The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The Faceless Entrepreneur Making MILLIONS | Jubilee Media

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

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From a grassroots start as a simple production, driven by one man trying to raise money for a good cause, to a million-dollar startup revolutionizing YouTube with the real-life social experiment videos that consistently go viral over and over and over. They've also famously been reacted to by the likes of PewDie Pied, Cody Co, and plenty of other popular streamers and YouTubers. And today we get to sit down with Jason Lee,

the founder who started it all, and we chat about the strategies, failures, and successes that he has seen in growing this massive production. So if you guys enjoy videos just like this, make sure to subscribe because we post a brand new episode every single Sunday. So thank you guys so much. And now let's begin the podcast. This is Jason Wiley from Jubilee Media with the Ice Coffee Hour podcast.

And to date, I think this podcast has made $267,000. People are getting pretty close. $251,000. Dang. That's pretty good. You guys haven't dropped the Mr. Beast. or the Dave Ramsey one yet, right? Not yet.

I feel like when that happens, it'll scale quickly. Those are coming out soon. We're going to hit 267,000. Okay. Actually, I think Dave Ramsey's posting tomorrow or Sunday.

Okay. So that's coming really soon. Hopefully in the next couple of days that we can get there. Yeah, and then Mr. Beast probably a week after that. So you might be after these two. I don't know.

We'll see. We'll see. We'll figure it out. I feel like I'm in good company, actually. You are. Yeah. You are.

Yeah. Step up a few levels of the podcast. Well, congrats to you guys. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Amazing guests and like having some really good conversations.

Yeah. Well, including you, by the way. This is something I've really been looking forward to this one because I've been watching Jubilee. Gosh, it's been what, five years? I am at about five. Four, four years. Yeah.

Well, likewise. I was just saying, you know, my wife and I would just buy a home, but I was like watching. I've seen so many of your videos. But at the time, I was like, is this a good time to buy a house? And it's like, oh, no, Graham says it's not a good time. You're buying at the worst. Yeah. This is the top.

of the bubble and then the next video is like, this is higher part of the bubble. And then I'm like, okay, I don't know. But no, obviously a big fan. And thank you so much for being a part of a lot of our stuff at Jubilee. Of course. Yeah. I feel like you gave me such a huge opportunity in 2019. I think I was just coming off of that $78 Tesla video. And I appeared in a Jubilee video. What was it? Millionaires versus minimum wage workers. Middle ground. Yep. Yeah. And I almost said no to that episode. I had an interview. And I didn't know how it was going to turn out because I watched the video.

I think it was, what was the one where there was a big argument? Was it the vegan versus the... Yeah, there was an odd one out vegan. Yeah, that was it. They can get kind of spicy and very like, you know, it's all about real people bringing their real stories, right? We try to create a safe space for it, but sometimes it can get a little bit heated.

So totally, I've had friends say, like, no, I'll never show up on one of your videos. But we were happy you came on because I think you gave such a great, like, nuanced view, right? Because people hear about millioners and they're like, I don't know. Like they're all d' eggs or whatever. And I think that people really resonated with your story.

So I mean, that's just a credit to you. We're just happy to like give platform to good people. Yeah. I am so happy. I decided to say yes for that. It was honestly a no up until maybe a week before. Maybe 10 days before.

I was like, you know what's the worst? I really actually made a pros and cons list. I'm like, what if we get in an argument? What if I say something? Right. Because I remember asking one of your producers,

I say, if I say something, can I have a final say and like, what gets put out? And you're like, no. I hope they said no. Yeah. Yeah, they said no. They just said, we'll include what we can. We want to make you look good. And we want to make sure that, like, you're happy with it. But no, we're not going to let you see it before. Just be careful of what you say. And if you need time to speak. Just like, take your time. Good. That's the answer. And I was like, I made a pros and cons list. And I was like, there's more pros and cons. I'm going to do it. And I think that video was like number four on trending. It was, it was really well. Yeah. Yeah. And then am I right that you made a response to the video to?

Of course. Oh, yeah. Any way possible. Yeah. This is called. the infinite monetization loop. Yes. So if I could react to my own content, I will. Right. Because it's just another way to monetize. Yeah, so later on Jubilee,

I will have a response to this podcast. Yeah, perfect. These are all the reasons why this was wrong. No. No, you've been on several videos now, right? Three or four, I feel like. Every time our audience sees you, I think that they really enjoy you.

And it's awesome to see you guys blowing up on the podcast and obviously your videos are always killing it. Thank you. It's funny because it was also that video specifically that sparked my first. final email to Graham. Really? Yes, because I was going to sign up for it as a minimum wage worker because I was working minimum

wage at the time. Imagine if that was like how you guys had connected. I forgot about this. Yeah, and I emailed him about it. I'm like, dude, I'm so bummed out that like I was going to sign up and I could have met you just by chance and I didn't know he was doing it, of course, but as soon as I saw it come out and I was like, dang, I was going to do that one. Wow.

Yeah. Has you been one of my videos of a sudden? I have. You have. It was because of that, I think, was one of the reasons why Jack is now working with me. That's crazy. What video have you been?

Unfortunately, it was capitalist versus socialist. And you came on the... Capitalist. Capitalist. Okay. Yeah. There's been so many people in our videos that now, people come out to me like, hey, I was in your video, and I'm always like, oh, your face looks so familiar to me, but I...

I didn't think I saw you on the set. I wasn't. I'm rarely on set these days anymore. Interesting. I don't get to be a part of it as much. Yeah, it would really be interesting to get an inside look on, like, what exactly goes down for you on a day-to-day basis, considering this is something that you you came up with it all yourself.

Right? I did. Yeah. Tell us about this because didn't you quit your job to do, jubilee and create that. Well, I was watching your podcast with, was it Elliot who was talking about like consultants. So I'm a former consultant. So I can explain. What do you do? What is that? So the way I would explain it to like my mom, for example, is we just help big companies like solve difficult decisions. Essentially like these consultants have seen so many of the same problems, whether it's around headcount, whether it's around strategy, whether it's around like launching a new product that they become specialized at doing that thing. And therefore, they're not going to be able to give you the answer, but they can help you answer a lot of the questions or like ask the right

questions along the way. So when he said like frameworks, that's, that's the right answer, actually. There's like, we've seen this a hundred times. It doesn't mean now that you guys are going to launch your own coffee, that we know exactly what kind of coffee you should launch, but we know all the right questions to ask that you can avoid some of the pitfalls. And then we would make like a final recommendation. So yeah, I was a consultant for three years. So was it a good gig? For me, I, I grew up in like, my parents were both academics. So I grew up like pretty, and there were grad students like my entire life. So we were pretty like lower income, I would say growing up.

So growing up, I just thought, hey, one day if I can make $100,000 as a salary, that will be like, I'll be rich. That was my mindset. My first job out of college, I was making six figures. I was like, I've made it. So there was everything I kind of had dreamed of working in New York City. I was in Times Square, working at Bain, one of the biggest consulting firms. And I was like, I've made it. I'm going to be so happy.

And in a lot of ways, it like checked that box. But I think it also made me really honestly reevaluate everything. But I was like, I achieved everything I thought I wanted. And despite all that, it wasn't that I was unhappy, but I felt like kind of unfulfilled. And I think a lot of it was as it relates to as a consultant, you're spending so much of your time and your energy helping other people pursue their vision or their dreams. But you don't get to own a lot of it yourself. And I think I started to recognize, okay, maybe I'm not a consultant. and maybe I'm a builder myself.

What would that look like if I was doing that? So that was kind of like the whole world when, and I was while as a consultant at Bain, that I made my very first YouTube video and that really started Jubilee Project and eventually Jubilee Media too. Got to tell us about that video. Can we see it?

Yeah, it's still up. It's still up? I think that, yeah, if you watch, it's a little bit like cringy to watch. But I think that's important. Is it on the Jubilee channel? It's still on Jubilee channel, yeah. So the first video I ever made was called My 100 for Haiti.

My 22nd birthday was January 12th, 2010, but it happened to also be the day of the Haiti earthquake. And it was just like weird confluence of events where I'd just gotten this new job. It was like living in New York City, New York City apartment, killing it, all that. And then that afternoon it was like devastating photos and videos of Haiti. And I was like, why am I so blessed? What am I doing about this? And at the time, that's 2009, sorry, 2010. It was during the height of the recession.

So we weren't doing much work as consultants. We were like on the beach, as I said. We were just like waiting for the next case. It's like, I got to do something. So I decided to go to Union Square, like a subway stop to busk with my guitar to raise money. We raised $80. I made my very first video. I put it on YouTube.

I said, I told my friends say, hey, please watch, please donate. And within a week we had 10,000 views. We had raised tens of thousands of dollars. And it was kind of like that lightball moment. Not of like, I want to be a YouTuber. But wow, we can actually use media, storytelling. telling to really galvanize folks and do a lot of good. And that kind of got that started. So soon thereafter, I started Jubilee Project, which was a 501C, it was a nonprofit. I got one of my

best friends, Eric and my brother, Eddie, on board. And we were just like doing that rag tag nights and weekends. Do you still run as a nonprofit today? No, we don't. Okay. So Jubilee Project still exists as like a sister organization now, like a foundation to Jubilee Media. And then in 2017, I launched Jubilee Media, which is a new entity. Got it. And you quit your job to do that? How is that? Well, I quit my job to do Jubilee Project, which was insane. Because this was 2012.

And at the time I was working at Bain, my older brother, Eddie, was working at the White House at the time. He was at the Obama administration. And my friend Eric was at Harvard Med School. And we were, like, doing these videos on the side for fun. And we said, you know what, this is what we want to do. So we all quit same day, which was crazy. It's me and my brother were the only children of Korean immigrants. Eric Taiwanese,

only child. They're like, what are you going to do? We said, we're going to make videos on YouTube. They're like, how are you going to make money? And we're like,

we're not. We're going to be a nonprofit. It's like, not only are you going to be a video creator when like the idea of being a creator was still relatively nascent. We're going to do it as a nonprofit. So it was like, let's shoot ourselves in both feet so we cannot walk or run.

But it was just this leap of faith, you know, I was speaking at event. I don't know if you ever do like speaking events for like colleges or things. But I was speaking at an event for a college and there was a woman who had spoke right before me and she was speaking about a woman named Bonnie Ware who was like a palliative care nurse. She's someone who helps folks who are like under deathbed. And she asked everyone, you know, what is the biggest regret that you have in your life? So and the biggest regret that

folks had was not like, I wish I made more money or I wish I had traveled more. The biggest regret that folks who were about to die would say was I wish I had the courage to live a life to myself and not one that others expected of me. And when I heard that, I was like, cut to the heart. I was like, oh, this is my life. My entire life up until this point, I've made all these decisions because I was supposed to go to a good school. Let me try to go to Ivy League school.

I was supposed to get a high-paying job. And I never asked myself, what is it that I wanted to do? And when I started a Jubilee project, I was like, whoa, this actually feels like something I'm supposed to do. I'm using my gifts, my talent, to help other people. I'm going to quit my job. And then the mayhem started, right? It's like, what are you going to do?

My boss is like, this is crazy. You have no backup plan. We were making no salary at the time. But it was just like a huge leap of faith. And slowly, I saw that like when you are pursuing what you're meant to do, kind of like the stars in the universe or God or faith will align to allow you to make it so. When everyone quit, was the nonprofit generating any like reasonable amount of revenue to quit? Or was it just like a Hail Mary?

We were, yeah, we were bringing in probably 20, 30k annually, but all that was going back into our video content. So we weren't actually making any money ourselves. How did you support yourself then? Yeah, all of my savings that I had from Vain, I just like used that as my nest egg. And what I mean by like people just came out and supported us when we moved to, we were going to like move to L.A. Right. Like everyone's here. We're moving to L.A. They're like, where are you going to live? And Eric's mom had said, you know what? You can live in our home. So they're like, where are you going to live? We're like, we're going to live in Irvine. They're like, that's not L.A.

But we lived in Irvine for two years for free. My brother and I were 23 and probably 25 at that time. We were like living in a bunk bed, you know, a tiny home. Finally she kicked us out. Someone else that we knew said, hey, you can live in my house for free for another year. Like all these different kind of things happens that allowed us to like just continue to do what we did. That's really generous. Oh yeah.

Absolutely. And that's the thing. It's like that's why when folks kind of reach out to me and say, hey, I think I'm going to quit med school. I'm going to quit my job to do this. I don't say, go for it. I say, hey, what have you done thus far that can demonstrate that you'll have some kind of success? Right. I was doing Jubilee Project for several years while at Bain before I quit even.

But when you start to make that leap of faith, I kind of truly believe that like things will kind of happen and work as long as you're persistent and humble. And has the style of content stayed the same as far as like what you guys are putting out now versus what you guys were doing back in the early project days? Not at all. My first video was My 100 for Haiti. So that was kind of like a vlog, like kind of video. I did several like that. And then we actually started doing like short films. Like romantic skits kind of is what I would call them. I don't know if you're familiar with Wong food productions. They're big in like the Asian American space. But we would do like a love story. But then it would raise money for a certain cause. Some of the messaging was unclear at times. But we actually had a lot of success doing that. One of our biggest videos called Blinders. devotion short film it's about like seven or eight minutes and ended up getting about like 25 million views which is unheard of for like a scripted fictional piece right so that was really what we were doing but then when i started jubilee media i started to recognize this is like not really a viable way to scale it costs so much time and money to do that that we knew that that's not the way that we were going to make the difference talk to us about the evolution between going from that to where

jubilee is today how many employees do you have we're about 40 employees that's incredible i remember remember when I filmed, it was a much bigger operation than I thought. I'm used to just like, hey, it's, it's one person and like maybe a helper to people like doing it themselves. But I walked, it was like a full on production. It was like a set. It's blown away. It's been, sometimes when I'm on set, I'm like astounded by what's happening. And I used to direct all of our videos ourselves. And now they're like, please do not touch a camera, Jason. You're going to mess something up. I'm like, you're right. Let me stay away. But yeah, the transition from Jubilee Project was the three of us, it was like the three of us, the three of us,

three mesqueteers. We were doing this together. But after a couple years, both Eddie and Eric, they fell in love with different folks and they kind of saw that they had a kind of a different path. And they both left. And it was just me doing Jubilee Project alone, actually. Did you have to buy them out or did they just say, hey, you could take over? It was a nonprofit. It was just, hey, you know, I'm going to do something different. And Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa

is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

Actually, that was a really challenging time, because even though we were starting to really grow in subscribers, we had maybe like 150,000 subscribers, I want to say. We had just launched blind devotion. It got like 20 million views at that time. I felt like a complete failure, actually. I felt like my brother and my friend don't even believe in what I'm doing.

I felt like the last man kind of standing on like a sinking ship. And that was about a year or two of just like internal soul searching, I would say, where I was like, man, what am I supposed to do? I don't know my purpose. Like, is this even what I'm supposed to be doing? Should I go back into consulting? She'll go to business school. My mom's like,

just go to business school. Everything will be fine. Even though that was a really dark and difficult time, it ended up being really important because I started to kind of like pull back all the layers of like subscriber count didn't not matter to me anymore. Like getting this person

in the video didn't matter to me anymore. Like all these things didn't matter. I started to really ask myself, why am I here? What is it that I want to do? And on the back end of that, that was 2016, 2017, around. the election. And after the presidential election, it felt like the world was like more divided than ever.

And that's when I started to see like a really clear vision for what I wanted to build a Jubilee, which is as the world is more divided, why don't we create a media company that's about bringing people together? That's about discourse. It's about provoking understanding and real human connection. And I felt like that was something that the world really needed. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try to do that. But this time not as a nonprofit, we're going to raise capital.

We're going to do this as a proper venture. and we're going to scale this as large as possible. So that kind of kicked off Jubilee Media. So 2017, I raised a small round of capital, and I was like an officer races. Who did you raise from? Well, first I got like, I literally have a list.

I have 83 knows. So when you kind of talk about like raising capital, it at first sounds like the most like, I had no idea what that would even entail. Because I had never done that process. I didn't know who to speak to. So I was talking to anyone and everyone. And I actually got into rooms with like really,

reputable VCs, like a lot, a lot of big investors, and I totally just blew it because I had no idea what I was doing. So 83 knows. My very first check came from a professor at Warren, where I went to college, who taught entrepreneurship. And she was like, Jason, let me kind of help you. I believe in what you're trying to build. Let me give you your first check. And after that slowly, I started getting checks. How much was the first check? My first check, I think it was about 20K. Okay. Wow. And what were you doing wrong to blow it the first 83 times. Yeah, first of all, articulating the vision is really, really important to tell people very clearly what you're trying to build and why. And I think I knew why. I just didn't know how it would look. Because at that time, you got to remember, there was no middle

ground. There was no spectrum. There was none of these shows. I was just saying, we're going to make positive content. And people are like, oh, cool, like upworthy. And I was like, no, not like upworthy. Upworthy is like what my mom and my grandma watches. I want to make positive content for young people that will like provoke them. And they're like, what do you mean? Like BuzzFeed. I was like, no, it's going to be with more value. And there's going to be like a point to it.

Not to say. Yeah. We get it. Yeah. I think everybody understands. Yeah. Don't start. And then so so many people just didn't understand it.

And then secondly, sometimes you find yourself in a room with someone that will just not say yes because it's just not the right fit. Right? They don't care about media or they don't invest in media. They have no interest in what you're talking about. So that was the majority of the nose. And then once I started to like articulate what I was trying to build better and actually get into rooms with angel investors, for example, I found, oh, they're the folks who are looking earlier stage.

Like if I'm at a VC company, they're looking to invest big checks into like slightly further stage companies, whereas angel investors are like, you've got an idea to make this kind of coffee, whatever. great, I'll give you 10K, 20K. But some of our early angels are like, include everyone from Kevin Lynn. He's one of the founders of Twitch. Steve Chen, one of the founders of YouTube.

Like we've got some really incredible founders who, some of those conversations were like the fastest. Seven minutes. They're like, oh, cool, cool, cool, okay, I'll talk to you later. I was like, oh, I blew it. I was like, hey, is there anything I can send you to like maybe give you more info? They're like, no, no, I'm going to send my check now. You know what I mean?

Part of me believes maybe it's because you got that first check that all of a sudden it shifted something for you where you're like wow the fact that one person believed in me means that there's got to be someone else and then that like changes a mindset too and think about yourself as an investor do you want to be the first check yeah right like it's a very scary thing is you're like I've got no validation but then you start hearing oh graham and jack both invested and Steve and Kevin and the founder of this company and then you're like oh wait I want to get in there's like a natural kind of fomo or human instincts to do that so it totally makes sense I don't hold anything against the previous investors

because I think it really required me to figure out what I wanted to build and that process can be really difficult but it's supposed to make you a better founder I think. Was there a lot of skepticism around YouTube being like a viable profitable business at the time as well or had it already kind of proven itself?

There were examples. Luckily at that time BuzzFeed was the heyday of BuzzFeed where people were like this. What is that like 2014? This was yeah 15, 6. 1415. BuzzFeed surveys were everywhere. And you would have to click like a new page for every single thing. Like 10 things you did know your girlfriend does. You have to click eight times.

I hated it. And all the quizzes. Oh, and the ads at the bottom. Yeah. Also their video content, if you remember, like the try guys. The Tri guys are fantastic. Tasty was just getting along. People were like, oh my God, this is the future of entertainment.

Which was not untrue, right? But what people kind of believe that media would scale infinitely, which we learned is not the case that you can't go from 1,000 videos to 2,000 videos and go to 10,000 videos and believe like that line will be linear with brand partnerships, for example, or with advertising necessarily, because it's difficult to do. But there was a model for that. And like a lot of folks were interested still in that. So when someone's an investor, does that mean they get an equity stake in the company? Or how does that work? It can look a couple different ways. It can come in the form of like a debt note or like a safe.

So safe is like the YC, like the Y Combinator version of a debt note. Or it can come as a percentage of equity. But yeah, the general idea is this person is buying a small percentage of your company and believing that it's going to be worth a lot of money one day. And an interesting thing about angel investors or like this stage of company is they really want you to either become a unicorn, like a billion dollar company or sometimes they would actually rather you fail. Like it's not good for them if you become,

let's say a $20 million company, you're making good revenue, you're like feeding everyone and giving good salaries to employees because they don't get an agisid actually. Right? So they want to find the next Facebook, Microsoft. They want the write-off.

Yeah. If they don't fail, there's no right-off. That's a good point. That is a good point. Yeah. I have to consult you lots of tax questions later. But yeah. So for you personally, like you're kind of, I would assume in that middle there between unicorn and like a, you know, a struggling.

I would like to say that we're right in the middle, but that's not true. We're still, I think, on the early end, generally still in our life cycle. But it's all a matter of perspective, right? The way I think about it is when you were first a founder and just yourself and starting a company, it's like going into the ocean with like inflatable life raft. And you're just like feeling every wave. So every success, and this is like so relevant even to creators too, right? Like every video that crosses 100,000 or a million views, you're like, this is the best thing ever. And then you like, I don't know, you have some kind of problem.

And it's like the worst problem. And you think, oh, my company will never succeed or I'll never be a great creator. And slowly as the company grows, it's not the waves get bigger. It's actually the boat gets bigger. So you're actually able to like withstand some of that difficulty better. And eventually, hopefully you want to be a unicorn where you're on a cruise ship, right? You hit the same wave. you like literally don't even feel it. I kind of feel like we are well on our way to be in cruise ship,

but I still feel like we're still pretty nimble. I kind of fancy us as like a small yacht. How do you come up with some of your ideas? Like the originality of your videos, I feel like get copied. Like you'll come up with the concept and within a month. There's like five other channels to do the same like Tinder swiping in real life. Yeah. Similar thumbnail styles too. Yeah. I mean, they do, they're great mimickers. It's just sometimes I see some with their thumbnails. I was like, did we make that? No, that's not our video. Oh, interesting. I'll watch them like, wow. Well done. Who comes up with those ideas? What was the first big idea? Was it the swiping in real life? The first big idea, no, was middle ground. It was actually the one that, you know,

you bring two sides together to quote unquote have a debate, but really it's about finding common ground. And that first idea came about, actually, this is pretty interesting. There's an organization called Defy Ventures. What they do is they'll bring entrepreneurs or investors and they'll actually bring them to like federal prisons and you'll spend a couple of days or weeks with folks in prison who have like an entrepreneurial idea and at the end of that program they'll actually pitch and then they'll like give seed money to folks who are starting companies really really incredible and the idea is like how do we empower folks like have capital create their own opportunity right the first day I was in that prison they had an exercise where they had all the folks who were in

On one side, they had all the entrepreneurs and the investors on the other. And they would ask a series of questions and they would say, hey, step to the line if this is true for you. I remember some of the questions were like, hey, if you grew up in a two parent household, step to the line. And for that one, like a lot of folks who are on my side, like step forward. And some folks on the other side did not. There are other questions, though, that were like, if you've ever broken the law before, step to the line. And everyone had stepped to the line, right? Like, I've run a red light before.

I've done things. Maybe I'm not proud of. And some things that were just innocuous. And it was very clear that actually a lot of us had very, a lot in common, actually. And maybe it was our circumstances or the way that we look are different things that actually cause one of us to be in prison and one of us to be like a founder of a company. And it was just kind of like a very mind-blowing idea that we actually have far more in common than we might think.

And we started thinking about, oh, in the context of this election, I'm from Kansas, very, very Bible Belt, relatively red state. We live in L.A. now, relatively are very blue. I know people on both sides of the same debate who actually have very, very similar interests and actually want the same thing, but they articulate such different ways.

And we're like, what if it didn't matter what color shirt you wore and what color short I wore, but we talked about some of these issues as like humans, what kind of things would we actually agree on? And that's kind of what really sparked middle ground as a show. So that's not the way that we come up with every show. We don't go to prison every time and say, hey, what is like, hey, man, we're out of ideas. Just go to prison today and let's see what they're doing.

Yeah. Some of the way we come up, this might be fun. We really think about creating new shows as creating IP, but we almost think about it in a startup perspective. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with like hackathons and MVPs, like in the tech space. But hackathon, right, is like Google will do like a 24 hour hackathon where they'll be like, hey everyone go and spend 24 hours to build a tech product and that's where like Google chats came from or something at that we said okay what if we actually do like regular hackathons within our company so like these used to be 24 hours we don't do

24 hours anymore because it's too painful but we'll have everyone just drop what they're doing and for a day say hey what if we can come up with a thousand video ideas what would that look like good bad ugly it doesn't matter then we'll take a bunch of those ideas we'll ask a handful of folks to MVP them MVP standing for a minimum viable product, right? It's like, what is the minimum viable thing that you can do to test whether this idea is a good one or a bad one? So, for example, like with Spectrum, we actually had one of the guys who came up with the idea, Michael, go into a room and he took his iPhone and he drove lines on the ground and said, hey, I'm going to ask a series of questions. And at the time,

there was only three lines. And it was like, oh, this is not very interesting. So he's like, oh, let me draw two more lines. We got to five lines. He shot it all with his iPhone. And when we watch it back, we're like, okay, there's something interesting here. So we kind of iterated on that. So before we even like rent a production space, bring on the entire crew that you see, we've thought about and we've tested to some degree what that production will look like. And it doesn't mean now it's going to be 100% successful, but at least we have like a process for like weaning out bad ideas and bad concepts. We try to be as creative on one hand, but also as framework or consulting as possible in another hand.

I have to say I really admire the creativity that goes into your videos. I think middle ground, spectrum, the ranking, attractiveness, intelligence. Like, I would never have thought of that idea. But it's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now.

We're running out of time and we still don't know. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Oh, good, and it's simple, and it's easy to watch. Yeah. Anybody could comprehend it. And sometimes people will come, some of our creators will come with an idea.

I'm like, oh, can we do that? Like, you know, but I think that that's a good question that we want to, like, be close to that line of, like, We really want to make authentic content that sometimes revokes people, but provokes understanding for a good purpose. Can you say something where you were presented with an idea and you were like, I don't know, that might be crossing the line? I'll give you a good scenario that I'd be curious to you guys thought on. For example, for us, we really want to make sure that we're trying to be as balanced as possible. So Republicans and Democrats is the easy one. with vaccines early on there was like a big debate about you know vaccine vaccine hesitant there's a

question that always comes up from some of our like most empathetic but like hardcore employees who are like would we ever feature white supremacists in a video and then that kind of becomes a really interesting and difficult question of so what's the purpose of that would we be platforming a perspective that we think could be harmful are we actually giving empathy but these are important questions that we have to be asking ourselves if we want to be provoking understanding creating human connection, right? I feel like from a business standpoint, it's probably not a good idea because you want to keep a clean record. But I'm a big fan of just airing out anything, right? Like letting anybody say whatever. And then obviously, I'm a firm believer, like whoever is the most moral,

whatever the most ethical argument is, will always win. So I'm a fan, like, you know, give whatever people opportunity to say whatever, but I don't think there's winning or losing, though. I think with something like middle ground, let's say, there is no winner or loser. And there's, I don't know, two perspectives, then you let the viewer decide. I don't know if I would do a middle ground on that. Yeah. This would be like a much of a middle ground. Yeah.

Okay. Maybe that was the, yeah. No, it would be like I'd ask me. Ask me anything. Yeah. It's more like that. Yeah. You know, there's not a right answer to any of them to some degree.

So that's where we go back to like, what is our vision? Our vision at Jubilee is we want to provoke understanding, create human connection. What are the values? values that we have as a company. You know, like in business school, and they're like, mission, vision, values. I was like, I don't know why that matters. And now I'm like, oh, it matters so much to me now. Because these are the ways that we're going to make our decisions.

And if you ever disagree with me or with the creative director or someone who's having to make one of these decisions, there will be a clear paradigm as to why we've made that decision. That's not just like, oh, well, Graham said he wanted to do that. Or Jack thought this was a good idea. Have you ever filmed something that has not been aired? Like you just couldn't post it All the time

We probably don't put out Over 10 to 20% of our content Really? That seems like a high amount Just because it wasn't like exciting? Multiple reasons. One, sometimes it's not of the caliber Like it's just not something that we feel like We're proud to put out

So excellence is one of our values It's like if it's not excellent we don't want to put it out We have put out stuff that's not excellent in the past, by the way. But that's what we strive for. Other times we feel like we've like inaccurately portrayed or like insufficiently portrayed one side. So for example, if middle ground happens, but one side just like they're not able to articulate

their points well or personality comes out or like someone drops out last minute, we get a fill in and we're not feeling like we've appropriately respected that kind of point of view, then sometimes we'll just feel like, oh, it's too in balance. Well, we're going to have to redo this. We'll have to reshoot this. Those are probably the two major examples. The one video idea, by the way, that everyone comments on the one that I was on, you got to get two groups of people together, one self-made millionaires and one that

have inherited their money. Oh, that's got to do that. That was the top comment, I think, on a few of the millionaire videos that you've done. Can we have you back for that one? Yeah, no, I would love to. Okay. Well, you guys here first. We'll start that.

Yeah, I think that comment I've seen more often than any other comment was that idea. So I got to represent the comments. section, by the way. That's right. So, slash the like button. There we go. Thank you. Subscribe. You would probably get a lot of great ideas.

Honestly, just going through the comments. Going through every, that's what you should probably have somebody do, go through every single video and just read the top 20 comments because I read all the comments. And some of the best ideas come from people just sitting at their computer. This is a good idea. And it's like, wow, that is a really good idea. That's a great topic. Yeah, we've had some really good topics come that way as well.

Yeah, we have to do a better job now of just like we get so many just to like, final way to make it happen. But yeah, I agree. Yeah, because they've got a really good pulse on like what they want to see. And chances are if it's got like 10,000 likes to it, then it's like, you already know there's an audience for that particular topic. Yep. Yeah. Are you ever worried, like you said, about you're putting three people against each other in a middle ground or something like that, that like you said, people, people's arguments can be poorly portrayed. What if you did something with like 50 people on both sides and they had like blue and red shirts and then you could do something like a spectrum or something like that where it would lower the variance of how like one population feels.

Obviously it would be a little bit more logistically challenging. No, yeah. I think it's a great idea. This idea of like social polling is one that we've been toying with quite a bit. Actually the cut has a great video series that they used to do called Dirty Data where they actually had like a POV camera from the top and they would have people like move based on what they believe. They stop making it. I'm not sure why. Sounds expensive.

It is expensive. Yeah. Think about how many people show up and you're paying. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's a great idea as far as like, you know, I think a lot of times what we don't want to do is we don't want to say this is fact or this is fact or this is correct or this is correct. Well, we want to be able to represent as different people's experiences and beliefs. Right.

So it's not like, oh, if everyone moves over here, that means that this is right. But it's a great snapshot right now of how people might think or feel or believe. And you might believe, oh, this is right. But wait a second, everyone moved over here. Maybe I'm wrong. Like when is the last time we've really heard or seen in media, like, folks kind of take accountability and be like, I don't know. Like I could be wrong here or like, let me change my perspective here.

I think that's like really important for us to model. And that's something that we hope happens within even middle grounds. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes people are like, this is my point. I'm sticking to it. But what I love is that coming off of the set, there are so many folks who end up staying in touch and saying, hey, I'm still in touch with whatever, that. gang member. I'm still in touch with that police officer and we have conversations all the time now

about X, Y, and Z. So that's like our mission still kind of at work, I think. Are you ever worried about someone signing up for an episode in order to use that to gain like personal clout or something like that? Like kind of like bad baby did on Dr. Phil. It was very strategic where you can act crazy in order to get publicity from that. Or let's say you have like conservatives versus liberals. One liberal or one conservative could join the other side, right, and say that they're the other person in order to make that population look crazier. I haven't thought about that second scenario, but the first one I think definitely makes sense. And I think there are a lot of folks who want to be in our videos just to become famous or to get cloud or followers. And I don't know. I mean, I don't think that's

a reason we would not have someone in a video as long as they're like portraying their, their stance accurately. Conversely, I'm really proud of the fact that a lot of people end up having huge careers from being in our videos. For example, we had a guy who was in one of our dating videos, actually. It was about like dating 10 musicians based on like their music. And a guy got a record label. Like he got signed by a record. I think I know. There was one guy who was really, really, really, really talented and all the guy. I don't think did he get picked? He didn't get picked. He didn't get picked. Wait, why didn't he get picked? It's all about, you know, it's a personal choice. But yeah, people were like, this guy's amazing. I think I remember that. The amount that he played was

actually not very long. And it was incredible. But we saw like. We've had that happen. We've had people fall in love and get married and have people. Tell us about that. Jack, you got to get on this. Oh my, yeah, put me on a date.

Oh my gosh. We got some big stuff coming actually. That's something I can share about. This has happened on multiple accounts. Actually, we've had even fans meet each other and get married. Because they just love Jubilee content. They were both in our Facebook group.

They met each other. They met San Francisco and Australia. Wow. Long distance. They would watch content together. They just became friends. And then now they're married. So we have crazy stories

We've also had folks Like quit their job Become full-time YouTubers, influencers, all of that So it's been really fun Because I don't know It feels like we get to shine a light Hopefully on good folks Who are like living their life

And pursuing what they're passionate about Now you have a really interesting Fiancee story Have you done the wedding yet? We have yeah, yeah that's right Your invite There was one video where you're like Oh if I can invite it to the wedding

That's right it was the reaction to millennial money. I remember seeing that. We got to talk about that as well. But yes, my wife and I were married now, but. I must have lost the invite. It's okay. That's right.

That's right. It was COVID. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I know you were moving to Vegas. My wife and I, okay, the way that we met was my wife, Mel, she was formerly a reporter for Yahoo Finance. So she would like just do a bunch of interviews with CEOs and investors, all that stuff. And when I was on Facebook one day, I was like scrolling through and literally an ad pop. up a video ad and you know usually I'm just like X out keep scrolling but it was an interview

it was an advertisement for wealth front as an interview with the CEO and it pans back to the reporter and it's like this beautiful like brilliant woman asking all these really good questions I'm like oh my god she's amazing so I click in I watch the video think nothing of it next day I come back the same ad is kind of fed to me and this happens multiple times in a row and like hmm it's because you clicked it My mind's like, oh my God. God wants me to meet this girl. So her name pops up, obviously, in the lower third, take Melody Hum.

I Google her. I find her on Twitter. Find out like she's Korean American. I'm Korean American. I'm like, oh, this is fate. You know, she loves like R&B. She's blah, blah, blah. Turns out she's in New York.

But I decide I want to tweet her. And I just said, hey, big fan of your work. This is like a public tweet. And I like linked one of the articles. Hey, this is a great article. She was, oh, thank you. We just become friends on Twitter. That was the extent of it.

And because I lived in New York, I would go back every once in a while. Actually, for a wedding. When I was there, I asked her to grab coffee. And she was, okay, sure. It ended up being that we ended up grabbing drinks. And that night we essentially spent the whole night walking around New York City. First bar, we closed at like 3 p.m. Next bar close at 5 a.m.

It's crazy bars closed at 5. Did you not have anything to do the next day? It was a holiday weekend. Okay. The thing I did have to do was catch my flight in the morning. at like 8 a.m. So I remember like the sun was coming up. I was like, oh shit.

Worth it, man. I have packed. Yeah. So I was in. I was like, this is it. She's the one. I had never spent a day like that or a first day like that with anyone.

So we were texting and, you know, she was like super cool and she didn't seem like super interested per se. So I was like, okay, this is on my, this is the balls in my court if I want to make something happen. So I was in Toronto for a project and I told her,

oh, I have to be in New York for a week. let's like hang out. She was, okay, sure. So I booked a one-way flight to New York. And I was on my buddy's couch and,

hey, I'm going to stay here for about a week or two. Do you mind? Oh my gosh. What about work? Well, this was, this was,

this was 2015 probably. Oh, okay. So this was right around after the guys had left, I was like, no vision for Jubilee project. I didn't start Jubilee Media.

Got it. Okay. As soon as I get to New York, I'm texting her, hey, do you want to meet up for coffee? No response. I kid you not three days of no response I'm like walking around New York I'm like I'm the

stupidest guy ever like I'm starting like look up flights finally she's like hey sorry things have been so busy we end up she's like I can meet you one day for coffee we made up coffee that went really well I'll make this short at that day I was like hey I've got tickets for a Broadway show tomorrow do you want to come she goes ah I'll have to move things around but okay run to the Broadway like ticking office bought tickets smooth and then And at the end of the week, I asked her to be my girlfriend. She said no. But a couple of weeks later, she said, yeah.

Let's get into the weeds right here. Probably too soon, I'm guessing, right? Not only that, she didn't want to do long distance. I was in L.A., she was in New York. She had done long distance in the past. And she had come out of a relationship relatively recently, and she was like really just enjoying her hot girl summer, I think. And I was like, I don't know.

I see it. I see the vision here. And she's like, I do not see it. But it ended up, she went to a Drake concert, like, I think had a really good time. And, like, came home tipsy and called me. I was like, hey, let's do it. I was like, so. Thank you.

Thank you. And she was like, Drake. Wow. And she thought like, okay, this is the guy now. She had a revelation there? I don't know. So that's what you got to do. Okay.

If there's a girl that you really like and she kind of likes you, send her to a drug, just fire to herself to a drag concert. What happened to the Drake concert? I'm so curious. Like, what happened? Just gets you in your fields, you know. Is that it? That could be it.

So now, fast forward. Start from the bottom. Now we're here. Yeah. There you go. Six years later. Yeah, we got married during COVID. So, 2020, we had our kind of COVID wedding and then we had like a real wedding.

Now, here's what I'm curious. You asked her dad for his blessing. Yeah. And he said no. Wow. This is a deep cut. Yeah. What happened?

You did some good research. Wow. Yeah. So Mel's father is a maestro in Korea. He's like a conductor of an orchestra. amazing, brilliant man. Very fiery, as you can imagine. And the day that I asked for permission was actually her cousin's wedding.

So Mel was gone. She was like with the wedding party the whole time. He and I had grabbed lunch earlier. And long story short, there's like a series of events that like went terribly wrong that like did not go the way I had planned. Because I had like, you know, growing up, I was always like the kid that like parents were like, oh, he's such a nice kid. Like, he'll be, you know, I was just, like, not super concerned.

I was just, like, practicing my lines in Korean. I wanted to, like, ask properly. We ended up showing up to a lunch that the entire family was supposed to be a part of, but everyone else had to drop out except for the parents. So I was like, oh, this is my time. But I ended up being there, like, in a T-shirt and shorts. And when I asked, her father was like, no,

you're obviously not taking this seriously. Like, why are you going to dress this way? you should be in a suit. If you're going to ask me for my permission, it should be way more formal. So that was like the start of a terrible day. Later, what happens is we decide that we're going to go to the wedding together from the hotel. I run down my suit, super early.

I'm like five, ten minutes early. As soon as I sit down, I had like a small tear in my pants. I'm like, shit. He's going to be the one type of person who will see it and be like, dude, this guy's a scrub. Like, what's going on? So I run to the front desk. I was like, hey, do you have a sewing kit? They're like, yeah, we do.

I'm like, perfect. run to the bathroom, I'm starting to sew it up. Get a call in my room. They're like, where are you? I look at the clock. I'm like three minutes late. I'm like, shoot. Come back down, get in the car.

He's like, why are you late? Clearly, you're irresponsible. He said that to you? You're lazy. I don't like you for my daughter. Yeah. And I was like, ah, and I was like, oh, sorry. I forgot my car.

He goes, no, that's not acceptable. Get out of my car. No. And I was like, no, sorry. And then I said, okay, the truth is, I had this tear in my pants. He said, all right, fine. So, we're going. driving driving driving

mom's in the back seat I'm in the front seat you know I'm like navigating for him New Jersey highways it's like very rural but your girlfriend was not in the car no she was at the wedding slowly he's getting more and more angry

he's kind of saying like oh in my family this is not okay I don't like you blah blah blah like this and this reason you show up to lunch like super underdressed and you like are late I don't like this and it got to the point that I started getting really upset because I just felt like I was getting berated so I very close

calmly said, I totally understand. I'm so sorry. But in my family, like, we don't talk to each other this way. And when I said that, open the door, he kicked me out, he left me on the side of the highway and left me. Are you serious? So I ended up Ubering to the wedding.

That became a whole thing, right? Because then it was like, I was like preparing to buy, to get the ring. I knew how I wanted to ask Mel to get married. But it kind of caused like a good series of conversations with myself and with her, first of all, about like, if we're to be in a family,

what are we going to be like? You know, ask a lot of difficult questions. Me talking with my parents, her talking with her parents. Eventually, I said, you know what? I'm going to ask her. And lo and behold, like, her dad has come around like twofold and it's amazing.

And it's like, we're so happy. So what was the conversation you had with your girlfriend at the time? Did you tell her about these conversations? Be like, hey, yeah, yeah. Oh, she knew about it. Did he tell her? Oh, no, no. She found it after her.

No, in fact, she was like, oh, I've, you know, he's an incredible person, but he's very, I would say, like, he's pretty idiosyncratic, like his personality type. So every time she would tell me about him, I didn't really understand. But then I experienced it myself, and it actually gave me a tremendous amount of empathy for, for, like, her and what her upbringing was. So in a lot of ways, I think it was, like, very positive, actually, in retrospect. Okay. Was she okay getting married with her? her dad's permission or did you wait then until you got her dad's permission and then you proposed? You know, once I proposed and she said yes, her dad was like, oh, I'm so excited.

And at the wedding, his speech was the best because he essentially says, you know all this time, this is my only daughter, their only child. Yeah. I was, this is a series of tests I want to put you through and Jason, you've won. Is what he said at the end of his speech. Do you think they were tests? He just improvising. It sounds like you're a little.

And he's awesome now, so we get along really well. I'll tell you, the first time I met him, this was far before the lunch. I literally, I meet him, and he's like, hey, I'm a big soccer fan. Are you a big soccer fan? I go, oh, you know, I watch, but I don't really play. He goes, let's go to the field and we'll, like, play some soccer. I go, oh, cool. Like, just the two of us.

Yeah. He shows up. He's got cleats on. He's got, like, goalie gloves. I go, oh, we're going to play soccer, soccer. He goes, yeah. And he goes, we're going to do a series of, um, penalty kicks.

And if I beat you, you can't date my daughter anymore. Oh. And I'm like, oh, my God. You know, this guy, he's like pulling out. He's prepared. So, and Mel was there. She's just laughing. She thinks it's hilarious.

I get down four to one in the series. So we're doing the five. I'm down four series, four to one. I'm like, crap. Like, if I lose five to one, I'm like, this is bad, bad. I came back four, four. He ends up beating me five, four. But he's like, you know what?

I see a lot of rules. in you, good job. You can still keep dating. Like, this is obviously a joke. Could be a good test, though. If you make it so unbearable for the boyfriend that if he leaves, you know he's not one to stick around.

But if he does it anyway, and he perseveres, then he's someone who will work through those issues. If you have a daughter, would you put her future boyfriend through any test? I don't know how I would be. I would joke. What's your credit score? That's what you'd ask.

I would always joke about, like, I'd like to think that. I don't know. How much are you saving? What percentage of your income are you saving? I feel like I would play a lot of jokes. You know, just like, make it just like unbearable. The credit card, like statement would come up. Yeah, I see you're spending $7 a coffee a day.

How much do you think it would cost you to make your own coffee? Yeah. Did you guys buy a house yet? We did. Yeah. We bought a house. When was this that we closed? Probably in March or April, South L.A.

But yeah. Can you tell us like the city? Yeah, we're like near Lermert Park. Okay. Like west of USC. Yeah. Well, I know you're in March or April. Vegas now.

Yeah. How's that been? It's, it's really nice. I honestly, I have never imagined that I would live there to be, like if you told me three or four years ago, never would have thought I'd want to live in Vegas. Yeah. Until I found like two really nice communities, both Henderson and Summerlin are fantastic.

And everyone is so friendly. It's one of the few places where I could be like walking down the street and like someone's driving by. I don't even know this, anybody drive by, but they'll just wave. They'll say hi. I'll say hi back. Everyone is so friendly. you see the same people at the community gym

at the same times are always there. It's like it's a really nice friendly place. And I think it's because you get people from around the country that maybe are from areas where they're more open. The reason I ask is, I think community is so important. Like who do you surround yourself with, especially as creators when like you have to be able to find a place

to go back to the well. And when you feel like dry creatively, I think you need to find folks who are not even doing the same type of content or same type of business, but they're excited about what they're doing. and that can kind of give you inspiration or like help kind of fill your tank, so to speak. Yeah, I had a pretty terrible neighbor at West Adams. Yeah, she was the lady who's been there for probably 50 to 60 years.

And I went over to introduce myself and I remember I brought her a bottle of wine. I think I got her some like some snacks. And I really wanted to make good with the neighbors because I was remodeling that house. And I was probably going to spend like five, six months fixing it up. I didn't want there to be any, you know, any animosity. And I will never forget. One of the first things she told me is make sure you don't put your trash cans out front of my place, but you've got to put your trash cans on this side, not in front of it.

And she went off because I guess the person who lived there before would put the trash cans in the driveway. It was kind of like on her side. And she wanted to make very clear that my trash cans went out of front of mine and not hers. And since then, it has been a struggle. I never want to do anything to provoke her, but sometimes I'll do anything and she'll just flip off. Like there was a time where I forget what it was. It's in the backyard doing something.

And so she purposely took water and started spraying my car. I forget what it was. What were you doing? I don't know what I was doing back then. No, I'm so quiet. I forget what it was. That's the worst. Yeah.

Now, the worst was that I had a driveway where it was basically my driveway, and then right next was her front yard. So, I mean, maybe there's like a foot in between my car and her front yard. And I had a service technician come to do like an inspection of my car before I returned it as a lease. And the guy was kind of like standing on her side of the yard. And she comes out and turns on the sprinklers. No.

Yeah. Gets him soaking wet. And he had his iPad laying down there for like, you know, for the car company and just sprays all of us. And we're telling her like, hey, we're just out here. like we're not being noisy, nothing, didn't care, to turn on the sprinklers. There's been so many instances

where she has just been so awful. She's screamed at us before. Oh, there was one time, too. It was raining right before, like right when COVID was announced and we were moving some stuff in the rain 8 p.m. at night and she complained that we were being too loud

in the driveway. And then we literally just closing doors and stuff like that in the rain. It's horrible. The thing about neighbors is like, when you have a bad neighbor, it can just like ruin everything about your living experience. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on like, what is the premium or depreciation of an asset based on like how good of a neighbor is, would you say?

Like, how much weight would you give? I don't feel like it makes the value of the property go up. Like a good neighbor is worth more. But it can certainly negatively impact it. Because you've got to think too while you're selling, imagine a prospective buyer like parks in front of her house. Right. And she comes out and yells at that.

person, it's over. Right. So, yeah. There was a house at the bottom of the street that I grew up in and they were, or there was a lot. And they were building these two really tall homes right next to each other. And across the street, there was a small single story house and they put up probably like a 12 foot by five foot, like board and spray painted on if you buy these houses, you'll see us naked in our bathroom through a glass window. They did that to try to deter prospective buyers from that. the house.

It ended up being a selling point though. For months. Did someone end up buying it? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. Dude, that's so stressful.

Yeah. I don't know. Something about buying a home, I think that like a lot of like human instinct come out in good and bad ways. I find that I'm becoming like a lot like my dad and like I walk around like putsing around and like yard or like I just love grilling now. I don't know. I'm like, oh, I love me.

But there's something also just about like I own this land and therefore. I don't know. It makes me bummed when I see that version of it. Whereas I think there's a beautiful version of it where I've seen a lot of my friends who have homes who are like, this is a space that I want to build community in. Or like we try to have like dinner parties at our place where we're like, hey, come on over.

Like we're going to cook for everyone. We can finally do that because we have a home. So I'm bummed to hear that though. Is everything okay? Do you have tenants at that house? Yes. Fortunately, they're fine. They've never mentioned it.

No, I mean, I think they follow some of her rules like for the trash cans and things like that. But yeah, thankfully the tenants who are there now are amazing. I really like them a lot. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Small chance they're watching this. I don't think so.

And to the woman as well, it's like, hey, we're just a new love. We'll make sure we take care of the trash. No worries. Speaking of love, you were mentioning love. Well, actually, what is your relationship status? I'm single. It's complicated. Just single.

Okay. How are you finding love life in Vegas versus L.A. I don't know if there's much of a difference. I think in Vegas there's a lot more people coming and going. Whereas LA, there's a lot more people living there. In LA, honestly, I didn't really, I didn't like go on many dates, you know what I mean? Because I was very busy at that period of time in my life, whereas now, you know, I can go on dates, but I still won't necessarily go on a lot of dates. Are you on the apps?

Yeah. Oh, all of them. Yeah. I only asked because we've been doing a big deep dive in like the love space for young people. And what we're finding is that like something like 50 million Americans are on dating apps. But the MPS score, like the net promoter score for the dating app industry is minus 25, meaning the majority of folks who are on apps are very disgruntled with their app experience. They're finding, and when we do these interviews, they're finding that I'm spending a lot of time on the app.

A lot of times these won't necessarily translate into real in-person dates or it's not the proper ROI or whatever. It's like swiping culture, like a little fatigue of it. So they're not getting dates? That's the problem? They're not getting dates or they feel like maybe this is not even the right way to even look for. Is that both male and female? I think that we're seeing a little, actually both. Yeah, relatively both.

Because I heard somewhere that I think it's the top 5% of profiles were matched with the vast majority. Yes. And you might be part of this. You're a good looking guy. So I feel like you might be in that group that's like, hey, I'm having a good. great time, but I think the majority of folks are feeling like, oh, shit, like, this kind of sucks. The reason I ask that, though, is because we're actually, I don't know when this podcast will come out, but September 20th, we're launching a new brand, a whole new channel

all around love. So all of our dating content is going to go there. And we're actually starting to build even technology and, like, different things that's going to, are you going to create your own dating app maybe? Eventually, that could be where we did. Now, how do you differentiate? Because I feel like dating apps are a lot like a good title thumbnail where you really got it hone in you can't just create you know throw up a picture and expect people to to match with you i feel like most people are really bad at describing themselves yes and conveying who they are we completely agree yeah are you as um fans of like enneagram or myers briggs like i've heard of the meyers briggs i've heard of the horoscope right horoscope right there are all of these tools that we use to like self-categorize

ourselves into personality. I'm an extrovert. I'm an introvert. I'm like a thinker versus a feeler, right? And what we found was that like with relationship stuff, there's a lot of different personality types or even relationship beliefs, but there's no good way to categorize them. There is like love languages, like I love gifts or acts of service, but that's not what leads

to compatibility. But what we've been working on behind the scenes, I guess this is relatively public if I share this, but is we've been working. with a bunch of data scientists and like relationship scientists on what are actual relationship beliefs that we have. So for example, one of the criteria is like a, are you an I person or a we person, right? And some people are I people. Even if I'm in a relationship with my wife, I may still go somewhere and I don't expect her to come and I'm not even wanting her to come sometimes. We're independent people. You do your thing. I do your thing. We're still partners, but we're

people. Some people are we people, right? You know every time they show up, they're going to show up with their partner. And that's not good or bad. The problem, you do you do your thing. The problem sometimes happens when there's an eye person with a we person. Not that they're less compatible, but they have to have that conversation. I saw the look. I don't know if there's an eye or a we person here. I'm very independent. Okay, you're an I person. Yeah. And your partner? I would say, she's a we person. Yeah, yeah, she's a wee person. So you have to have that conversation, right, about like what does that look like for you to be able to, like, does that change? Yeah. I feel like there's a bit of a give and take, you know. She gives all, wait, no, no, okay.

So we each have to give and take. I mean, you know what I mean. There's a balancing act. She gives, I didn't know. So what we're trying to build is actually almost like a personality or a love assessment that we can all take and just kind of identify. Am I an I person or a we person? Am I like intimacy? Am I more physical or am I more emotional?

None of these are better or worse, but it's better to understand ourselves. Yeah. Because we actually might fit better initially. with someone who are more similar. So does it give you like a score, like a, oh, it's 85% compatible or something like that? We're actually not even starting with compatibility. We're starting with individual assessment. So you'll get like your own kind of like read out on, hey, this is who you are.

Oh, interesting. So people will take a quiz, then it'll spit back some information. Yeah. And then they'll be like, you're a magenta and this is why. And this is what you should be looking for. And this is what you should be thinking about. So you give them some tools, but you don't match them based on that? Eventually we'll go into matching.

But we want to start with. actually think that the problem, but one of the things that's broken with dating culture is that people are not even critically thinking about who they are in a relationship or what they want in a relationship. So if we can kind of give some of those tools via the technology and via our content, eventually that we can actually lead to better compatibility too. So imagine if you're a magenta and I'm a magenta, like we might be more compatible initially, right? So like that could be good. or at least it will give us good framework to like have that conversation of like hey jack i know that you said that you're like a physical intimacy person but i'm more emotional person so i need more

time where we talk about stuff before we make out whatever this is all hypothetical by the way but yeah we're excited to launch all this it's called nectar the whole space and we're going to launch it in a couple of years called nectar why nectar it's a decent name yeah i think it's fine that's good i'm happy you didn't say oh that's a terrible yeah you're like oh you're like that's adjutant I think of it. I mean, I like the name. It sticks out. Nectar. It sounds like a company that you could one day sell for a lot of money. Neckler is like a very sellable company. I kind of think like love is like the like the essence of life, right? It's like the magic of life and life we can like distill that down and like purify it. That's how we kind of think about nectar.

Are you going to also do that for friends? Yeah. I think relationships when we say relationships, it shouldn't just be about romantic relationships. But I think initially most of our content is all going to be around like love content. So I think people initially think about the assessment as a love. Are you taking investors? We actually just raised another small round of capital. Did you actually? Yeah. If you're serious, we can talk about it.

I'm serious. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think all the content would revolve like at the end of the day, nectar. So it seems like a lot of organic reach that you've already built. Exactly. If you remember, we did a whole, we did a middle ground.

And we did a partnership with a ground called Ground News. And they're like a news aggregating website. But you can read any article and they'll tell you like, hey, this article leans like 73% conservative. Or this article is like skewing 82% liberal. And we worked with them to build a custom test, like a news bias test where anyone could take it. It takes 15 minutes. And I'll tell you what your score is. But in the episode of every video, it popped up.

It was like, hey, this is Jack. He's 23. he's 72% liberal or his news bias is 72% liberal, etc. We plugged it into the video. The video did relatively well, maybe a million, million and a half views. Within a week, we had 120,000 users of the test.

Wow. Zero customer acquisition cost. Zero KAC. What if now we're building our own product and technology that fits into what people are interested in anyways around love, politics, identity? That's been the whole vision of what Jubilee is going to be. become. We love making the media content, but what young people keep on wanting to do is they want to

participate. They want to be in the videos, obviously, but what is, we can't do that. We can't put everyone in the videos. What if we can actually build deeper ways for people to engage and actually participate in other ways? Love is a great way to do that. You can imagine, you know, dating events, dating apps. You can imagine going back into politics, political compass, conversations, all that stuff. How would it make money? Dating is actually incredibly lucrative. 50% of Tinder users are paying. So that's, yeah? Oh, yeah. You find more success there? It's been a long time. I've been dating. I would tell you I find more success. Yeah. If I'm, because I can, like, sort by like, like, for example, people that like me, I can see exactly who they are.

Yeah. Rather than just continually swiping. And it's like not that much, right? Per month. Well, I have the, I got that, you know, the premium version. Oh, let's go. Well, hey, this is good. I don't, I think it's like 90. bucks per six months or something like that? I thought you were going to say a month. I was like, oh my gosh. You know Andre Jick? I don't.

He's a finance YouTuber and one of the big ones. He sold me on it because he said, Jack, if you're spending, let's say, theoretically, time or half a thing, an hour per day doing that, whereas you could now be spending 10 minutes per day. It's, you know, no, I think that that totally makes sense. And that's what I'm saying about there's a problem right now because people are spending hours on dating apps with very low yield. Don't they want that, though?

Isn't it good for 10? I saw an article somewhere. Oh, Tinder absolutely wants that. Yeah, that Tinder is programmed to keep you on the app as long as possible. Absolutely. Because there's always that like next like hit. But there's a problem. It's like, same with TikTok.

It's like not every video is right. I know. It's like they took after the casino logic there where you don't want to do everyone, but you want to keep it like staggered to keep your brain always like on edge. Like where's the next video? Tinder, I think it's probably similar. But what if we could upend the entire paradigm as to which even dating apps exist? That's no longer even.

about swipe culture, but there is some sort of compatibility component or even interaction that's not just like, hey, what's up? We've built a series of different ways that humans can interact through our shows that are fun and entertaining and interesting. That's like, takes pressure off. We find that it can be all these different ways that people actually engage and like, no pressure, like, we're going to play the game or we're going to like answer the series of questions in an interesting way. So we've got a lot of excitement about that. So we raised a small round from mostly tech investors because the one thing we haven't done well before is we've never built anything tech based.

It's probably going to be way more expensive than you think. It is. It is. It is. Yeah. So we're going to kind of try to, how do we MVP this as well, right? Meaning how do we actually show traction and gain a lot of users without doing the

full thing? There's a way to kind of do it in a low-fi way. That's going to be a bigger part of the approach. That's exciting. And what's your end goal with that? Like, let's say you build it up and it is successful. It's working. What if Jubilee could be the home for all?

human connection full stop. We grew up in a time where like Facebook is all about social connection and making friends. But the truth is we're not making friends on Facebook. We're not really even making friends on Instagram. It's not built for that. What I think is happening right now is that young people in particular, Gen Z, even though they're more connected than ever, they're actually more lonely than ever. And what we want to do is we want to find ways through our content to bring people together, but now through technology do that too. And maybe even one day in person. Like we actually right before COVID we're starting to do something called the empathy warehouse where we would have different rooms and every room would be like pretty intense like social experiment that you're kind of like

oh shit we're going to do this but it created this incredible like you know that kismet feeling when you're like on the subway or you meet someone you're like man that was like such a cool conversation I think that we're just longing for that and we need that and I think there's a way for us to create spaces for that to happen so that's kind of the big vision of jubilee that's why as we think about becoming that cruise ship or that, you know, that unicorn, that's what we would have to become. But we feel like we're kind of like well on our way towards that. That's really cool. Yeah.

Appreciate it. Are there any video ideas that you've wanted to do? You just don't have the funding to do it. Oh, yeah. So many. I really like that show on Netflix. Love is Blind. Yeah.

I loved that show. Love is blind. It's good. Love on the spectrum is good. Oh my gosh. Macy and I watched, I think, all three seasons. It is the most heartwarming show. Yeah.

You kind of see. that and you see like, oh, there's a way to do reality television in a way that's actually like meaningful. Yeah. Without being terrible or corny. Sorry, what are these shows? Oh, love on the spectrum. If you did a version of love on the spectrum, oh my gosh.

So they had people pair up that are on the autism spectrum ranging from, you know, severe to, you know, high functioning mild. And they follow their stories, their interests and their complications with dating. And I think what makes it so relatable is that everyone I feel like has had those experiences where you walk up. I'm like, you're nervous. And the guys literally looking at the camera. Like, I don't have to show it. I don't have anything to talk about anymore.

I don't know what to say. And they come back and they're just like, so the weather is nice. They're like, yep. And it's silence. But I think everyone just understands that. But it's heartwarming because it's so genuine. Yeah. And they're so open with how they feel, even though it might be difficult for them to talk about that.

It's really, you got to watch it. It's one of the few shows where you feel better after watching it. Got it's weird to describe, but it's, it's just hard. Like you feel good after watching. It's like it's really nice. Yeah, that's fun. And you've seen the other one. Love is Blind.

I haven't even heard of that. It's where individuals will first meet and they'll actually like fall in love without ever seeing each other. And then they'll like choose an individual and even like proposed to each other other having never seen each other. So like is love really blind? It's like kind of the thesis. How do they make that happen?

They're in like pods that are like, you can see some. silhouette, but you can't actually see individuals. But they're doing it over the course of like weeks or days. And then they marry each other after weeks. They have to propose to meet each other. Holy mack. So the gimmick is pretty strong. What do you think the divorce rate is of?

I think the success rate was pretty low actually. Yeah. So. I don't, yeah. Some of the couples they, they followed up with and I'm like, that is a train wreck relation. It really, they seem so unhappy. But they stay together maybe because of the show. Yeah.

Because they gained, they've gained so much popularity as a couple that they've turned that into, they're all influencers now. All of them. I mean, you can't work a normal job and then be on love is blind. When they hit Netflix reality TV show, you get millions of followers and be like, well, I'm going to still work at my job for 80 grand a year. You're going to make a million dollars a year just being an influencer. But yeah, doing an episodic dating show is something we've been really interested in. So that's something that we've been twying with and doing it the right way. The problem with a lot of existing reality shows is like if you look at the behind the scenes of like what the producers are making individuals do, it's like so gnarly.

For example, there's a show called, have you heard of the ultimatum? No. It's like Graham and I are in relationship. I want to get married, but Graham's never going to propose to me. We're going to go on the show and either he's going to propose to me or we're going to break up. And we're going to switch partners with someone else. So I'm going to choose someone else for six weeks. And at the end of that, either I will choose to marry this person or I'm going to marry Graham.

or he was going to decide. Oh, my gosh. But apparently what they did, what the producers did was when they signed up for the show, they didn't know that there was an ultimatum even involved. Oh. And they said, you guys,

and as they were starting to film, they were like, you guys have to have an ultimatum. Graham is the one who does not want to get married. Jason, you're the one who wants to get married. So you know what I mean? Like they're put into this scenario,

such a false way that you're like, well, the whole premise, it's all flawed then, right? If this is all a charade, like, no one's coming into this, like,

with real authentic. And then, And then everything falls apart in my point of view. But I think that we can make great shows. Like, I don't know if you guys have seen a Terrace House. No. It's a show that's started in Japan, but it's like so raw, authentic. Like, it feels like no production is touching it.

Just like living their life and just done in such a beautiful way that became really popular. But speaking of reality TV shows, I feel like I've seen you in a couple episodes of Selling Sunsets. Yeah. I don't think I have. had piece together what happened, but what was the backstory there? Or are you working in the show or part of the group? No. No. So when they approached Jason, I forget exactly how it went down, but they filmed the pilot. Okay. And I was in the pilot episode. Of the first season.

Of the first season. And they cut me out pretty quick. I think there are two things. Yeah, there were two things that happened. I think they want to meet to fill that spot of drama of like, what do you think of Christine? They would ask me questions of like, each person I worked with. What do you think of Heather? Heather's great. I like her a lot. What do you think of Christine?

She's awesome. Mary's are really hard. I didn't say anything negative about anybody. And also I knew that they would see this. So it's not like why would I say anything bad about anybody. Could you tell that they wanted you to say negative things? Or would they even lead you towards that or not? A little bit.

They would say so, you know, do you go to clubs a lot? How do you spend your money? Or do you flashy? Things like this where I think. think they wanted me to become like this playboy who clubs every night who's dissing on everyone I'm working with and like living that sort of lifestyle. I couldn't do that. I mean, that's not me. And so they made it pretty quick that they out was cut out of that. But then I think they realized the dynamic between the, you know, the women in the office was way more interesting to focus on that

than me. I mean, I'm not going to say anything bad. And that was around the time too where the YouTube channel was beginning to actually gain some traction. I think maybe I had 20,000 subscribers at the time. And I remember kind of thinking between the two, like, what if they asked me to be on it? Like, would I give up the channel? I was like, no, I wouldn't give up the channel. Were you, you were working with the group, though,

prior to the show even starting? Yeah, yeah. So I joined the Oppenheim group. I think 2014 or 15, I can't remember. Okay. And you're still with them? No. So when I left California, I also left the brokerage.

That could have been a great episode, though. You walk in, you're like, Jason, I'm done. I'm moving to Vegas. Yeah, well, I mean, it happened organically. I would still be in the office five days a week, but as the channel began doing better and better and better, I just slowly, you know, stopped taking on as many clients. If there was a client that would take a lot of time,

I'd pass them off to someone else in the office. I slowly scaled back, so it was never like an abrupt stop. But yeah, when COVID hit was the time where, like, nobody was doing any showings, open houses stopped entirely. And when you're home, I'm like, well, I'm going to just make YouTube videos. Right. I'm going to go 100% in this. And then pretty quickly I realized, like, wow, this is what I want to do.

There was one scene. It was the first season where I saw all the cameras pointed in one direction. I'm like, I'm going to sit there. Because I felt like I got no screen time. So I'm like, I'm going to sit right there. And it turned out that was where like some drama went down. You just see me sitting there. I just kind of like observing.

I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea what anything was about. But I, yeah. But I was able to get that. Yeah. Insane though, huh? Like there's so many people who watch Sonding Sunset. Yeah.

You know, it's crazy. We had no idea how successful that was going to be. And I remember the first season that came out, it got kind of mixed reviews in the very beginning. Some people really disliked it. They thought it was in poor taste. Other people really loved it. I think when season two and three came out

was when it really started to shine. And I think because just everyone who was being filmed, all the cast just got more comfortable being around cameras, like being filmed. and I think, I mean, maybe I shouldn't be speaking for them. I'm guessing maybe they let their guard down a little bit more. Season two, three, and four that people got a real sense of like who they are and what they're about. How do you feel about the portrayal of the different characters?

Do you feel like it's pretty appropriate, fair? Yes, I mean, I guess the only thing that I think is that they film, I've seen how much they film. And so you can only show so much in, I don't, eight, one hour episodes, but they'll be filming for a months. Right. And so you take months of stuff and condense it down to like the moments that are the best, like the highlight. And it resonates with their character as like this type of person. Right. So for all of us, I'm sure like over a month, we have one hour of highlights that are just like the best that make it seem so excited. But when you add in all the other stuff, like you could just as easily edit it down to be like, I do nothing but stay home and watch YouTube videos. Or wow, I'm

traveling every day. It's so crazy. So you could probably narrate whatever direction and It's up to them, but they got to do something that people want to watch. Unscripted space, which folks would call us an unscripted space, but the way that they approach content can be radically different too. So we've seen some bad actors and we've seen some amazing people and we're trying to like, you know, how do you navigate both creating something that's entertaining the watch but is also authentic or real? Like that can be a really difficult challenge to try that need. I wanted to ask you what your experience with millennial money was because I know that's something we both were a part of.

That's right. Because I did mine, did I do mine before years or after, I think I did mine after years. Yeah. Well, I had two millennial monies. The first one. Okay. Yeah, the first one was fantastic. It was when Jessica was in charge of that and she was meticulous.

I mean, you could tell when somebody is so sharp and like on it and she was that person. She was the one. Asking the difficult questions. Yeah. Well, she was just her vision, her shots, what she wanted was so clear and good. It was so aligned with exactly what I believed should be done. And my experience with her was a 10 out of 10. And she was responsible for all the early millennial monies.

And you could tell all of those were just like hit after hit after hit after hit. The second one I felt I wished it had her attention to detail on it. And she had temporarily stepped back because she had a child. And so I had a good experience, but nowhere near the level that I had with Jessica. What was the difference between the first and second as far as just the, angle. Oh man, it was I mean the shots, the framing, the questions. It was kind of around

COVID. It was kind of around the COVID time, so I think they hired out some of the people and they were contractors. And it just didn't hit. And there were a lot of suggestions that I wanted to do, but I didn't want to get in their way. But then I saw the shot, like, that's a terrible shot. The lighting

is awful. I didn't like the angle that they took with it. But then again, nothing is ever as magical as the first time you do it. So it's like how do you live up to that? I never expect to surpass that first one. It was so good. I only ask because I find that the millennial money audience is like very strong.

Like I'm just, I wasn't super familiar with. I had seen several, but I didn't realize that people just love watching these millennial monies and like understanding how people use their money and how people make their money. When I first been approached to do it, similar to you with Jubilee,

I was like, I don't know why I would do that. I'm not sure. Like why would I show my finances? I was like, this feels very deeply personal. And then later I was like, oh,

an interesting exercise just to show even my team like how much money does Jason make right like how is this money spent even so yeah I had an interesting intro with them so I was introduced to them because it was reacting to their videos they would post a video

and then two days later my reaction would post on their video and in the well for a lot of those videos my reactions would get more views than their videos were yep and so I did this for months and that's really how I grew that second channel was just off of them. And, you know, I don't know, I got an email from them.

And I remember, like, oh, my God, they just emailed me. This is crazy. And I got on a call. And I don't know if I was speaking with Jessica. I think I may have been. But she was saying, so do you intend to keep going with these videos? And I'm like, yeah, they're doing really well. There was something like, oh, yeah, I guess that's the YouTube thing to do. Like, I don't think she was exactly happy that I was. You could tell, and I could tell, too. She poured her heart and soul into these videos. Right. And to have me come on and, like, take views from that and then add silly commentary about the people spending. I don't think, because for her, I think it was like, it was a piece of art that she was creating and I see that vision.

Right. And it's like, what's up you guys? Welcome back to the show. Let's see what this is. You know, it's just, I don't want to say poking fun at it, but it was definitely taking a very lighthearted approach to something that she took very seriously. And I understood that. And then she asked if I wanted to be honest. It was like, well, I can't say no.

but you didn't want to. You were like really 50-50 on it. Yeah, the reason why was because I felt like they would do something because I was like negative or portray this and they're going to be like, we'll get back at Graham for this, for, you know, reacting to our videos

and doing all of the... So, and, and I mean, because I was really into SEO, like, I wanted to rank on millennial money. And so all of mine would have millennial money in the title. So when you typed in millennial money, like my videos came up first before theirs. And so it was like all these silly tricks,

but, you know, I wanted to rank first. I thought it was entertaining content. I enjoyed it. I was happy to talk about it. I felt like, you know, they would have all my info and they could spin it. Like similar to Netflix or with Jubilee too. Like you could,

they could edit in whatever the way they wanted. Of course. I didn't want to be portrayed as like maybe someone who is, you know, I don't know. Just. After that, Did you continue, do you continue, are you still doing the millennial money reaction? Yes.

Not too much. Not as much. Well, my experience was with filming them was fantastic. When I saw the episode, they showed it to me the night before. I loved it. And they did such a fantastic job. And then after that, I'm like, anything I could help Jessica with it. I mean, I'm forever grateful for them.

I don't know if they did. I see, I'm probably too arrogant to think that, like, they did this because of me. But all the videos became too positive and not that good to react to after a while. Yeah, and everyone has a YouTube channel. It's like a joke now coming on. It's like, oh, guess what they got a YouTube channel? And it just became not as fun. Like, the beginning episodes were so good because sometimes I felt like the people were so

bad with their money. And that's what kind of made it enjoyable. They were making a lot. They were spending a lot. And the expenses were so out there. But now it's like, went to college without any debt, joined the military, started a YouTube channel, saved all the money. Everyone's a hero.

Yeah. It's like, I can't say a. single negative thing about the people who are on now. And it makes it less fun to react to just because there's nothing I could poke at. There's nothing they're doing wrong. Everything is perfect. There's only so many times they could say, hey, this person is perfect, a great example. Keep doing your thing. Well, this is why I've always felt, and I think we've talked about it.

We've talked with folks on my team about it. You'd be such a good host for that kind of a show. That, like what you're doing, like, a... That's right. You know, about you and my finances kind of thing. I remember you guys reached out a while ago. You got to make that happen. Yeah.

I think that there's such a avenue for it. Not only because it's entertaining as it is, but there's a lot of financial education that happens that way, right? It's not just like, let's shit on this person because they don't know how to like balance their book. It's like, oh, wait a second, my finances look like that too. How do I actually learn from someone who's more experienced and can help me walk through a lot of that?

So, yeah, hopefully we can make that happen. I'd be open to that. It's just hard with it with such a tight schedule, finding time to film and then getting those shots. I am so particular about like, what's shown, where, getting all the shots, and then taking a day's worth of footage and there's 15 minutes and like that's the, maybe 20.

I totally get it. It's funny you talk about even like the reaction stuff because we're on the other side of it where so many of our videos are reacted to or mimics. It's so good for you, yeah. Which is great. Yeah, well, for a while there was like an internal debate of like, oh, is this good?

You know, like we can monetize or we can claim it if we want. We actually don't do that for a lot of videos because we're like, you know what? We want them to like, whatever. When it's this on the internet, it's no longer ours only. And if someone's mimicking our content or like replicating it, we're like, hey, that's a good sign. It means that like we've built something great. But early on, I don't know if you've ever had anyone like kind of like mimic, I'm sure, like copy your style for sure, right? Yeah. How do you deal with that feeling when you see

like clearly there. Yeah. At this point you don't. It's become a bit of a joke between us now, like an inside joke that we predict certain, you know, top. will come up and usually it's like up jack right on schedule yeah and you know yeah but you know what at the it's a good sign right there's not yeah some sometimes it feels like because i spent so much time on youtube um it's really hard to find like topics and things that do well um but you know at the end of the day it just means that there's interest in that so yeah that's but yeah what was it like having puty pie react to your videos dude that was insane it I never thought that someone of that magnitude, let alone the biggest YouTuber, would ever be seeing, let

alone reacting to our content. So when that started happening, it just blew up all of our socials, like our audience was growing. And I think that's when I started to realize there was a shift in what was happening with Jubilee, that we were no longer like a niche channel that people may have, may not have heard of. But now, like, it felt like anyone who was spending any time on YouTube at least had seen one of our shows. They may not know the name Jubilee, but they've seen something that. that we've made, which was insane. You try to keep your persona fairly incognito?

Not that I intentionally would do it, but I always knew that if it was all about me or Jason has to be in every video that we would not be able to scale. So early on, I was like, okay, it has to be about Jubilee or it has to be about the show. Otherwise, I'm going to have to be on every episode

or I'm going to have to be on every set. And we're not going to become a unicorn that way. We're not going to become a scalable startup. So when you ask me, about like, hey, are you ever on set? I'm rarely on set now. And I see it as like, wow, that's crazy. But also that means that we can do so much more.

Do you guys, because I know you have had people that are recurring in your episodes, do you try to build up certain personalities within the company or not really? It wasn't like a strategic thing of like, oh, Jack, he's a star. We're going to make him a star. It's more when there are folks that we just love, both like as a cast member, like how working with them, but also how they show up and audience resonates, we like to bring them back. I think dating is actually a good example of that. Like we had a lot of folks who were like eliminated early for whatever reason, but like

they didn't get their time to shine. I like that. They come back and you're like, oh, this is the hero and people recognize them. They're like, oh, finally, justice for Jack, you know. Has there ever been a fight in like a middle ground or a spectrum or something like that where people like, you know. Fist fight? Yeah.

Luckily no. You know, there have been episodes. where honestly we've been nervous. We had an episode of Middle Ground where we brought together four or five different rival LA gangs on the set. And, you know, we were not super familiar

so we had done a bunch of research but we were like, this could be really difficult or bad. And they were on set and they were amazing and they had this incredible conversation and they were like dapping each other up and it was like, okay, wow, this is awesome.

And then there have been other episodes with random, participants who get very competitive, like very difficult, and we're like, where did this come from? This was supposed to be, like, a very easy episode. So that's tricky because there's, like, a lot of potential burden or, like, emotional trauma, like, that can happen on set that we're, like, very wary of. So it's something that we're, like, a lot more cognizant about, like, do we need security ever? Like, do we need therapists? Like, how do we even, like, deal with some of these complicated issues?

But luckily, no, no fights, no broken arms, nothing. Probably should have one security guard. Yeah, I would say somebody. Now, yeah, we've got a security guard for difficult issues. What is like the big vision for this podcast? Where does this go? To take it mainstream. That's the goal.

Yeah, we want to get on people outside of like the YouTube space. I want to get like musicians, athletes, you know, pop stars and stuff like that. Yeah, I'd love to get all of those people to talk about personal finance. Because I feel like, you know, with musicians, Adam 22 has such a good pulse on that. to talk to them, but I feel like there needs to be a financial component to that, and I really think we've got a great angle on that. It's still taboo, like in the mainstream media to talk about people's income from certain movies and stuff like that.

And people theorize, oh, X made $40 million off of this movie, but to actually hear them talk about their competition for certain things, or sports stars, kind of like the GQ My First Million. Yeah. But kind of to, you know, I guess open up the conversation in the mainstream media setting. Yeah, like I feel like a lot of people, um, Behind the scenes are great investors and really savvy with their money, but you don't know them for that. Like Shaq would be a great example of like a really talented business person, but not everyone knows

him for that. They'll know him for basketball. He's fantastic at basketball. But I feel like financially, he's made way more money from his investments and his businesses. So I feel like a lot of people could be showcased in such a way where it's an inspiration for people who, you know, no matter what the background is, you could make it in business. And not only that, but they've got a lot of experience with that. So those are things I'd love to showcase.

I love that. I believe it. So I hope that becomes the case so that one day I can be like, hey, I was one of the first, what, 100? 150. 150? Well, we actually know. We're probably 130, 120. I don't know.

Within the first 200. Within the first thousand. Yeah, you're in there. Well, thanks for having you guys. Cool. Thanks so much. So much. I really appreciate it.

The one thing you got to get a free stock down below the description. We got to thank Eric from tri-com. Eric from Tri-Carrot. He gave us this entire set. This is a lot of his equipment. It is true. He runs Tri-Carrat. We'll link it down below.

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Check them out with the link down below in the description Thank you guys so much Until next time Until next time Cool I really like that That's great