Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - Ep. 85 Louis Cole - Ear Biscuits

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

Fearless adventure seeker, YouTuber, and vlogger, Louis Cole, best known from his channel FunForLouis, joins Rhett & Link this week to discuss his passion for inspiring people to face their fears and break out of their comfort zones, why a court battle with the RSPCA lead him to abandon his original YouTube channel FoodForLouis and his videos of eating living things including a scorpion and tarantula, and how he prevented a full on gang brawl from breaking out inside of the double decker bus he drove around London. *NOTE: This conversation contains adult themes and language To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I'm Rhett. And I'm Link. Joining us today in our final recording from VidCon is YouTuber, globetrotter, vlogger, and adventure seeker, Louie Cole from his channel Fun4Louie. Louie travels all over the world and documents his experiences

and it's probably not an exaggeration to say he's experienced more things in the past few weeks than most people experience in an entire lifetime. The dude is the real life version of the most interesting man in the world. Indeed. I think. And his YouTube channel, Fun For Louie, which hosts daily vlogs of these traveling adventures,

currently has 1.5 million subscribers and 155 million video views. Some of his escapades include spearfishing in Australia, swimming with ducks in London, yes he did that, integrating himself into the Himba tribe of South Africa, horseback riding in New Mexico, para skiing in the Alps, and rowboating in Vietnam. That's just a few of his adventures.

This guy has a good time. And he's not just experiencing the stuff we wish we could experience. He's the type of guy you'd want to be experiencing this stuff alongside. He's got a positive outlook, his free spirit, his ability to live every moment to the fullest really inspires his audience to face their fears

and break out of their comfort zones. Of course, this made us wonder if Louis has any fears himself. Hmm, so we talked to him about that and a few other things, got some great stories. There's gotta be a sequel with this guy by the end, but we talked about the gang face-off that happened on the double-decker bus

that he bought and drove around London. We talked about eating many extreme dishes on his now privated or deleted, I think, Food for Louie channel, including he ate a live scorpion and a live tarantula. That gets controversial and so we unpack all of that. And finally, how his itinerant lifestyle impacts his personal relationships.

Yeah, this is definitely one of the best, one of our all time favorite conversations we've had on Ear Biscuits and we know you're going to enjoy it. But first we wanna take a moment to mention today's sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas.

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But beautiful. And now, onto the biscuit. Our lives intersecting with yours is difficult because there's one huge variable, and that's your life. Yeah. So whenever we get together, which this is this, I mean, we've passed at events, but like, gotten together to create something like even this is like, oh, this is, it immediately feels more special

because you're such a moving target. Well, but it's like you're the real life example of the most interesting man in the world. That's how I think about it. Oh yeah. I see that Dos Equis commercial and he says all these things and I'm like, but I know a dude who kind of does all this in real life.

Yeah, I guess so. Agree or disagree? I mean, there's obviously the behind the scenes. It's every second of every day is not as interesting as the videos and Instagrams. But yeah, I guess this has been the most interesting, action-packed kind of couple of years of my life, this whole YouTube adventure. Right. Okay, so let's backtrack from this moment because even if I look at your channel currently, it's basically real time.

I mean, you're within a day. You pretty much load something up every day. Yeah, every day. Do you ever miss a day? I've started to as of the beginning of this year. I just thought, you know, it was only me that set the challenge of doing a daily vlog and then I just thought it know it was only me that set the challenge of doing a daily vlog and then i just thought it become it become a little bit unhealthy where i just thought i'm

not taking any me time i'm not taking any rest time um okay but still give or take i can look at your channel and i may take off like one day a week uh one day fortnight but it's around it's at least i'm doing at least six days a week. So you got the VidCon Madness Begins video, which has been up about a day, because you've been in VidCon about that long. Yeah. And that's almost 15 minutes. But then if I backtrack from there, I can tell,

okay, you came from Hollywood, you were riding on, I'm just based on thumbnail only. Yeah. You can get a lot from your thumbnails. You were in Hollywood riding horses, and then, that's probably Griffith only. Yeah. You can get a lot from your thumbnails. You were in Hollywood riding horses. And then that's probably Griffith Park. Yeah. And then you were on the beach doing a cleanup.

Is this like a self-imposed cleaning up a section of the beach? There was a charity and we were helping, yeah, do a beach cleanup with them, yeah. Okay. And then you were doing a GoPro audio test underwater. That was in New York. You were in New York for that. Yeah. Yeah. gopro audio test underwater that was in new york you were in new york for that yeah doing some rooftop instagrams uh testing out some of casey's danger toys whatever that means it sounds awesome

he's got these wheels these electric you know those uh you've seen those toys with the wheels and everyone's floating around on them yeah yeah yeah uh-huh they can be dangerous and your mom was in new york yeah i can tell that and And then you were doing some skateboarding in Central Park. I'm like, yeah, I'm like hitching a ride on the back of one of those bicycle taxis. You know, those guys that cycle around. But he didn't, they didn't know you were doing it. Not to begin with. We made friends.

We made friends quite quickly. He was cool. So even, and then before you were in New York, where were you? I can't remember. Swimming with swans. Oh, that was in London. In London. Yeah.

And then it was just two weeks before that. I jumped in, there's a lake in Hyde Park and I went swimming in it. There's actually like a, you're allowed to go swimming. And that's not a thing in England usually. Like these are, this is a lake full of ducks and swans. You just look at the lake. Yeah. But you're allowed to swim

yeah it's like a thing like i didn't notice a thing so anyway yeah we anyway that was that thumbnail we were jumping in swimming with the swans floating around us but but three videos before that you the first video in your london series is called back in london so right before that when you were talking with animals where were you uh italy yeah italy yeah you were in italy yeah and and this is over and i'm just i've just taken you through the previous previous five weeks yeah italy london new york los angeles and then where are you going after vidcon um i am doing a road trip up to um portland and then on the 11th of august i'm going to Sierra Leone in West Africa where the Ebola outbreak started. But I'm going with the UN and World Vision, this charity.

I'm going to go and interview some patients that have recovered. And it's going to be, I mean, that's going to be a pretty intense one, that trip. So we're going to get into like specific places and like highlights. But let's just talk about workflow. Like what's your approach? I see, you know, you walked in here, you had your camera, you were kind of leading with the camera. And so what's your general approach, like shooting, editing, all of that? What's your workflow? I mean, I'll just shoot as much as possible during the day. I've just found i'm happy to go

through a bit more footage each day to capture those moments and i'd rather capture a little bit too much i think that's my what i figured out over the years of doing this um vidcon's an interesting one because a lot of it's relational so a lot of it's just meeting people chatting with people all day um and that's a little bit more difficult to capture though the moments you want to share because some of the conversations it'd be weird if i was like like this the whole time with my camera um so the to be honest vidcon's an interesting one you can capture a bit of the party scenes i go and chill in the hot tub a little bit when i'm on the move and there's a bit more activity to the day and we're moving around a bit and there's a bit you know that's there's a slightly different workflow because i'm

i'm explaining a bit to camera how i'm feeling about where i am i might i might get put my camera on someone else and ask them something and then it's just a montage of clips of what we're up to and then you know another chat to camera and it's pretty it's pretty edit heavy then if you yeah so a lot of it i mean we had a panel this morning i was with uh casey neistat and uh ben brown and nadine and we all do well me and casey and ben do daily vlogs and nadine does travel vlogging and uh we we were saying it's it's almost entirely in the edit you know obviously you need to capture the moments but then it's how you cut that together and that usually happens for me late at night i'm my problem is i've got that fomo thing where i can't miss out so i couldn't like pull myself

away from a party to go and edit i have to wait till everyone's gone to bed yeah which things like this i mean i couldn't even edit last night we had this amazing conversation with a few of us about how we can change the world together as youtubers and you know having an impact until five in the morning and then i was like who was in this bunch uh jerome jar do you know jerome jar he's uh the biggest viner in the world uh and you know he's uh that french guy tall french guy does a really funny okay okay anyway his whole thing is making people happy making people smile and challenging people to face their fears so he like does like public singing and he goes up to people in public and like i guess pushes them out of their comfort zone but anyway we had this i mean i won't go into now but we had this incredible conversation about well just give us the conclusion what's the answer

how are we changing the world when we were in bed at 5 a.m but i want to be a part of this okay so my original point is i haven't even edited yesterday's video yet so it chops and changes um when when i edit and the workflow could depending on what i'm doing right so i don't want it to take over especially conversations like this which i'll explain the the the the crux of the conversation was um society's broken we have got this incredible voice um with millions of ears potentially between the network of people I was looking around last night at the YouTube party and I was like I mean this group of you know this small group of people here we could 100% change the world you don't need the politicians and the

and the big corporates to do it like we we could do it and then we had this conversation of what is it that's broken and how do you mend it? And it was all around the subject of compassion. And I think the three words, which my friend Dave, who I'm doing a lot of cool charity ideas with at the moment, and these are his three words, are compassionate problem solvers. So finding compassionate problem solvers and getting them to release that and other people. And I mean, there's I mean, this was like we started the conversation at 930 and ended at 5 a.m. So I'm struggling to summarize it. But it was but it was documented.

I mean, the cameras are rolling. Well, I filmed a bit and then I just put my audio on recording because I just wanted to listen back because it was just very exciting because there's a lot of amazing people and minds here and people have had incredible different incredibly different experiences people from all over the world but the one thing common is somehow we've built this incredible platform that people seem interested in our lives and what we're up to and there's this potential to inspire people and make a difference and i don't know that's that's where my head's at at the moment yeah let's skip from workflow to kind of what you want to accomplish you know your environment's always changing you're always figuring out how to take the footage that you capture which is always compelling but it's but it's a testimony to your editing and all those uh the music and the style that you bring to it but it's all for a reason like I really get a sense

that you you want to elicit something from your audience what it what is that what is your goal it's an interesting journey I think I started off just wanting to document my life and at times I'm just doing what I want to be doing regardless and then it just happens to be oh I've got a camera I'll just film this whilst I'm doing it other times and what I can fall into and I want to avoid is suddenly thinking oh I need to make sure I'm making an interesting video today so then I'll deliberately choose to do things to make them interesting and I don't think that's bad in itself because it does motivate you to you know have a fun day and not just sit in all day but I don't want that to be the primary drive for me is like I have

to make interesting videos that wasn't ever the goal it was just to share my life I think my my goal and what I would love to do is to inspire people um when they watch my videos a lot of people say oh you've really helped me face my fears or um dream bigger or you know some of it's about travel and that's my like face the fears of jumping off of random rocks or even that's the interesting thing a lot of my videos are literal fears like you know jumping out of a plane and and going to crazy countries but i think just if you just think about fear in general that's the thing that holds people back in life whether it's a fear of jumping out plane or whether it's a fear of leaving your house or

making new friends and if you say to you know if you if you explain to people embrace this this pushing out your comfort zone and and and even if it's scary do it um a lot of people have said you know I wouldn't have even come to VidCon, but, you know, watching your videos have, you know, helped me overcome that. And a girl yesterday said she wanted to go to, she'd never left her state and she wanted to go to university in New York. And she's like plucked up the courage and she's now got a place and she's going from California to New York in a month's time and she said it's all from this this general feeling of like facing your fears which uh I guess people feel inspired to do so I think this whole thing is like you can watch my life and see what I'm up to and there's this shallow sometimes level of like just pleasure seeking fun I'm jumping off things I'm having you know here I'm there I'm riding horses I'm jumping in lakes but i hope my hope is it's a lot deeper than that

people can see that my my kind of heart behind it all is embrace life and and be passionate about what you do and hopefully that can inspire others to um to do it in their way it might not be travel it might be something different well because you know there's an interesting there's an interesting dynamic when you when you watch what you do. I mean, one thing is you might be tempted to think that you don't have any fears. You're fearless. That guy's fearless.

I'm scared of everything, but that guy's fearless. And then the second thing might be like, man, I can't go to all those places. How am I gonna have, how can I embrace life and get the most out of life when it's going to the cubicle every day or you know whatever situation somebody might be in the classroom yeah yeah that is a tough that is a tough one i know i think that's why if i choose to vlog daily it means those off days where i'm

not going out having adventures and i might just be sitting at home with my family and the most adventurous thing i do is walk down to a coffee shop and get a coffee which often happens it shows that life isn't this adrenaline 100% every day doing the biggest and best thing it's there's there's a reality to it as well and I think that's why I quite like the daily thing right but what are your fears you know in this big conversation we had last night I realized where sometimes I do think I'm fearless i realized uh i realized i need to think about that a bit because i think there's some fears i have which aren't normal which aren't a normal classic fears well let's let's let's start to put circle some candidates is this a therapy sometimes it is like that okay um i think i'm i think I've got a fear of missing out, that FOMO thing.

But I think that goes bigger than just like the party. I think that's recently been, you know, I'm in this incredible position and I don't want to miss out on the opportunities that I can have. And then it's like, well, what are the opportunities? The reality is in my position with I'm I mean brands are contacting me every day saying we want to work with you we're going to do projects I could easily draw that kind of get absorbed into the world of like just making as much money as possible from this platform which is a tough one because yes I'm I've monetized my

videos and I'm earning an income and i've got dreams that require money so i for instance one of them is i want to buy a big plot of forest and build a treehouse ewok village in it and live there because i haven't got a house at the moment i was like who wants a normal house i want to live in an ewok village yes of course but we've been looking please build a guest room we've been yeah i mean i want to build multiple but we went and looked at a plot of land up in santa cruz which was like i mean it was a big plot of land but it was like half a million dollars and i was like i don't have half a million dollars uh but but anyway my point is i can work with brands if they work organically with my channel and my viewers are cool with that and understand the principle of me doing sponsor

videos uh and it can work or i can get i'm like well i just do sponsor videos every day like you know and then i'm just so that's one of my fears is i don't want to become unauthentic and i don't want to alienate my audience and i don't want to kind of sell out to things i don't believe in but i also don't want to be on my high horse and be like i'm not gonna i'm you know i'm just gonna make money yeah i'm not gonna make money because the reality is money isn't shouldn't shouldn't be a motivation but i think it's a brilliant uh tool and thing that can equip that can really free you to do you think awesome things so anyway that's been playing i mean this is the most to be honest this is the most honest i've been oh

really and i hope this isn't like a crazy subject to talk about but this whole thing's a fear of mine i don't know what to do in this situation i don't know whether to embrace it and just do it all or whether to like step back a bit i'm scared of missing opportunities and i'm scared of what if i if i if i do the wrong thing what could happen well the ewok village is a definite yes yes i think if a brand would pay you with an Ewok Village and take money out of the equation, would that simplify things? Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Well, I think that money represents an Ewok Village. So it's still, it's like it's an equation. Yeah, exactly. Seriously, I mean, just one piece of advice I would give just hearing that is I think that the nature of your content and the nature of the things that you're doing is that there is a really, you're concerned about authenticity

and that's a great instinct and you should keep that instinct. I think there is a really authentic way to incorporate brands that you believe in into the kinds of things that you're doing because there's, you know, whether it was like, you know, Red Bull is an example of somebody who does all kinds of things that you're doing because there's, whether it was like, Red Bull is an example of somebody who does all kinds of adventure things, which there's like a connection there,

but just simple things, like if there's something that you use or something that could help you do the things that you do while you're traveling, like there's a million people out there who'd wanna give you something like that to talk about as a sponsor. You have to figure out how to navigate it, but it's like, there is a lot people out there who'd want to give you something like that to talk about as a sponsor. You have to figure out how to navigate it, but it's like, there is a lot of opportunity there,

and I don't think that if you maintain that authenticity, you're not gonna alienate people, I would think. And then we could build that Ewok village. We'll help you, we'll come and we'll stay. Oh yeah, come stay. Next podcast should be in one of the tree houses. That's right. You know, and it's not our job to should be in one of the tree houses. That's right. You know, and it's not our job to solve your fears either.

It isn't. I think it's our job to just make you talk about them. No, no, I mean, yeah, I just need some processing time. As many sponsors as we work with, though, we are like, oh, you definitely should be doing that. We can find a way. We can talk about that more later. I will say that I think that the challenge is to find integrations that the brand

already reflects your values. Because a lot of brands want to. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of brands want to attach themselves to us, to you, in order to, by association, put your values onto them, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what you don't wanna do, you know?

And that's where, when they throw a dollar amount out there, sometimes it's difficult for us to say, oh, okay. Oh, now that there's that amount of money on the table, well, we gotta, now we gotta have a conversation. We gotta have a conversation. Right, because there are different kinds of brands. You can't do that, it can't be about the dollar amount. Right, because there are different kinds of brands.

I mean, Coke could come to you and say, we wanna sponsor you, and at that point it'd be like, okay, why is Louis being sponsored by this huge soft drink? But there are smaller. And their slogan has been enjoy happiness. I can see how that would totally work. Which totally makes sense. But does that work for you?

And I wouldn't answer that here. I mean, let's not talk specifics. But the general thing is, I mean, it's been tough. Some brand things I've worked with, it starts off great. You're like, yeah, I think we're on the same page. By the time this contract sign and you're starting to get things reviewed, then suddenly everything changes and you're like, well, this was never the plan.

And then it's this stress of like, I really don't want to start reading lines and scripts in my... This isn't a fictional thing. This is my life. So this is the this is the struggle anyway but um yeah i mean i think we it is but i think we are getting to a place where there's enough that's starting to work correctly that there's hope that it can be

there can be trust a brand brand can actually trust us. Yeah. But let's just see if that happens. The other fear of missing out is an interesting one because that's just more, we're going just more inside your head and not inside your wallet, right? Yeah, yeah.

This is more of like, I think the other thing is like, well, I don't know if it's quite related, but it's this whole shiny thing syndrome where I arrive at something like VidCon and I'm like, you know, like a kid in a candy store. I'm like, oh, and it's all about love. It's relational. Oh, I want to go and chat to that person. Oh, look at this person.

And then and also people come up to me. They're like, Louis, we want to talk to you. I'm like, yeah, let's talk. And then it's this whole thing of and then it's like meeting my viewers and it's like exciting but also sometimes a bit overwhelming and uh and it's this whole thing of i'm my attention is not in one place for like more than 30 seconds and this is this is rare right here sitting down and having a conversation because you're you're scared of missing out because why you know is uh so what i think part of it's just wanting to make the most of everything you know and make the most of life and i mean this is great i haven't really i don't know i don't i don't know is the is the

answer but yeah let's talk about it i mean well let's see if we can derive it because now i have a theory that as a youngster you were locked in a dungeon and deprived of all sorts of stimulation so now you're just making up for it at like age 18 so let's see if we can get there yeah so yeah how did you how did you become louis i mean how did you become this guy that is the most interesting man in the world for real where are you from um no i mean brilliant family really close to my family um loving home i was always say brilliant and not like a like extremely smart but like just like like in the british way of brilliant it's like when charlie says lovely he doesn't mean lovely he just means great i mean great yeah right got it

great family uh so i'm sure they're smart too though yeah um rather british quite um quite a typical like grew up in the suburbs middle class didn't have loads of money um my dad's been a high school teacher his whole life uh he's actually been i think like 33 years teaching at the same school and we've always lived in the same house so this is a very you know um in terms of like in terms of security it's just been same house same town I grew up in it's been nice it's been great but also this has been running strand of like my parents have been quite supportive and encouraged all of us to think outside the box I've got two sisters as well um so it's like thinking outside of the box and as a kid i remember i was like i love rainforests i love jungles i'm obsessed with like jungles so they let me

completely transform my bedroom into a rainforest i had like a running waterfall i i lived in a cave i painted trees all over the walls i had a pet iguana roaming free in my room oh as long as he didn't leave the threshold of your door that was his terrarium yeah i mean where did that idea come from i don't know my head i mean i just always loved i was always in as a kid i was always in another world like i was in fantasy land the whole time like i just daydreamed my way through my childhood i was just always playing games even at school i imagined i was i was a spy in a military camp like every day i was like i just create this fantasy world around me to it wasn't an escapism i just saw this i love seeing the magic in the

world around me yeah it was fun it just hit me that rainforest cafe could be a sponsor yeah no i love them i went i went to that they've been a big i've always loved the rain have you been there because yeah it's like your room but they serve food yeah the food isn't great though but you know but it is no it's a fun atmosphere it is like my room that was that is my room my room was like the rainforest cafe um but and then it's been i guess just crazy ideas i've had that don't fit into the normal like so uh let's fast forward 10 years like um I bought a double-decker bus like the you know the London double-decker buses uh that's quite a fast forward I bought a bus got some friends got some friends to paint graffiti all over the outside and then I used to run uh and help with young people and like bad neighborhoods

around London like gangs and we and I set up a music studio in there. And I used to like help with youth clubs and churches and different people. Did you drop out of high school in order to do this? No, no. This is that I'm fast forwarding past high school. No, I didn't go to university though. That's the interesting thing. And a lot of my friends I've talked to that are doing bigger things,

you know, entrepreneurs, and they've set up big world potentially world impacting things didn't do degrees i didn't go to university which is a common thread with a lot of my friends at home but your parents kind of stoked that flame of instinct for you to just yeah invent it and then do it yeah invent whatever you want to do and do it yeah so what was was the double decker bus the first example of that i mean he's multiple like i remember wanting to do something really fun for my uh 21st birthday and we could try and rewind i'm trying to think what else so my jungle bedroom teenage years uh i did a i did a i did like

a work placement instead of university and then um where that? Where did you work? I did like 3D animation. I worked in an office for Sky TV. Oh, really? So it was all like... Because I love graphics and visual stuff. Was that before or after you were homeless for the first time? This was before.

Okay. So anyway, then I left the corporate world of like... I mean, it was fun. It was visual. It was graphics. But it was still an office. And I had a... Not a cubicle.

Well, almost a cubicle. Like it was an office. I just had the same seat every day. then i thought oh you know this isn't me i can't do this anymore so after two years there i just left i thought i can i can save some money because at that point you're like what's important to me i'm paying rent and it made it made me challenge everything i knew about society i was like wait hang on i don't i don't think this has to be the way that i'm told it is like i think i can just decide what i believe um so the belief that i needed a house because i was like that's a big outgoing you know renting a house so i just bought

a minivan and i just thought i can just live in here and it's free so i left my parents said well my they were supportive they were like they were like well we know you're skilled enough to go back into a workplace if you want to but in the meantime go and have fun um and do you know that i've got a funny story so i went and lived in this minivan for a few years drove around europe with all my friends um literally survived on maybe 20 a week i was like eating cans of food and i just thought i was like i can live for free who needs money and it was this whole thing of like i just want to my at that point i was like time is so much more valuable and i i remember leaving my job and thinking with all the time in the world i can do anything i can i can literally take over the world not in a not in a good way yeah in a

good way i can just do anything um and still got to put gas in that minivan yeah and that's because i was always traveling with friends. I would literally pull in a gas station and be like, can everyone just put in like $1? I mean, I'm talking American for your sake. Can everyone give me £1 to put in for fuel? So I'd get everyone to chip in. We'd put £10 in the tank. It was literally like that.

I remember often running out and often having nothing and going hungry. I remember often running out and often having nothing and going hungry. But I love this testing the limits of what do I need and how can I adapt to create more time in my life. So it's this whole experimental time. Then I had this vision for the double-decker bus. I told everyone, I was like, I'm going to get a double-decker bus. But you need £10,000 or whatever to $18,000 even to do that. And then someone came up to me and they said

we love your vision here's the money which was awesome what do you mean someone came up to you well i i was i was uh involved with circles of people that like want to do cool things right so someone showed their friend he showed their friend and i found this uh almost like a foundation that want to support cool projects um and they said we love the idea here's some money and it was like literally wrote me a check now is there a a belief system that your parents kind of put in place that kind of kind of formed the structure for this was it just your parents saying go off and have fun or you know was there something else well i mean i won't go super into this but but like my, and on a personal level, I have

like a kind of a faith, like I grew up in church and like, I think part of that mentality of seeing a bigger picture to the world, it's not just the here and now, it's like, there's more going on. And I think that's what always thought this sense of magic, there's a spiritual realm, there's more going on. And I later on read books like The Secret where you're like you know you're like putting things out there and you know when you or it's like having even if you don't want to put it in terms of god and stuff like if you have a belief in belief that you can do something and that something's going

to happen i honestly feel like you can make things can happen, you know, like you can almost will things to happen. Whether you believe that's like a spiritual, spiritual. Yeah. Whether you believe that's like a spiritual, like God's got a path and he's, you know, doing something or whether it's just a law of the universe or whether it's a law of the universe. However you perceive it, because I don't want to like preaching my personal beliefs, but like however you perceive it um because i don't want to like preaching my personal beliefs but like however you know that you gave there's a jesus shout out in your draw my life well i just said you were inspired well i just wanted yeah i mean i just wanted to explain i wanted to mention because for me personally that is a massive impact on my drive and motivation what's difficult in in society is there's a lot of uh connotations and and and assumptions when you label yourself if i labeled myself a christian for instance it's you just you know it's just like such a a negative thing a lot of baggage a lot of stuff and also

there's like the whole republican christian south you know southern american thing uh state you know everything all of that uh for me i i i like the idea of you know jesus was an incredible character whether you believe he was the son of god or whether you believe he's just this cool guy that did some awesome stuff or whatever like so when i say i'm inspired by jesus and i want to follow what how he taught to live i don't i feel like that can't be that offensive for people i think he did drive a double-decker bus too yeah he was so it's all coming together um yeah but if you look at even you got the bus so i got the bus yeah let's go back to the bus so we got the bus um and from this motivation of like i want to you know growing up being taught as a kid it's bigger than you it's look at the world around you. We care for people, love people.

This is the whole message I grew up with. Like it's about loving people. And then I'm like, well, whilst I was in the minivan, like driving around, I'd meet these kids on the street, which had nothing. It didn't have good homes. Some of them had left, you know, run away from home or whatever. I remember sleeping under like in a highway, like in those, you know, they're like a highway, the bridges that go over the highways and there's a little tucked in there. I remember this kid was like distraught. He'd run away from home for some reason. The police were after him. And I, I don't know how I found him. Anyway, I had this conversation with him and ended up having a

conversation on the phone with the parole officer, his police person that was trying to look out for him. And, and just, I just thought, wow wow there's people really like in much more way more broken situations in their life and they're like struggling and i just thought i i can help i can try and help and love them in some way and then i just thought this idea of oh if they had a place to come that wasn't like this set location like run like government run youth club which there's so many restrictions and paperwork and i just thought oh i've got some friends around me as well that love to help and i just wanted to set up and i thought oh i could live in the double-decker bus as well because it's much more spacious than the minivan so i

the van where you can make a double-decker bus work double-decker bus had some it kicked kitted it out i mean i need to show some pictures in a minute these guys can't see but um anyway so i just thought it'd be great i had to have this safe space that i could pull up in the neighborhood kids could jump on board it was all safe like we had often volunteers like i even worked alongside the police the police said at one point this is the best thing we've ever seen like this project so it was like working alongside people already in the areas like charities churches the police the council and um just helping support young people often through just having somewhere to sit down have a drink have a like a hot drink

of hot chocolate or something or play a computer game or whatever they want to record like we were like making cds of their music at the time and so that was my motivation was this how can i love people in an interesting way that's not you know doesn't fit into the norms of society necessarily but it's like and how did the bus work like it was okay i'm gonna drive up under this bridge and say hey guys i got a double-decker bus come on get in i had this sound system that was so loud because i also used i forgot i used to dj a little bit as well just at parties for fun so i had this sound system so loud the the bass speakers could set off car alarms as we drove past so you could drive down the road and

like all the cars inside the road the car alarms would go so you just start pumping music and people would come flooding and then i had a microphone and i just hand it to a kid i was like do you like rap do you mcd and i just give him microphone and then suddenly that spontaneous mc battle on the street and it would happen all the time and then and then i found i'm not just around london yeah and i i don't i don't see myself as a like an entrepreneur but i i i soon found a way to fund it all um by kids saying can i rent this for my birthday party and i was like well yes you can so on the weekend like a clown though did you no on the weekends i used to drive around kids for their birthday parties and teenagers and used to rent the bus

out and that used to cut that used to fund the whole project it was brilliant and they would and i even got a message on my facebook uh and it said five years ago this is like last week five years ago you uh drove me around in your bus for my birthday party it was the best night of my life that is awesome and i was like wow okay and so but that didn't last forever we'd like to take a quick moment to break in and mention our sponsor who helped make today's episode possible squarespace yeah building a website can be tough and even if you do know your way around coding creating something that looks good and works well is a time-consuming affair,

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That's Zvia, Z-E-V-I-A.com slash podcast. Now onto the biscuit. So you were doing the double decker bus thing and then how did that come to an end? So it was pretty full on, it was most evenings a week and then every weekend was busy for me doing that i struggled to delegate and build a team around me so i was the driver always i never i sometimes took someone to help me with security because then i mean the stories i could tell you about the craziness that with working with urban like bad neighborhood young people tell us one i mean okay

uh what's the craziest one i mean there's one so it's similar to american the gang problem in london isn't as severe and there's not guns so that helps but they they still there's still this like the gangs don't have guns either i mean yeah they they some of them do but not like not not everyone not everyone's carrying a gun okay um but they can get hold of guns illegally so anyway so i was working i was living in south london at the time um and i'd worked in this neighborhood where there's this particular gang and i'd built relationships with a lot of the members and was just trying to be a positive influence in their life but it's i mean it's a crazy structure like the drug dealing the the the hierarchy everything so i took a bunch of

them out for their one of those one of their birthdays i was like oh i'll take you i'll just take you out because it wasn't like they weren't renting it i was just like come on let's go and do something for the birthday yeah freebie for the gang like i kind of see where this is anyway so we go off into london double-decker bus go off into london pumping music some of them are like emceeing often when i stop the bus people crowd around and then other people want to join in so often it will be there'll be spontaneous emcee battles with people on the street that just happens to be walking past and it attracts people over so anyway there's like this other gang that kind of show up and they start like mcing and then they have their own double decker bus no they're just walking along the

street and then and then and somehow they ended up in the bus and on the same deck probably no so this no this is the thing there's two decks there's the original they did separate the original gang members were chilling upstairs i'm like oh they're probably playing on the playstation or whatever this other gang oh there's a playstation yeah thanks for mentioning oh there's like a 52 inch plasma screen at this point anyway so downstairs this other gang came in and they start like chat like emceeing on the mic and then they start representing their ends which is like their neighborhoods and they start shouting out because there's this turf war right they're like north london north london i'm like i'm like oh like because my gang is from south london so i'm like anyway i'm like i'm just

gonna i'm just gonna i pulled over i'm just gonna go upstairs and check that this is this is safe like that because i can kick them off i can come down like walked upstairs the gang i'd originally come in had pulled over balaclavas on their face five of them blacked out all black black clavis black masks i don't know if you yeah in england we call balaclavas so it's just the eye holes the mouth where you're going to do a robbery or something right and and they pulled out like knives and i'm like i'm like well i'm glad you went upstairs i'm like whoa whoa guys guys chill chill like this isn't this is not happening you are not having a gang fight in my bus like and i because i built relationships and they actually respect me so i'm like so like take those masks off calm down i can tell these other guys to like get off It's fine. We don't need to start a fight over this.

But what was crazy is they ended up making friends. They came down. It was all chilled. And I was trying to be like, look, why are you fighting? Because you live in a different area. This makes no sense. I think in a gang's thing, maybe there's drug territory where there's dealers and stuff. Anyway, I managed to like-

There's an ecosystem of commerce. I managed to somehow make this bond over the music they everybody's equal on a double-decker bus once you get on the same deck and also because we're driving around we're driving in and out of different areas and there's no we're not in like oh you're in my location you're in my location yeah we're just you're confusing them they're going in their territory then they're going in somebody else's territory this is like the most genius gang solution there's ever been so i mean i drop them all off at the police i've had to like i've had to like confiscate weapons off guys um i've had to like break physically break up fights um it's been it was a crazy time actually i mean i should probably

write some of these stories down but uh but But it sounds like logistically it started to become too much to manage. Yeah. And I think it was just, yeah, it was tiring. I felt like I was achieving the bigger thing I'd wanted to. And then what happened was the YouTube stuff started alongside this, right? So I, with some some friends started eating crazy things just as a it was just it was never my thing it was just like a silly thing i did it was this whole thing of like questioning society why can't i eat a spider let's face my fears you know and

so the first thing you ate was a what i actually drank a but on my on my food for louis channel which is the first channel i had on youtube um it was we had some old footage on a mobile phone of me like eating a little spider off the floor and it was just just to be just it was never meant it was never meant for youtube it was just me messing around with some friends and they'd be like eat that spider it's a day right so i'm like okay okay because i'd already at that stage already like gone jungle trekking um and traveling and like i'd seen like there's this why not i can eat spider and and anyway so i did that and then you you had seen people eat a spider probably yeah exactly so then i did that and then i so we had a few clips that we put on uh youtube because we're

just like oh let's why don't we make this a thing and then my friends were egging me on and they were like um they encouraged me and then i drank a whole bottle of wasabi sauce and then things started getting more extreme this was 2000 maybe 2011 okay uh maybe maybe end of 2010 there yeah so you had this this footage off of youtube you start the channel you're gonna call it food for louis because hey you already had some eating stuff yeah and then they just keep giving you more stuff it kind of so then it escalated alongside the stuff so i was only doing snowballed i meant it was like yeah it was like once a once a week and i'd be doing my bus thing still a week and then once a week go around my friend's house what am i going to eat this week oh we bought you a box of crickets see if you can eat them all or you know and then it just escalated

and people were suggesting things in the comments that's when the video started going viral a little bit and then that's when we realized we're like huh this is this could be a thing like people like this there's people like this and also at this point a few other uk youtubers reached out to me because i'm starting to get some traction and interest and these are the young like the younger guys that were coming up so there's this whole crew in england and it was just the perfect timing and they wanted to make friends with me and i was like huh so what do you do what do you eat i have no idea and they were like oh no no we did you know we vlog in our bedroom and i was like i didn't even know there was people on YouTube.

I just watched music videos on there or like cat videos or like fail compilations. So I'm like, oh, okay. So you're chatting in your bedroom. What do you eat? Yeah. So you're chatting in your bedroom. And you're not eating the mattress or jumping out of the window. You're just talking.

Yeah, just talking. I'm like, huh, okay, interesting. out of the window you're just talking yeah just talking i'm like all right okay interesting um so i chatted to these guys and that's when um i came to i think at this point it might be in 2012 i came to a vidcon anyway as food for louis and um met a bunch of the american youtubers and i was like this is an amazing community and at this stage i got in a ton of trouble in the uk for what i was eating i actually got uh threatened with arrest taken to court for eating a goldfish which in england is actually illegal so the rspca showed up at my house they always had it was it was live and swimming it was swimming around i picked it out the bowl chomped it up quickly and in my opinion still didn't cause it

to stress or or like pain like unnecessary pain you didn't swallow it live you know i just bit his head off so then you swallowed it yeah then i ate it all so in my theory my my thing was if you're gonna eat meat don't be naive and think that the animal's not dying for you to eat that right so my i took it to the extreme of like well i didn't like the fact that i'm killing this animal. That's not what I'm finding pleasure in. It was just pushing the limits of like, how can I challenge myself to think outside the box and eat something crazy? And it turned out I ended up eating live animals like scorpions and spiders. And that's what I think a lot of the viability of the videos is like, people thought I was a psychopath, right?

Well, okay. So let's explore a few of these because that was our that was our introduction yeah that was our introduction was uh i think the tarantula one was the first one and i was just like so there was and i couldn't stop watching i had to watch all of them tell us about the tarantula that was the the most scary one of the most scared time in my life because this tarantula was this was when when we bought it from the pet shop right uh they they wouldn't handle it they were like you can't handle this species of spider these it was like some brazilian i can't remember exactly what it was

anyway so they kind of like kind of put you know two of them were like standing back pushing it into this plastic case uh i walked home with it did a bit of research like the trench was dangerous and it was mainly like you know they're not fatal it hasn't got fatal poison but it was it's gonna hurt a lot if it bites you and especially around your mouth throat area like i'm like the swelling yeah i can see there being a serious danger here also it has these hairs all over it that can like flick it It flicks at predators. It fires barbs. It fires barbs, yeah, at predators to deter them, right? So I'm thinking all of this.

I'm like, yeah, this is scary. And what was the biggest, most ambitious thing you had done up to that date? I'd eaten the scorpion already, which was again scary because of the stinger and the pincers. And it grabbed my mouth. Yeah, it grabbed your mouth on the way. Tell us about the scorpion. Pause that one. Tell us about the scorpion. I started on the crickets right like live crickets and i'd as a kid i'm pretty sure i've eaten or i mean i'm sure i'm sure i'd like eating live crickets and things in the garden or whatever like yeah sure like our kids do well you know i mean there's this there's the statistic everyone's

eating x number of spiders during their sleep. Yeah, I think that's true. But the scorpion was, what type of scorpion did it have the stinger? It was an emperor scorpion. It's the biggest species of scorpion. It had a stinger. So I upgraded from, I think I'd done, I might have done cockroaches before that, which were pretty vile, like the taste of pretty vile. But the scorpion was the first kind of arachnid,

predatorial little thing that i'd eat and where i was like this is going to attack me rather than just yummy in the video you hold it by its tail so you don't have the stinger and then begin to drop it down and it grabs my tongue the pincers grab your tongue and then you just kind of like bring it right in and just yeah yeah i mean that was scary. But as soon as I had the stinger, because the sting is the dangerous part. Right. So you ate everything up into the stinger.

Pop that out. Put it on the plate. The great thing of these videos. I mean, I'll fast forward to why I moved away from this. And then I've actually now taken these videos down. I'll explain in a minute. But they it was all my friends were crowded behind the camera laughing and egging. know but there's a lot of banter they were like saying funny things that was part of the fun of it it wasn't um do you know bear grills he does like the man versus wild yeah so the whole time i'm like

this is no different from going out into the jungle pulling over a tree stump and finding a spider and then you know eating it which he does all the time so everyone's like wow like he's showing us how to survive well if bear grills jumped off a cliff would you he did way in my opinion way more extreme things than i did but kind of got away with it as like oh he's out in the wild right i'm like oh i'm just in my friend's living room like you bought it at a pet sitting on the couch yeah but it's the same thing same thing. It's just a weird out of context, right? So the scorpion ape calls tarantula next step up because I can't hold the sting of the tarantula, right? It's got two massive fangs. These are like an inch long fangs. Just a question about the scorpion.

If it's got venom that can come out of the stinger, when you eat it, isn't that venom? No, it's all in the thing. It's all in the thing it's all in this also also there's a difference between being injected into your skin like a venom and poison it's different so you can some venom like once you digest it breaks down it's like protein whatever like okay so i did enough research to be like i'm pretty sure this isn't gonna poison me it's not a poison it's just you know it's just if it stings you that's like you know like bees things are acidic or whatever it injects this acid into i'm pretty sure your stomach can cope with that if i

ate a bee i don't think that would hurt either like as long as it didn't sting me on the way down but you had to find this out there's only so much you can wiki yeah i know and we i mean we really didn't do much research either and a part of that was part of the fear because you did say pretty sure i was pretty sure it wasn't well we had this whole joke there's a guy on the show i mean i'll there's a doctor right we can move in a minute sure it wasn't going to happen. Well, we had this whole joke. There's a guy on the show. I mean, I'll... There's a doctor, right? We can move on in a minute, but he wasn't a doctor. He was my friend and we called him...

The doctor. The doctor. And we were like, is this cool? And he's like, yeah. It was this whole like, very like blase, like, yeah, whatever. Like it was, we made a whole joke of it. He actually, when these videos started to go viral, his employer asked him to not be on the videos anymore.

Asked him to step away because they didn't feel it was they he was representing the company you know he he asked they asked him to stop appearing on them so we at one point replaced him with a dog my friend's pet dog who was just like there in the same jacket just looking like accomplish the same thing yeah we're like dude is this cool and the dog was just like yeah the dog gave the okay okay so now re-describe the tarantula so the tarantula um it's got these poisonous barbs or whatever and it's got these fangs and i'm like oh if i don't eat this correctly it will bite me because they're ferocious and it's a very vicious kind of attack thing like you shouldn't handle it i i looked online i researched uh eating

tarantulas i found these amazonian kids they would pull these tarantulas out the holes in the ground and and the way that they the way they grabbed them i was like i was like oh okay this is how you always wondered why you grabbed it i was like how did he figure this out so these kids like what they do is they they pin it down so he puts his finger on his back and they they pull its legs up so all its legs are above it. Yeah. So it can't run away and it can't grab it.

And then you just pick the legs up and they all like, you know, bent backwards. You know, I think all the legs are pointing toward the palm of your hand and you're holding it.

And then you're holding it and then it's almost like a lollipop. It's like the legs of the, you know, and then it's this body and you've got the underside of the trench. But then the fangs...

It's exactly like a lollipop. It's a spider lollipop. But the fangs were still there and i was like if i i need to also i don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain to animal i eat meat right so in my head i'm like right i eat meat i never research how that meat's been killed the reality is and for and the sad reality is for a lot of us we eat meat we don't research where it's come from. It's come from slaughterhouses. It's come from, you know, battery chickens where they don't get looked after. They're in agony their whole lives often.

So I got a lot of criticism for my channel, by the way. Like people hated it. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. It was very controversial. But my thing wasn't like, I'm going to torture this spider. I'm going to pull its legs off one by one.

And then, you know, I just was like, my thing was, I'm just to torture this spider. I'm going to pull its legs off one by one. And then, you know, you know, I just was like, my thing was, I'm just going to eat as fast as possible. I don't want to put it through unnecessary pain. Um, so within seconds, my idea is within seconds,

I want it to be dead. Right. And also you're explaining this on camera. Yeah. Some of it. Yeah. And then I'm like, I don't want to also don't want to get bitter.

So I'm like, if I just bite his head off quick, you know, so I'm like hovering, hovering in front of a mouth. This is where I like i like i honestly black out i can't remember what happened next uh and i can watch it on video but i blacked out from the fear because i'm like if i don't if i like miss if i miss my mouth or something and then it sinks its fangs into my lip like that's what i'm scared of like oh i got a spider bite in my mouth like imagine like and then and then the

barbs i'm like this could go all over my face. My whole face could swell up. So, these are real things that could happen, right? But I just went for it. I was, you know, shaking. My friend who was filming was one of them guys, the back of the room, shaking. Like, he didn't. Even right now, as you talk about it again, I'm like kind of backing away from you.

So, I bit the head off. All done. Really scary. But, yeah, uh yeah done no not really and then you had to get it down then you got to actually chew it and consume it at that point once it's dead i don't know it's not going to bite me i'm chewing that's fine that's just because once the because did you also do research or at least ask the dog that if it was okay that once you bite the head off not only can it not bite you but it can't like fire its barbs because i would be afraid about the barbs coming out off of the legs as i was trying to get down my throat i honestly didn't research it i just assumed once i got in my mouth those things spike spiky things wouldn't be as bad but i know it was all right it

was actually okay um what was the texture like? Was it like paper mache? The legs were quite chewy. The bit at the back, like the... I don't know what that is. Yeah, the spider butt was squidgy and goopy. It was like creamy inside. I don't know. It had spider juice inside of it.

And what was the taste? It was kind of tasty. I don't know. Like mushrooms? I don't know. I can't really explain the taste. It wasn kind of tasted like mushrooms i don't know i can't really explain the taste it wasn't you were blacked out yeah exactly um anyway let's not look let's not spend too much longer on it but the fact is i did all these things i got in a lot of trouble because you know and what i was going to say is the rspca which is the royal society of

prevention against cruelty to animals it showed up at my house they came here with freaking house yeah i don't know how they found my house with an f literally an fbi style file on me like literally show me flick through documentation every and every video like you know and their point was they were like we we're against what you do and you've taken it too far and they were waiting to pin something on me they were waiting to pin something on you yeah so they went and spin something on me they um so this goldfish thing right they're like this is in the uk illegal now what i could have done is say i didn't film it in the uk filmed in france or something you know because i was traveling at the time i was doing different things with friends but i was like something in me was like no i'm i'm just gonna be honest like i i did film this i don't think

there's a problem with it right and if if i'm gonna get in trouble like i found that a bit ridiculous like you can go fishing in the uk you can catch you can shove a hook through a fish's mouth pull out the water slap you know uh stab it in the head take it home cook it and eat it i'm like stabbing it in the head with a knife and and chomping and biting his head off with my teeth can i can i catch a fish in the river with a hook take it out and then bite his head off and then take it home and cook it and eat it you know this is my whole this is my whole theory right so i'm like why pulling it out and biting his head off and then eating it how is that illegal i don't understand anyway they took me to court they took me to court and it was in all the tabloids all the newspapers national press it was like psycho guy you know it's i was like hammered by the press about it and no one was on my side because it's not like i'm standing for an important issue here yeah yeah it's just like a

like who's this weird guy and he's eating goldfish this is this is wrong england's big on animal cruelty but so am i i don't want to cause animals pains, but then I'm like, I also, I am also a meat eater and I know animals are dying for me to eat. This is my point. This is my whole, the premise is like.

Are you making this point from the witness stand? Yeah, I'm like talking to the judge and he thinks it's ridiculous, but they're spending, the charity is spending. He thinks their case is ridiculous? Yeah. The RSPCA have, is the biggest charity in the UK. They and the he thinks their case is ridiculous yeah the rsbca have is

the biggest charity in the uk they have the most donations millions of people donate their private money to them they spent thousands of really good commercials they spent thousands well it's good it's all the puppies and the kittens and like poor puppy you know sarah mclaughlin is singing we have more than any human charity right which i find they're a bit crazy like i love animals but there's people dying as well yeah anyway so they're spending thousands of people's donations money on lawyers to pin me down for this and i'm like really like really anyway so it got to the point where i was asking my friends i didn't know what to do you hire a lawyer yeah okay to pay a lawyer i got to the point where i was like I don't need to fight this battle

I don't this isn't my I never set out to be an advocate for like the the right to eat goldfish so I just I just said out of court settlement

I was like okay I'm sorry I'm not going to do it again right they gave me an RSPCA caution it wasn't a criminal thing just a caution so like for instance if I

if I then am caught again like abusing a pet then i actually get issued this warrant thing saying i can't own a pet and then the police can confiscate me or whatever so i was like that was the that was the thing i had to admit that i was wrong and there was no criminal thing filed or anything and i was like okay but you didn't have to delete the videos no i didn't have to and they said like making a public apology and i think maybe i tweeted something but it was at this point they were like uh no i did i did have to delete the goldfish one okay no but at

this point some animal rights activist groups had gone online and they had gone onto my channel and just started flagging all the videos so like eight of my videos got taken down the day after all the tabloids showed me online so like ton of people started my channel actually got removed by youtube because so many people flagging it i went back to youtube and i was like hey look um i don't agree with this i don't think it's all wrong some of it was me drinking bottles of wasabi sauce you know maybe the goldfish was too far but that's an opinion thing. Anyway, my channel got put back up. I snuck a couple of videos back on. The same videos that got removed, you know. And it all started going again.

And I was like, I think I did a few more videos after that. But at that point, I was like, and I think one of my friends said to me, is this what you want to be remembered for? Is this your legacy in life? Is this channel? I'm like, no, it really isn't. I'm not a psychopath. I'm not. I know people are like, yeah, whatever like you're definitely a psychopath but i'm not and i just thought this is it was just a weird thing i was doing that kind of got way out of

control but but the positives are that i'd met this youtube community i'd realized there's a bunch of different content online and i just thought i can do anything i want so i at that stage someone said why don't you just film your life and just what you get up to every day and adventures stop eating crazy things and then that's what I started doing at the end of 2012 maybe and it wasn't a guarantee that it was gonna work might not have worked I think I think I just I started a brand new channel didn't even really push people over from I think from scratch yeah I probably had 400,000 subscribers on food for louis and I just from scratch started again didn't even really push my subscriber base over because those people didn't care about me they were like that's that weird guy eating weird stuff again they weren't

like oh we love you louis right so then i started from scratch got my youtube buddies that i knew in the community to help me uh and just built the channel from scratch again started the daily videos took my double decker bus on a tour around the uk um and at this stage this is where the transition was going back to the start then i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna take a pause on the bus stuff the the working with gangs and all that um go on a little tour and then go and spend some time in la came out here beginning end of 2012 i think um and then it just all took off from there met cool people started having cool adventures documenting it all uh and now i'm here with much much bigger channel i surpassed my channel quite quickly um and now i'm occasionally recognized as food for louis but now i've really

have like re rebranded redefined who i am online um and it's a bit of a mad story of how i got here really right well in this point with it being you know you you said okay i you when you started with the double decker bus you kind of took it on a tour but at this point it's just one adventure after another is is what it seems like and is it now the adventures are for the purpose of the exhibition right there so people can see it so now it's just now is it is it like i've got to plan the next adventure because i'm going to continue to bring people along for the ride is that sort of how it works well yeah this is the interesting thing so now i'm like i can fall into this trap of like i need to keep having adventures so people keep watching or i can be like look people are invested in me whether i'm jumping off cliffs or you know

you know doing adventurous things or just being me so i really want to be doing the things that i care about and want to do and the world changing projects and and then i think i would naturally just be doing that in an adventurous way anyway and let me let's qualify the the word adventurous here because okay what's the new equivalent to eating the scorpion and the tarantula because what's the craziest thing that you've done in your in your fun for louis adventures well this is a quant of qualify that this the connection here and it goes back to what we're saying before is it's about facing fears right so that was all about me facing fears every time i had a new challenge it was like can i do this sometimes there's a fear of it's going to

bite my mouth or sometimes it's the fear of like this is going to taste this is going to be the worst tasting thing i've ever eaten um and now in in my traveling and adventures um it's not i mean what's rivaled that like it what has rivaled that i mean there's been some kind of adrenaline style things sporty things that have been scary like you know jumping waves on this motorboat on this like high powered engine boat in south africa and there's like sharks in the water and there's like crazy high waves and i didn't have a life jacket on i remember that's probably the most scared i've been uh on a activity thing but i think sometimes um it's yeah, I mean, I don't know. It comes back to what are my fears right now.

I think sometimes the things I'm doing aren't necessarily my greatest fears, but they are things that people typically can be scared of, right? So going to new places, connecting with people and making friends, just doing things day to day that's slightly, typically slightly outside people's comfort zone so um hopefully being like you know i can do this guys and and also showing that it's not as scary as they think so a lot of fear is in our mind it's not things aren't black and white this is a scary thing you should be afraid of i mean there's some basics human fears which are good but a lot of it is just in your mind like and if i can show people just this is you can do this like it's easy to do this um

it can encourage people to do it what what do you think it's what's one of the coolest things you've done like it stands out in your mind like you kind of go back there in your own memory whether you re-watch the video or not like this was a surreal moment maybe it's this sunrise at this place maybe it's it's not jumping the wave with the sharks it's not the craziest thing the coolest thing the coolest thing i can think of this year was i went to uh i've got a pilot friend and we ended up flying this two-seater plane around namibia in southwest africa and we went to this tribe called the Himba tribe and they were like this the most primitive people group I've ever met they they pretty much naked they wear like clay in their hair and they um they live in mud huts right and they speak this tribal language and they're just very it's just so basic and they just heard goats that's their

thing and when you showed up what were they thinking well there's a there was a guide who um who translated a bit he grew up in the area but then had modernized his lifestyle right so he grew up in a similar as a kid in in super rural primitive then modernized gone to a school and like started wearing clothes and um learned a bit he brought you back so he came back with us um and this particular tribe had said that we're happy for tourists to come and it's funny because they don't they don't even really have a concept of money they just said bring us food so you bring a big bag of like maize and you give it to them and said here's the maize can we just come and have a look around it felt interesting because some of the people there wasn't a bunch of tourists there but at one point this german guy showed up with a camera and just

no real interaction with them just taking photos right and i'm like i don't know how i feel about this like it's it's tough isn't it because it's amazing to us and we want to capture it and be like look at these people like but you'd also don't want it to feel like a zoo like there yeah you know so i really wanted to interact with them engage and i don't speak the language but i was trying to have fun and they were showing me how to milk the goats the kids were loving it i actually ended up showing them an ipad i had my bag with a photo booth with the thing that squashes your face yeah and uh and this photo actually this photo went viral on the internet recently as the best photo on the internet and i and of what of you or of these kids holding this ipad and all grinning and going crazy

so so love it this day was incredible for me and i wanted to i wanted to stay there i was like can we stay here for a few days i want to like live like them i want to learn how so they we went we went for a few hours and we went back that night and they showed us how they cook their food and i was like helping them cook their food and making a complete mess of it. And they were just so happy, so content, had no material possessions, apart from a couple of them who actually had like Nokia 3310 phones.

They didn't know how to text. They just used them and they used to charge them down the road at a solar panel. But they had nothing else there no clothes but like a mobile phone hanging around the neck where do you put that around they hung it around their hang around the neck um which is a kind of wild thing so that i think that stands out as like it's totally different culture these people are content they they're not in the rat race they're not they don't care the crazy thing is that there's the full option around them with other villages to

modernize and they just don't want it they're like no we love our we love our like traditions and you have not like they're oblivious to it and they see the ipad and they're like cool and they're like um go and play with their goats as well like you know it's not a thing like they don't want to be and what i loved is they didn't seem to want to chase after this these technical you know these technology and this other stuff they didn't have the fear of missing out yeah i guess they just were so they just seemed so content and it was epitomized by this girl who was obviously thirsty running around with this little cup and she just grabbed a goat

and just milked the goat into a choose tiny like five milk the goat into a cup and just walked off sipping the cup i was like i was just like oh she's just chilling like just want a cup of milk yeah cool got the milk yeah i was just like she's just got everything she needs you know now you had the option to stay there you had the inclination to spend more time with him but you didn't do it you could have i could have there i could have they specifically at the time they got the men of the village were off herding some goats in another place and they said it might not be appropriate to stay just with all the women and children but i would have if the men had been there and it was cool i would have changed plans and i would have slept there i would have like i don't i just so fascinated

by this culture i was like this i i'm willing to do this you know this is i'd love to learn and and also interact and have fun with them it's not about like oh look at these weird people take photos and leave like i'm like let's you know i know this girl was showing me how to make fire and everything it was brilliant i loved it so that anyway i'm babbling but that's what that's what it was the coolest time of my vlog that's pretty cool well okay so in speaking of women you just said you're being with women in a village this kind kind of thing, living this life, this has got to get the ladies a little excited. What?

What do you mean, like this audience? Being the most interesting man in the world, this is sexy, you know? And I'm gonna go out on a limb here, I'm gonna tell you something, my wife has a little bit of a crush on you. And here's why. Okay.

She likes guys with dreads. She likes tall guys. I'm a tall guy, but I don't have dreads. And I remember the first time we saw your videos and then you were gonna be, I was like, I guarantee you this is the kind of guy that my wife would have a crush on. So you showed the videos?

You like served them up on a platter? No, me and the boys were watching some of the crazy, my kids just absolutely loved the Food for Louis videos. Yeah. And it wasn't like she sought it out, but I was like, you like this guy, right? This guy's your type. And she was like, yeah.

She just owned it. Yeah. So, but I'm not threatened. I'm in a happy marriage 14 years and going on. He's not in the same county as you most of his life.

Well, and exactly. Yeah. You're constantly traveling the world. So she can't. This is the thing. This is the thing.

Girls, I think, my experience is and some of the comments from viewers and, well, it's not,

the start is like most of my audience pulled in were like teenagers right because a lot of my friends had their teenage audience right so and i'm i'm old enough that they're not it's a bit weird i'm a little bit too old for them to have a real like obsession crush on like some of these young superstar youtubers that are like you know the justin bieber style like right so a lot of the interaction is you're cool and you're like an older brother kind of vibe and i'm like i love that vibe like you know i can i can inspire you guys i can try and be a good role model that's much better so i'm not getting that same obsession but then i do meet a lot of people a little bit older that are like yeah they might have they might and what i means what i have gathered is the my lifestyle is very like a romantic

idea i just i don't i just travel the world have fun exactly but the reality is there's no security in that i don't know what i'm doing day to day often i'm completely erratic there's not much structure that when you start breaking it down and start thinking about not many people want to live how I do. And it sounds romantic. It's like, oh, you live the best life. I wish I could live like you. I don't think everyone's built for it.

I honestly don't. I think a lot of people need like a bit of, a bit of like that. They want the home. They want somewhere they can just, you know, I'm home. You know, they want that, that comfort. I'm built differently.

I'm wired differently. I don't need that. And I think when people might initially be find this i this concept romantic but the amount of people that step in and be like oh yeah i want to i want to do that everything and really when they think through it i'm gonna right i'm gonna move out and what has that happened though have you have you been in relationships that uh were stressed because of your lifestyle before youtube yeah i was always i'd always loved traveling and i i didn't see eye to eye with one of my ex-girlfriends and she was

like uh she's like i don't like it when you travel and i was like but i love traveling and i was like come with me and then she didn't want to and i was just like like this isn't she was gone yeah it just didn't work so what about now what's your love life like i don't talk about that uh but um let's talk about more vaguely like i i think let's keep it vague the thing is if i was to uh i just you know a lot of viewers speculate i hang out a lot of cool girls on my channel right and everyone's always speculating who am i in a romantic thing with i at this stage i don't want to like um talk about that but um all i will say is like i think at the moment in my life the only way a relationship of any sort could work is if

i was traveling more often with someone that they had a more nomadic approach to life i would never be a fan of like like a long distance thing where i had to go back to somewhere to see that person so i think that's always been the thing i've thought i've thought well i've adopted a lifestyle which creates me it means that meeting someone and being able to start and sustain a relationship is really hard really i'm like i'm setting the bar really high like i'm saying i don't live anywhere i travel the world and i feel my life every second of every day like it's all it's quite a lot to yeah suddenly if someone's like you know oh i want to be with you i mean there's a lot that

comes with that there's a lot of yeah conditions you know and also then i'm like you know how far if i just fell head over heels in love with someone what would i sacrifice because the reality is and i've seen it around like daily vlogging isn't great isn't always conducive with like a healthy relationship that where you've got where you've got like a marriage and you start thinking about a family and stuff some some people have done it there's channels you know there's there's families that do it but i don't know i don't know that's all future stuff i need to think through but it's uh it's much the whole thing works a lot easier with this concept of i'm just me i'm louis i'm single and i'm just doing my thing and i don't need to i don't need

to worry about like someone else's decisions and it all well i think it's going to be you know my prediction is there would be a magical moment at some point in the future. You'll be somewhere in a savanna riding on the back of a lion and you'll come upon this beautiful woman drinking directly from a buffalo. Or yeah, let's just say a zebra drinking directly from a zebra and you'll lock eyes.

And it'll be like, Well, I'm riding past the lion. I'm like, yeah. And then she'll be like, I, I'm riding past the lion. I'm like, hey. And then she'll be like, I'll get on that lion with you. Yeah. Or he'll get under the zebra with her. Either way, yeah. You're going to be going the same direction.

And better yet, she's going to already be vlogging it. Yeah, exactly. She'll be down there next to the zebra teat with a camera on herself. Yeah. And you'll be like, you understand me. Let's make this happen. So, ladies, if you're out like, you understand me. Let's make this happen. So ladies, if you're out there

and you're currently suckling a zebra and filming it, then we've got the man for you. Ladies, like there's multiple. Yeah. All their heads

popped up at once like. This has been fun, man. I think this may be one of my favorite biscuits ever made. We need to plan an adventure together is what we need to do because so up for that. Our adventures have to be very well planned in advance.

But I didn't even tell you about this. You may have seen the email, but I met a guy last night. You may have seen that weird email that came in from Australia. This guy was like an adventure planner dude in Australia for years and I was telling him about one of our dreams is to do some off-roading and surfing combo thing in like Australia.

He was like, oh, I know all the people to hook you up with. Don't be talking about it in front of Louie because then he's gonna do it. No, but he's, we do it together. Let's do it together, yeah. Okay, we'll invite him. Yeah, okay. He's still here, he's listening. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, let's do it.

All right. Thanks for hanging out man this is great really fun yeah all right and there you have it our conversation with louis we had a lot of fun with louis i was going to make a play on his channel name, which is Fun4Louie. We didn't have fun for him. We had fun with him in the conversation. Let him know what you think by tweeting at him.

His handle is Fun4Louie. Use hashtag EarBiscuits, y'all. Tweet at that guy. It is definitely difficult to have a conversation with a guy like this and not think, man, I need to get out more, which I think is, you know, A good thing. It's a good thing because we should get out more. We should, I need to get out more, which I think is, you know. A good thing.

It's a good thing because we should get out more. We should, I'm not necessarily saying that we should be eating any live stuff or we should necessarily be buying double-decker buses, even though all that's exciting. Well, he does neither of those anymore in fairness. Right, but this whole idea of squeezing all of the excitement and experience out of life in as many places as you can,

that's something that I'm gonna try to make happen just in my commute in the Southern California area. That's as far as I get. That's exactly what I was gonna say was, it's not like you've got to dive into the Amazon to experience life. I think the challenge for us is, within the parameters of the life that is ours,

that we have, you know, with our wives, with our kids, with our friends, with our coworkers, within the context of commuting, finding a way to squeeze the realness out of it, live in that moment. Yeah, and there is something that we can both begin doing right now that doesn't require travel. We could grow dreads.

I just started, could you tell? No, you didn't wash your hair today. I did, but I just started. I didn't wash it right now again. Okay, so that's it. We're not gonna wash dreads? We're not gonna, well, it's a complicated process. Just wiki it, man.

Okay. It involves washing and not washing. You can't just put shampoo, normal shampoo, and put your hands in there and separate your hairs because then you can't make dreads. You have to let them lock up, and then once they lock, there is a way to wash them, but it's not a traditional way. But we're not gonna talk about that

cause that's gonna be wicked. That's right. Okay, that's also your assignment. Start growing your dreads and experience life to the fullest. Those things are, you don't have to do both. You can choose one or the other. But they are mutually exclusive.

No, they're not. And we'll talk at you next week, guys.