Unsubscribe Podcast - Is it Too Late To Stop The AI Takeover? | Unsubscribe Podcast 250

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Our friend Richard Ryan is here to tell us about his new book! Watch this episode ad-free and uncensored on Pepperbox! https://www.pepperbox.tv/ WATCH THE AFTERSHOW & BTS ON PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/UnsubscribePodcast 👕 Merch & Shoes https://bunkerbranding.com/pages/unsubscribe-podcast 🔋 Energy Drinks https://drinkechelon.com P.O BOX: Unsubscribe Podcast 17503 La Cantera Pkwy Ste 104 Box 624 San Antonio TX 78257 ------------------------------ THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! HELLO FRESH Go to https://hellofresh.com/unsub10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling Knife ($144.99 value) on your third box; offer valid while supplies last, new subscribers only. MANDO Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off + free shipping with promo code UNSUB at https://shopmando.com ! #mandopod CASHAPP Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/5u7gm6rr #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow, cash back offers and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. PONCHO OUTDOORS Go to https://ponchooutdoors.com/unsub and enter your email for $10 off your first order and free shipping. Let them know Unsubscribe sent you. SHOPIFY Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/unsubpod ------------------------------ FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS! Unsubscribe Podcast https://www.instagram.com/unsubscribepodcast https://www.tiktok.com/@unsubscribepodcast https://x.com/unsubscribecast Eli Doubletap https://www.instagram.com/eli_doubletap/ https://x.com/Eli_Doubletap https://www.youtube.com/c/EliDoubletap Brandon Herrera https://www.youtube.com/@BrandonHerrera https://x.com/TheAKGuy https://www.instagram.com/realbrandonherrera Donut Operator https://www.youtube.com/@DonutOperator https://x.com/DonutOperator https://www.instagram.com/donutoperator The Fat Electrician https://www.youtube.com/@the_fat_electrician https://thefatelectrician.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_fat_electrician https://www.tiktok.com/@the_fat_electrician ------------------------------ unsubscribe pod podcast episode ep unsub funny comedy military army comedian texas podcasts #podcast #comedy #funnypodcast Chapters 0:00 Welcome To Unsub! 3:34 Insider Trading In Congress 9:59 How The Boys Met Richard 16:28 Richard's Original YouTube Content 23:44 YouTube Adpocalypse 36:04 Slow Motion Filming 39:19 OG Youtube Stories 52:08 The Future Of Al & Al In Warfare 1:15:08 Al Influencers 1:30:29 Mainstream Media & News 1:47:44 Richard's New Book 1:59:25 Richard's Wedding 2:04:30 Richard's PR Packages Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With Amex Platinum, you have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. You can hear me on camera. You're the bad guys. Holy shit. You used to do sketch comedy too.

Sketch comedy and stand up for a while, yeah. Do the N-word joke you have. You're getting real red right now. No, it's the Cedar Fever. Oh, I see. The Cedar Fever activated. by racism. Yeah.

Say hi to Eli. He's racially ambiguous. Brandon. His hair is fucking fabulous. Donut. A dark joke disposition. And there's a fat electrician. Welcome to unsubscribe.

Hey, really quick. Before the episode starts, we have a special little giveaway with Mr. Richard Ryan. I actually don't sell these books anymore. It's the limited edition Matt Black hardcover. So I got like a thousand copies. I'm going to give away to viewers. How do you want to do it?

Head over to bunker branding.com, buy any two shirts, and we will send one of these for free back at you. Do me a favor. If you like it, maybe leave me a review somewhere. Where? It doesn't matter. Amazon. They just write a note.

Doesn't matter. Just let me know you appreciate all the hard work that went into this. Their diary. Love it, big fan. Now back to the show. Gabe. Give a... Gay!

Richard Pug, motherfucking Ryan. We just brought you here to make fun. Yeah. That's going to be a roast the entire time. We're great. Awesome. I love, I like dags. Ha-ha.

You like next? Damn. Doogs. Doogs. Do you do that. You're like, stop. Not now. Everyone ready?

Oh, shoot. Can I borrow one? You right here? Oh, this one. And then one, you want to pop. What is it? Oh, is this? What is this?

That's Apple. You like Apple? Sure. On the count of three, we're going to pull. Pop it next to the microphone. Ready? One, two, three. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the unsubscribe podcast. I'm joined today by Eli Double Tap. Richard Ryan. Brandon Herrera, myself, Donner Operator. Thank you so much for being here. What's up? Fri. Vote for Brandon.

He... District 23. Well, I've heard better pitches. It's not the way. worst I've heard, but it's not great. Just start with violence. Like, what the fuck? There we got Mr. Richard Ryan today.

We've known each other for, we were just talking about this. Yeah, two days. Yesterday was their first date, and man. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you. You are.

What happened to your farmer hat? I switched, because I was like, oh, I'm going to, I can't compete with Don Fry. I was like, he's the only other person to wear a cowboy hat, right? I can't believe you just called it a farmer hat. That's a farmer hat. That was made of straw. That's true.

Also, if you have a problem, you can talk to her HR person, Don Fry. Yeah. Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. Oh, my God. Connor, come try Richard Ryan's hat on because I know he has the largest head in the fucking world. So we're starting this out with...

I'll fight Richard on that one. I know. Richard, you are proud of you. We're starting this episode with a humiliation. Yeah, I guess. It's like an eight, like seven three-fourths. Oh, fuck. Seven, seven, three-quarters, eight. Dad, can we go to the baseball?

I was like, wait, Richard just has a big ass. No, I do. I have a normal size day. Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's two cows. Me thinks the lady don't protest too much. Love it. They killed two cows.

I just got that. Oh, man. This is going to be a fun one. Dude, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we got all kinds of hot takes and stuff to go through today. Oh, yeah. I feel like half of them are going to be targeted, but let's go.

No, no. Come on. Come on. All right. So we might as well start with hot takes. Insider trading or insider trading when it comes to politics and everything. I just feel like my hot take is, no, they should be able to and they should make a shit ton of money while they're in there. The problem is the incentives aren't aligned.

They're misaligned. They're making money while their constituents are losing money. So how about we structure things in a way where if their constituents are winning, they're winning. If their constituents are losing the purchasing power of their dollar and their housings going up and all these other things, bailouts and different industries, and stuff like that, then they lose their money and their equity and these other things as well. The consequences for them, I think, should be equal to the constituents. And I think they're just, you know, if you ban people from insider trading, okay, then they'll get people to prop up their campaigns, however they're going to do it through super PACs or whatever. And then they'll, you know,

grind it out for four years, eight years, or however long they're in there, then they'll get a nice job when they're out. So I think that's what they do now. No, no, that's what I'm saying. They all get like big, cushy million dollar lobbying jobs and stuff like that. Well, actually, one of the things that I had thought about, and these are things that you propose and, like,

I'd have to talk to people about it, whether or not it's actually, like, a legitimate thing. And plus it would, I would probably never pass a vote because, you know, people typically don't vote against their own interest.

It's the shitty part. But I had considered, like, what if you capped the salary? Because the salary for, for Congressman, I forget it. It's like 130 a year or something like that. Yeah.

What if you capped it at whatever the medium salary is in your district. Because personally, I feel like congressmen are overpaid. I know it goes, it's going against where I guess you were going with that. But like I feel like they're overpaid. I feel like it's community service. Like if you look at state legislators here in Texas, they don't get paid jack shit.

I'm pretty okay with that. Yeah, but I look at it from a business perspective too, right? Because so one of the analogies that I've had with a lot of people is like as a businessman or whatever, you know, if you're, you want your salesman to be making a boatload of money, if they're commission based, right? Because if they're winning, you're winning. How do we set politicians up to have that where there's some form of accountability where they win, we win, or we win, they win, and if we lose, they lose. So how do you set up an incentive that's like, especially a monetary incentive for doing a good job that isn't just getting reelected?

Yeah, no, that's the incentive right now, right? It's like, which I think it's kind of a shitty incentive. You get another job for another two years. Yeah, I was wanting to. Unless you're insider trading. Yeah, I was wanting to break it to you like here. But we kind of talked about it before because it wasn't fully fleshed out and everything. But I think there is something there. The unfortunate situation is I think that you look at the purchasing power of the American, you know, taxpayer at this point in time. You know, they're getting destroyed by inflation.

Like the, you know, inflation, regardless of what you see reported is like eight to some sectors like 20% year over year. nobody's getting that kind of raise from their bosses every single year. It's the biggest invisible tax on the average America. That's exactly it. And so, like, my fear is that the rich are going to keep getting richer because they're invested in these assets or whatever they are, and they're going to keep getting bailed out, which bailouts in and of themselves is, like, you don't buy a Ford and then Ford goes bankrupt, and then they get a bailout, and you end up paying for it either way, and you didn't get the product, right?

it's screwed up in so many different ways. But I think that we haven't hit that critical mass yet, but I think we're rapidly approaching where we keep adding more powder to the keg. And something like a Charlie Kirk or whatever, it's not going to be about that thing, but it's going to lead to something unprecedented that I don't think the last two,

three generations have really seen within the United States. And if we don't start rapidly like focusing on, how do we realign the incentives around politicians to focus on the things that really matter to their constituents and not just getting reelected. And so what we were kind of talking about was like, okay, what about, this is a wild crazy idea, but America is extremely litigious in so many different ways. How do we leverage that against or leverage it for the constituents for the people who are voting for these elected officials?

Well, if you had a handful of candidates that were looking to primary somebody and they were willing to put, like disclose everything that they own, their stocks, their, their house and everything else, put it into not our irrevocable trust is what I was thinking before, maybe just a blind trust where they have an executor, which could be the super PAC or whatever, and they just have a set list of criteria. I will not ever vote to increase the national debt. I will only vote to balance the budget or whatever. I'll never vote to infringe on firearms, whatever, like five things that like most Americans can agree on. And if they ever vote against their constituents, their assets are liquidated,

their fucking, all the money that was put towards their campaign, reimburse the super PAC, you know, and like that kind would flush out the bad actors. You'd have to have a lot of trust in whoever's running that super PAC. Yeah. Because that basically makes them completely beholden to them, more so than already. You would have to define, like, so like any trust has its own governing documents, right? And so you would just stipulate these are the things that they could not vote against their constituents on. It couldn't just, you couldn't make it up as you go. It'd have to be part of the articles whenever you go into it. But I think that if we don't find a way to introduce accountability with elected officials, people are just going to get tired more so of voting for change and not getting it to the point where, you know, you can't afford groceries. year over year, you're getting less and less to the point where something like a Charlie Kirk happens and people just, you know, more people start dying because of it.

Richard, I love you. Welcome to our comedy podcast. Is that what this is? This has nothing to do with the book. Nothing to do with the book. Richard, how do we know you, man? How do you know us, dude? Well, you've known, because you knew everyone at the table in different times and different reasons.

Yeah, I guess, man, I guess, I mean you way back. I moved to Los Angeles way back in the day to pursue a career in comedy, failed miserably. I forgot. You did. Holy shit, you used to do sketch comedy too. Sketch comedy and stand up for a while, yeah. I didn't know you did stand up. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like a lot of. It was funny. I would go to the, I would go to the store and... Do the N-word joke you had. It was so funny because I had this, this notebook, Orlando Bloom notebook that I had like all my sets and stuff.

There's just like all these really cool spots that L.A. has. Like one was a, it was a Ramada Inn that used to be a morgue and it was like the basement. And it was a really cool spot because that's where a lot of tourists would stay. And so you would get, really fresh crowds because typically when you're doing a room in LA, it's full of a bunch of other comedians. So it's kind of tough. We're getting like the tourists and everything. It was great. But anyways, I digress. We, you know, I did sketch comedy, which led me to YouTube and everything.

And also at the same time, I was doing software development. So I built a YouTube app and had it in the app store four years before YouTube, which was awesome. And I tied AdSense to it, which kind of coincided with a partner program at that time. And then through those relationships, it started collaborating with other people like Freddie Wong and Corridor Digital and everything. That's how I met. Eli was through Corridor Digital.

And then... It was like 2012, by the way. Yeah. I can't even know these two individuals. Dude, what hurt me... What hurt me was like the first time I think you and I met, it was at the range... I was just going to bring this up.

Fucking crushed my soul. You were like, I used to watch your videos. when I was a kid. I was like, I didn't mean it like that. It was like a comp, I was like a sneak dis. I didn't mean it like that,

but really I did grow up. Like when I was, when I was watching, you know, early YouTube in the days of like, you know, FPS Rush and stuff like that, it was like your,

like tech assassin videos and stuff like that. I just remember it was so, for the time, yeah, this is where you have like dudes with a 360P, you know, $400 Best Buy camera

yeah, propped up in. the woods like, huh, huh, I'm going to shoot some cans. And you're doing like Hollywood production, like video assets and all. Like, it looked like it belonged on discovery. You are the one of the first slow mo. Or were you the first slow mo individual to use it, especially for firearms? Yeah, no, I think I was. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think at the time, the only big ones were maybe will it blend? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Will it blend? And then FPS Russia. will it blend?

I forgot about... I forgot that existed. Yeah. Man, this is like, oh, that's here. There's a lot of people in the audience won't even remember this shit. Like, it's before their time. Yeah. Yeah.

And then that kind of branched off. You got like, you got the people who really kind of doubled down on that was, I think, tech racks. and then demolition ranch kind of went from specialty shotguns to like 50 cows and stuff like that and everything. Pour one out for the homie. Yeah. Yeah.

Dude, come on now. That's wild to see like inception and the whole arc and then just like, yeah, it's wild. Him from like being like a real young guy to being like a successful family man who's just like, all right, peace out. When I left Los Angeles to launch that media company with Verizon and hers, I actually I came through here and I stopped to visit with Matt and we filmed a few episodes where we like duct tape, I don't know, some shotguns together or something. Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's a very small world.

Can you bring up the company's name? Because then I helped with that too. Which one? Red. Oh, Rated Red? Rated Red. Yeah, yeah. I helped.

And that was another thing. This is absolutely met. I helped, what was the L.A. based group, this military veteran one. That helped run Rated Red 2 on the back end or create content for quick shorts. Oh, I don't know. There was a handful of people. Yeah. It was weird.

Like, we were tied in multiple different businesses without we met. And then it was just like random. Oh, this company is working for rated red. and helping build media on the military influencer side. That's the thing I've noticed about Richard is that like no matter what, who he's affiliated with at time or whatever, he's always around. Like it's just like,

oh fuck, I didn't expect. What do you do? I expect to see you here. That's cool. I just tell people I'm a subject matter enthusiast. I just get really excited about shit, try to figure it out and go hard in the paint.

It's called autism. Yeah, that's true. Well, or being poor as a kid. You know, like one of the sorts of, I like tell is like my my very first car is like was a 67 Mustang and people would be like

oh wow must be nice like bro slow you row and technically as an 80s kid that was not a cool car maybe and like my grandma my mom got it for me it was probably like 500 bucks it didn't run when I was 13 and like here's a Haynes manual if you want a car to drive whenever you're 15 figure it out and so like I'd spend my summers working at like an amusement park like Winnipe Soca for those in Northwest Georgia I was a carnie in some capacity. And then I'd just start figuring out how to get the car running and everything. So I know everything about like those 289 and 302 engines and everything inside and out.

But that's kind of been like the ethos for me in life in so many different ways was I try to understand things, deconstruct it and figure out how to make it better if I can. So that's why I taught myself how the program and, you know, embrace the whole YouTube thing and content creation because I was really frustrated with a traditional way of, asking permission to be creative in the entertainment industry and everything. So, well, one more time. Hey, you probably heard of Yellow Fresh.

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Before they sponsored us, I've actually been using HelloFresh for years, paying for it, and it's always a great value, and it's always really good recipes. I have actually done the same, and it was, I will admit, it was pretty damn good. Now, Hello Fresh or a meal replacement program like that is cheaper than going to at this point. Dude, yeah, as expensive as fast food's fucking getting. Go to Hello Fresh. dot com slash unsub 10 FM and get 10 free meals now plus a free breakfast for life a whole breakfast for free for life one per box with active subscription free meals applied as discount on first box new subscribers only

very spy plan that's hellofresh dot com slash unsub 10 fm to get 10 free meals plus a free breakfast for life getting into the youtube space what was the launch into that where you're like oh I want to do this with firearms I know you're saying comedy but what got you on the firearm side oh dude it was this completely a cerebral situation where I was doing still doing stand-up and I was doing sketch comedy

and it was doing really well they were actually starting the coming together for the station so that was Phil de Franco Kassam G and all these guys coming together to create one of the first multi-channel networks every new name is just a flashbang into like oh shit yeah

like 10 15 years ago Lisa Nova I met Philip because of you yeah like it's all the those weird random stuff. Yeah. I always forget about that. And yeah.

And so they were like, hey, look, you know, you should, you should do your own thing. And I was like, well, I don't want to, I don't want to take away from what it is that we're doing here. I don't want to go from making sketch comedy to doing other sketch comedy stuff. Like, I want to keep contributing to that. So what's a hard 180 from this? What do I enjoy? And I literally sat down as like, what could I do every single week that I wouldn't get tired of? What would be evergreen?

What would constantly have new stuff coming in? That's where I kind of came a tech assassin. and the breakdown because there was always new movies, new video games, new gadgets and shit like that coming out. And then I would always have something new and I wouldn't get burned out, which I did. It happens. It happens. And editor, if you could put up just like a little like a little clip of like the tech assassin stuff. Like I really want people to understand like the assets and whatnot involved because it wasn't just a dude in a field with gun. Like it was very like in depth. Somewhat thoughtful. Yeah. Well, you're adding like visual effects and shit. Which

like nobody was doing in the, at least in the gun space. And I don't think anybody's really doing that now, frankly. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of hard to invest that kind of, like, bandwidth in any way. We just, like, there's no point in diminishing return with that. It's like, you just keep getting demonetized and throttled with your distribution and stuff. It's so frustrating. Yeah.

Turns out they don't like us very much. No. No. No. No. It's weird. It's very weird. It's like, it was, you know, the chip on my shoulder with that.

was that they would, you know, they invested $25,000 into my channel in the first Next Up. Who's the day? Google. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I was part of YouTube's first Next Up class. That was 2012, I think. And they flew us out to.

What is Next Up? I don't even know either. Oh, okay. So what they did, they did it for one year like this. And then the years subsequent were a little different. But what they would do is they would pick. 25, 40 channels that they were going to invest in and give some type of mentorship to as well. So like, you know, various, you know, C-level executives would be your mentor.

And you would get a grant, you'd go to New York for a week, and you would just hang out, collaborate, and do Jimmy Wong was one of them. I think Zach King, Final Cut King was one of them. Outside of our YouTube rep, we can't even get a fucking call. back. So like that's, that's crazy they were doing that shit back then. There's only a handful. I mean,

at 25 to 50, there's probably, that's like everyone over a million subs at that point. Because there was only a handful of, oh yeah. No, and there were, dude,

I mean, a million subs was probably 10 to 100 million now. Yep. I'd be curious to know the numbers around how many people have over a million subscribers at this point. Oh, it's a metric shit time. I think it's public.

Let's see. It is a lot. a lot compared to, because I remember that time frame too. If you were over, Freddie was king at 9 million subs or 7 million. Crushing it, yeah. And he was like number one in all of YouTube at that time. YouTube estimates around 69,000 globally. Yeah. That's 9K over 10 mil or a mill? Over a mill. Sixty-nine thousand. That's wild. That's kind of crazy. But that's also like a bunch of companies and like music and stuff like that too. But that's, I mean, not diminishing that.

2,800 have achieved 10 million. That's wild. Those numbers don't seem right. That's so hard. You've got to think how many people are subscribed to multiple people, though. No, for sure. I have like 20, well, more than probably 20 YouTube channels. Yeah.

So it's like. It is also the family channels we don't know. There are so many channels where we just have no idea and you're like, oh, I did, I've never heard of this channel. They have 70 million subscribers. And you're like, how many of those are? Peppa Pig clips, you know, stuff like that. Dude.

I mean, Mr. Beast just hit 460 million. It's insane. Subs. 460 million, no one. I guarantee no motherfucker was like, this is how big YouTube will get or at one individual will get on his platform. They're running out of colors for play buttons for him. Right.

Yeah, what are the milestones? Gold human. 10, 100. 100,000, 1 million. I think 5 million, 10 million. Oh, five millions won. I think five million is five million one? It jumps straight from a million to 10 million.

And then 20 or 25? I think it's 50 million is another one. No, there's a 20 or 25 million. And then 50 million, then 100 million, then 250 million. Whatever Mr. Beast hits, they're like, would you want one? Yeah. What would you like, sir? I would like a, I want a room to Google.

Yeah, so there's 100K, 1 million. 10 million, 50 million. Interesting. And then... PewDie Pye got one for 20 million. The red diamond is 100 million. Mm. Mm.

Which... That's a number. Yeah. You doing okay. Okay on that one. I remember Beast back in the day. He was putting up the billboard signs, like, subscribe to PewDiePie. You remember that?

Oh, yeah. Oh, dude. Yeah. Yeah, the subscribe to... Trying to get them to... 100 million at the time because they were trying to beat that little Indian channel. I say little.

I know to 100 million. What was it? Mr. Bees versus or no, it was PewDiePie versus T Series. T series. Yeah. Anybody who remembers that beef was yeah, that was fun. Well, until it suddenly wasn't there was a thing that happened but

PewDie Pie was or Mr. Beast was actively trying to fucking beat this huge company back in the day, T-Series. Yeah. Because it was an Indian, like, network, like, television thing. It was an Indian, I think they were music, yeah.

But, well, the thing I was talking about was the, it was the Christchurch shooting in Australia or New Zealand. There was multiple. So it was that, and it was also the science at the same time. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, no, it was the guy, like, the guy was, you know, a fucking shit lord kind of thing. But, like, before he committed the shootings and, you know, subscribe to PewDiePy. And it was like, it's, you know, a whole.

separate ordeal, but the same thing which is just like, I'll touch Fytee by real quick. That's going in the intro. Yeah, Pughes fucked me back in the apocalypse back in the day. Yeah, because that's when you were just... Dick. Oh, because that's when you just started

like trying to do YouTube full time, right? I just started YouTube and I was making like $1,200 bucks a month. I think I talked about this with you who won't say how to Eli. Motherfucker, dude. I love you, Putes, but you f***ed me there for a minute, man. God.

Damn. Was that because of Bridgegate? Bridgegate. Yeah. Tell me. You've never heard of bridge gate. No, no, no, no. I'm sure you did.

PewDie Pye went in his live stream problem that happened. Mm-hmm. So he was playing PubG back in the day. Like player, you ever play that, PubG? Yeah. So he dropped a hard R on stream. And that was what? 2017.

Yeah. 16, something like that. That was when my channel was starting to like, I was getting a little bit over like 100,000 subscribers and I was super happy. I was making like 12, 300 bucks a month. I was like, yeah, I can do this thing. He drops that July of 2015. Oh shit. That was 2015. Yep. Yeah. And so I think it was Wall Street Journal or like one of the big publications picked it up. And they said, hey, this is, this is what's going on all your ads. And so every major company dropped their ads from YouTube. so no one made money off of YouTube for like several months.

And I was, I had just quit my job as a police officer. And I just started content creation. I was like super happy with my revenue. And so I became a realtor. Yeah. Well, so not like I didn't know it by that, but I've heard like all the different apocalypse and that they get me so angry, so frustrated. Because having been on all sides of the equation, like,

consulting for studios and ad agencies and stuff. Because Google and Alphabet would pimp me out to studios and ad agencies early days, specifically for them to figure out their return on ad spend for digital campaigns. Because at the time, everything was discretionary spending for digital because there wasn't attribution models. They weren't tracking pixels that were sophisticated like they are now. So that whole purchasing funnel was very vague. So they would essentially subcontract me out to them to figure out,

what their return on their spins were and everything. The frustrating thing about these adpocalypse and everything is that they're all bullshit. Like, like, they're ideological bullshit because anybody who's ever had a business and ran ads before knows that you can set exclusions and segment the audiences which you run ads on. And so to say, like, I'm not going to run ads on,

you know, I don't know, firearms videos or, whatever, people use the F word or whatever it is, that's total bullshit. Like target, all of them were pulling their money because they like, you know, they had an agenda. And it's like, screw you for being lazy and not going and setting exclusions for certain sectors that you don't want to be affiliated from or with. It's like firearms, you know, how many times have we had a product that we want to sell? And it's like, okay, well, don't demonetize my firearms videos. I'll,

I'll sell fucking echelon energy on it. How about we do a revenue share split and you just give me cost on that so I don't have to bid in an auction against all these other businesses and I'll still give you a little bit of a cut on that. It's a win-win for everybody. If you actually had a fiduciary responsibility to, you know, your shareholders to increase the value and everything, you would take that deal. But you have an ideological one where you don't want to support this community.

You want to make firearms taboo. with a younger generation so that they're going to accept you infringing on their constitutional rights. Don't get us started on the firearms content. A lot of it too is just, it's YouTube, it's not necessarily,

I understand they have to take certain actions to protect their advertiser and stuff like that, but a lot of it is just like forward fronting shit where it's like, oh, well, you know, look, look, everyone who's putting us under scrutiny for hosting this stuff,

look, we're doing something. It's like, well, A, are you? And B, like, I don't think that's why policy should be written. Yeah, well, just like the, um, the, every other adpocalypse, like, what was it, the kids videos? And they were demonetizing, um, family channels and stuff like that because of something that had happened.

It's like, you just roulette with a genre or something like that. And they're like, oh, look, I'm doing something. Don't fire me. And I'm looking at it now. Apparently part of the adpocalypse was not only just like, uh, like PewDie was like an element of it, but a lot of it too, apparently, uh, advertisers found their ads on few disturbing videos, such as, I see. killings.

Yeah. I didn't know about that part. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. Well, we. Well, we. Beheading is for Coca-Cola.

Broughts me by Nabisco. It's like, I can understand why you have a little bit of a God. This is a one minute ad read? Yeah. The fucking the gunpocalypse that we had to go through a couple years ago. That was wild.

Oh, yeah. That was close, man. Jesus. Yeah, it was terrible. What do you mean close? Especially with Pepperbox launching a descent. Really? Good God.

Oh, so. Yeah. So they couldn't insert a fucking magazine into a gun. It was weapons modification. If you had a 30-round magazine and you were shown inserting it into the weapon on camera, you could get a strike. Yeah. And also screwing on a suppressor, that's a strike.

Weapons modification. This is strikes, not demon. This is strikes. Oh, wow. And I remember having a conversation with my YouTube rep, I'm like, look, dude. He's like, oh, you could just go back and blur it or you could do this. I'm like, dude, I have enough. videos on my channel of this happening

that you could nuke my channel 50 times over. Like this is game over, man. Like if they go forward with this policy and they don't grandfather, which also, getting on that soapbox, a lot of everything.

That's fucking insane that they retroactively apply it. Because I'm like, how the fuck am I supposed to as a creator, make content for what your guidelines are going to be in five years? Dude, you're preaching to the choir.

Remember, I'm the guy that you pay. $25,000 to invest in my channel to create firearms content only to have them five, 10 years later say, oh, that content you did? Sorry, we're pulling the plug on it. That's wild. I quit my jobs. I focused on building this thing. And it's like, it's hard not to be fissioned in that situation. Like, you know, I look at like the comedy side of stuff. Like, man, it's tragic. But like, how many people move to pursue those careers in entertainment or used to to Los Angeles and, you know, aspiring actor or comedian or whatever.

And they come up snake eyes, man. At least they gave it their shot or whatever. But, you know, and it's the same thing now with like YouTube and everything. And it's like not only are you risking so much of your most valuable asset that you have in life is time, right? It's the commodity we trade. And you can have somebody where you invest your time, your energy, your soul, your money into creating something. and you're playing by the rules only to have them retroactively change it. It's fucked.

Well, we realized after a minute, like, the reason they were saying we can't have 30-round magazines inserted into a gun is because it was illegal in California. We're fucking YouTube based out of. Yeah. Fucking California. So, like, they were taking their guidelines and they were enforcing them on us based on where they were living at the time. We're like, the company is based.

Do you ever struggle? With tiny toiletry bottles? No. Well, with Mando, struggle no more. I would not want to spread whole body deodorin on you, Nick. It's gonna get all clumpy in my chest hair. It looks like I've been rolling around it mashed potatoes. How well does it lubricate?

It's developed by a doctor and it works for 72 hours. Show some respect. I'm gonna tell that to everyone at the Magic the Gathering tournament. I wish I was there when they figured out that it wasn't good for 73 hours. I like to imagine just a fat guy on a treadmill for 7, 72 hours straight is up. He's turned. Time to shower finally. Faddy curdled. Thanks to mando. It's also named after Mount Fuji. Really? Mine's bourbon and leather because I'm a mando. Couldn't even get through an ad without a pun.

What? Do you want to sell the deodorant or not, Brandon? I'm just waiting for the sweet release of death. It's not going to come for at least 72 hours. Listen, we did a lot of meet and greets during the live tour. Y'all motherfuckers could use some man, though. For a strong independent woman, you can do everything a man can do. You can still use some mando. Our Kentonick dead. The cops are coming.

We've got 72 hours to hide the body before it starts to smell. Actually does smell pretty damn good. This one smells like the body wash smells actually really good. I have bourbon leather. Anybody find the body? No, but that ditch over there smells delicious. There's no one. There's a body over there.

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over at shopmando.com. I won't give names or details because we, like, you know, obviously. Fuck you, Bill. Yeah. Obviously, you don't want to like docs people. And I think we might be under NDA for certain things as well. But we were, we had meeting specifically with YouTube on some of these firearm issues. And they were telling us a bunch of shit that wasn't true.

Like, they're attorneys that were like, well, you know, this is, this is why we're doing this. Like, for example, I don't know if people know you can't show thermals. Like, you can't show thermal optics on YouTube. That thermal argument. You f*** idiot. It's like, it is my fucking job. to know like firearm laws across the country because if we ship something out to let's say you know Washington state right not compliant that falls back on our license like I know the firearm laws and

this is a firearms manufacturer who has all the licensing in the country and we I'm having this fucking argument with this guy because he's like well actually I'm an attorney and I know that thermals are illegal I'm like no they are not I said there is no state in this country that thermals are are illegal, like just outright banned. There's certain states where you can't hunt with thermals and stuff like that. Like there's different, like, there's local municipalities and things. There's like some nuance to it. I'm like, no, in the United States of America, thermals are not illegal.

No. And he's like, well, agree to disagree. Like, that's not how it works, sir. No. Your disagreement does not make it illegal. My least favorite statement is agree to disagree with a factual statement. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not. Hmm.

Oh, I'm going to rage if you actually say that. again please do not now i will say with it it's a great shout out to pepperbox because that hit the exact same time pepper box launched and it was like hey guess where you can watch this stuff and not worry about any of that we don't have to change sensor we can show full autos blah blah and it was at literal the same month that happened with you to pepperbox launched it's like yeah okay well serendipitous this worked out really good for us and i'm not saying that that's why they rolled back the restrictions. But it's also like it's a great way for people to vote with their dollar. Like, yeah, I don't like the bullshit that you're putting me through. I'm going to go

to a different platform that allows me to do that. Yes and no. Yes. But the problem with that, the problem with that is there's very small. It may be a lot of people to you guys. But in the grand scheme of things as far as society and globally is concerned, that's a very small cut of YouTube. What they're doing is they're making something that is constitutionally available to us within the United States for us to exercise those rights. They're making it taboo to a younger generation so that they will later on accept these erosions of those rights. And it's like, because you're not seeing you or, you know, the father going out to the range with his daughter shooting, you know, a 22, or even a suppressor or something like that where it's going to make

the experience much more safe for everyone involved. Like, they're making these things taboo. So it's not socially acceptable. And that's the crime, in my opinion. It's like, I'm glad you brought that up too, because we get a lot of people that ask, especially on my content. Like, well, why would you give YouTube any, why would you upload on YouTube? at all. Like, it's just for the money. Is it this or whatever? It's the second largest search engine. They're a monopoly. Owned by the first. Yes. Correct. Yes. And so it's like, well, if part of what I'm doing is trying to influence culture, it's like, why don't you just go exclusively to Pepperbox, Rumble, or whatever? It's like, well, they don't have the user base on YouTube. It's like, if you're trying

to influence culture, you have to go where the people are. Because if you just shut yourself into these little corners of the internet where it's only people who agree with me and you got this little echo chamber, you're going to have zero cultural impact and you're going to lose what you love. Yeah, well, it's really failed. Good on you for running for office because I will never do that. You're smart. Because I'm like, hey, guys, you know what? You're going to do that. Cool. Awesome. Section 230 doesn't apply to you because you're operating as a private company, not as a public utility. So that's the whole section 230 thing. Guess what? We're coming for you. They hate it when you bring that up. Yeah. I mean, you can't pick and choose when you're a utility and when you're a private company. If you're going to change what it means to be an American citizen, no, fuck no, you're acting as a private company.

We're going to treat you as one. Well, because they get both legal protections. Right. They get them from both sides right now. It's the publisher versus platform thing. Yeah. It's, yeah, I'm passionate about it. I love it.

Yeah, I mean, largely, that's in part the reason why I stopped making videos myself. Like, I already, like, I never saw making YouTube videos as a way to make money. it was a way to do the things that I enjoyed, to grow an audience to create the brands or grow the brands that I was excited about monetizing, right? So like every single time I would make a video, I would lose money on it. Like not Mr. Bees spending millions of dollars,

but I would burn like 200 grand a year on making YouTube videos. You were focused on the ad because it is that idea. It's like I'll do my out-inser my own ad reads for this video to back up the company that I, supporting. And like slow-mo cameras, like, dude, one of my cameras is like $500,000. My, how I got my first. That's an expensive canon. How I got my first, my first slow-mo camera, I couldn't like, again, being a starving actor in Los Angeles and everything, this was around

the time of the multi-channel networks and stuff. And I was consulting for discovery at the time. And they were like, hey, look, we, you know, we love for you to come on board and be part of our multi-channel network and everything. It's like, okay, here's going to be the deep. I'll make with you guys. I need a slow-mo camera to like because I can't keep written because they're so expensive. And you have to hire an operator for them. And I just can't afford that. So I want to buy a camera, learn how to operate it myself.

So what we're going to do is we're going to do an agreement where, um, you're going to give me a loan for $50,000 and you're going to bank that against my ad sense for in perpetuity until I pay that back. And you're going to give me like, I don't know, 20% of my average. Revenue and you take 80% until that loans paid back. That's how I got my first camera and everything. And, you know... So, just so everyone understands, this is a Phantom.

This is 2012. What year was this? I still have that camera. It's a Phantom V12, one. And what year was it? Around 2012. And this is... You didn't have like the free flies and stuff like that.

Like, cameras were, like, slow-mo cameras comparatively to back in the day. They're cheap now. The red one was like 80, 80,000. Yeah. It's incredible. your that phantom was the only slow-mo camera yeah 120 frames was about as max and the red years came out with that yeah and that is period even cameras iPhones didn't have anything near that so having the only slow-mo camera it did cost 500,000 dollars and then

dude like how much was an operator because that is money just per day this is drives hard drives when you're hitting record. Oh, well, operator like $750 to $1,500 a day. Now it's probably like $2,500 to $4 a day. And you've got to think that these are very fast writing cards. And so you can, you know, they're usually one to two terabytes. And it'll offload 512 gigabytes in, you know, just a few seconds. Jesus, Christ.

This is record about three seconds. And he's not joking. It's two to three seconds. That is 500 gigs. Like, at a time when this did not exist and hard drives, very expensive. Super expensive then, too, yeah. All right, I got a question for both of you guys. Obviously, you guys knew each other in Los Angeles in the early days of YouTube.

Who did you guys know back then, like early YouTubers? I'm curious about the, we were talking about it a little bit at Brunch. Yeah. Do the Asian accent when you say his name, though? Freddie Wong? No, I said, do that. Asian accent that when you say it. I can't. Why? I don't know it because you do it so well.

Like I'd be like, you're the best at it. You're getting the card. Yeah. I'm getting... I'm letting you do a really bad accent. Yeah, go. And Asian. And Asian. Go on. Freddie Wong. Say the Freddie Wong, you know. Say Freddie Wong. It's okay. Your skin does not play in this. Miss or Rich or Ryan.

I can't do that. You can. You very good with camera. Okay. No. I mean, yeah. He's just like, I cannot. Yeah, no, I cannot. You're getting real red right now. No, it's the Cedar Fever. Oh, I see.

The Cedar Fever activated by racism. Did you hear, you remember Clint? Yeah, of course. Dude, I remember when, I remember when they were getting Clint to move from Georgia to Los Angeles. Who's Clint? Pohnisher. Like, so he did cardboard warfare. This is like, like, with.

quarter Clinton or he yeah he so before that before corridor this is this is where like one of the stories I like to give people uh I absolutely love was like a lot of people get into this gear kind of I'm going to start creating when I get this camera or I'm going to start creating when I buy this thing or whatever it is and I'm like it's not that like if you really want to vent creatively you need to find a way to do it and just exercise exercise exercise that And the best example is like, uh, Corridor Digital and Freddie Wong were doing just top tier VFX for the time. Uh, you know, like the 2010 era or whatever. Um, and then this kid comes out and does this video that's like call a duty based, but he couldn't afford, he didn't have the budget to go get airsoft guns.

So he called it cardboard warfare where he took and he took and cut out cardboard guns and tanks and shit and then VFXed everything in and did these epic battles. scenes and stuff. And I'm like, dude, in a world where he had the money for that budget, that wouldn't have existed. And he wouldn't be the person he is now because of it. Those constraints can definitely help you. And that's like, you know, he ended up meeting Freddie and them because of it and moved out to Los Angeles to do VFX for the team and everything. But it's also, it's ahead of its time, though, because it's, it's that idea of like, everybody's seen a CGI gun battle. Yeah. You know, but to be able to take that next step and say, well, I can't afford that.

It's like, all right, well, fuck it. Let's be silly. That is where the internet eventually ended up going. We're like, that's, you know, that's the content that's rewarded because it's fun. It's like everybody likes it. Yeah. Carbore warfare, World War II. It's like there, it's D-Day, but for the 82nd and there it's cardboard plans.

And he did all of that. So it's kind of like tiny guns. Yes. It's silly, you know. But this is like 2012. Yeah. And it's fucking wild. I have a dude Clint and then when he did taxes for the first time and they have that on video of him not understanding taxes and he's like buddy

Freddie Freddie why did I move here what are these things he wasn't used to like how taxes were especially in LA wild yeah where the city will come after you when you move for their 1% their their taxes and it's wild yeah uh Harley um at big nail time um of course Kyle from FPS Russia. Yeah, there were so many people. Jenna Marbles. Yeah, just a bunch of really, really cool people. Brandon, why do you keep sending me money through cash app with it saying just deckwork?

Wait, is that not you doing all my yard work? On the real, I think we all do use cash app. It's a quick way to pay friends if they owe you money. Finn! Where's my money? You told me you could beat the house. You know the saying, Fen always wins. Real talk, though, I've used cash app like this week. Yeah, I think actually that's what we use to pay our boxing instructors.

We also use it on vacation to pay for rides and just random things. It's like, hey, let's split this Uber. Let me wire you $20. It's the two best things. It's easier and it's free. Why'd we go to Vegas to build decks? And why were you building decks at two in the morning? She was Hispanic. I thought she was just good at it. Why were you skiing in the snow at 4 a year? The cash app can do way more than you think to make your money, work for you. If you direct deposit at least $300 in paychecks each month and use the cash app card

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Because I was going to go back to that. What was it like working with Kyle in like the heyday of FPS Russia? Awesome. Like such a cool dude. Like to this day, I love him. Like he's like he's like autistically honest in so many different ways. Dude's just like no filter. Like he he was like, hey man, I'm going to blow this house up in Texas.

can you help facilitate like some explosives and everything? And I'm like, yeah, dude, I'll fucking come film. Awesome. Yeah. Those are the phone calls. Everybody's like, this is what America is actually like. Yeah. Yeah.

I actually got told the story about that. I don't know if I'm allowed to share it, but do it. I'll ask permission or excuse me, forgiveness and not permission. Because driving the, what was it, the APC or the BPC through the house? Mm-hmm. Or the BP. What is that called? Yeah, it's an armored personnel carrier.

Yeah. Hey, PC then. Yeah. BMP. BMP, that was what I was looking for. Driving the BMP through the house, some of the guys over there were telling me that when you guys did that, it wasn't taken into account that on the other side was the pool.

Oh, yeah. And so they're like, oh, yeah, if we had accidentally gone a little bit too far forward, we probably would all drown because the hatch would have been obscured. It was, it was. Okay, so it happened. Well, so I don't know how, how, realistic that threat was, but he might not have seen where they were going for sure, but we did some charges in the pool because we were doing shape charges because he was going

to demo the whole thing. I was like, let's do some underwater charges, see what happens to this, you know, and just like, and like see how quick it drains out and everything. So they knew the pool was there. But yeah, it's a pretty cool spot. I will say watching how many times they would use explosives on objects that turned into very fast shrapnel. Oh, do, yeah. Wild. The door. The door is like case in point.

Editor, pull that up. Multiple times. This is not like a one-off. That's what's crazy to me. I'm like, wild man. Like, that's the stuff where you go, they might need to put something on that video. Because they am in Oakland,

cornfield. It explodes in Scrapnel. Because what I was told is that what he normally did when he was blowing up a car. I think I remember this. Maybe you talked about it on like a PCA episode, which I forgot we were both PKA alumni. Yeah. But having,

they would normally like hang the explosives from the rear view mirror. And that truck didn't have one. So they were just like, oh, fuck it. We'll put it against the door. And so that's what turned the door into like basically just a shoot truck.

Well, at least they told you that because for the longest time they were running with, it's VFX. It's VFX. And I'm like, bro. That's not VFX. Yeah. That's what they said. Yeah.

Because I think at the time there was a kid in Georgia that shot a lawnmower with Tannerite and it blew a piece off and it cut his leg off or something. Blu my damn leg off. Exactly. Yeah. Just shooting a video and a fucking lawnboat mower blade just coming and cutting your leg off. I think I did that on my first ever Darwin Awards episode was that video or the guy. Because like he kept like the blades were in the longboat.

lawnmower. Wild. And that's what became the shrapnel that. How much it did, how much it did you get? Because you and Freddie's first video was a 50 cow, or was that Freddie? Did you guys do that one when he put the watermelon on his head? I don't know. Maybe.

Because we did go to the range a few times. People thought you actually shot a watermelon off his head with the 50 cow. It was all VFX. They had like a charge and it blew up. But timed it and it was like 50 cow shoots. there on an open field and then it explodes and he's like, oh my God, that was so crazy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the only video I've ever, like, taken down that I felt like needed to come down. Wait, wait, wait, this is the one time you got in trouble, right? No, no, no, no. We got to talk about that one, though. No.

The drone thing. Oh, no, I didn't get in trouble. Oh. No, that was all me. I thought you got in trouble. No, fuck no. No, okay. for context.

So what happened was. Yeah. So what do we now see in Russia and Ukraine, Richard? Yeah. About 15 years ago, before DGI was a company, again, I like hacking and building stuff. I would build things for video games and movies for the breakdown, recreate elements of movies or video games that I like.

And Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier came out. And it was all about small drones used in deployed in warfare for ISR or whatever. And so in six months, I built a fully autonomous flying multi-rotor platform that would drop five-pound bombs to detonate at proximity. And pretty much all of them, like, yeah, 15 years ago. And so, again, I have all the licenses to do so. I'm a manufacturer of destructive devices, explosives, all these other different things. but I also work in conjunction with other organizations that have clearances like Tripwire Operations Group and everything else.

What are you, a type 10? 20. Yeah. Yeah. And this predates the FAA regulations around these things too. And so a lot of the components, which this company no longer exists anymore, were readily available at FRIES electronics. For anybody who's ever appreciated electronic stores, they were the best. like you could get everything from resistors or whatever and as a hobbyist and things like the

chicken party that I was talking about earlier and everything you just use like raspberry pies or arduinos and you can pretty much program them to do whatever you want like you put a pisos sensor a pisos sensors like that from a rock band video game the drum set that recognizes impacts you can put that on a wall somewhere on your garage and go dda did did and it open your garage door right you can program little cool things. So I just got a sonar sensor and programmed a ping. So a sonar sensor pings things. And I could set an altitude for a proximity burst of an explosive by running an electronic

blasting cap and some liquid binary and some C4 and everything else and fly it in this multi-rotor and everything. You're autistic. You want to talk about a wild, a wild like, shoot. the first weekend, the bombs didn't detonate. And I had no idea why. And we'd spent like six months building these things. And it's like, I don't have extra ones to like just randomly.

Like I can't blow them in place. So I had to go disarm them. And so the whole time, no bomb suit or anything like bomb suit is not going to help you anyways. But like I'm over there like disarming these, these bombs and everything. And then the next weekend, uh, we had a successful drop and it was epic and it was like the biggest orgasm of all time. I was like, you can hear me on camera. It was like six months of floor play.

It was awesome. But like in the after action report, I guess, the weekend before was terrifying because I was over there disarming these these explosives, these UXOs, whatever. and the reason for them not going off was the liquid binary was leaking down onto the sonar sensor. And it was preventing it from pinging and had it dried out while I was over there

disarming it would have detonated. So the explosives were fine. They were fine. Yeah. Yeah, it was covered because the liquid was leaking through that plastic seal onto the sonar sensor because it was pointed down towards the ground

and everything. I love it. Like you motherfuck think you're autistic. like, oh, I know every kind of train. He broke warfare 10 years before world governments. Yeah, well... Would you have seen it go...

Dude, like, would you have seen it going to that direction? Because we've talked about multiple times on the podcast where never did it register, oh, the next kind of warfare will just be drones flying out, dropping bombs, or just ramming people

now at this point. Yeah. We've seen IEDs. We've seen fucking... H-Bids, everything like that, but not drones going flying at it. And you're like, blah, ha, video game taught me something. That's the one thing I kind of pride myself on is that I can be, I can get really excited about things that are coming.

And it gives me a little bit of an edge in thinking. That's why I say like I built like all those AI accounts over the last three years is like these AI influencers and stuff. Another product that I built that it didn't really talk about or. Maybe I'll elaborate on it a little bit more, but it was an AI oppo research tool. And the idea around that is it's coming. All this stuff is coming. And my concern is that in the near future, the open AIs and the apples of the world are going to have such a competitive advantage on this that it's just going to take a state department to really lean on them in a way that they're going to have a dystopian.

an edge on anybody who ever wants to do anything in politics or anything. But the way I was utilizing it, essentially, I would use the APIs of the various different platforms. And so API is an application like interface. So like it's like the back end for access to YouTube or any of these different platforms. You could pull all the different videos that you were in. It would auto transcribe those videos, and then, which is already being done by Google as is anyways, this was even before that auto transcription component was added to it. And then using different language models, you could clean that data and you could start parsing through it. 100% and figure out the various different threat vectors or subjects that you wanted to

address in some type of campaign. If you open up your photos, if you have an iPhone, you know how sometimes it gives you memories, right? It'll, it'll, here's your dog or these other different things or here's this person. So it's running a local kind of context window of what would be machine learning. And I think in the near future, it won't be just cloud compute. There will be a lot of a lot of local processing that's happening either with AI models or agents in some capacity. the concern is that like the advantage of the haves and the have-nots is going to be such a competitive edge that like that's why I think that there's definitely people strategically placing themselves around those people like in what way various various well the conversation we were having earlier about people within government and their proximity to influence

and creators and advertisers and everything else. I think that's rapidly coming. I don't think nobody's prepared for. I think like you start looking, again, the real competitive advantage is going to be the apples or the Facebooks or something that can run these things in the back without telling you. And they're going to be able to,

they're going to be able to parse all this information at scale in a way that's unprecedented. Because in the past, You had to isolate somebody and you had to get a team of people together and you had to do this thing. And now you're able to just autonomously do this in a way that's just, it's terrifying.

Way, the level of how fast it can do it too is fucking wild. Brandon, what kind of shirt is that? I'm glad you asked, Eli, this is a poncho. Brandon and I actually wear poncho so much. We constantly end up wearing the same nice poncho shirt. Good thing nobody's ever pointed that out before.

Now, if you guys have ever seen one of our live shows or this podcast in general you'll see Brandon and I wearing these incredibly comfortable great looking shirts all the time. Finn pull it up with pictures they're literally always wearing the same shirt. I got turned on a poncho like a year ago been wearing them ever since I personally prefer I think this is the Western because it's got the pearl snaps because it's hot in Texas and I like something breathable. Here's the thing I find really cool Brandon do the glasses trick. So ponchos have this neat little thing in the pocket where you just take your glasses. No, the other one. The other one.

Be more specific Let's give the shit about that. Alright. Watch everyone. So if you got fat fingers and you smudge your glasses all the time, the bottom of the shirt actually acts, it has like a microfiber so you can clean your glasses. I make him clean my phones. He does.

I like the hidden little pocket on the breast. Wait, what? Right over here. Got a little zipper pocket. I didn't even know about that one. Is that where you hold Cody's heart? And his drugs. Things you might need to know.

Pancho has put a lot of thought. and detail into each one of their shirts. Oh, holy. They're soft. They're really soft. Yo, what? That's my one thing is fucking fabric sensitivity.

I don't wear uncomfortable shirts. This is comfy as fucking. That's why we wear them all the time. So poncho's got a bunch of great styles, the original Western denim and ultra light. If you're looking for the perfect shirt, something breathable, and stands out in a good way,

give poncho a try. Go to poncho outdoors.com slash unsub and get $10 off your first order. That's P-O-N-C-O-O-O-O-O-O-D-O-D-O-D-O-S-O-SUB. That's, it's crazy when you start learning how AI works or iterations and then how it learns. You're like, oh, okay, so I just have to be very targeted and it will refine, refine, refine. I mean, even on a basic level, just in the last six months, if you've noticed AI, even just image generation has gotten faster. Well, that's big, way faster.

So that is exactly, that's what I'm saying. That is because of iterative. It's time done. AI is just getting smarter each time. That is one iteration. It's getting more efficient, I think, too. Well, it's iterations. That's all that is.

It's like, I've learned this once. I've learned this twice. I've learned this three times. I've learned this four times. InVVitia's making that money, though, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. GPUs online.

Jesus, the scariest thing I've seen recently. Do you see the ice pulling the baby away from the mama? No, yeah. You got to see that one? Perfect example. Is it just AI generated? It was shared 11 million times on, on Facebook, and it was a nice agent, like, taking a baby from a mom out of a car.

There's a third arm coming from, yeah, completely AI generated. I mean, we're reaching levels of disinformation that no generation before us has ever had to deal with. So here's the thing. I got a hot take on that, too. You know, I think that the Second Amendment doesn't just apply to firearms. I think that the Second Amendment applies to any tools at which you're able to defend yourself against tyranny. And, you know, I think that digital warfare in and of itself is the threat vector more so than, you know, an invasion. I mean, now granted, I can go on a rant on an invasion too because I think the humanoid robotics thing is going to be a insane Trojan horse.

Because to my understanding, you're an investor in that as well. Yeah. Dude, I am, I am, I'm like the irony of it is I am I am hedged 50 50. I'm like individual rights absolutist but I also know that this is the path of least resistance and a lot of people are going to lean on convenience. Trojan horse is the best verbiage I have heard for that because I told them about how if AI took over like took over it would it would show in one way. You would never know AI is in control and then trying to do something bad. until it's way too fucking like.

Oh, yeah. It is that Trojan horse of, oh, we don't know. It's going to just, it's going to, oh, find a server farm. Oh, we can control it. And it'll be, AI will never run away from us. We're in control. Okay, then it learns that. Then it outsources its mind to a server farm.

And now it's like, okay, well, I'm going to live here. And now I'm going to find new iterations to get around this control. But I'm going to just make it look like code. or something like that, or it's mankind made and then I'll come in later. Dude, it's intellectual masturbation to think that you're smarter than like, so like the point at which machine learning or an AI is recursive in its learning, like, and again, different people debate on, you know, general intelligence versus super intelligence and everything, regardless, at the point at which it's smarter than the collective humanity or any one person

alive, you know, you can't, if you're an ant, you can't understand a human stepping on you or coming with ant killer or something like that. You're just trying to live your life. You only know how to go left or right, go get your food and do this. By definition, super intelligence will have threat vectors and understanding of things that we cannot comprehend. And I think for most people, they're so egotistical in thinking that they're smarter than the average person or smarter than this or that, that like, you can't see that the threat is going to be so great that you're not going to be able to comprehend it, literally comprehend it, because it's going to be so much smarter than you.

It will look like, man, what is it called with the Great Divide or that a type one civilization, even to us? Oh, Cardishev? Yeah, we're at a point eight, but a type one civilization, would look like a god to us. Even though they're just like more advanced, it is that idea of looking like a god and we're just like, what is this?

Same for AI. The best hope is that it gives zero fucks about us and zero of a threat in that sense. But I guess back to the second amendment, I feel like when it comes to these AI models, the concern for me, and one of the reasons why I had been doing a lot of these, like hundreds of AI influencers.

And you'll see like little crumbs here and there, the people that I will talk to or maybe collaborate with and stuff like that. You'll see crumbs as to maybe who some of the people are. But I don't want to get too far out there because I don't want to give up my data, my data sets, right? Because right now it's clean. I can see the way that the different platforms are moving their detection systems and stuff like that.

Well, this is the second time you brought it up now that you've had like AI influencers that you've generated. Yeah. What do you want to get into like? Because I've, we've had this conversation before and I find it fascinating. Because not only what you're doing, but why you're doing it, the why is super interesting to me. Yeah.

So if you don't mind talking about it. Yeah. Please. Yeah. That's great. You know, again, I think I'm an individual rights absolutist in so many different ways because I think that the further we get. in this technological progression, the more we're going to really need to shore up those

rights as best as we can. And when it comes to AI and like these diffusion models, specifically a diffusion model, so most people are familiar with a language model. A large language model is an AI model that's trained on human language and it creates pattern recognition based off of the probability of the next word. And it can kind of sound small. And it can kind of sound smart and understanding, but it's really just a probability in what the next word's going to be. That's kind of like the middle button when you're typing on your iPhone. Correct. That's exactly it. So that's a very distilled down way, a crude way of putting it, but nevertheless, a diffusion model, if you've ever gotten a mid-jurney or something like that,

a diffusion model is just a bunch of pixels that's trying to make sense of the text that you gave it. And it's creating an image based off of the understanding around those. And so, My concern is while the internet, like very much social media, YouTube and everything was very novel in the beginning. It was us. It was the creators against the big industry, against the studios. Like we're fighting the man like for distribution. We're going to make movies and put them online. The barrier to entry is zero now.

It's zero. It becomes the Wild West. But then industry and government comes in and says, okay, we got to rein this thing in. How do we do this in a way that we can keep? control of this thing from getting out of hand or the people getting too much freedom from it. My concern is that language models and diffusion models will be heavily. So there's not many open source. There's open weighted language models and stuff.

So an open weight, like you can change the emphasis on something. Right. So like the deep seek, the Chinese model, you can't say, you know, make me an image of Gigi Ping as a Winnie the Pooh or something like that. Because it's open weight. It's not an open model. You can't change the fundamental code base around it. But in the future, I feel like as these things consolidate, you're going to have your Apple or your Open AI and your Gemini. And you'll have the three big ones. And then they'll have the monopolies. And then they can start leaning on the consumer in a way where it,

really infringes on their ability to do things because look at how much how much does various AI technologies help assist you in your day to day maybe you're writing something maybe you're creating an image or whatever it is you're you're getting you're getting a lot from it but the what you're giving uh is atrophying skills your cognitive your physical whatever these things are they're atrophying because you're not using them it's just like every other technological advancement that's ever come along in human history. It's like, yeah, you're, you know, we've gotten way, way less tolerant to extreme climates

because of air conditioning, like shit like that. Well, and here's the thing. If you give your guns up because you now have a police department and a military, you're trading that in hopes that they're going to have your best interest at hand and they're never going to leverage it against you, but the power should lie in the individual. Historically not great.

No, it's not. And so I feel like it's going to be the same thing with various AI models that are closed source. And people argue, well, you know what? They're private companies and they're spending their money. But yeah, you know what? You're also training off a public information off of the internet. You're using our data against us.

You know, like your biometrics and your sleep patterns, your mattresses with subscriptions and shit like that. The regulation is also retarded. Do you remember when they brought Zuckerberg up to talk about fucking AI? and all that stuff. Was it Facebook? Or just like about the Wi-Fi?

Yeah, just simple, like not even talking about AI, just like the simplest of terms. And it's like, do you remember the Congress people that were grilling him about everything? Does Facebook use my Wi-Fi? Yeah, it's like, do you use my Wi-Fi? It's like, you guys don't even have the simplest understanding of how any of this works, much less AI. It could have been a like, you're in charge. That could have been a very uncomfortable. It probably already was.

but I'm like, that could have been a very uncomfortable hearing for Mark, but nobody knew the right questions to ask. Yes. And it's very frustrating. Which is terrifying for AI. It is these companies, they're not putting in the regulation. It's a hard one. It's like, oh, what regulations do we put into place?

But then on the flip side, if you don't have those regulations in for AI, AI can outthink a human extremely quickly. Like not, like, for one minute is, for, yeah, one minute is 16,000 years to, it's like, oh, I consume this much data in that one minute of time. Yeah, the big, the kind of watershed moment in a lot of ways was for a lot of people when they started talking about digital twins. Are you familiar with that? No. So a digital twin is, it's a simulated environment, I guess you could say. And so it's really, it's really meant for robotics, humanoid robotics.

It's a big thing. What they'll do is they'll create a digital twin or a simulated environment of like a warehouse. And they'll stage all the different shelves and all these other different things. And then they'll simulate all the different circumstances which that thing could move in that environment or need to do things. And it'll, it'll do it millions of times until it finds the, the optimal way to do it. And this happens in a very short period of time, right?

Whereas you would have to hire, you know, all these people to do these different things to refine these systems. You can do it in a digital environment. The problem with that is like, you know, you're rapidly outpacing human innovation in a way that you can simulate it digitally and that the average person is just not going to be able to compete with in the future. It's just, I don't know. It's like, it gets very dystopian, very fast.

And so you have to, like, you have to find a way to bring it back to optimism and everything. And I, like, if I wasn't optimistic, I wouldn't be doing this shit. I'd be off in a farm somewhere just like being a hermit. Also really disconcerting that you become a farmer. Yeah. He fucked off to a piece of property and started like growing. Releasing a book about the Warriors Garden on farming and anything. No, okay.

Well, the book's not about farming. Yeah, okay. What do you call that double digital twin? They do that with warfare too, right? Oh, yes. Yes. Are you kidding me? And that's where, like, dude, this is where I get fucking, I geek out on.

Because I was like, if I were to do another book or like, what would it be on, like, I'm not in any way, shape, or form. Like, the surveillance economy and, like, it's like the sheer amount of data coming in, I is fucking insane. Dude, with AI, it is on a next up. People do not understand that next level of, dude, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. And like, here's the thing. Like, it's nice that you're running for office and like, I, like, I'm glad I can

have this conversation with you. Like, um, so in, in foreign conflicts, like, you know, they, they would test out different things. Like, uh, there was like the global hawk and all these other different, um, these different, different aircraft that could fly hydrogen powered or whatever and loiter for extended periods of time for very long. And they'd have, and the problem with like satellites as an example for ISR is they're moving so fast around the earth. It's hard to get crystal clear images over long periods of time because it's literally going around the earth. It was like 17,000 miles an hour or whatever it is.

You'll have to ask somebody way smarter than me. But if you can get aircraft or these other different things. That's why the balloons, the hot air balloons were such a hot button subject that most people weren't really like understand the full gravitation of like the situation. It's like these hot air balloons are flying over these sensitive areas, which were probably intercepting their communication so we know what they're the reason. But anyways, they're able to stay on an image for a period of time and pick up different things. Now we have like, Have you, I think the app's called Deflocked, or something like that? And you know what Flock cameras are?

No, no, I have actually. Do you? Yeah. Okay. So Flock cameras is, Flock is a private company in, in, they are creating strategic partnerships with counties and cities, municipalities around the U.S. And they have cameras on all the traffic lights. Oh, oh, yeah.

Well, yeah. And so they start out as license plates. readers and all these other different things, but very much like the, you know, the insurance companies like are working with Lexis Nexus and some of these data brokers where you have a SIM car in modern vehicles. They're able to see how fast you're moving at certain times, the acceleration, you're breaking, whether or not you're in one state or another state impacts your your insurance premiums and all these other different things. So flock is. So flock is. is creating these situations where you're potentially circumventing a person's Fourth Amendment rights to search and seizure

where an officer could pull you over and see exactly your entire path of where you've been in the last 30 minutes to an hour or so. This is now. This isn't in the future. This is right now. And this is to a degree. You are at a rally in some, you are in a crowd of a giant rally. it will find you. Yeah.

And it will show every frame you were there, what you were looking at to it. This is what made it terrifying when I did that one video with you because I trained the model to learn your face. And it was like, Richards here, here, here, here, here, here, here. I was like, oh, what the fuck is this? Holy shit. And then it's printing out, and I'm just training Richard's face. It's like, also, here's the 200 other individuals at these events that he was speaking at or doing anything associated with. Here's everything. Here's where they were at those events. Period. And this is 2020.

I think through all of our years in business on the internet, we've all used Shopify. I've used it for merch and my skate shop and a couple other businesses. I will actually agree 100% on that. Everything we do is run through Shopify. Even bunkers run through Shopify. Our shoes, which is a separate company, is run through Shopify and they talk together because of Shopify. Shopify runs the world. Did you know Shopify will actually help you design a, website also Cody? I know I didn't know about starting an online store when I started my

career online and Shopify just made it super super easy for my dumb. Bring it what happens if people haven't heard about my brand though. That's actually easy, Eli. Shopify helps you find your customers with easy to use email and social media campaigns. Step Cody, what happens if I get stuck? Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer service. Step support, bro. You got my back. And your front. Shopify helps millions of businesses around around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US. From household names like Mattel or Jim Shark to new brands just getting started. On some shoes, unsubmerch, bunker.

No shit, we've all been doing this for over a decade and Shopify is the easiest e-commerce platform we've ever used. I think every single one of us has used Shopify at one point. I think all our businesses right now are using Shopify. No, except mine, but that's because it's guns. Can't do that. Just one of them can't. Turn those dreams into SFX.

King Shopify new cell sound. And give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today is Shopify.com slash unsubbod. Shopify.com slash unsubbod. I've debated on like trying to get some protests going in like, in like Hayes County and some of these other places close to here. And getting a group of people together just to create signs and stand outside of churches and stuff like that. People that might be kind of weird about it and be like,

flock knows if you went to church today or not. Because it shows you're right by a traffic light that shows your license plate coming in and out of here and everything. We're like an unprecedented invasion of privacy. And like there is no constitutional right to privacy. I think that they're like if ever there was something we should work towards an amendment to it would probably be that. But and I think the industrial complexes around that are getting very close to profiting in a way

where they're never going to get that up. So think of quantum computing where it can crack a password instantly. Now it is going on, what is the ring cameras? Yeah. It is now tracking everything. You walk by your ring camera and then every ring camera that can pick you up. It knows that. Then as you're driving, it's picking up every traffic stop sign that has that flagged to wherever

you're going and it can record that data and be like, Brandon was here. I was specifically told by somebody who did a lot of work in this industry. He basically said like, oh, yeah, with what you're doing. And this was last cycle. He's like, which means it's only gotten better. He said that, yeah, you don't want to really worry about like somebody following you in person or whatever. No.

And I'm like, oh, that's good. He's like, no, it's not. They don't need to. Yeah. Because essentially, if they really want you that bad, every cell phone is a microphone, every, you know, publicly accessible camera. If it's got audio, they have it. if it's got video, they have it, all this stuff. He's like, yeah, it's, no, no, the government knows I'm an asshole.

It is, I have no dick. That's a bumper sticker. The government knows I'm an asshole. I have no dick and I must come. Yeah. That is, not the book title. I mean, not to like pissing people's Cheerios and stuff like that, but they, like, you know, the thing is, is like, you know, people will say, well, you know what, I can, I can do

into encryption and all these other different things, but you don't understand, like, client side scanning of devices and stuff like that. if you have your private keys to encryption on your device, if they can access at an OS level, your phone, they have access to all your encrypted conversations and stuff, or your Bitcoin or whatever it is. It doesn't matter if your keys are on your device. It's kind of like building a four-inch, like little moat in front of your sandcastle at the beach. It's like, well, yeah, it helps, I guess. Yeah, that's exactly it. Well, if we can actually just roll back just a second ago, because I really did want to talk about

Yeah, elaborate. The AI influencer thing. Sure. Because that's super interesting to me because we talked about, especially even like in the regards to like the trafficking thing. Yeah. If you want to talk about that. Sure.

Are you talking about the like the human trafficking? Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't, I didn't go down that path because it was just still kind of weird for me. So so what I did was I created, I started out with like 500 AI, we'll call them influencers, took images of people. that either I got rights to or I just completely fabricated. And I started split testing on different platforms to see what would work well on X,

what would work well on Instagram and everything. TLDR, white women tend to do better than anybody else, any other demographic for some reason. Especially in India for some reason. It's weird. But I did various ethnicities. male, female, and then we would use different, you know, I was never provocative with the images or anything. You know, there was no like crazy cleavage or anything because I didn't want to give

any type of signal that would suggest that this was potentially going to be AI because it'd be like, why would somebody have such a boring person creating photos? Like, yeah, it was like, okay, this is clearly so when you engage with people, like, you know, the one social, uh, manager, that I had in the Philippines or have in the Philippines that handles all of these accounts on my behalf, you know, the goal was really to figure out how the platforms were going to evolve and change. And because I'd built all these, you know, this diffusion model, the application is actually available.

If anybody wants to go download, it's called Pose, Pose AI. And, you know, I kept building features for it like you could have couples photos. So you and your partner or whatever it could take and have family. fantasy vacations or weddings or whatever and all these other cool different things. I was like, well, fuck. Like it was so much work to put all these guardrails on it, you know, because you have to do checks for nudity and all these other different things because you can't be in the app store and sell or anything.

And so I have all these different layers of systems on top of it. But I was like, one of the things I could do is just take all those guardrails off, have a completely unfiltered one that does like, um, essentially. And then what I would do is I would have a KYC or know your customer verification process where somebody would have to submit their driver's license and their ID and everything else. Prove that they are who they say that they are so that they can't create revenge or something like that. And if they were, then allow them to use that to create supplemental content for their only fans or whatever. And then 100, well, not 100%. I wouldn't make any of the money from it.

50% of the money because most, well, I don't want to say most, a lot of the industry is very shady. And there's a lot of claims around human trafficking and unethical conditions. And so it's like, how do you, I'm very big on incentive alignment in so many different ways. And everything that I talk about is like almost always trying to figure that out in whatever the problem is. And it's like, how do we take and take the profit away from this industry that's exploiting people and turn it around and help people. So we'd take like 50% of the, whatever the revenue was generated and put it towards like Operation Underground Railroad or any of these which explain on that. Yeah, anti-human trafficking organizations that help rescue people

that are being exploited specifically children or women. And then the other 50% of the revenue that we would generate, we would take among the team quarterly and we would say, okay, look, what, what is going on in the world. There's a hurricane here. There's an earthquake there. Whatever this thing happened or just something locally in the community. And we'll have some type of nonprofit action arm like HEB does. HEB like it deploys to the state.

Like, you know, anytime there's some type of natural catastrophe or whatever. Even for like the curvil flooding. Like we saw so many of like their rapid response vehicles and everything like that up there. So like it's not me being naive saying that like, I'm not going to do it because, you you know, me contributing to it. Like, you know, the, I'm, just because I don't participate in it, doesn't mean it's going to stop this, this industry that's making, uh, absolute metric shit ton of money.

But I'm like, I have so many different things to focus on. Like, is this the thing that I want to be known for? You know, well, yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, the thing that was interesting when we talked about it was, you were, you were talking about the native de-incentivization. Yes. Of that. We're basically if you, because, you know, instead of drive the cost to zero.

Bingo. Yeah, if you want to elaborate on that a little bit. Because I found that to be like, that was probably the best argument I've ever heard in favor. Yeah, so for me, and, you know, social media, a lot of ways my anecdotal journey in this book was to take and say, hey, look, like, you know, something's happened in society. We've traded so many different types of real world interactions

and experiences for this. digital one and there's there's a cost associated with that and like you could say that with the you're you know there's a there's in in real life you have to meet somebody it's uncomfortable you have to get out there you have to have like you know shots on goal and like all these other different things and you get rejected but then at the point in which it builds up and you finally do meet somebody and you have sex and you have an orgasm it's like oh you know there's there's there's an there's an there's an oxytocin release and you know there's pair bonding and all these other different things that go on whereas like oh you know you just go

up one out to it's like it's a very junk food processed version of that in that sense. Again, I'm not passing judgment. I'm just saying that there's there's a physiological and a neurochemical process that happens in the real thing. The same thing with social media. We've been given this lie that, you know,

this social experience is an accurate representation of someone's lived experience. And the impact on that in society in so many different ways is, you know, you have stress on relationships because you see so-and-so is doing this. and they're going there and they're doing this. And he really loves her this way and they're getting that and they're doing that. And it's like this person's job is so much nicer than mine or whatever. And it gives these unrealistic expectations for the average person in thinking that like, oh, they have a shitty life.

The comparison, the bias in that. And it's so, it's so frustrating for me to see so many people upset about their lives and the things that are going on and they're comparing it to, you know, us in the world of social media. It's like, no, dude, that's my, that's the, the highlight reel in my life. And at best, you know, that you're seeing the highlight reel. At worst, you're seeing an AI influencer that I created that's completely false. Or you're seeing a face-tuned image of a chick that doesn't even look remotely close to what she looks like in real life. And you're comparing yourself to that. And like, you know, young girls are growing up with

eating disorders and like body dysmorphia among males is increasing and like, you know, rates among teens and everything else. All these things are increasing. So I was like, hey, look, if I can create a tool that helps people create content as an influencer, let's just drive the cost of creating shit to zero and flood. And now the term's called slop, but the slop's gotten way better in the last few years to your point where you can see things like that ICE video that's completely fabricated. But a majority still do not.

That's exactly it. 90% of you still will follow girls on Instagram that are completely AI-based and you will not know what you're looking for because you're like, oh, this is a normal individual. Oh, she's hot. X, Y, Z. The average AI video from 2026 will one shot anyone over 50. Oh, yeah. Over 50 and then a majority still, if you look at your AI influencers, it is fucking insane that people do not know what to look for. Because it is hard.

Unless it's like looking at VFX. I am a VFX artist. I can look at something like, here, X, Y, and Z, this is how it's done, blah, blah, blah. I know, I can be like, what do you see on this? And they're going to be like, nothing. That's a normal human. I'm like, it's how with Freddie, when Freddie would walk in or when I was doing VFX for Rocket Jump, I would ask your average person to come in.

I'd be like, hey, can you watch this real quick? Hit play? Hit play. Like, do you see that? And they're like, no, what am I looking for? Like, that's all I needed. I didn't need my approval on what looked or what was off. I needed your average individual to walk in.

I can hit play. And then being like, what am I looking for? I'm like, that, that's it. That's all I fucking care for. And now females. I still have my parents send me, like, reels and things today. And it's like, you know, we've been in the game, like us collectively. We've been in the game for the past 10, 15, 20 years.

My parents will send me something, they'll be like, have you seen this? And I'm like, the raccoon jumping on a trampoline kind of shit. Yeah, I just, I respond back like, that's AI, that's made up. And they're like, really?

Really? That's scary. And that's where I go back to the second amendment, right? Where I feel like the, as these tools become more powerful, the control is going to consolidate. And they'll be accessible to the halves, but not us.

And so as they start making these, because it's too dangerous, dangerous freedom, man. Like you can't, like, you can't trust the individual to be able to create fake news and stuff like that. And it's like, oh, but we can use it to overthrow this government. We can create all this realistic propaganda. And then we can give it to the news organizations here as if it's factual. Oh, and by the way, that watermarking and metadata like fingerprinting and everything like that, you know, don't worry about that. will override it at the platform so it gets distributed, whereas if the individual use the Gemini model or the open AI model, it's fingerprinted. And so it's going to get flagged as AI whenever

you use it and everything. So it's like these things are like, it's very, very concerning that like, you know, people are willing to like just, you know, just hand it over. And it's like, no, like these do not, do not get complacent in these times because this is where the ground gets taken. Because I mean, shit, I mean, our campaign motto is dangerous freedom. Yeah, that was what, like we were talking about earlier, it's like this is what the entire American experiment was founded on. Yeah. But when you were talking about, you know, driving the cost to zero. Yeah.

The, the biggest thing was when you were talking about in relation to human, human trafficking. Yes. We were like, okay, well, now all of a sudden, when you have these AI models of women, like, all of a sudden, you've driven the cost of exploitation to see. To a degree. Two degree, right? Because there's always going to be the psychopaths that, like, they will literally get off on the harm that they're inflicting on a real person, whereas maybe that, maybe that, like, you know,

there's those other people out there that maybe that won't impact them or whatever. I don't know. But I think that, you know, it's a very controversial conversation. It definitely is. Like, it's, and I'm not saying it's right one way or the other, but it's, well, I could pretty confidently say human trafficking is wrong. I was like, Brandon, we can replace that statement. I'm talking about the AI.

The AI version. The AI element of it. Like, you know, there's arguments to be made both sides. But I had never considered before we had that conversation that, like, oh, shit, okay, there might actually be something to that, like the financial incentives. Yes, absolutely. And so if there's, like, some key takeaways, like, I'll give you, like, just some context around, like, the book here and everything, too, because the book in a lot of ways

is meant to really try to get people to understand the, the ways. at which they're not necessarily being manipulated, but they're losing their most valuable resource and time and kind of look at things a little bit more objectively. Let's have a quick conversation on this. One of the litmus tests where I try to have these conversations with people will be like, where do you stand on this? Where do you stand on that? Student loan debt. Perfect example, right? It's like, and you don't have to pick a side or whatever, like, but like, you know, most people inherently will go like, well, fuck it, man. I like, I'm a blue collar worker. I'm a I didn't get, I didn't get my education paid for.

Why should I bail those people out? And the other people are like, man, you know, fuck, man. Like, I've been paying on me, I'm an indentured servant. And like, I can't even, I can't even like file bankruptcy. And this debt goes to my children and everything. Like, and like, both people are right. But the problem is, is like, there's two parties. There's a uniparty that's leveraging those conversations and never addressing the problem,

the root cause of it. Yeah, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, you're, you're not looking at it the right way. The right way is like, how do you come together collectively to solve the problem? The problem is not that these people have student loan debt. It's not that these people couldn't afford or didn't get a handout to go to school or whatever it is. It's that these institutions have structured a deal with the government. Yes. To take and subsidize these loans in a way where people can go into,

debt and never go bankrupt. And now these institutions have endowments that are like the GDP of most countries. And they're spending more money. So why should the taxpayer bail them out? Why not make the institutions bail them out and say, hey, you know what? By the way, from now on, anybody who gets a student loan can go bankrupt. And what that does is it forces the institutions to go, oh, shit, we need to underwrite this loan. like we can't give out

you know I don't know a gender studies degree or something like that we need to know what the value in the marketplace is so that there's a probability that this person's going to actually pay us back you need to like institutional accountability that's exactly it but that's it with government too

that's why I say that's why I say like so many people are caught up into the left versus right us versus them and like we really need to be thinking about things in a way that gets us to come together so that we can actually get shit done. The fraud in Minnesota is good. That was the first time in a while we've seen everyone.

It's like fraud's bad. Even on Reddit, it was just fraud's bad. I was like, what's happening right now? This is wild. We're seeing like, we don't care about either side. Yes, on the extremes, it's like, blah, they're like, whatever it is. But for the most part, everyone was just like, yo, this is what my money's going towards. Why?

Props to Nick for doing that. absolutely. But anytime I see mainstream media running with something in any capacity, I'm like, what is this just, what is the other hand doing right now? Wait, wait, what is this a distraction of? What am I supposed to not be looking at? What vote is going on this week?

Like, or did the Epstein stuff get released this week? Right. And that's another thing. You get to see that during that time frame. It's like, look. And then Minnesota stuff's happening now with the other protests and eyes. and you get to see like, here's this. No, look at this.

So it pushes everything else down. Well, that and I think most mainstream news, most news in general, is now run on the, what can I sell? What can I get to piss people off and rile people up? Like, what has happened that I can, no, I, well, actually, I'll tell you exactly when it happened. It's when we stopped moving, when we moved away from the subscription-based newspapers and subscription-based news in general and move to the click factor.

because when you were running subscription-based news, you had a trustworthy news source, you paid a subscription, you got your newspaper every day, and then you read what the news was for the day. And then as soon as you move from, your revenue is directly tied to how many people can click my headline

and how many people will click this article, and all of a sudden you have a major financial incentive to sensationalize. I think it's been refined since the newspaper. I think it's like, I think everything, like, I mean, it from, you can say, from information. Information has followed this path of distribution at scale or there were all these choke points.

It was the Bible could only be interpreted by these, you know, religious, you know, higher, whatever. And then there's the paper and then there's the radio and then there's the television. Even TV refined the process with ad breaks. You would create a hook going into the commercial break so that the people would stay through the commercials to come back at the end of the commercial break. And that did that with news and all these other different things. The problem was, is like whenever you take social media, which is machine learning on a very intimate device, and you iterate on that in a way that like you can really hone that down to exploit neurochemistry in a way that like is unprecedented, right? And so,

and you can make it individualize. It's not just generic anymore where it's like you had your three major network news stations and stuff like that. Now you can you can create algorithmic optimization for every single person that increases watch time on platform and watch time on video by exploiting that neurochemistry. And whatever it is that that gets them in typically it's the the snapping of the twig and the savannah that that that that that very like primal instinct for us. It's called like negativity bias where the thing that, um, the thing that, causes fear or anger is going to keep you on there more. And I think that's, you know, they have a fiduciary responsibility to extract value

for their shareholders. The value is between the customer and the the company is like, you know, Google or Facebook and the customer is the advertiser. We are the product. And our attention is the commodity that they're trading there. So whatever that they can do to increase watch time on video and watch. I'm on platform. Unfortunately, the thing is, is for most of us, it's anger. It's the divisiveness. And if you're in a constant state of that all the time, you know, it just lived, I don't know,

for me, I did a bunch of meditations and like these different thought exercises and trying to figure out, you know, what was really important to me in life, friends and stuff like that. And, you know, I, the very first chapter is about insight in a lot of ways in turning on screen time and stuff like that. And then I just do these. Meditations like I can be on my deathbed, like 85 years old, who's in the room, what's the temperature like all these other different things? What are the things that are important to me? You know, like friends, family and stuff like that. And then take and, you know, I'm fortunate enough to be able to come back to a fairly healthy body and I have this life in front of me and everything

else. And then I can take and look at my screen time. And I quantify that extrapolated over, you know, however many years and whatever that is. So I've got, you know, two and a half years. on Instagram. Is that really something I care about at this point in my life? No. Like I do not. And so like I'm going to prioritize the things. That's why I was saying I really prioritized meeting people and going on dates and trying

to find a wife and all that other stuff and like prioritizing friendships and everything. There was just so many different things that I felt like that, you know, you had to go through these processes. Oh, brother. I started a series back in the day on my YouTube channel. It's called Liar Liar. pants on fire where I would take what the media was saying and they would be like, oh, they shot this unarmed man.

It's like, no, the guy actually had a fucking gun. They're all just in there for clicks. That's all it is, dude. The guy that just, it was, we were talking about it at lunch, it's the guy getting shot by the paintball or the pepper spray in the face. Oh, yeah. Versus, Cody, what was the clip they're not showing right before that? Yeah, so going back, I'm probably making a video about this one soon.

The media had, and it's a, dude, it looks like a picture that you would take. You're a good photographer. It was a beautiful picture of this guy just like crying and standing back and he's like, and like a pepper blast, excuse me, he's hitting him in the face. And like what you don't see is right before that, he's grabbing the cops. like grabbing the cop's gun. It's essentially a grenade launcher. Yeah, yeah, it's a pepper blast.

It's not a pepper ball as a pepper blast. It's like a 40 mic, Mike, oh, nice. That shoots out a, just a blast of fucking go away. O.C. Like, go away, spray. And, like, he's fighting with the cop. He's screaming him.

He grabs it and pulls it away. And the cop goes back and the cop comes up and he hits him with the pepper blast. but the media picture is this guy, and it's a beautiful picture. Like I was saying, it was something that you would take. Well, they're beautiful photographer, you motherfucker. They're using it for that specific reason. It is, here is what we need to portray in the single image of, and people are comparing it to the Vietnam photos,

where it's like they're aiming guns at the, like the college. Yeah. It's that. Trent State, I think. Yeah, and they're comparing it to that because they're release. leaving out. What, Cody? That he grabbed the cop, he grabbed the gun and was pulling, like trying to take the cop's gun. He pulled it away from him. And that's when the cop stripped it away and pepper blasted him. And that's, that's how quick because the majority got, it's got to be like 80% 90%

can't state. Can't state. The fucking wildest thing that I've seen this week, dude, is as long as you just leave them alone, like leave the cops alone. Like, they're not out there stripping babies away from their families and shit like that. Well, they are, they are an AI. In AI, yeah. Like, we were just talking about the AI, 11 million shares on Facebook. God damn, dude. That is the 1 to 2% that you're being served because Reddit X, whatever your algorithms cater to knows that that is going to elicit a reaction from you. Yeah. And then because of that, you're going to comment, share, create another reaction. And then guess what, bots are going to get a hold of that?

Push it even more. We talked about how many bots are on fucking Reddit, which is... Reddit is a bot farm. Like, people think Twitter's bad. Reddit is... 30 to 50% of Reddit, they were saying like, hey, this is how many bots are on this. Because I was showing Brandon, look this guy. I forget his name.

He was just talking about it. But it was as simple. He's like, oh, I found out how to talk to bots. and you will see they will never elicit a response to this. What state do you live in? And dude, dude. And I told Brandon, he's like, oh, and then I showed him. He's like, holy, it is a mind-blowing number.

He's just asking bots to this. And there's no one will respond to it. They will give paragraphs, but never, the bot doesn't know how to respond to what state. It'll just be a different set of talking points. Like, it's kind of like if you talk to a telemarketer from New Delhi that just has a script. Yeah. And if you ask them a specific question, they will never respond to it.

And it's just paragraphs. And I show Brandon because it sounds weird. You're like, what, no? And then it is, dude just responds with, what state are you from? Paragraph. No response to that. Paragraph. And every response, different bots.

Same thing. I don't know, I don't know how to respond to that. I will give you this paragraph every fucking time. And now you're looking at Reddit. And then I Googled and I text you. It's 30 to 50% of all accounts on Reddit bots. Wow. I'm just going to go back on my thing with that fucking asshole in Minneapolis

that got blasted with some fucking pepper spray. You know who they're protesting? Do you see what DHS released yesterday? It's a, the people they were arresting there that they were there for, there's a list of like 20 dudes. They come from all over the world. And, like, they, like, DHS was there. ICE.

Oh, sorry, ICE. Oh, those fucking bad guys. ICE was there to arrest. Like, it starts at number one, shting of a child. Number two, sacking of a child. Number three, shti of a child. Like, they were there pulling people out and arresting them and deporting them,

who have had deportation orders on them from, like, 2005. they're just going in there and they're cleaning shop. And I appreciate those motherfuckers because, like, I have my son, my 16-year-old, right? And I want to have more kids. I don't want these people living around me. And ICE is going in and they are taking these people out of communities. And you've got these fucking white women,

these fat, stupid, ugly white women who come up and they're like, you're the bad guys. and then suddenly your lesbian partner gets shot because she's impeding them. I just fucking whatever. What if we did a, what if we did like a U.S.O show, like the U.S.O. kind of thing for ICE agents.

We called it on sub on ice. I like that a lot. It's such a weird area because of all of it, I do not touch politics. I fucking hate politics in general. But for that stuff. I know. But for that stuff, I'm like, do not compare that to Nazi Germany.

That is a wild statement to me. Like, no matter how you look at it, it's like that is not Nazi Germany. ICE is not Nazi Germany. This is, as you're saying, hey, they're collecting because X, Y, and Z, but not just we're putting them in carts and then gassing. Yeah. Wild comparison. No one's putting anyone on trains and sending them to get fucking gassed out. They're sending them to the countries they claim to love.

Yeah. Isn't that a wild fault? I hate that that is a crazy statement to make in this day and age. Like, I don't know if you have anything. Like for me, it's just a wild fucking statement to compare anything like that because it does a disservice to Nazi Germany and what everyone went through at that time. I'm like, does a disservice to Nazi Germany. I was just wondering about that.

I'm like, sorry, that's probably poor freezing. To the Jewish community that experience. I was goose up in earlier. I didn't know what was quite going on. I get it now. No, I mean, I honestly, I don't. My opinions on a lot of these things are really like, like they're all distractions in so many different ways.

Because the fact of the matter is that again, if you take machine learning, it's face value, most of these stories are being optimized for the things that are going to increase watch time on platform. And these things, as much as I hate to say it, 99.99% of the people who consume it are going to have fuck all to do with it. And like, they're not going to be able to make any impact, any way, shape, or form. The only thing that's happening. They can put the black square on their profile. Whatever. The only thing, the only thing that's happening in this situation, the only thing

that's going to happen from the situation is going to be that their time is extracted from them and advertisers are going to serve ads. The platform's going to make money and they're going to be worse for it. If people spent just a fraction of like, you know, and again, I'm going to keep spinning it back to the book, but I like start spinning. I start spinning data points around like Mr. Beast and other content creators and it's like, again, this is just a thought, thought exercise. But you take amount of time that people consume certain types of content. And you take, you know, how many views he has and you extrapolate that by like, you know, 15 minutes average watch time on video or whatever it is. And that's collective human experience that's focused on this one thing.

And I look at my videos and stuff like that. And I'm grateful that some people were entertained. But I'm like, what if just a fraction of that time was spent on making somebody's community better, right? Just like five minutes a day, like, at times, you know, three million subscribers or whatever. Dude, that's a big positive impact. You don't have to film it. You don't have to do this. Like, if people focus just a fraction of their time on the stuff that they actually can make a positive impact on in their families and their communities and not the shit that's the existential crisis online that's just really meant to serve ads.

Like, we'd be better off for it. Richard, you're preaching of the fucking choir. I know. I'm just looking for some clips here. Six months. Yeah. Six months. Yeah, six months ago.

What was the thing six months ago? Was it Ukraine or was it like free Gaza or like what's what's the new thing? Well, I will just say. Now we have ISIS bad. Like what was the new thing three months ago? And it comes back to what you're saying is like whatever farms clicks, whatever makes these. Whatever makes the ad revenue. And that's what I was going to get into real quick because like this has been burning me up is like since we had that conversation about like

news outlets and everything like that about how they they generate revenue based on, you know, what can get shared, what can get clicks, whatever. Social media, like, it's the best and worst part of it is that you've now opened that up. It's now open source. The users now get to do that same thing. They can do the job of media and they can share these things and they could put this stuff out there. But it's also, they fall into the same trap that all of the media did as well, which is they're only incentivized to get clicks based on what is sensationalized.

What is something that will... It's like if you've ever read like Ryan Hollidays like trust me, I'm lying. Yes. Fucking crazy where he talks about like the only thing people will share are things that are funny or things that make you angry. And that is what you see on social media.

Look at one of the clips right now and the photos. Look at this angle of the event that just took place in Minnesota with the shooting. It was all AI-based. none of it existed it was a photo that did not exist and then an AI

of movement that did not exist all that and then you got to see the reaction and the shares from it of look this makes innocent or fucking guilty doesn't matter they got what they needed this is 10 million views and it's all fake

and you don't know until 5 million views after the fact if you double checked it what I would encourage people and very much like just trying to talk about like the student loan debt thing and all these other different things. Anytime a situation like these big geopolitical, I don't know, whatever the hot button thing is that comes out, like try to see if there's a way that you can zoom out and find a different perspective on it and not be so

emotionally charged in that conversation. Because again, like, you know, we were talking about the various government organizations that are looking to lean on these platforms and these various weighted algorithms to drive a narrative so that they can introduce the change that they want for whatever profit, if it's overthrowing a government or whatever, or if there's a novel virus that comes out and you want to suppress a portion of the population that may be objective to, like, or not wanting to have, I don't know, a vaccine that may be or may not be ethical. You know, there's all these different things. And so I think that a lot of people, they get so fired up.

Rightfully so, I mean, you're a human if you see something that you feel is unjust, but like just try to figure out the situations in which you're being manipulated for something where the other hand is doing something that you're not aware of. If we can bring it back around for a minute, your book, The Warriors Garden. Yeah. What was kind of the inspiration for why you're like, man, I just really, because you've accomplished a lot in your life. Like you've done a lot of things.

You've worn a lot of hats. What made you decide that you need to do? to write this book. Well, I'm super proud of it. It's funny, like, Jack Carr gave me some insanely positive feedback on it. It meant the world to me because I respect him so much as an author. But I was like, yeah, you can definitely see my ADD come through there a lot and like how I try to set the tone for different chapters.

Like, I'm really big on perspective in quotes and stuff like that. Like the very first chapter is led with a quote by Charlie Munger. It's show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And then I kind of talk about early days of YouTube and the incentive misalignment around social and stuff like that. But like even Prince like has a fantastic quote. It's like there's a war going on. And the, you know, the, now I'm going to butcher it. There's a war going on inside.

And the battlefield is the mine and the prizes of soul. Oh, yes. Alex Jones. Yeah. And so for me, I was going through this kind of phase in life where I was really, burned out as a creator and trying to figure out things in life like, you know, you may be, you can definitely relate to this in so many different ways. But, you know, with the whole YouTube demonetization thing with the firearm stuff and everything, I never really wanted to be known as

the gung guy on YouTube or the slow-mo guy or anything like that. It's like, what is my contribution here? Where, where, and I'm just going through this anecdotal kind of detox phase in, you know, you have social capital as an influencer, right? When you get 40 million views a month or something like that, everybody's blowing your phone up. Everybody wants a piece of the action or whatever. And then the second you stop doing these things, like you stop jumping out of airplanes, your adrenaline responses, all these different things like Dr. Anna Limke from Stanford calls it the pain, dopamine seesaw. And so like if you're always jumping on the dopamine, you know, the balance when you come back is going to be really difficult in the pain side. And I don't want to say I was like depressed by any

stretch of the imagination. I really appreciate Cody reaching out from time to time. It really meant a lot as a friend. But like it was going through this anecdotal journey and trying to figure out these, these ways to establish these boundaries around my digital experience in a way. And again, I'm not passing judgment on anyone. I don't want you to think that I'm asking you to, you know, delete your social media accounts or anything. It's just it was me trying to. It was me trying to. to be as assessing the things that I value in my life, figure out what my consumption was, how to establish boundaries,

figure out what the mechanisms were, like, you know, community friction, even gratitude. One of the most powerful things for me that I found out, which I didn't think was going to be in this process, I'll give you a little statistic. One of the most research data points of all time will be the placebo effect.

And that means that they have, to account in most studies two to three percent for placebo. And so what that tells you is the brain has the ability to impact the physiological state in a meaningful way. So if I, if I'm able to take this negative experience and find a way to inversely spend some positivity in my life, it will mean that I have a better lived experience. And I've, I've kind of, I found that over this journey. And even like, it's funny, I was talking with a publisher and everything, like, I was very adamant about putting a journal in the back of it because I didn't want to be a guy who like just goes around selling courses and shit like that after the fact. It's like I want to jam as much information in this as possible, but then also give people like a journal in the back so that they can go through like this whole digital thing and these processes and stuff.

So for me, it's very much an anecdotal journey and tools that I found that helped me in the process. but I think that the reason why I call it the Warriors Garden is because I feel like the the mind is that for me. You know, I've dove deep in the world of regenerative agriculture in like the last, you know, six, seven years. And there's a saying it's not how much rain you get, it's how much you keep. And so for me, I'm trying to cultivate the soil of my mind in a way that I'm not angry all the time.

the stuff that I bring to the table is as objective as possible so that whenever I do get the rain, I retain as much as possible. Not to get too personal, but is that something you've struggled with before? Like just being like just an angry person? No, no, no, not even.

Not even. I would know. So there's a number of different things there, right? So like as a content creator, you know, we're always at the whims of the changing winds of the distribution, the platforms and stuff like that.

And I remember early days of YouTube, you know, especially in my 20s, it was go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Like, I mean, this person, we're collaborating. We're doing this. We're doing that. We're traveling here.

We're doing this. And you're not making a whole lot of money. But if YouTube changes this thing, you're screwed or whatever. And even to this day, that still stands true. Fucking life. Yeah. And so for me, I found that I was, I was very, um, there were areas of my life that were compulsive.

And so a good data point for that compulsivity, um, was, um, in screen time, you can see pickups. and pickups, notifications, and first pickups, which really cool data point for that is once you have it run for a month, because there's an observation effect in like the first week, you start like throttling the shit that you do because you don't, you know that you're like, oh, I'm doing this too much or whatever.

And then you look at first pickups. It's like, holy shit. I'm looking at, I don't know, Instagram. Like, that's my first pickup. And I've got 1,000 notifications that I'm checking every day. And it's like, okay, realistically speaking, again, not passing judgment on anyone in any shape and form coming from a guy who created his, you know, living off of being online.

But it was like, is this being true to my future self? And so this is the thing that's always kind of, I guess I'll unpack something psychologically here. I've always found that because I didn't know my dad. I always found that I was trying to please a father figure in my life. That's why I was always an overachiever. Every single job that I had, you'll, you'll find some superior will be like, that is the best employee that I've ever had because I would bust my ass.

I would, I would go 110%. I would put the extra mile in, like the effort that nobody else would. And then I found that to be a little unhealthy as life as I got older and everything. And I was like, I need to really try to find a way to figure this thing out. And I did. I was like, oh, shit, like, it's me. Like, not me now, but me 15 or 40 or 50 years from now. The person I'm trying to impress now is the person I want to become.

And so I have to look at the things that I'm doing now. Am I being true to my future self? And so that person who's laying on that deathbed 80 years old or six years old because I lost the leg, did diabetes or whatever, am I being true? to that person by spending X amount of time on Snapchat or whatever it is, right? And again, it's not saying that I can't do it. It's just, but am I finding myself doom scrolling in a way where like, oh, shit, 62 hours of my week was on this.

Did I really need to be on that? Could I put 15 more hours to learn in the piano? Whatever. Again, not passing judgment, not saying to abstain completely, but you have to objectively assess the situation and what are the things that you care about and then hold them up. It's going to be uncomfortable, right? It really is. Like it's almost like a junkie, right? Like you're going to find ways to talk yourself and say, well, you know, it's not that big of a deal or whatever. It's like, but again, the person I'm trying to please is a future self of mine. That's horrifically

profound. Unless it's unsubscribe, then you can just watch as many reels or podcasts. No, hey, let me say this about you guys. So there's a chapter. There's a chapter. dedicated on community. It's crazy. Yeah. To unsubscribe. You gotta get it. To the one.

Yeah. To the community. No, community. And the fact that you guys, you guys had like an in-person, like, event. Like, and you did a tour. That's so awesome to get so many people together in, like, an actual lived experience and not some just bullshit digital, you know, cash grab online. or something, right?

Well, it is the hardest thing, because this is one thing I'm very big on. You want to build a community aspect. You have to do that. It can be uncomfortable. It can suck, but you have to do that in order to give back to them and then to yourself because you are making a stronger connection with them. We can be on camera every day. We can talk to millions of people every fucking day.

That is not as important as. as connecting where it's like butts and seats. Especially doing good stuff with it, like the fitness challenge, for example. Like so many people, and we're really proud of you, like genuinely. Like we check the subreddit and everything like that. Seeing how many people that like actually turn their life around, like losing, you know, 50, 60, 70 pounds. Oh, yeah. Just completely doing a 180.

And I'm sure like everybody out there that did it, they feel better. They are living better. Like it's. We just had Ethan on too. Yeah. Ethan Bernard. like a really, really good example. Not taking credit for what he did, but like,

I am. That's all. That's all. 260 pounds. You have no idea how much Eli bullied, Ethan. I've seen the text. It's actually disgusting. You, yeah, yeah.

It's, why are you at the fucking. Eli, he threatened him with a gun. I don't know what the medical term is, but I think it's close to lacerations. Yeah, there was, there was severe penalties.

But it is so rare to have that. You can attest to that. It is like that is, that's what makes the difference. It is a typical online content creator to let's perform. Let's actually interact with them. And it, it separates you so much.

And then it motivates the individual out there. They're like, holy shit, okay, I'm showing up to this. I'm interacting with the guys or I'm interacting with other individuals in the same. space, motivation. And then you have the weight loss programs, everything else on top of that.

And that program, like, you say weight loss program, like, we're not selling anything. We're not doing anything. We're literally just like, hey, for it. Yeah, we were, we were giving money away. That's cool. Yeah, we lost money, assholes. Yeah, it's like, look, you bitches. But it's the thing where it's like, not even just like something that's a financial incentive for us. It's just like something that's like, how can we continue to make this community more and more tight knit? Yeah. That's huge. And do something positive with the influence that we've somehow got, I don't know. Can I talk about how much I don't like Richard?

Please, go on. Oh, thank God we're here. We're going to put this at the front of the pocket. Stop talking. The roast of Richard Ryan. This mother, all right. All right. One of the kindest,

fucking most intelligent human beings I know in my life. He invites me up to his wedding. I'll tell you the story. he has these beautiful cowboy hats he gives everyone cowboy hats stetsons as a matter of fact this mother f*** has a beautiful dinner it's wonderful great he plays a song oh yeah wait what he he plays a song his first dance song it was the one i've been planning for months for my wedding he plays it though shake the frost

by Zach Bright by Zach Wright Great minds think alike What are you talking about This mother I'm just telling you guys He's not a good person Yeah Richard

Richard actually I've been in your text messages Yeah We heard Play the beginning of this podcast With AI And then Richard being I created AI

And then just stealing Cody's idea To ruin that song Richard bought the rights to that song He did Just to make sure that you can't play it at your wedding. That's how it happened. If you guys are taking anything away from this podcast that Richard is a fantastic person, you should probably read his book.

Genuinely, one of the most, like, I'm sorry, I'm going to suck your life here, but genuinely one of the most intelligent humans I've ever met. And I, from the bottom of my heart, I always enjoy having conversations with you. I appreciate it. Very fun. Loves blackface. Well, he's not Harley. That's a bad.

Yeah. So where do you guys sell your merch through? Bunker. Yeah. Okay. Because we were talking about this earlier. Maybe I could like, because I actually don't sell those limited edition hard copies anymore.

But maybe it's something we could do. We'll figure it out. Like maybe I'll give like a thousand copies away with like people who buy like 50 bucks worth or merch on. For every book you get, you get a photo of his penis. Yeah. It's in there. It's a little.

It's a little. It's a horrible person. Yeah. Very small. Small what penis? Small polo, right. That too. But where can they find your book?

Anywhere books are sold for the most part. I mean, you got digital copies. Walmart? Yeah, if I can go there, ask them for it. Be like, hey, where's it? Where's that? Anywhere that doesn't sell it, cause a scene. Go to Barnes & Noble.

Where the fuck? Where's the one with the camera warrior? Yeah, like strike your local bookseller. Yeah. There's a, I read the audio book. There's a Kindle version. You read it? Yeah, I did.

Is it out now? Or you spoke for the audio book. I read it. So it's funny. I've debated on doing this. I debated on doing this because I was going to start making some videos on my personal channels, like 20 years old. I was like, fuck it.

I'm just going to read a chapter, a live stream me reading a chapter to people every night. You should do it in the Hugh Hefner robe next to a fire. Yeah. Just a fireplace reading. I kid you not, literally, my fireplace with the little deer over it. Yeah, dude. I'd watch it. Live stream that.

And then I'm making like a three-hour kind of Netflix-style movie of it. You're all gay. I hate you. That's chapter three. It's all AI. That would be the motherfucker if you wrote this using Chant GPT or something. trust me you you read any of it you're like nope definitely not let's say you really like that you could talk a dancer is it is there a

perhaps a epic a throw motion explosion videos from herebreery with a YouTube channel called a fruera maga glory to CCP you like flips the chapter where you stole my fucking first dance song to donut operate. Fuck a him in the mood. See, and what's funny is like, that's, like, I don't want to say it's a common song, but, like, that's such a recognizable song.

I thought you were going to say simple man at first. Like, because, like, that one, that one's so different. I was like, oh, like, like, I don't think most people would have heard that one. Simple Man by, Leonard Skinner. Not Skinner. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I'll show it to you.

Okay. Yeah. It's like Cody during the wedding you ever get to fuck. Yeah, it's awesome. Richard, where do the people find you? I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, you go to the Warriorsgarden.com and that'll direct you to wherever you want to go to find the books. I mean, I'm on social media and stuff, but I'll also say this bit when you sent us out, also thank you by the way. Yeah.

You sent us out. I loved your fucking package. The little packages that you sent out all of us that had the book. I thought it was a nice little touch. There was also like 10 little packets of seeds. Yeah. They came with it. It was like very literal. And I, I just got to a place where I wanted you to get out and plant something. I have a garden now that I'm just like, oh, fuck yeah. This is going to be my new project as soon as

like the spring rolls back. I really enjoy doing stuff like that. If I do another book that might get me deleted, uh, I've got an idea of, uh, the way that I would do the kit and everything. It would be really cool. Really cool. He only sent me cotton. seats. I don't know what that means. Literally my... Wait, real quick. My text to you. I was like, well, now I have to do a story on this book

just because of the packaging. And you're like, dude, epic, glad you dick it. Dig it, dick it. I'm glad you dickhead. Dude, I am so big on packaging. That packaging is so nice. Because it is something so simple. You, Jack R, which I'm assuming you learn

that from Jack, because Jack does a fantastic job with packaging. You matched that and it's like, oh, fucking, okay, well, Richard, I got to do a story on this down. I said, well, yeah, well, not to get in a pissing contest or whatever, but like, I, like, I actually, I made like a hand-carved box for him. Yeah, I was like, dude, I really appreciate you, like, kind of giving me this opportunity and everything, like, just, because, like, you know, when you're, like, when you're known for

something or, like, you know, I've, I've, I've. done the whatever, like the new stuff with Raided Red or the firearm stuff on YouTube. And you get like that social capital, that clout and people know you for that. People always want to put you in that box. And I really put a lot of time and effort into that book and everything. And the fact that he like showed up to our conversation, he like, you know, he's a really fucking busy dude. But the fact that he would go through so thoughtfully and give me the opportunity to chat with people

about that and everything, I was like, dude, I just thank you for like not just seeing me as the gun guy on YouTube or, you know, the other guy who did this or the tech guy or whatever the fucking box that you like, you like, you saw, saw me for the work that I put into that and I appreciate that. So he's like kind of an inspiration? For sure. Is that why you like starting to dress and look like him? Yeah, no.

Did he be your wedding up to? No. No. Okay. No, that's funny. Fuck you, Jack. That's hilarious. That's hilarious.

No, I actually reached out to him before I started writing. And I was like, hey, man, like just any kind of pointers or anything like that because there's so many different paths to go down. Like I, like, there's so many things that I want to cover in this. I need help with like researchers and stuff like that. And I don't know like, do you need ghost writers? Do you need publishers or whatever? He's like, just do it yourself, man.

Like, just like, like, do the work and get through it. It's going to suck and everything. But like, like, don't, don't rely on, you know, someone else to do that for you or anything. Don't worry about a publishing deal or anything like that right now. Just do the work. Any final words to people out there? No, look, again, when you see people talking about things around like the attention

economy and digital addiction, it's very easy to assume that people are going to want you to abstain and, like, you know, delete your accounts. And in no way, shape, or form is that it? I'm just, I really, what I want people to take away from it is life is very short. The time that we have with the people that we care about is very limited. You're doing yourself a disservice if you don't at least assess your relationship with your digital experience versus the lived one that you're wanting and establish some boundaries around it. Yeah, so like you don't need to be a Luddite. I mean, you can use $2 words around me all you want.

What? $2.00 words. I thought we were friends Now call him a B. Say the word, Richard. Yeah, say the word, Richard. Balls in your court, white man. The word bifurcation for the first time ever in your book.

I was about to say, motherfucker, you've been using $3 words all day. What the fuck? I love it, man. I love it. You know, fucking. It was cold in here when we came. Now it's like burning out.

Sometimes you bring friends in who use big words and still your song for your wedding. It happens. I don't think he's going to let that go. I love it. I love it. Hey, look, hey, see if like, you know, like one of your buddies could like make a call to Tyler and see if you do it live or something. Lord have mercy.

Yeah. Yeah. Raise the stakes. Raise the stakes. All right. Cody closing it, boys. We're doing it. Guys, thank you for coming to the unsuscribed podcast.

I was joined today by Eli Double Tap, Richard Ryan, Brandon Herrera, myself Donut Operator. Thank you so much for being here. Love you, bitches.