, it's 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.

I would say 10 years from now. years from now that would be five years from now probably 10 years from now i feel like that would just be like you know is this a rocker an iphone or whatever like no one would they're just going to be normalized to especially like younger people like younger kids who grow up with chat gpt and ai and stuff like that it's like it's just intuitive to them you know to go use these things or um as opposed to other means and so it's just like as that generation you know grow once they become a thing then give it a couple years for people to get used to it and normalize to it and then

you know, it's not going to take that long. Yeah. It's going to be very, very, very weird.

Yeah, it is. It's like, and it's also like scary because you don't know the implications, like whether it'll be negative, positive, you know, some people will be negative for other people will probably be positive. Right. You know, um, like if you're a VFX artist in media, you'll probably be able to spend more time doing cool stuff and creative work and, and less time like going frame by frame and like, you know, like no one actually enjoys like rotoscoping someone's hair and 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 allowed 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 and not to the point where you just don't even need the person entirely but it's like anyone's guess where like the puck ends up stopping you know 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 uh 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 gonna probably restrict people's ability to make decisions

because we're so destructive i did i listened to your podcast with uh mark and recent and and i do like what he said or not like but it's just interesting when he pointed out that like you know ai is the smartest doctor in the world is the smartest blank in the world is the smartest of everything right and typically you know billionaires like him would be only have limited access to these high level professionals in each industry but now essentially democratize that 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 uh not omnipotent but all knowing and knows all these things like it's like scary because it's like we don't want i as a human i'm like no i don't want to make those decisions but if you like purely take emotion out of it logically it's like well would you rather a human with flaws that could do something fairly bad or this thing that has a lot more context and you know knowledge and experience right you say you want an experienced person making a decision well technically this has the experience of everyone ever in history on the internet right so yeah but it's also i don't even know man it's crazy but hopefully for the most part right now at least it seems like it's allowing people to do less like busy work and less things that they don't enjoy and focus more at least in media what i'm seeing focus more on things they they do enjoy like i was saying like the example of not having to roto every single frame on a body or you know being able to pre-visualize scenes or or whatever so i it's like it seems and everything i'm seeing and maybe i live in a bubble on twitter it seems like it's 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. 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. And so then you have to give them motivation. So you have to explain to them at an early age that going after tasks, completing tasks, doing things that are difficult and challenging is actually exciting and fun. And that's what you should generate. And then we're going to have to reward people based on that. And it's just to figure out, like, what incentivizes people to do things. because if they don't get incentivized and then we also have vr and ar and games that you can play all day long that are way more exciting than real life that you don't want to just take your government money and play call of duty all day yeah especially if it becomes vr call of duty

exactly that's where it's gonna get hard because i think of like how addicted to video games i was when i was a kid i mean still to some degree now but like and if it was in a headset and like a completely different world like oh my gosh like my poor mom like good luck getting me out of that like she struggled to get me to stop staring at a screen and making call duty youtube videos and playing call duty when i was younger and you know uh but if i was like actually in a headset oh and all my friends are on it yeah you know and then you take it off and now you have freaking homework and like real life stuff and like you went from the most overstimulating beautiful different utopia world where everything's a

Thank you.

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 it better and better with each iteration exactly there's no way to stop it it's going to happen and that's sandbox vr but times a million if you go 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 and there you do a bunch of stuff but if this is an actual fucking warehouse you have physical boundaries that exist like and then you're in a virtual space where as you're walking it looks like the actual ground that you're walking on yeah and And you won't be able to tell what's real and what's not real.

And with those omnidirectional treadmills and stuff, when someone cracks the code, you've probably never heard of it, but there's a popular anime called Sword Art Online. It's just a guy gets trapped in a video game, and he lives his life through there. And I remember watching that when I was younger. And I remember when I was really young, fresh off of watching that anime, I was like, man, I hope they figure this out in my lifetime. So when I'm like 80 years old, I can just put one of those on and just live in the video game. and it's like at first he's scared but then he ends up loving it because it's just like everything's great and um uh and yeah so i think uh yeah there's just well the problem is like what's real

and what's not real you know is it really important for things to happen physically in in the real air quotes real world or will it be just as fulfilling to exist in these virtual

worlds i mean there i remember when i was younger i'd play like this game called wizard 101 it's like world of warcraft like an mmo rpg 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 better and like i don't care put that headset on me like i'm done let me just live it out in here you know someone come in stretch my my limbs every couple of days like you know put an ib 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 yeah between the simulation and real life and you know there's a lot of people that are very intelligent people that believe we are inside of some sort of a simulation currently elon's one of them he said the odds of us not being in a simulation are in billions 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 a thousand years yeah the

hundredth 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 an event horizon 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 not far-fetched to think you could have someone put a headset on or whatever and simulate, you know, trillions of things.

Not just that, but then there's the reality of the structure of the universe itself, like subatomic particles acting differently when they're observed versus not observed. experiment yeah yeah so it's like okay what what effect is consciousness having on reality itself and are we limited in our senses and our ability to recognize the impact of it and do we live in a siloed version of reality that's we're imprisoned by our sight there's 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 no 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 a thousand you know blind people or people who couldn't cc again with cataract surgeries and i i did think about that it's like fascinating because you know if they didn't have other humans around them they they just would have never known that sight was a thing 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 sense that we might not be aware of that a bunch of them i bet yeah yeah i mean but that that is like an interesting thought experiment and like because like to those people um it was uh you actually a random memory i just got to we we also did a video where we helped a thousand deaf people here again um and a lot of them it was just giving them like really really advanced hearing aids and that you know and they just hadn't heard in years and there's this one scene we did where um a guy had a newborn child that was like a couple years old but it was deaf since the the child was born and had never heard his child and so we we put it in and it like really really amplified sound where he could actually hear he hadn't heard sound in god knows how long and then the first thing 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 but yeah that was that was a like one of the most special things we've ever filmed was like that moment right there i was like wow that's crazy yeah we we assume that the

senses that we have detect everything that's around us but we we know that's really not true because they're so limited just in terms of our ability to see things right we see more things with the 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 Right. It's just, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if we'll ever know, but.

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

Exactly. Yeah. And, like, yeah, this is kind of crazy. You'd have no idea.

If you didn't have a sense of smell, you would just be existing just like everybody else. And 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 can smell anything. Yeah. You know, but think of, like, gases and all sorts of, like, a gas leak in your house or weird shit that you smell, skunks. All that stuff you'd be missing out on.

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

It would suck. Food wouldn't taste as good. Yeah. You wouldn't know if you had BO. Yeah.

But for the most part, your odds of living don't really drop that much. And, like, your overall happiness wouldn't change dramatically.

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 is like rejecting. You know, there are certain things you smell. You go, oh, what the fuck is this? I got to get away from that. Because your body is letting you know, like this is toxic. Whatever you're breathing in is not normal air. 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 four years ago and it's like uh especially like the entire podcast uh i was way younger back then was all about like youtube data and analytics i don't know if you remember that and it's like i do uh like one thing i've noticed it's interesting because like i i started making videos when i was 11 so my entire life is on the internet right and like my puberty every development and stuff and i i look at that our old podcast and like it is so like uh 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 uh someone were to theoretically search mr v's joe rogan and they you know if they clicked on either one of these podcasts it'd be two completely different experiences right um well you look differently yeah i mean you look great man i was saying

before the podcast you look fantastic you lost weight you look really healthy thank you yeah i

was uh telling joe before the podcast i lost 50 pounds between the last one and this one that's awesome man yeah and and last time when you would ask me about movies or you asked me all these things every because i was listening to it on 3x being a car right here every single thing i was like i don't know i was like one thing and one thing only i know youtube it was like i know nothing else and i i blocked everything else out of my like my world which is interesting because I actually think that wasn't a positive, right? I think if I consumed more other mediums and culture, it would have been better inspiration. I would have been a better storyteller. So I actually don't think it was a good thing, which is why I've since then opened up and I let more things into my mind.

If I could push back on that, though, I think it allowed you to be hyper-successful because you were so focused on it that I think it really worked out to your benefit. I don't think it's a bad thing.

Yeah, no, I think the hours put in, yes, but it's like instead of consuming four hours of YouTube a day, allowing like allow myself to occasionally watch a movie i think i would have been more tapped in

and understood how to tell stories well you were younger and you that's part of the process i know

it's just so funny listening to that podcast because i even i as myself i watched that i was on the car i was like wow i like seem like borderline like a freak on certain things here it's like you were like you would like change the subject on certain things and then i

instantly bring it back to the one thing i knew like youtube data and like i i could like tell that i didn't even know and i would just be like oh yeah that thing anyways retention and it was just so funny uh listening to it but it's just interesting though because you know i'm sure you see like a lot of your your podcast you do most people consume it through clips on social media right 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 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 sometimes there'll be things 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 full 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-one-minute-ish vertical content, you know, that they swipe through the feed.

But it does inspire people to listen to the whole thing. Yeah. And 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 of like 56% of people now prefer to watch a sporting event through clips as opposed to like the actual thing. Like they'll just get it on their feed.

I guarantee you that's the case with like the UFC. because i know for the ufc when they analyze the performance of a show like how many people watched it on paramount plus versus how many people consumed it on tiktok oh my gosh yeah it's many many fold it's like you know they they they get hundreds of millions of views on social media yeah of different you know i haven't watched the fight live in a while but

like you know the the the white house one i mean i i saw everything on my tiktok feed i mean i probably saw 150 clips of it so i have like a relatively good grasp of what it looked like

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 absorbed how bizarre it was yeah to actually be at the white house it was very bizarre the whole thing was very surreal like me and daniel cormier and john anik there were so many moments like the day before the event where we're we're rehearsing so we're standing by the octane i made a video of it where i put it on dc it's like the white house like i'm showing the white house there's the cage and then the white house is

right there yeah and the flyover and everything nuts but see that's how when i was talking about the roman coliseum before that's how i yeah but i didn't get the like well you know they were

going to do elon musk versus mark zuckerberg in the roman coliseum but it was going to cost 150 million dollars just to secure the venue and and set everything up i mean i could have hooked him up also it would have been a terrible fight yeah like he would have been destroyed it would have He thinks he's big, and so that's going to be enough. But Mark knows how to fight. Mark is, like, really into it. He trains all the time. I mean, he's obsessed. He brought this guy that I know, Dave Camarillo, who's a world-class coach, who's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, judo black belt. He's been training him. Like, he's training with, like, hardcore people.

Well, because 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, 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, I can tell that's, like, his way of, like, bonding and building friendships. And, like, yeah, he just, like, he was being very serious. Like, he wanted to roll, and I've never done that in my life. And I was like, oh, I'm good.

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

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

Oh, no, no, no.

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

Well, the way you could tell that it's not fake is watching him train because there's no way he could be that good if he's not actually putting in the time. Because even his striking, his jujitsu, all that stuff is like, it's clear. There's many hours been spent working on technique to achieve this level of proficiency. I mean, he doesn't look like a world champion or anything like that, but he looks like a guy who's training a lot.

Yeah.

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

Every time I listen to whenever you have a podcast and you talk about the UFC and stuff like that, it always makes me like, I feel that masculine urge to go train and do it. But it's like, I wish I could like, I wish I could fork my life and have like one where I keep going down this path of just grinding 18 hours.

today and building all these companies and then another where I could like pursue fun stuff like that and like because that would be fun like to well how old are you Jimmy 28 yeah you're still

so young you could just do this for another 10 years and amass so much money that you could never spend it and then 10 years from now you know just slack off a little bit on that and just go do a bunch of stuff and not only that you could create content doing a bunch of stuff like Mr. Beast discovers the world like you could you could do anything man yeah I think you're so young You have so much time ahead of you.

Yeah, it's hard to even – I think you, like, as humans, we, like, build the patterns and stuff. And I've been working so many hours every day for so long that it's, like, literally, like, ingrained in me that it's hard to ever really imagine a world where, 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 the companies or making content. And, like, another 10 years from now, that would 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 war mode obsessed with it. So it's hard to envision a world where I could ever shut it off. You know what's interesting?

You and I have been doing it about the same time. We started this podcast around 17 years ago. Holy crap. Yeah, it'll be 17 years in December. I think so, right? I think in this December it's 17 years. So it's basically we've been on these parallel paths.

Which is crazy. You know what would be funny? Envision like 17 years ago you had 11-year-old me sitting here and then you sitting there.

and like comp it to today that would be amazing yeah so what are you gonna do you're gonna do uh a show on youtube uh where'd you get this idea youtube does your mom know about this

should you be in school i'd be like i don't know it was such a like how many hours a day do you

spend waking on content hey man go outside yeah 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 it's interesting too because uh it's like very accepted to be a content creator it's like cool people love it it's like even parents now 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 etc 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 to go survey like 100 random teenagers, a lot of them, a good chunk of them would say they want to be a content creator. Maybe not specifically a YouTuber, but between TikTok, Instagram, influencer, 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 going to make money? You're going to be homeless. Yeah. And so it's so funny to see how it changes.

Well, the same thing with podcasts. Back then, I would tell people I'm doing a podcast, and they would be sad. Like, oh, poor guy. Like, what the fuck's wrong with you? You used to be on TV. You're like, oh, I'm having fun.

Yeah, you've fallen from grace. And it's so interesting, too, to see, like, you know, as, like, YouTubers and stuff first started getting big, like, they all used 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, like, 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 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 um you know not everyone can make tens of millions of dollars or maybe be as successful as like you or i can but i do believe most people if they you know find something they like put in a lot of hours like a ridiculous amount of hours consume you know basically everything's available on the internet now consume all knowledge available on how to be good at certain thing and then you know do a thousand iterations on it um then they can come out the other side and do it for a living you know what i mean like i feel like they're but most people aren't exposed to that kind of i mean to be honest rhetoric like they they think still you know their parents went to college god 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 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 there are like you know certain content creators that might blow up in two 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 time frame you can give yourself but if you're surrounded with other people obsessed with the certain thing you're obsessed over or whatever it is you're you put in 10 000 hours and in those 10 000 hours you do a thousand iterations and you consume all knowledge available on it it's like you know the better you do it the further to the right like the two-year mark you'd be of being able to do it for a career but you know it's sometimes it will take longer and you just have give yourself enough time in it but eventually you can make it happen and i think that just more young people need to to hear that really um 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 consume it and then recognize like you might be like oh well this person did it in 10 months why is it taking me so long it's just it's average and statistics and just give yourself enough time frame and like it's it's hard to again i'm not saying you'll make tens of millions of dollars but if you want to do that thing for a living it's if you follow those those you know traits like it's it's going to happen eventually um because well

you have to be process oriented not goal oriented you know the process is getting better at stuff the the goal of being financially secure comes with it eventually but if you think i want x amount of money well that's what you're 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 And this is – you know, one of the cool things about owning a comedy club is that we've set up the club so there's a real path. Like these people understand how you can become a professional. Because becoming a professional when I first started was this very vague, weird thing. Like you never – no one knew how it was done. Like you went to open mic nights. You did open mic nights. How do I get paid? How do I ever be a professional? Someone has to ask you to go with them on the road, and then you wind up getting mentored by another comedian, which is nice because they usually need opening acts. And that's kind of how we did it. But what we set up at the comedy club, we have a real creative director, this guy Adam Egan, who is the creative director at the Comedy Store, the talent coordinator. He watches all the open micers, and he finds people that are good. We have two nights of open mic nights. And then we have Kill Tony. So we have Kill Tony, the show, which is every Monday, where these people pull a random name out of a bucket. and you have a chance to go up. Phenomenal show if people don't watch it. It's hilarious. The best fucking show ever. Yeah. And these people get to do one minute of stand-up and if it blows up and they do well, they get to come back. And if they get to come back, then all of a sudden millions of people have seen them do stand-up and now they're selling out comedy clubs and they have real careers. 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 Matty was in Estonia and he went to Australia for 10 years, just grinding trying to make it in comedy gets on kill tony boom now he has a career it's

incredible and i don't recognize those names but 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 there are millions of people like me that we're not like we're casual comedy watchers right i don't you know maybe i'll watch netflix special here or there and i watch kill tony and so like yeah if you don't exist in one of those two things you just don't exist in my world and there's so many

people like me there's a lot of people now like that particularly and we wanted to set up a network we wanted to set up like a real pathway where these people can you can see hey other people like like like cam patterson he was a doorman at the comedy store and now he's on saturday night live or yeah doormat the mothership rather and now he's on saturday night live he started out at the mothership and he's working there as an employee and he's funny and i know who he is He's amazing. Because of Kill Tony. Yes, because of Kill Tony. Exactly. But there's multiple versions of that now that are coming out of the club. And so we wanted to set it up like that. So you still have to do all the work, but we want to, like, illuminate the pathway. Exactly. Like, there's a clear pathway.

Well, because it's different skill sets, right? Like, being able to get attention and get in front of people might be a different skill set than being funny and being able to make them laugh and, you know, the things that make a great comic. And so it also makes it a little straightforward for people who might be just world-class cinema on comics, but they don't know how to scrounge up enough money to travel the world and do all these things and smart enough to figure it out. And so handling that part, because at the end of the day, as a viewer, I just want to watch funny people, right?

There's also, you have to be able to see other people who have done it already and how they did it. So because of a guy like Cam Patterson goes from being a doorman at the mothership to now being on SNL, people see it and they go, oh, it can be done. What did he do? Well, he kept killing every time he got on stage. so that's what i gotta do i gotta work on my set really grind it out and i was with this guy three years ago and now this guy is rich and he's famous like this is amazing he was poor just like me like literally working for you know uh i'm sure you pay well yeah yeah but i mean doing road gigs and doing whatever you can guys are barely getting by but that's the key it's like you gotta 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 the show to have Hundreds of millions of subscribers. I want billions of hours consumed worldwide I want it to be like one of the biggest shows in human history history and i'm gonna do it on youtube you're out of your fucking mind yeah right yeah it went back

then like viral videos back then were like two million views right and so like if you would have said back then i want to get a hundred million views a video like i mean people would call you the the lunatic like you're just delusional not even delusional like a certified like lunatic

like you're not even living in reality but now that you've paved the path and then you've shown people that it can be done now you see everyone's it has a lot more confidence to reinvest it's a real career path it's a real career path if you pursue it the way someone pursues learning how to play guitar and being in a band like do it the right way i want to be a pilot what i have to do i 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 yes i mean dozens upon dozens of creators who are hiring dozens of people each i have 150 open racks in my business i mean they're you know these creators hundreds of thousands of people are going to become creators themselves full-time and those creators are going to hire millions of employees over the next you know decade or so so even if you which is what i've seen a lot of people who try to become a creator who end up failing they end up being phenomenal you know partners or employees for uh other creators right and they're the space is growing so big and there's just so much demand for it because not everyone who did stuff in traditional hollywood you know acclimates as well over here and so there's just so much like everyone i know just needs like five or six people so it's like it's a pretty useful thing and it's like almost like the equivalent of getting a college degree right if you're a teenager now and you put in 5 000 hours 500 iterations you obsess over this thing 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 um 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 four of the biggest

films came from creators it's like not even like it is like a factual thing now some of the biggest new ips are coming out of them yeah it's where all the viewership is going i mean when i was on this podcast last time i it was probably like whatever 1.8 billion people use youtube every month now it's over 3 billion you know what i mean it's it's growing and it's not slowing down it's growing more and more and more which is what i said would happen you know last time i was on here and what i still believe i don't think these things have peaked i think they're going to keep growing and um you know it's just what younger people use they've never watched television which is obvious to me and you but yeah 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 even fully understand like they're like like sometimes when i'm talking to like a younger person like um if i'm like trying to get a gauge of what 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 like no and i'll explain to them that there's like two to three minutes of commercial breaks kind of like when you watch nba but instead of like a sporting event it's like entertainment and they'll be like why why would you do that why would you like why would you put like three minutes of ads every four minutes like what and i'm like well that's just how things were and they're like why

When you've got a one-track mind, you go where the cravings take you. Welcome to Racetrack. Breakfast that satisfies. Snacks that sing. Drinks that refresh. It's a stop that pulls you in. We don't blame you for having a one-track mind. Because once you stop at Racetrack, no other stop will do.

Same time tomorrow?

You know it. Racetrack. Whatever gets you going.

It's so dumb that they still do it that way. It really is so dumb. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. You don't have to do it that way. They could probably make as much money through product placement and having an ad at the beginning and doing it. And you'll probably get more retention. You'll probably get more views. No one is going to sit and watch CBS.

What's even crazier is you would have to pay money. You'd have to pay $50 a month for cable to then have 33% of what you consume be ads, which is a higher ratio than when you watch YouTube, which is free it's like it's crazy wow and then you wonder why people are moving in hundreds of millions of droves over to this uh new form that's just like yeah and then there's podcasts which is like how many podcasts are there now oh millions obviously but how many successful ones yeah

obviously there's millions but 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 you have to plan it out yeah podcasts you're just sitting down like we we talked for five minutes before we started this podcast yeah we said hi

hey you look great what's up good to see you give me a hug you gave me some caffeine to get me cracked

out and then 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 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 podcast

how many have been uploaded this week how like that's what you know active yeah still posting

on yeah let's say seven million or something like that that's crazy yeah that's crazy i would guess active probably one million

please put this this is what I want to know how many podcasts were active in 2009 ooh let's guess that okay put that in our AI sponsor Perplexity Perplexity probably has the answer to that

wait they sponsor you guys? is that why you had the founder on?

yeah well also because he's cool I talked to him and we started talking about ancient Hindu mythology

I was like dude this gotta be a cool guest I have a download. I haven't listened yet.

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

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

So that's when I started.

Now, what is it now? that i'm curious now in 2026 how many podcasts are there oh i bet seven 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 are 69 000 versus several million shows today depending on the database you look at okay but what is the number though 4.5 to 4.7 million podcast shows globally

as of 2026 you know what i'd be curious of how many people uh do content creation full-time

i wonder what that's a good question okay let's let's figure that out yeah and compare that 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 five. Content creation is like a very online content creation. Yeah. But the problem is that's like bloggers and. Yeah. Through social media. Yeah. 2009 social media is just coming out, right? Oh, true.

You're right. 5,000 is probably coming out.

So let's just think. Let's just not even think about that. Let's just think about today. How many people are professional content creators today? Let's guess. I say 25 million.

Move. I would say lower. Probably eight. Let's see what I said.

Eight million?

Yeah. That's probably more likely.

The barrier to entry you're making me look up here is also tough. In the U.S., like taxpayers, people who are filing or just like kids who have made five bucks.

Worldwide, how many people do content creation full-time, right?

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

I will, but I'm just like, I know what it's going to do.

What do you think it's going to do?

It's going to freak out and it's going to say, there's a lot. Let's see what it says, though. That's going to say the same sort of thing. What does professional mean?

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

It's not a...

I know, it's not a great question. But let's just see what it says, just out of curiosity. It might have an answer. How would it know, really?

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

It could guess, because it guessed there, 4.5 to 4.7 million.

It's probably just going to look for any database online.

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

Are they making money? Are they not? Yeah, this seems relatively like it got the gist, though.

Yeah, it got it. It wasn't a problem, Jamie. You were pessimistic. We don't have an answer. It's given us rough data. The rough data is 8 to 12 million professional content creators, 200, 300 million people identify as content creators. So out of those, which kind of makes sense that, 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 one or two open mics a week. and how many will eventually become professional stand-up comedians and make a living off of it, you're probably in the same range of like 4% or something like that. Probably less.

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

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

I mean, at this point, if they don't see it, then I don't know what to tell you. I'm literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year or investing hundreds of millions of dollars a year into content. And so, I mean, it shows what the upper bounds look like.

Well, you're really wise in that regard, is that you spend so much money dumping it back into the business. And by doing that, your content is just so much more advanced than anybody else's. 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're just like, fuck it. Let's just spend it.

Let's go hard. Well, it's what I used to call the – creators would back in the day reach like 5 million subscribers. And then it was a real inflection point that I would notice where they'd either keep growing or that's where they'd start to teeter off because it's around the time where they'd start to make good money. And it's either like, okay, now they have a house, they have a car paid off. And like the ones that are really money motivated, they kind of got that security. And so that burning fire that was pushing them to do crazy things like kind of started to die off. And like it's like the Fermi paradox. like for quite a few people it's around that range is where you see like your favorite creators start to get lazy upload less not put as much effort and not care as much and so um but yeah i never really had any of that i just like you know i mean like i probably talked about last time we're on here i used to live in a apartment that i would share that was 720 a month so like 360 rent and um i drove a 2006 dodge durango that cost a couple thousand bucks and i just didn't have any liability so i was just like screw it i'll just keep my lifestyle cheap so i can just reinvest

at all and you know that's so wise most people don't do that and most people don't have the

discipline to work as much as you do well and yeah 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 well you were right I know, and we're great now.

But it's up to parents.

Parents always worry about their kids. Exactly. So I don't think it's like she was doing anything wrong. By all purposes, like she was doing the right thing. It's just – so you also have to overcome that pressure as well because there's so many forces around you where even if you believe in yourself, all it takes is one person like saying something like that puts self-doubt in you, and then you're like, okay, you know. But that's where I'm a big believer if you really want it. Just keep your liabilities low, like live below your means, and that way it's like, you know, It's a little easier to be riskier if you have all these things you've got to afford because what really changes if you fail?

That's definitely smart. But there's something happens also to people where just the constant grind of work, it diminishes their enthusiasm and they lose their perspective. They lose this perspective of, God, you're so fortunate to be able to do this. You're so fortunate. Exactly. And people just get really complacent. It's it's so easy for people to just forget how fortunate they are to be able to do what they're doing.

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, oh, 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, oh, you kind of regret your decisions. But then you got to like snap out of and you're like, OK, like the small subset of time. Yeah, it might be brutal. But for the most part, I'm doing dope stuff. like i'm in the pyramids i'm in the roman coliseum i'm doing like beautiful amazing things and i get to entertain and and help people and it's like and you just have to i think it's very important you're around people who like you if you have a group of people around you who when you get in those negative thought loops encourage it and help you spiral then it's bad but if you have people who are in which you know not everyone in my spot position has like people who are you know willing to tell them how it is right who are just like bro grow up like it's fine you know this will be done in 20 minutes and then you know your life's pretty good like you you don't it's it's like a it's a weird thing like you really because like i've had some of those conversations with people where i give them the perspective and i can tell like they haven't had that perspective fed to them in a very long time and you can like see it in their eyes they'll be like yeah you're right and it's like yeah you really need some like better people around you because you feel like you're you're like spiraling in these like really weird thoughts but like if you look at it objectively it's not as

bad as you think that's the really difficult resource resource to acquire is being around

positive people powerful people people that really get things done and people that are motivating and people that are really exciting that's because so many people have fast things so many people do just enough just barely enough yep you're supposed to go all the way you go three quarters of the way you know so many people so many people just they don't they and but if you're around someone who really gets after it and really is enthusiastic and really is powerful and very positive then it's contagious 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 referring groups everything even at the stage i'm at it really is because you are like you think speak talk act like the people you're around and like they say show me the five people you're around the most i'll show you what your future is and it it applies at every level you know yeah so my friend brian simpson has a

great saying he says you can't be your own boss and be a shitty employee wait elaborate on that so if you work for yourself if like you're the one who's out there doing it either yeah 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 going to be your own boss you better be a great employee and i was like oh shit like you can't be your own boss and a shitty employee yeah like if you are going to work for yourself you've got to get some shit done because that's a very rare position to be a person that works for themselves yeah do the thing you actually love to do yeah and i think one of the things that's really powerful about this time as opposed to any other time in history is that there's so many conversations like this where you get to hear from a guy like you who is doing that so people young people who are listening to this right now they listen to you like this fucking Mr. Beast is just getting after it, man. I want to do that. And instead of like hanging out with your friend and just gets stoned and plays Call of Duty all day and is always complaining about everything in his life. But meanwhile, he doesn't do anything. You're like, that's not how I want to think and behave. But that guy is. And so you get examples outside of your own personal social circle because maybe they don't know a Mr. Beast. Maybe they don't know someone who's out there doing whatever they want to do with their life. But they get examples of it online and they can listen to these people talk and they can get inspired.

Exactly. And I would assume you have a lot of parents who watch these that have kids. And I would encourage the parents to like the last three minutes of what he just said there, like maybe play that for your kids. And I can like go on top of it to say, because I agree, I don't think enough young people get exposure to this kind of mindset that it really is time, friend group, iterations on certain thing and consuming all knowledge available. It's those four things. And do those four things and like you'll make it further than you can imagine. And like, you know, there's outliers. Like you, this is what like skews a lot of people's perception is they'll find an outlier of like, well, this person became very hyper successful in this thing, but they didn't do those four things. And there's, there's outliers everywhere. But if you look at statistically the average, right? The person listening to this, you're not going to be this one in a million freak outlier. Statistically, you know, if you want to make a good income doing something you're not currently doing and you're not currently very knowledgeable in it or have much experience. It's just those four things. Find those people, put in the time. But it's like if you just listen to every Joe Rogan podcast, you're not going to 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 podcasts while also consuming all of Joe Rogan's podcasts, right? So you're doing both while also consuming all knowledge available about podcasts while also surrounding yourself with other people who want to be podcast. And then, yes, this podcast might have blown up in a year, but statistically that's not going to happen, right? You have to give yourself like the average might be four or five years. And some people like me take 10 years. And you just have to be so in love with the journey that you're cool with it. you're just like, I'm just going to do it till it works out. And, you know, it could be as soon as this, more than likely they'll be here, but there's a chance it could be there. And if that freaks you out and then scares you, then you probably don't love it enough. But if you're like, well, I'll have fun while I'm doing it, then yeah, do those four things over the long horizon. And, you know, again, you probably won't make $100 million, but if you want to make $100,000 a year or whatever, it's not out of the realm of possibility. And just those sentences alone, for a young person, they hear it, it opens like a third eye in their mind where they've just been told their whole life go to college get a job 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 do 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 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 and the process is available to anybody you just keep doing something you'll get better at it be objective be self-analytical like Recognize what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right and get better at it and constantly try to improve. And just because something doesn't exist as what is your occupation, you know, in a form from 2001 doesn't mean it's not a real job, you know. And just because you can't tell people – you know, if I told people at a cocktail party in 2009 that, oh, I'm a podcaster, like that means zero. You tell them today, they go, oh, amazing. How long have you been doing that? you know like it's a job now right so how did it become a job a job because people figured out how to make it a job and they did it and it worked and so there's a process so that process exists with virtually anything you want to do that somebody does for a living i don't care if it's rock and roll star stand-up comedian novelist there's a thing out there that you want to do that someone is making a living but meanwhile there's going to be people who's like all the odds you're making it and that like okay yeah is that what we're doing yeah we just fucking playing odds, the odds you're dying are 100%.

Once you adopt this mindset, though, then the naysayers go from being brutal to actually being good, because now the naysayers are what stop other people from doing the thing you're doing, which actually increases your odds, 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 youtube creator 10 15 years from now you know oh gosh i mean it would have to be something with ai that yeah even so what could it even be like what would it be that people are

missing that other people are gonna it's changing so quick like my brain can't even comprehend it

like nobody even thought only fans 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 only fans pages something some crazy number it's like 10 of girls 18 to whatever have only fans is that in the u.s yeah wow it's a nutty number it's crazy yeah and an enormous number of people subscribe yeah i think it's like literally half of american males have at one point in time subscribed to only fans 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

high i mean i i mean where my head's going if we're trying to predict the future maybe it would be like ai filmmakers or like something like that but i don't even 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 only fan stuff's not new though it's just right the money yeah just got the money from

a normal ads to subscription what also centralized it in the like where playboy was always a thing where you had to get picked by playboy you know now all you have to do is just take a photo of your box and now there's always the local yeah i mean but it's not centralized like only fans is where you go there and there's like thousands and i don't know how many more than that content creators you know yeah i don't know time will tell yeah time will tell but uh it's just such a fascinating world that we live in where the number one most watched show in the world is yours like you have the number one well if it's on youtube then it's the number one most watched show period yeah it's in the known universe well right now you're the most watched person in the

known universe i i opened it up on the the way in because i figured we'd talk about the size of the show uh in the last 90 days on just just our main channel it's like around 850 million unique people have watched a video in the last quarter that's so crazy yeah so we're doing around four billion

views uh 850 million people is so crazy that's too because we do we did around 12 billion views

the last 90 days on just the main channel and of those 12 billion views like whatever eight percent of them are different humans so it's like

actually like 850 million like when i say that people are like oh that's 850 million views so like you know 80 million but no it's 12 billion views 850 million unique so it's just like it's crazy man and it's like what's fascinating is you like 10 years ago like even with cable or whatever 20 years ago 850 million people didn't use the same platform right 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 geminiing 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 yeah 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 is like it's it's like uh it's crazy it's it's a really wild um opportunity and because it's a platform where

anyone can upload the the variety of content is extraordinary because there's no gatekeepers like a lot of it's trash and nonsense but there's so many interesting shows 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

all of a sudden has a million. Our homepages are very similar probably. I have so many like old history videos where it's like some old guy that's just breaking down World War II battle scenes or whatever. Agreed. And like they go as niche as possible down to like this is like the most you know largest fights in history and like a ranking of like 10 you know deadliest fights or yeah like

i would say like a third of my home page is like just history videos was here uh youtube uploads users upload roughly 500 hours of video every minute okay not to be that guy that's that's uh

very outdated i believe but maybe or or actually no no uh 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 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 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 one and a half hour lecture on exactly it's nuts and that's the the beauty to

tie everything together as like a bow that's why you can learn anything and you can do anything you want for a living for the most part if you allocate the time because it's all there there's literally on youtube harvard classes that are recorded the same thing you would go into crippling debt to like to attend it's 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 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 hard but you can all the ingredients are there you just have to go collect it put them together and put in the work and to get a to z z being you know the career you want to do um it's because all the knowledge is there ever like even i've literally gone on podcasts countless times and said everything i know about youtube with no gatekeeping whatsoever i've literally had people where was it i was in some gym this uh i think it was in la or whatever in between shoots just working out and a guy literally came up to me and i have no idea who he is but he's like i have three million subscribers on youtube i started like 18 months ago and like i just listened to one of your podcasts and i just did like exactly what you said and i got a friend group i started obsessing over it and um you know and i did like these analytical things and i just like quit my job a couple months ago and i was like no shot this is like a coincidence you were like you're like tracking me or anything he's like no and he's in gym clothes sweaty he's like i was just running on the treadmill and i just wanted to tell you that like i literally just quit my job and i'm making more money because i just listened to one of your podcasts and i was like whoa and It was crazy, but I've had experiences like that countless times where, like, these things, which is why I'm so passionate about sharing it, like, opens people's minds. And he's like, yeah, I just didn't realize that was a possibility in life, you know?

Well, you're coming from life with a perspective of feast, not famine. And that's the good thing about it, that there's enough opportunity for everybody. And I have a contrarian view on that because a lot of creators do see other creators as competitors, but I've always been like, if someone's doing well, I don't get threatened. I'm like, yo, let's just film together. Collaborators, not competitors. There's literally trillions of views going around. If you think this person getting an extra, even if they crush a billion views a year, has any impact on me, you're crazy. It has no impact. I mean, people are sometimes spending four or five hours a day consuming content. right they watch their little 20 minute video you know that they upload every two weeks no impact whatsoever and so i think it and i was really the first person to kind of adopt that mindset and more people are doing it now but yeah that's why i go and share everything like literally to a t and like i'll help people make you know some people end up making millions of dollars that i've helped mentored 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 Mr. Beast show was on NBC and then there was another guy who was on CBS, he might also be at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. You're like, fuck that guy. Yeah, true.

I'm not going to give him my secrets.

Yes, you would never. But because the fact that YouTube is available literally to anybody and the amount of people that are viewing it is so immense, it's an abundance. 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. And there's no one who will, at this point in my career, you know, be able to go tell me something that will make me 10% better. But there are infinite amounts of people that can make me a better storyteller or better, 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 them together. And so, like, you know, sometimes I'll give someone something that, you know, might fundamentally change everything for them. But then they'll teach me something very small. And I'm like, oh, that's actually very useful. And if I retain it, I can see how, you know, that'd be really cool on like on the set design on how we could do a background or like, hey, after X amount of feet, you don't need as much detail. So now we can put more time into like the detailed stuff up front. But, you know, and sometimes it's 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, yeah, you just have to like some people don't see the value in that kind of stuff. But you can learn anything or you can learn something from almost anyone. And I do believe that because everyone has, like, different things and different experiences and stuff like that, especially as a content creator because you're also making content for millions of people. So even just learning, 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 to hear. Because if they just follow those principles and just follow your passion and really be disciplined and focused, you could do a lot of things in this life. Exactly. You could be like Jimmy. You could.

Probably not. Statistically not. Statistically not. Could you be a person with a couple less zeros and all the numbers? Yeah. Of course.

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 a million kids that work in illegal child labor on cacao farms?

Wow.

Yeah. Where? In West Africa. So Cote d'Avar in Ghana, which is where the majority of the world's cacao comes from, there's rampant child labor. You can ask perplexity. I'd love for you to pull up data so we can see that I'm not just making it up. And I think when I last came on here was right after I started a chocolate company, and I had no idea how bad it was. In the last few years, I've been trying to figure out how we can build our own supply chain where we can actually get kids out of illegal child labor. I don't know if you're interested in it, but there's a lot of stuff I'd love to share on that.

No, that's very cool.

Yeah, so basically, just ask perplexity, how many kids work in child labor in West Africa, in cacao farms? And right here, 1.5 to 1.8 million people or children. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And I had no idea. And it's been like this for decades. So it's so normalized in the chocolate industry that 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. So if you were to work with – how it works is 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, 46% of those farms will have child labor. Some won't. Some will. And so you're buying at a cooperative level. I went to all the biggest distributors and everyone that does all the sourcing for Kakao. And I was like, so is there any way I can pay a premium and not have little kids work on my farms? And it literally didn't exist. I was just so mind blown. And it really was frustrating because it's not even did it not exist. No one really seemed to even think it needed to exist. I was like, you guys, these are kids. You have no issue making billions of dollars in profit on little kids working on the farms. It was like a very weird thing. so that's crazy so that's most chocolate uh well majority of the world's cacao as you saw it 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 uh i met a different company called tony's chocoloni who is like a reporter who you know started talking about this uh and wait a minute his name is chocoloni uh tony but the chocolate brand is tony's chocoloni they did ethical sourcing and i i spent a lot of time learning from them and like i've just been on this journey with feastables it's how can we ethically sourced, you know, feastables cacao. And so we actually, this is a fun thing I've never said publicly. So we started doing, working with certain farms, but then I started around seven months ago, a big case study where we went to five villages that the average child labor there was like 45%. So 45% of the labor on the farms in these villages was illegal child labor. And we went on the doors and we collected every single data point. We knocked on every door. We got, there's around 10,000 people that live in those five communities. We knew everything from the child labor rates, to school attendance, to everything. And then throughout the last few years, we've just been collecting tons of data on why kids work in child labor, how you get kids out of child labor, which most of it comes back to poverty. Big Choco pays farmers so little that they just can't afford to not use children. So part of it is there's this thing called a living income reference price, which looks at the cost to actually live there. So we guarantee 100% of our farmers that we'll pay a living income reference price. And then we work with Fair Trade, 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, 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 in this five-village case study that we did, there's around 10,000 people living in there.

And about seven months ago, there was around 550 kids that were in illegal child labor in those communities. And so then we started taking over sourcing from there. So we started doing our sourcing principles and paying the Farmers Living in Raff Prince Prize. Fairtrade came in, come in, started paying the premium. And now, seven months later, we just got the initial results after we did our check-ins. And some of the communities, we were getting so many kids out of child labor, there literally wasn't a school because kids just worked on the farm. So, like, some of these we literally built a school so they could go to school because the goal isn't just to get the kids out of child labor. It's also to get them an education so they're not, you know, because if you grow up only working on a cacao farm, you have no education. So then you're basically doomed to working on it your whole life, you know, because you don't know anything else, right? And so we just did our recent wave of check-ins where we knocked on all the doors to check school attendance and everything. And so seven months ago, it was 550 kids-ish, roughly, in illegal child labor. What do you think it was now, basically six, seven months later? I don't know. How many? We were able to get a 90% reduction and get it to where there's only around 50 still in child labor with our first check-in. And now we constitute a kid remediated out of child labor with two check-ins. So that was just the first one. So technically, by our books, they wouldn't be fully remediated because there might have been an accident or whatever. So we like to double-check it to make sure things are accurate. So we'll do another check-in in the future so they're not technically officially remediated. But it just shows that, like, it's possible to reduce the child labor 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 swerves of hundreds of thousands of kids out of illegal child labor. And so the big way 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, 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 where they're like, yeah, this is our ethical sourcing strategy. But at the end of the day, obviously most cows go into big chocolate and, you know, they can say they're doing all these things, but factually there's all these kids in illegal child labor. So it's like, I mean, I don't know. No one's put in the effort that you're doing what you just said that. Yeah. And so that's amazing, man. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm really excited about, and I just wanted to mention it, A, because obviously you're the biggest podcast in the world, and I just wanted to educate people on it, that it's fucking crazy when you're buying chocolate. And B, I'm really excited, though, with what we're doing because we're essentially, with Feastables, building one of the most effective systems for getting kids out.

of illegal child labor in the world. 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, right now, it was a 90% reduction. It went from over 500 kids in illegal child labor down to 50. And obviously we're not done. We're going to keep over time trying to get those 50 out of child labor. But now imagine that if we can keep sourcing more cacao as we keep growing and we could keep getting more and more kids out of illegal child labor. And then eventually, because I have over a billion followers across all my platforms, I can show these case studies and then just 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 I think step one is showing that it's actually possible to not use it because right now technically there's not really a way you could like –

I think what's really important is getting people to understand that that's happening. Exactly. And you talking about it right now, now people will be aware of it because I think the vast majority of people, me included, were not aware. I know. So then they hear, they go, wait, hold on. What about this company that I'm buying chocolate from? Are they using child labor? And then, 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 is so big, they're going to want me to be quiet. But in a perfect world, they'd hear these messages and they would have a soul and be like, you're right. We shouldn't make billions of dollars in profit off the back of little kids. Let's just put a little bit of the money towards getting the kids into school and putting people that aren't kids on the farms. And so ideally, that's what comes of it. We'll see in the long run. But right now I'm just really focused on building these case studies and really showing like in depth exactly how they could do it. So then hopefully they just come around to, you know, give them the avenue to go, oh, we just didn't know. This is cool. Cool. We'll start doing it. I mean, because technically there isn't really like all these shopping companies are so old. Like technically the people who built and grew it, like the founders, they're dead, right? This is third, fourth generation people. Like some of these people have never built a business from ground up. So maybe you could give them a little slack and be like, they just don't know any better. and it's a problem they don't know how to solve 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 can get them all to switch I mean I don't

well maybe force their hand I mean maybe maybe just making people aware of it will help force their hand

if I wasn't the biggest 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 them 1.5 million kids and 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 it's been like look at How many kids are in illegal child labor in West Africa on cacao farms? Okay, we're back. Big chocolate scented an attack.

Yeah, we've had this issue. You're good. But listen, man, it's just another example that you're an awesome guy. 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 hear is, especially in America, do you know that, I mean, it's probably not going to surprise you, but 40% of food that's produced in America ends up getting thrown away. I have heard that. Yeah, and so a lot of what we've been doing is working with non-profits and setting up essentially so many stores and restaurants just throw away perfectly good food or they'll have things like if something's within a week of being expired, they just toss it out because whatever, but it's perfectly edible. There's literally nothing wrong with the food and we've been just setting up like many, there's a 501c non-profit 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 and storing and distributing it, just taking food that would have been thrown away, but it's perfectly fine and perfectly healthy and just, you know, figuring out how in a couple of days to just get it to food drives or people in need. And that's another thing too. Illegal child labor and cacao in 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, 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, every week we tend to throw away food around this time, come pick it up. Like little tweaks like that is like so simple, but would feed so many people in need and save us so much money. 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 over the next 12 months should be able to distribute around 10 million pounds of food. So whatever that is, maybe like 7 million meals. And it's like just taking food that would have been thrown away. And it's kind of like mind-blowing that in America, more people aren't aware of that because it's a very solvable thing, to be honest.

I think there's so many people that are only concentrating on what's going to make them money. Of course. It's very rare that someone like you thinks about greater good and actually puts a lot of effort.

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

But the effort to enact greater good.

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

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

congratulations and 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

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

next time next time you see me and Joe together it's gonna be fighting off some zombies alright sounds good thank you it was awesome

thanks for having me oh my pleasure thank you bye everybody

Thank you.