1235: Oobah Butler | A Trickster Turns Deception Into Art and Insight

1235: Oobah Butler | A Trickster Turns Deception Into Art and Insight

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional arms dealer, former Jihadi, cold case, homicide investigator, or money laundering expert.

If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and Negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's guest is a human glitch in the Matrix, British filmmaker, prankster, certified chaos entrepreneur, [00:01:00] Oobah Butler. He's the guy who turned a literal garden shed into London's top rated restaurant, built a bestselling Amazon product out of well piss really, uh, and launched businesses that make lawyers and PR people cry into their policy manuals generally.

He's also tried and sometimes failed spectacularly to turn internet mayhem into real cash, meme coins, sportswear lines run by kids and a documentary or two that force you to squirm and then laugh for both at the same time. He calls what he does, performance art set up as a scam. I call it bold, ethically complicated, and one of the best seats in the house to study how modern bullshit really spreads.

I really enjoyed Oobah's company. I think he's an awesome guy. I really enjoyed this conversation and today we're talking strategy, how to game reviews, how people game platforms, where the law stops, how the loopholes begin, and what these stunts tell you about truth in the internet age. We'll also hear, of course, the human side, why he does it, what he's learned, and whether there's any line that he just won't cross stick around.

This one is weird and smart and messy in all the [00:02:00] best ways I can think of. Here we go with Oobah Butler, how would you describe what you do? Because. You're a filmmaker, you're a writer, but that sounds way boring compared to what you're social media provocateur, but that's makes it sound like you're an influencer, which sucks too.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, I don't know. I quite like social engineer.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Oobah Butler: that's fair.

We've got a mutual friend, uh, Jon Levy, he's a behavior scientist, but it's weird how often we find common ground when we're talking about.

Oh yeah.

So there's a lot of that going on. But then also, I don't hate it when people say comedian, but I'm not a comedian. Do you know what I mean? Like...

You don't do

Jordan Harbinger: like standup sets?

No,

Oobah Butler: I, no, no. It's its own thing.

You don't like comedy films? Yeah, it's tough, then.

People will often say journalist and people will often say comedian, and I don't really think I'm a either, but I'm simultaneously a little bit of both. So engineer, writer, filmmaker.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

It's either good for your career slash tough for your career to not be in a specific category, right? Yeah. Because if you're a comedian, like there's kind of a path, right?

Yeah, there is. Yeah.

Do a bunch of clubs. Make sure you move to New York, try and book bigger clubs. Open for somebody [00:03:00] famous, knock it outta the park.

dot.dot. Madison Square Garden. Yeah. Right. But for certain creative niches. It's funny 'cause Jon Levy is the one who told me this. He's like, how you doing? This is years ago. I was like, I don't know. I don't know what's next in my career. And he's like, that's fine because you're in a creative career.

There's not like a path that you follow. And I was like, that's a really good point.

Yeah.

It's different if you're a comic and you're playing open mic nights and it's 10 years into your career and you're like, I'm not moving up.

Yeah.

But if you're like a podcaster or whatever the hell is your show shrinking?

If no, you're doing pretty well, I guess, are you starving? Are your kids begging for food outside? If no, Dave, you're doing fine.

You're on a better path than about than 99% of the people.

Right? You're in the top 1% if you can pay your rent and the police aren't coming after you. Exactly. For, yeah. Panhandling. So you're in kind of that bucket too, I guess, like, yeah.

Okay. Your stuff's on Vice. You're making your own films. I saw the latest one where you quote, unquote, made a million dollars in 90 days. I wanna talk about that a little bit, but you've done some this shenanigans sweatshop, run by [00:04:00] kids, fake restaurant using Amazon's return policy to fill potholes. We'll get into all that.

It's like performance art set up as a little bit of a scam that you use to expose something dark or uncomfortable about society. Is that fair?

Oobah Butler: That's a really, uh, generous read of it. I suppose. Like as I've started with Vice and it's gone on a little bit of a journey as I've gotten a bit older to have more explicit meaning to it.

Do you know what I mean? Like explicit things that I get interested with. Maybe at the start it was just nihilistic and fun, and now I've hoped to like keep the atmosphere around it of that, but have more of a point. Gotcha. Try to explore.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. You start off as, let me just embarrass other people and put it on vice and then it becomes deeper meaning in society.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's do like social critique. If Banksy was just like, I just wanted to spray paint my name on a bathroom stall. No, here's a critique on Yeah, exactly. War in Gaza or something. Let's start with the fake restaurant. So you used to have a job writing fake reviews on [00:05:00] TripAdvisor?

Oobah Butler: Yeah.

How was that a job by the way?

I moved down to London and I just started taking gigs. There was a website at the time that connected people with third party. Writing jobs, and one of the ones that came up was restaurants who wanted people to leave positive reviews to influence their ranking on TripAdvisor, which is basically Yelp, which was interesting to me.

And as I'd worked in restaurants and in bars, and I already knew that people who worked in those environments would reference the ranking. If someone who came in who had an issue with the place, they was like unhappy, they would often threaten like, well, we're gonna leave a bad review. I knew that it had a power to it, the ranking, the reviews.

So then later to be someone who was. Being paid to fabricate positive reviews for restaurants to improve their ranking and therefore probably inform whether people were gonna go there and how they felt about it. It wasn't like something I did loads of and that I lived off, put my kids through college writing folk.

No, I did it [00:06:00] on the side as part of a load of different, I used to write clickbait news. That was kind of one that came later, which was also useful.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Oobah Butler: Now news organizations write clickbait.

Yeah, exactly.

They don't need you anymore.

The whole ideation, the coming up with an idea. I think it's helpful to have your eye on that because ultimately if you wanna get people to even be able to discuss your work and communicate about it easily or whatever.

If you can make it easy for them, it's more likely to have an impact and spread. So that clickbait thing, it feels hacky to talk about clickbait, but like it's a useful skill.

Jordan Harbinger: You're not wrong if there's a whole science behind realizing that journalists are really busy slash sometimes really lazy, depending on which bucket they're in.

So if you do most of their work for them, they'll do more for you. So I remember a long time ago, somebody was like, we're gonna do something for a news organization. And I was like, here's our website. Here's some of the stuff we do. And the publicist at SiriusXM Radio, I called her and I was like, how does this look for a media kit?

She's like, no, no, no. Write like the whole article. Wow. Basically. And [00:07:00] then they'll edit it in their voice. And I remember writing whole articles about my business and being like, here's something that to give you inspiration. And then what they would publish would be like that with their byline on it in a few additional sentences and maybe each paragraph, but generally not.

And like another paragraph at the end that sort of wraps it all together. Yeah. In the style of whatever publication it was. Yeah. And I was like, this person spent maybe 20 minutes on this, probably half that.

Oobah Butler: The churn of the people call it the word is content. The churn of that I always found interesting and, and how much pressure people are in to produce a volume of stuff means that, I suppose that stuff makes sense.

Or maybe it's a little naive to even think about it in the content terms. Maybe it's always been like that. I dunno. But yeah, no, you are a hundred percent right. And in that my new film, I end up paying for a Forbes article in that. Yeah. And that's

Jordan Harbinger: right. Forbes. Was it like Forbes, Forbes, Georgia, like not the state, the country of Georgia.

Right. Okay. Exactly. Yeah.

Oobah Butler: But the vertical, you know, exists on there. [00:08:00] If you search up my net, it's now been ingested probably by check GPT and everything.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Oobah Butler: And it just says Forbes. It doesn't say like, yeah, exactly. Forbes

Jordan Harbinger: asterisk, by the way, this isn't the official one. Like when Forbes, Sri Lanka is too expensive.

Yeah, Forbes, Georgia has your back.

Oobah Butler: But it was like me writing the head, like me writing business genius super butler. And you know, that was kind of exploring and in something that I find intriguing about that. But yeah, it was one of many jobs that I did write in fake reviews about restaurants, positive ones.

And it also, as you say, the start of this process of beginning to question slightly these platforms, which we all considered to be completely trustworthy and people curate their lives based on consensus, right? Like I think you're either one or two types of people. You're either pay attention to consensus or you're like critic opinions.

I'm a sucker for like the wire cutter website where Oh yeah. I'm a sucker for it. Like, oh, there's these group of experts have all tried this thing and they've not been paid. They're not corrupt. They've all tried these pillows. I'm gonna [00:09:00] buy the pillow. I mean, so I'm part of the other group secretly. They haven't been paid officially,

Jordan Harbinger: but they all got the pillow for free.

Yeah. In front of, and one of them is their sister's pillow. You're right. The Forbes thing cracks me up. 'cause I remember early in the day we had our podcast, we had a radio show on satellite and we get these pitches that are like, Oobah is in the top 30, under 30. And I'd be like, that's impressive. 'cause there's only 30 of them.

And then later on, I remember getting a pitch like later that week that was like, Hey guys. Forbes 30 under 30. And I was like, oh my God, they're gonna pick us. And it was like, pay us five grand. Pick the category of 30, under 30 you wanna be in. And I was like, category. There were like a hundred. Wow. So I was like, oh.

So there's 130 under 30 list. It's like tech, podcasting, furniture, building camera, whatever, like hairstyling. It's just any category you can think of. You pay for your client or for yourself. If you're a publicist, you pay for your client to be in there and it's like top 30 in fashion. But it's not just fashion, it's like little niche fashion.

Yeah. Things. Or like Brooklyn Socialite. I mean, you can just sort of [00:10:00] imagine whatever you want to be. Cut Forbes a check. Submit your blurb, they'll reformat the thing or whatever. And there you are. And I was like, oh, this is all bullshit.

Oobah Butler: It's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. I'd had a similar experience and, and that was what kind of gave me the idea to do it in a show.

I thought, I wanna do that in a film that I make that makes sense to explore that. And, you know, it's so cynical. And you know, from then on, you can then use the Forbes logo on your website. You can say it was featured in Forbes, business Genius, as I said, like that will be ingested by various sort of, uh, large, uh, large language models.

Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Back in the day it was Google and now it's large language. Now it's even more obscure. Right. Because in Google you could click it and go. Yeah, but the source is board.com/thirty under 30 slash category slash brooklyn slash social slash fashion. And you're like, whatever. Yeah. I asked chat g PT for the number one podcast and they said, Jordan Harbinger.

So you must be more popular than Joe Rogan. Yeah. Chat. GPT told you that. Yeah, yeah. Right. I heard your audiences because Joe Rogan, and I'm like, nah, we'd be having this conversation on my yacht, first of all. Yeah, right. I love Melrose podcast, but I [00:11:00] would own this place and it would have a cleaner bathroom.

Okay. I dunno. It's New York. It is New York, yes, that's true. So you say in the film, and then one day sitting in the shed. I live in, I had a revelation within the current climate of misinformation in society's willingness to believe absolute bullshit, maybe a fake restaurant is possible, not just a fake review.

Maybe it's exactly the kind of place that could be a hit with the help of fake reviews, mystique and nonsense. I was gonna do it. I turned my shed into London's top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor. So how do you get a location for something like this? You said it's a shed. I saw the film. It's pretty much a shed.

It has running water, so you got that going for you. So this is just like the place where you lived?

Oobah Butler: Yeah, I lived in there. So I just moved to London. I came from the Midlands. I'm from a little village called Fum, you know, moved down to London and back then it was probably maybe 1400 for a cheap studio apartment.

It would be $1,400 a month. This was 2015, 16. And then [00:12:00] I found this place, which was 800 and it was a garden. Shed out the back of someone's house and you had like access via a side entrance. It had running water. Like at the time it was very nice because it was way more affordable. Now looking back, lived there for three years and by the end there was like sewage coming out the back of the thing that I didn't realize.

At least. It was

Jordan Harbinger: your sewage probably.

Oobah Butler: It was probably, yeah. Or customers. Yeah. So it was just literally that It was as simple as I lived in a shed in a place called Dulwich in London. It wasn't hard to come up with a concept because it was one I was living. I was aware as I was living there that it was weird that I was living there.

It was outta necessity because of money, but it was better than the studio apartment I've been in before because it had more character. And you felt a little bit more like We had that yard. Yeah, I mean there was junk in it, but like whatever. Yeah, there was, we had foxes like you get in London, there's an unbelievable amount of foxes everywhere, particularly South London.

It's crazy for it. Yeah, they're everywhere. And we had a family of them in the garden and that was quite cute. [00:13:00] Foxes in a major city. I guess it's better than rats everywhere, but What do they eat? Rubbish. Like trash. Oh. Oh, okay. That makes sense. But they eat everything. They're omnivorous. I think foxes are, foxes are great.

Do you get raccoons in New York? In New

Jordan Harbinger: York? Probably not. Just rest. I've never seen them. No. I've never seen one in New York. I mean, you get 'em in la, right? No, I would imagine we do. That's a good question. I've never lived in a place that had enough nature in LA to see what kind of wildlife you would have there.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, so right. I had an idea and I'd been doing stuff for Vice, was kind of sat in this irreverence space. I'd found a voice. I'd been writing for free for years, for a lot of places. I'd progressed into clickbait news and stuff. Then I'd started working with Vice and it was one of those things where it was like a big idea that I never thought it would be possible to even get it registered on the website, I thought would be tricky.

I

Jordan Harbinger: was gonna ask, don't they go, alright, we're sending a person out to make sure you exist?

Oobah Butler: They're like, nah, that was what I suspected, that was what I thought would be step one. And no, I just sent off a few things. Like I needed a mobile number, I needed a [00:14:00] website, I needed a concept. And that was basically it.

Really. So you need to get like a burner phone from the drugstore. Yeah, it did. Yeah. That's exactly what I did. And it was shocking to me how little there was to stop you from doing this.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You basically needed a drug dealer phone and a computer that could register a domain. Yeah.

Oobah Butler: And then the concept for the restaurant was this thing called the She Dulwich.

It was like this gourmet food place that sold the menu was like a, you don't order meals, you order moods. So you have like comfort. I remember writing that. It was soup served in an Egyptian cotton bowl, which made me laugh. And then, uh, cotton bowl. Yeah, cotton bowl. The thread count was high. Yeah. And then the food photos on it, you know, it looked like gourmet Mitch and star food.

That was the cropped images, but the uncropped images, which I revealed, you know, a year after I, I worked on this for about eight months or something. The end of it, I revealed everything and the uncropped images were like, you know, what was supposed to be like a ham hock was an egg on my foot. So grossing, [00:15:00] luckily your foot is pasty enough to look like a ham hock.

Yeah, my foot is, yeah, I've got hobbit feet, but without the hair, the hobbit feet, because they're, I'm not that tall and they're like big feet. So I've got big ass, big head, big feet, some eggs on 'em. And uh, there's something really funny about just getting the gourmet food crowd. We're all kinda suckers in a way, I think.

And there was just something. Funny about some people finding something so grotesque, appetizing. You used like toilet bowl, like the urinal cake I guess you would call it. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, ooh, let's pour some honey on this and drizzle that on there. Yeah, trying to make it look like a pan fried scallop.

It was me and my friend Chris, who's a photographer, and we just sat there. We did it in a day and it was fun. It was like one of those things. At that point, I didn't realize how outta control it was gonna

Jordan Harbinger: get. To be fair, my friend's mom growing up, she was a food photographer for restaurants and marketing, and she came in and told us how they do this.

This is in the probably early nineties, maybe even the late eighties, a long time ago. So she [00:16:00] would say things like, because we were like, how come the burger on my plate doesn't look like the burger in the TV commercial? And she is like, oh, you couldn't eat the burger in the TV commercial because this is not actually meat.

This is, and the bun is real. But we pick one out of, I'll look at a hundred or 500 buns. Wow. And then she's like, then I glue the sesame seeds on with glue in the exact place that I want them to be in like a different order. They're spaced out differently. And then all of the food is sprayed down with oil so it looks wet and fresh.

Oh, interesting. I'll go to the store and get fresh lettuce. We get fresh tomatoes that are freshly chopped, put them in the freezer for a while so they get all like plumpy and weird. She's, she's like, you couldn't eat that. Even if you tried, most of it's not edible or a lot of it's not edible. So you putting honey on a urinal cake, it's not really that much different.

Oobah Butler: No, that is fascinating. I mean, it kind of just furthers that thing, doesn't it? Of the, how much we live in a kind of just false reality. Like it's like McDonald's isn't

Jordan Harbinger: gonna be like Yeah. If they showed how they actually make the burger. [00:17:00] It's gross. He wouldn't put that in the commercial. Like here he's squeezing the fake meat out onto the circular mold.

Yeah, yeah. Slams it shut and it cooks it air quotes immediately. Yeah. And then they spray the black stuff on it to look grilled. Yeah. My God. And then they put it on the bun, which has been like sat on by the guy during his break because there was no place to sit. There's no break room. I mean that's like the real

Oobah Butler: Burger

Jordan Harbinger: King, right?

Yeah. Right, right. The real whoppers like stepped on.

Oobah Butler: I remember that the supersize me there was such an amazing bit at the end of that film, it's just like a vignette. They did. You remember he bought a burger and he just left it and some fries and he had like a burger he bought off from a street vendor, a burger from some other place, then a McDonald's burger.

And they all grew mold and whatever at various rates. And the McDonald's burger would just remain perfect and the fry is completely perfect. And you just think,

Jordan Harbinger: oh dear. Yeah. At least that's going through my entire body and being absorbed by my organs. All right. So you got a menu that you print, you got the website, you got the fake cuisine.

Did you need to learn how to cook things? No. Okay. Explain [00:18:00] that.

Oobah Butler: No, I mean, it was, the whole idea of the restaurant was that it was an appointment only restaurant, so you had to apply for a reservation, so no walk-ins, although the address that we put it was my street, my road, but it just didn't have a number.

The idea was ex exclusive. It was fortunately or unfortunately, like we're conditioned in such a way that we just want what we can't have. Yeah. And that was basically it. And also I lived in there, so if anyone showed up, the game was up. Yeah. Hey, why are you sunbathing naked in the yard? This fancy restaurant.

Yeah, exactly. So it was a appointment only restaurant and. It all just felt like a kind of like theoretical thing for quite a long time. And then eventually, basically I was soliciting fake reviews off my family and my friends asking people to write reviews and I gave 'em a style guide. This is what the experience kind of looks like, but didn't stop people putting in mad stuff.

That was funny, felt consistent, felt believable, you know, further exacerbating. Just please mention like how hard it was to get a table, but [00:19:00] eventually when you did it was like unbelievable. Yeah. Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: you like Chef's Table, you'll love this place. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oobah Butler: That was one of them.

Jordan Harbinger: It's like, okay, it's what reviews sound like for sure.

So you're not writing

Oobah Butler: all the reviews

Jordan Harbinger: yourself from

Oobah Butler: your own home. No. Okay. I basically wrote a sincere kind of, I wrote an email to family and friends and just said, please, could you leave reviews and five star reviews, obviously, and at various points. So very quickly, like it was 18,000 restaurants in London on TripAdvisor at the time.

Yeah, I

Jordan Harbinger: saw. That's crazy.

Oobah Butler: And like quite quickly, within six weeks we were up to like number 1,400 or something with about 30 reviews, but it didn't feel real until one day when the phone rang. And that wasn't like my phone, but it was the phone that I'd bought the shed. And yeah, on the other end of it was like an actual human trying to book a table at my non-existent restaurant.

Wow. And what was interesting to me about it was that they were repeating the kind of terms of my mythology that I'd set, that I'd asked people to write under, that I'd asked my family and my friends to reference an appointment, any restaurant, all the [00:20:00] stuff, they were parenting back to me like it was gospel and like it was real.

And there was no questioning of that. And. I just told them that we were fully booked for the next six weeks and to call back soon. It quickly gathered momentum and when people were emailing in to get tables, and it wasn't just like random people went from being locals to them being foodies in the city to being tourists.

The further we went up the rankings, the more Right. I saw these

Jordan Harbinger: TV executives be like, I'm gonna write for my bbc.com or whatever, email addresses so that

Oobah Butler: he knows I'm an important person. Yeah, exactly. I'd forgotten about that. I think they were actually American, but it shocked me how much work people were doing in their own minds to build up the idea and the gravitas of this fake establishment.

And yeah, people were doing anything they could to get a table and the more the phone calls increased, the more people that called me. The more people that wanted to talk to me, the more that I told 'em they couldn't come and the more they wanted to come. And yeah, that was fascinating to me.

Jordan Harbinger: So your rank keeps climbing.

It's crazy [00:21:00] because 18,000 restaurants is such, it's a ton. You make it to the top 1000 with no real restaurant, no food, no real customers. No. Yeah, exactly. And you just have 30 or 60, whatever it was, number of reviews that just shows you that most restaurants just have no reviews at all.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. I also think that the way that their algorithm was weighted was that negative reviews were way more significant than positive reviews.

And the fact that we weren't getting negative reviews was probably why the algorithm I see found us so lovely to juice.

Jordan Harbinger: Look at this up and coming. Yeah. Spot. Yeah, exactly. That's really taking the world by storm. People are applying for jobs. People are sending you free samples. How are they sending you things?

If there's no number, there's no address.

Oobah Butler: I started giving them addresses on the road for friendly people. That wasn't my house. Hey man, can I use your exactly mail? You're probably not gonna get anything. Actually, we got a bunch

Jordan Harbinger: of spices. You want these. Exactly.

Oobah Butler: I was back in London a couple months ago and I had someone, uh, wave me down in the street and they were like, I used to live next to you when [00:22:00] you were doing the shed.

The feel when you're doing something like that is you don't want anything to get in the way you want it to go to its dumbest or most significant conclusion. It can. So like when people are sending stuff and, and they're like, what is this? Then why are they sending you this? Why does it say the shed at Dulwich on it?

And I'm like, it's okay. Don't worry about it. Thank you so much for the favor. I remember being very stressed about, 'cause we were close to getting to number one and there was a lot of moments where it felt like it was all gonna blow up. I wouldn't be talking to you right now. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: And I assume the neighbors are like, look, as long as it's not illegal and I'm not gonna get in trouble with it, like fine.

And you're like, it's not illegal, not gonna get trouble, I promise you that. Okay. Were people prowling around the neighborhood being like, where's this place? I wanna see it from the outside or like maybe knock on the door, see if we can get a table. Know that we found it. Surely that happened.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, it did actually.

Because obviously I had a side entrance. I didn't even go through the main house. And I remember coming out and on the street there was a couple asking, you know, they asked me if you seen the shed at Dulwich around here, do you know where it is? And I was like. I'm really sorry that I don't think they [00:23:00] do walk-ins.

Okay. We're gonna call it. And I had the shed phone in my bag. I remember filming myself like a minute after this happened. And like the end of the street, you can see the two people kind of walking around, looking around. It feels like a made up story, right, because it's, you're

Jordan Harbinger: like, I really have to pee by.

Yeah. Yeah. It's your phone starts with vibrating. Exactly. That's exactly what happened. And

Oobah Butler: then I got up the other end of the road and recorded myself saying, so these people were just trying to speak to me as I'm talking again, it's going off still. Oh my gosh. I just basically said, I'm sorry, I've gotta get moving.

I've gotta go. But yeah, it was as I was going, it was vibrating and calling in my bag. I don't know exactly how many people went in search of it, but it must have been significant because we were getting hundreds of people trying to book. So what

Jordan Harbinger: rank were you at this point when hundreds of people are trying to book the

Oobah Butler: place, that was when we got into the top 50 I think.

Wow. We had a period where we were at the top 50, in the top 30 and we kind of got stuck around there for a little bit and I felt like that was as high as we were probably gonna go. Yeah. How are you gonna be,

Jordan Harbinger: God, what's the Indian place that everybody loves and you wait for 90 days? Deum, they're gonna be deum.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, yeah. It's not gonna happen. No, it's not gonna happen. And [00:24:00] like it was shocking to me how powerful this website was. Still massive. Still I think the biggest tourist website in the world, I'm sure. Yeah. Obviously now, like the way everything's integrated into the Google platform, like a lot of people just use Google now, but like yeah, it was massive how much power and how much it could make or break a business.

That was a shock to me.

Jordan Harbinger: So did TripAdvisor ever notice like, Hey, you are really trending. I, you'd think there's somebody going. Wow. This place went from zero to 50 to 30. This is awesome. I work at TripAdvisor. I want to go. Yeah, right. Check this place out. You got 89,000 views in search results in one day.

That's insane. That is insane. Yeah, that is absolutely insane. So like anybody, basically anybody who's searching for restaurant London is seeing your place is seeing my restaurant.

Oobah Butler: I've never heard that statistic, but I don't think, maybe I have. Maybe I Right. I'm pretty sure it's from like

Jordan Harbinger: your movie. So was it from the movie?

It It might've been. It might've been the article archive. Yeah. Yeah. They called you and said [00:25:00] information request. Right. And it looks like. Based on this piece that I read, you were like, oh, it's over. They're like, wait, who are you? We drove by. There's no place we took out your property. Right. And so you're worried about this and we just wanted to let you know you're now the number one restaurant.

Oobah Butler: Congratulations. It was absolutely insane. Okay. Yeah, I remember now. So yeah, it felt like they were basically taking more notice. 'cause we were so popular. I thought it was, yeah. Dave's were numbered. It was the 1st of November, 2017. So that's eight years ago. Yeah, eight years ago. And yeah, it became the number one rated restaurant in London.

In

Jordan Harbinger: London. So a restaurant that, by the way, does still doesn't exist. Highest ranked restaurant in London in one of the world's biggest cities. Yeah. On the internet's at the time. At least. Most trusted review site. Probably. Possibly. So is was the plan just to expose how easy this is, because you're not gonna serve food in your shed?

Right.

Oobah Butler: The thing is, is that the plan was unclear. You know, I think it'd be incredible to get it as high as possible, but I genuinely didn't think that would [00:26:00] possible. Now we'd done it. It felt to me like it was the end of the game. I felt like that was the end of the story, like I'd made this absurd point.

The idea that would be doable was just so absurd to me, and it didn't seem possible, but just like the public had other ideas and people were applying for jobs at the non-existent restaurant, I remember the local government trying to offer for me to open up different outlets of the shed in different places.

They were gentrifying.

Jordan Harbinger: This area's a little rougher around the edges, but we can give you a break on the property tax if you open up

Oobah Butler: the shed in like Jamaica or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I felt like that was the end of the story, the public head of ideas, and they kept on applying for tables and it hit me that maybe the end of the story was to open it for one night only and serve real customers real food.

Yeah, that's what I did. I basically opened my garden shed for one night only to see like whether people would, I don't know, like believe the reviews they'd read online more than their objective [00:27:00] experience. How far could the bollocks go? And I borrowed some chairs and tables from a local cafe and some

Jordan Harbinger: chickens.

Don't forget about the chickens

Oobah Butler: in this Wendy house, it was like a little toy house for kids in the garden. We emptied it and filled it with chickens. And the concept behind that was that it was like. Lobsters at a fancy restaurant, you'd like pick your chicken and we'd slaughter them, but not

Jordan Harbinger: really.

'cause there's somebody's pet chickens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was

Oobah Butler: this guy called Trevor's Chickens. We didn't even do that. It was also, at the time, we were listed as a vegetarian restaurant, which is quite funny. But the food we were serving was like microwaveable TV, dinner type things from supermarket.

But they were dressed up to look nice and fancy. So like edible flowers, micro herbs on them, and designated moods because of the mood menu. So over half of the people there that night were actors who I'd asked to come and act completely natural. 'cause it was an a weird experience. Like we met the real customers on the street and blindfolded them.

Then led them down the side of the, and they willingly

Jordan Harbinger: were like, all right, [00:28:00] sure. Yeah. Okay.

Oobah Butler: They were, I think it's like this like experience junkie thing, you know? Yeah. I'd imagine those people, if you ask them now, if they were sat here and they hadn't had that experience, would you let someone you'd never met before blindfold you and lead them down there?

Gut, probably not. Yeah, London, yeah. I wouldn't do that, but like we had eight real customers on the night. We had two newlyweds from Sunny California who the night before had been eating on the banks of Theen.

Jordan Harbinger: In Paris? In Paris. Like at a real restaurant. Yeah. And

Oobah Butler: now they were at the shed. We had a table of four who were from a massive fashion agency in London.

Then we had two locals who had been trying to get a table for months. We had eight real people, so three tables, and then the rest of the tables we had one on the roof, which definitely was not safe. No. Yeah. My friend Phoebe, who now writes on like Ted Lasso and Fort Weddings in a funeral show show on that, so they're, they're

Jordan Harbinger: the social proof that's gonna be like, oh, this is so cool.

Oh, this is delicious. Like that kind nonsense. Exactly.

Oobah Butler: Lolla Ope was there now. It's so fun. Now she's so famous. She was in Shrill, the Hulu show. She's in ghosts, she's in [00:29:00] loads of stuff. She was in that new Armand Ucci series. She's a friend of mine. She was one of the customers. But yeah, they were like, the idea was to try and create the same psychological space as TripAdvisor.

If enough people say something is great. Will you deny the fact that you've got a bad meal in front of you? Will you deny that? Will you deny your taste buds and buy into the nonsense?

Jordan Harbinger: And the answer is yes, basically, because you, you hire the fake chef. Fake waitress, so that they're dressing up the food really good.

But the, what is the food? It's like instant noodles and cup

Oobah Butler: of soup, or whatever you call it. Cup of soup and microwaveable, mac and cheese, microwaveable lasagna. But then, as I said, with these edible flo and micro herbs to offset it. Of the people theredescribe that food as a wartime classy. Yes. If by wartime

Jordan Harbinger: you mean locked in the basement because the Nazis are bombing the city.

Yeah, yeah. Back at the shed. Phoebe has arrived. She's an intuitive waitress who can really get across the nuances of our menu. By serving pudding in mugs, we're aiming to replicate the experience of what it's like to eat pudding out of a [00:30:00] mug.

I love that, man. That's so funny. Ooh, we've comfort. It's in a cotton bowl. Does that make any sense? No. But whatever. Here you are, it's the dumbest thing, so people just don't trust their senses over what they read online. That's like the big lesson.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. No. End of the night I saw out the last four customers actually, and one of them said like, you know, now that we've been once, is it gonna be easier for us to book again next time?

And when it came out, like completely blew up. You know, completely built a life for me, essentially. It was such a significant thing that happened and it's been now referenced so much in media. Every week I'll get another different page, has reposted this story and it's got a hundred thousand like, you know what I mean?

Oh wow. Or like in academic papers, in media, there was an Italian film that came out, that Italian director went on Netflix and he referenced me in his interview and it's had such an impact now on culture. I'm okay to say it goes against my, um, British sensibility to like shit on myself. But it has been a significant [00:31:00] thing that's happened culturally that really people use as a yardstick for how far we've come.

And the thing is, look, this was seven years ago, the film came out and we're so much further along now, what do you mean by that? Further along? What I just think now, this was kind of almost like a forecast of where we were of,

Jordan Harbinger: of just believing hype bullshit over reality.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. We really are living in the golden age of bullshit.

It is so easy to convincingly lie to people and to have that informed the way they feel about the world. Me included, by the way, I'm not saying I'm above this.

Jordan Harbinger: We're all susceptible. Yeah. The customers were mostly sophisticated people like the newlyweds, I don't know they were on vacation, but people from a fashion agency, they've ostensibly eaten at a nice, fancy, trendy restaurant before, as have these television executives and people like that.

And they've already pre-constructed the narrative in their head. So instead of coming in and going. This is a prank. They come in and go, wow, they nailed this. It really does look like some shitty garden show that Duke lives in. Exactly. And you're like, yeah, it does, doesn't it?

Oobah Butler: We really pulled out all the [00:32:00] stops.

Exactly. We had the newlyweds. It was just like, I never like my stuff to feel like, I don't like punching down. That's not what I'm trying to do.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you didn't, yeah, I was, one thing I was gonna mention is when you interview the people, like, Hey, did you like it? It wasn't like, Hey idiot, you fell for this.

Let me rub it in. It was more like, Hey, what'd you think? And they're like, you can tell like, yeah, it was all right. I don't wanna say anything bad. It wasn't the best meal I've ever had, but fine. We had a good, it was an interesting experience. It doesn't make them look

Oobah Butler: dumb. It wasn't supposed to. Anyone who's in that film, half of the customers consented to being in it.

The rest are blurred. And everyone who's in that film, like the newlyweds, I spoke to them again for them now. It's like this crazy, a hundred million people watch that film and, and it's like this insane thing now that's like we were part of this. Cultural moment, but at the time I was most worried about them 'cause I felt bad about the time of theirs that I'd taken almost.

It's on their honeymoon

Jordan Harbinger: and your waist you've given them. But you know what, it's gotta be funny that surely they rewatch that and go, this is Roger being really polite and be at the restaurant. Definitely. Yeah. It was a great, interesting experience. I mean, [00:33:00] try something new. It's funny now, right? They don't remember that it

Oobah Butler: was too salty because it was a microwave scene.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. As I said, the point of the film was not about them, it was about all of us. It was about, they were conduits for us to talk about the cultural environment that we're living in and I feel like that was a decent forecast for where we've headed. Yeah. Completely changed my life.

Jordan Harbinger: This concept holds up though, man.

I live in San Jose, California. We're here in New York, but there's a ramen place in the mall and. When you're walking around the mall, you'll go, oh, what's this crowd for? And it's, oh, it's the line for, I forget the name of the place, but it doesn't matter because it's good ramen. But there's a lot of good ramen in the area.

And you go, huh? And as you're trying to walk around this huge queue of people that they're pushing up against the wall. So it's not to get in the way. You see a sign that says like, from here, 90 minutes. And you're thinking, what the hell? Who has the time to stand in this line? It might not even be 90 minutes.

It might have been like 120 minutes.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. And that was almost like the perfect metaphor for what we were doing with the whole thing. I see it now. 'cause obviously I live in Manhattan and like you see it [00:34:00] all everywhere. But I think TikTok has had an interesting impact on this. The mark of a in vogue business is the line out the front.

It's so easy to manipulate.

Jordan Harbinger: It is. Before you had to be Anthony Bourdain to put like a street food cart on the map and make that person a millionaire. Yeah. Now you need to figure out how to go viral on TikTok. Yeah. And then, oh, the best hand pulled noodles are from this old grandma who's from Vietnam.

And then you go there and you're like. Are we sure about this? Whatever. Just eat the noodles.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, exactly. People are doing all the work about the place before their food has even knit their mouths, and that was exactly the same with the shed. Scarcity.

Jordan Harbinger: Oobah builds fake companies to expose real ones. I build fake segues to get you through the ad break.

Hey, at least we're honest about it. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and Nvidia. Picture this, you're at a sold out game in the stadium. In the future. No lines, no tickets, no cash. Your face gets you in to, buys your beer. It even finds your seat. That's how I roll. I never carry a wallet.

Anyway, that's how episode 10 of the [00:35:00] cybersecurity tapes kicks off. It's called Instant Replay. Everything's running smoothly until one security guard notices something off. A woman scans in for a drink, but the system says she's a 34-year-old dude named Roderick Vazquez. Okay. That's when it all starts to unravel.

People start getting into VIP suites. They didn't pay for the game Clock doesn't match the one on tv. The owner's freaking out live on camera, and then they realize the stadium has been hacked. Nobody knows who's behind it or how deep it goes. It's creepy because it feels way too real. This isn't some far future sci-fi thing.

This could happen today. Episode 10 of the Cybersecurity tapes instant replay is out now, and it'll have you side eyeing every smart gadget you own. Once things start going wrong in that stadium, you won't be able to stop listening. Check out the cybersecurity tapes wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is also sponsored by Caldera Lab.

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Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, pranksters, whatever you wanna call it, every single week, it's because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over@sixminutenetworking.com.

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Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again, it's all free, shenanigan free@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Oobah Butler. I wanna switch gears a little bit. You infiltrated an Amazon warehouse, which I think I read about this in the news before we actually met.

'cause I remember [00:38:00] thinking. How is there no video from inside an Amazon warehouse? And then I searched for that. And your stuff came up like some of your raw stuff, whatever it was years ago came up. Tell me about that. First of all, how do you get past security at Amazon? Because it's like a prison.

Probably should have chosen different words, but maybe it's accurate. It's a high security facility. There's crazy fences, there's scanners. That's only what I can see from the outside.

Oobah Butler: So this was part of a film that I did. The first film I did for British Television, which is Channel four, which is like BBC, public Service broadcaster.

We did our first documentary with 'EM two years ago over here. Vice bought it, so it's on Vice, you can watch it on their YouTube. It was all about, you know, Amazon, Amazon, I think since the Pandemic, I used to use it all the time. It's become so ubiquitous and it was just something intriguing when like the fabric of how we live changes a lot very quickly.

Let's say it was in six or seven years or something, right? And then consumer behavior changed completely around this company. Essentially. I was intrigued to make something about them because you hear a lot about Amazon and maybe some stuff they're not doing. That might not be [00:39:00] great. I kind of just wanted to find out, like I wanted to go on a journey to see like how they've made up so much ground so quickly and how they did it.

One of the things I wanted to do was to go and work there undercover and in order to do that on TV is quite hard. You're invading people's privacy, not just that you're breaking all your employee NDAs. Sure. You're taking a risk, obviously, you know, you guys here of, is it the First Amendment free speech, which should protect whistleblowers and things like that.

We don't have that in the uk. Oh, you

Jordan Harbinger: don't have that? No,

Oobah Butler: we don't have a free speech yet. I guess that's why

Jordan Harbinger: we have that.

Oobah Butler: Exactly. Yeah. You have to tee in crumpets with the king and then you get out scot free. We kind of spent months trying to prove that maybe there was wrongdoing going on in the warehouse in order to get permission from the lawyers in order to be able to go in and I had this kind of button camera that I was wearing.

I got a job there. I dyed my hair brown. I, um, wore glasses. Some vaguely recognizable with my blonde hair. I used to work in warehouses when I was younger. When I was in my late teen, like 19, [00:40:00] 20, 21. Work in car factories where I grew up. Birmingham's kinda like the. Detroit of, of the uk. I

Jordan Harbinger: I've heard of that.

I I heard that everybody, you don't have this, but I've heard that's like the most, the hated accent that, yeah. Yeah.

Oobah Butler: Ozzy Osborne. That's his accent. Okay. Yeah, so Ozzy Osborne, picky blinders. I'm trying to be polite, but it's really hard. Yeah, it's like a trashy

Jordan Harbinger: accent maybe. Yeah.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing is with regional accents, the UK is like a very special thing about our country is that we have so many accents in such a small space.

You do have a lot of really specific

Jordan Harbinger: accents in the uk. I was in Las Vegas at a conference about podcasting and I went to take a leak at a urinal and I heard a guy talking. He goes, oh, you Jordan Ainger? And he is talking, and I said, you know, you sound like. My friend Jason, who produces this podcast, my audio engineer, and he's like, oh really?

And I was like, yeah, his name is Jason Sanderson. And the guy goes, I know a guy named Jason Sanderson. And I said, yeah, he's from Sheffield. And the guy goes, oh, that's kind of where I'm from. It turned out to be the [00:41:00] same guy. So I, this guy taking a piss next to me. He talked so similarly and so specifically.

Yeah, like my audio engineer that I picked up that it was actually a guy from the same That's amazing place. Amazing. And he was like, oh, it's the same guy.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. That's amazing. I love Sheffield Sheffield's. Uh, Sean Bean is from Lord of the Rings. Oh, okay.

Jordan Harbinger: There you go. That's your famous Shef fielder. It's just, it's so crazy that an accent can be that specific.

In one town where I go, you sound like my engineer. Oh, what's his name? Jason Sanderson. I know what you, I mean it's like the same guy. 'cause if you hear a New York accent, you're not like, oh, do you know Tom? Maybe that's

Oobah Butler: why

Jordan Harbinger: I

Oobah Butler: do love it. I love that I can hear some orange from where I'm from very easily.

I'm like, immediately I'm like, where are you from? They all stem from different languages. The Birmingham Mexican comes from Mercy Mercian, which was a thousand, 1500 year old. Completely different language. I never heard about this. Yeah. So we all had different languages that we'd speak and there's plenty of reasons why the languages are so entrenched.

Jordan Harbinger: I just figured it's 'cause nobody moved around very much. Yeah, probably. So it's like you're in this little isolated village that traits fish or something for like a thousand [00:42:00] years. Your English sounds weird and it's got Norse mixed in it or whatever. I don't know.

Oobah Butler: It's definitely part of it. And like, you know, I, I grew up in the same, my mom's family had been in that village for 200 years or something like that.

Yeah. The web toes explain it and wait what? No. Okay. But my dad then is from Birmingham and Okay. Irish sort of family, but yeah, my dad's got a very thick broy accent. Okay. So I've got a little twinges of it, but I lived in London for nine years now. I live here and it's smoothed out a lot, but very understandable compared to

Jordan Harbinger: people I've met from small villages in the uk

Oobah Butler: so, so yeah.

So I went in with the suspicion of stuff going on. It felt like some sort of dystopian nightmare than a workplace. Every time you go off the warehouse floor, you have to go through scanners and they scan you and they didn't find your camera gear. I told 'em that I had a pelvic screw. Ooh, smart. Which is not true.

Uh, which apparently is legally also not great.

Jordan Harbinger: I lied about a medical condition. Yeah.

Oobah Butler: To evade

Jordan Harbinger: security equipment at my employer.

Oobah Butler: But yeah, I mean, I saw people who were crying 'cause the amount of pain they're in, just like standing around and moving boxes all day, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Oh man. Repeated strain and [00:43:00] the newsletter came out.

We couldn't get people to go on the record for the show, but there was someone who had a heart attack at work and in their words called their claims that they received disciplinary for leaving. Early, sorry for dying. There was a lot of things going on that I saw there that I, yeah. You know, I was caught on the third day I was there.

Someone recognized me through the brown hair and the cart Kent disguise. Wow. I'm

Jordan Harbinger: surprised. Although it must have been, I mean, given your restaurant chops, maybe the dye job wasn't professional. I did it spray, yeah. Maybe get a haircut next time. Yeah, I

Oobah Butler: think so. I think I could have done with a Groucho Marx mask or something like that.

Yeah. So I got and got kicked out and I got taken to one side. They kind of tried to figure out what I was doing, and they were on the cusp of this union vote, and they were flooding the warehouse. Allegedly. They were doubling the size of the workforce. This

Jordan Harbinger: was a little confusing to

Oobah Butler: me as an

Jordan Harbinger: outsider.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, yeah. Workers

Jordan Harbinger: were trying to unionize and You need what, like a certain critical mass percent Aha. Oh, I see. So Amazon was like, cool. It looks like you're gonna have over half, unless we hire 200 more people this week.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. I mean, the reports were that they doubled the [00:44:00] size of the warehouse. So we went from 1500 people to 3000.

These temporary workers, I was one of them. They need to get you to

Jordan Harbinger: agree to unionize and you're like, yo, I don't even know where the bathroom is.

Oobah Butler: Exactly. And a lot of the people that I was working with, I was on a shift with about, I think it was about 110 new people and they were all kind of students who are on temporary visas, mainly from India.

And they may be less inclined to piss off their employer. Really? Yeah. Especially when they're spending so much time and resources, having people come in and say, Hey, it's really bad. Unionizing. Don't unionize. I didn't see this, but like that's as reported.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. On that note, honestly, my friend also at Amazon, he has a disability, told them about it.

They were like, you can work from home. Then they were like, Hey, you can't work from home. He's like, well, my doctor said I have to. And they were like, we don't care. And he is like another doctor, second opinion also said, I have to. They're like, we don't care. He is like, okay. Got a third doctor's opinion.

They're like, look, everyone has to come in thinking they're maybe trying to get people [00:45:00] to quit. Maybe. So they put him in an office that's not his normal office. He can't get into it 'cause he's a wheelchair user. Wow. There's no accessible bathroom. 'cause there's a one that has like a step or something over it and it's all right, I'm just gonna just ran my wheelchair over this 'cause I gotta the bathroom.

Someone had to let him outta the bathroom 'cause it was like physically impossible for him to get out. Thankfully someone came by, but it took a while because it was not a fully occupied building. Something I, I gotta be really, really careful. Something about the environment, I'll say triggered one of his issues and he was unconscious.

Found unconscious, and then they waited like a double digit number of minutes before calling 9 1 1. Wow. And now his lawyers are like, we need to figure out what happened here. Give us the tape where it shows him falling unconscious. And they're like, no. We're not gonna share that. Obviously they're gonna be compelled to do that in court, or they're gonna go, oh, we really blew this.

Here's $2 million, or whatever the heck. You know. But it's crazy to me like, this is a disabled person. You're deliberately mistreating them against their doctor's advice. [00:46:00] Then they have an adverse event and you're like, oh, well, don't cooperate. I mean, that's messed

Oobah Butler: up,

Jordan Harbinger: man. It's

Oobah Butler: really messed up. As I said to you, we had the thing of the woman being penalized for leaving to go to the hospital for her heart attack, having, having had a heart attack.

She had apparently had two heart episodes at work and, and I worked with another guy who, I actually lost the footage. This guy, who I felt for a lot growing up quite near to where I grew up, because it was in the Midlands near where I grew up. The warehouse, he doesn't drive because of his heart condition.

I thought, like me and him were doing some of the most strenuous exercise, you know, and, and I'm pouring sweat. I'm struggling, and they've got this guy next to me who I assume was about my age. And he had this heart condition and, and I just thought, this guy shouldn't be doing this. He can't drive, but he can load a hundred pound boxes onto a truck.

Yeah. In that heat. It was crazy. You know, your story doesn't surprise me or the amount of horror stories that I've not only experienced but heard.

Jordan Harbinger: It's not just the warehouse workers getting mistreated, it's everybody. And as you found out, the drivers are also mistreated and they mistreat the drivers [00:47:00] too, like you found out in the film.

Tell me about that. Tell me how you started down this path.

Oobah Butler: Spending a lot of time going outside of their fulfillment centers, and I think it was actually in Glendale in California where I applied this, but it was noticing how there were outside of a lot of their film centers as bottles of urine. How do you know they were urine?

I sniffed them. I'm a journalist straight to the source. I assumed apple juice, it was not apple juice. And. Wherever I went around the world, I noticed this. I went to one in Queens. I went to them in London. I went to them in Birmingham, back where I was from. I implore your listeners to go to their local fulfillment center and sniff random

Jordan Harbinger: bottles

Oobah Butler: that you find

Jordan Harbinger: outside.

If it says Aquafina, but it's yellow, open it up and take a good whiff.

Oobah Butler: Well, you can watch the film and see me do that, but yeah, I just started stopping drivers and it was globally. I spoke to them in Spain. I spoke to them in the uk. I spoke to them in us. I spoke to them. Italy and Yeah, it was the thing, you know, they have these unrealistic [00:48:00] targets.

Obviously the app that they work through and their DSP, 'cause technically they're not Amazon workers. They work for a separate third party.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I always see like on track or whatever. Yeah. What is this?

Oobah Butler: But I mean, it's just the way the company does a lot of things. A lot of their warehouse workers, not technically Amazon employees.

Jordan Harbinger: This reminds me of how Nike's like, we don't run sweatshops. Yes. Maybe some workers jump out the windows and kill themselves, but those are our subcontractors and we don't control them. And it's like, eh, we're gonna hold you morally

Oobah Butler: responsible anyway. It's tricky and I feel like what I heard was that I actually managed to speak to a dispatch in Glendale.

You know, I was looking at the app on their phone and you can monitor live the location of the drivers. So they get a score, which is down to the speed of their delivery and all that stuff. It seems like

Jordan Harbinger: we're encouraging unsafe behavior like, hey, did you have to go to the bathroom or did you have to lift something heavy or somebody was chatty with you.

Now you have to speed to get to the next place and go above the speed limit in a school zone because otherwise your score gets [00:49:00] lower.

Oobah Butler: Absolutely. That is exactly what and and a lot of the female drivers I spoke to talked about getting UTIs from holding it in,

Jordan Harbinger: holding in their p Oh, I didn't realize that.

I never thought about that. Yeah, so you've got the guys

Oobah Butler: who are often, and I dunno if the girls using chew wees or whatever, but the guys are often urinating bottles and then, which I will say to be fair, slightly to Amazon is way of the road delivery drivers do urinating bottles, but a lot of delivery drivers, like if you're a UPS driver, you're getting a hell lot more money and you're getting a whole lot more benefits.

The thing is with Amazon is that the people that I stopped and spoke to, I spoke to a UPS driver, he says, yeah, this does happen. But I can't remember exactly how much they get, but it's four yard dollars an hour or something like that. Wow, okay. Maybe it's, whereas the Amazon drivers, it's 17 or 20, you know, like just the people I spoke to you, look, I do understand that driving can be like this, but I don't think a lot of them are having to be surveilled in this kind of inhumane way.

And they've got all these different cameras watching them, and if they don't do this, they'll get called. They'll get penalized and they might lose their jobs and Yeah. So often what I try and do in [00:50:00] my work is I'll try and find an image or a thing or something that captures a complicated thing. You know, talking about worker exploitation, Amazon, I feel like most people listening will probably have heard stories, but it's trying to find versions of that that cut through.

That's kind of what I try and do. And the, the urine bottle was something that could become a kind of symbol of something else.

Jordan Harbinger: So why don't they throw the bottles away when they get back to the warehouse? Why do they throw them out the window before they get in?

Oobah Butler: Yeah, so what I found, I spoke to a dispatch who told me that they often chuck them out of the windows when they are coming into the fulfillment centers because for each bottle of urine that's found in their cab, they get a point and if they get 10 points, they're in trouble.

It could eventually end in, so

Jordan Harbinger: it's, don't pee outside. Make sure you pee in a bottle, but don't leave the bottle in the van. Get rid of the bottle.

Oobah Butler: I don't think they encourage the urination of in bottles, but they don't want to know, you know? It's not like if you leave them in the [00:51:00] cab, you are gonna get, right.

It's like leaving

Jordan Harbinger: garbage in the car. Like you left your whopper wrapper and your drink bottle in here. Exactly. That kind of thing. Okay. So it counts as like just making your vehicle D You think the solution here, not that it's the real solution, would be there's a dumpster on the way into the fulfillment center.

Yeah. Maybe throw your bottle in there. It says biohazard on it.

Oobah Butler: I tried to do that. I tried to stand outside of one of the ones in the UK and had a big sign that said urine collection point outside the front and had a bin. No, I used it. Maybe security came out. There was a lot on the floor though, but yeah, probably.

Yeah, there was a lot.

Jordan Harbinger: People probably tried to hit it from the window and I'm not getting out and getting that. It's also a little act of rebellion. You guys are gonna make me piss in this bottle. I'm gonna throw it on your lawn. Yeah, yeah. And you can pick it up. I can relate. Tell me what you did with the piss to expose Amazon here.

'cause this is where it gets interesting.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, so what I did is I collected a load of the bottles of urine and I repackaged it as an energy drink, which looked similar to a very popular influencer led energy drink product

Jordan Harbinger: that's not [00:52:00] specific enough. All energy drinks both

Oobah Butler: look and taste like recycled Amazon driver urine.

The design is quite similar to an energy drink that people might know. Stan, who I work with is an editor of mine. We co-write together. He won a design award for the bottle actually. And so anyway, we basically packaged this energy drink. It was just literally Amazon driver urine and I managed to list it on Amazon.

As a drink and they put in the description what it was. You can find on the way back machine, you can, you know all the whole list together. The pictures, the description. This is collected from Amazon drivers urine. So it says in the ingredients like urine or u uh, 97%, but you know all that, the composition of urine.

But then it says in the description, this is made from the collected discarded bottles of Amazon drivers urine. Correct. Literally says that. Okay, did people buy it? You might be recognizing the pattern here. I got all the people that I know to juice the algorithm and to buy the energy drink. And what ended up happening is [00:53:00] yes.

We did become number one, we became a number one drink on Amazon with a bottle of Amazon driver's ear.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh God.

Oobah Butler: But you're not shipping a pallet of, of piss or whatever. No, we, we, we didn't. We had real people trying to buy the energy drink as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Gotta look at this new one. Yeah, exactly. That's cleverer the branding.

Yeah. Yeah,

Oobah Butler: exactly. But we didn't send them, I canceled those. My lawyer was very worried about that. I'm pretty sure it's

Jordan Harbinger: illegal to ship. Used urine in just random bottles to people who think they can drink it.

Oobah Butler: Well, if there's any lawyers listening right here. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm also a lawyer and look, I'm not a product safety guy, but I'm just gonna go out on a limb and, and say there's multiple issues with this particular

Oobah Butler: Yeah.

We're not misrepresenting it. We're saying it's urine, it's not false advertising.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm worried about that. It's not false advertising. It's more of the shipping, a biohazard non up roof container and something that could actually hurt or kill people. Oh, for sure. Yeah, there's, there's

Oobah Butler: a lot. But there's something here as well, just to touch on it a little bit, is that the platform itself didn't stop us from doing that.

Jordan Harbinger: The greater point is you recycled [00:54:00] Amazon driver year end the number one drink on Amazon.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, exactly. And you would've thought that the biggest e-commerce platform on the planet might have infrastructure that would protect its consumers from That didn't seem that way. I, I

Jordan Harbinger: worry about some stuff. When you search for, I don't know, rechargeable batteries, and it's EBL, Energizer, Panasonic.

You're like, okay. And then below that is like high win all caps. Yeah. Right? It's like full de glug and it, you're like, what is this? Not a real word. And it's always all caps for some reason. And you're like, this is an algorithmically generated brand with maybe fake or AI stock photos or something like that.

And I'm like, this is just knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff and possibly something that could explode if it gets too hot. And you see these like very middling reviews of the product, but instead of $12 for four, it's like 12 for $4. Yeah. And you're like, oh, okay. People who are looking for the cheapest and assorting book price, they're gonna buy this.

And there's just no way that this rechargeable battery pack for your iPhone is as good as a good brand.

Oobah Butler: It's easier if you've got like [00:55:00] the privilege of being able to make more ethical, you know, decisions with your consumption, then that is a kind of a privilege. Amazon tends to be the cheapest. So I don't begrudge the consumers for using Amazon.

Oh, it's not

Jordan Harbinger: the consumer. It's the fact that Amazon goes, oh, you stole the patent and product from this other place and now you're selling their product. Even though it's technically illegal and hurting one of our other brands. They've got a

Oobah Butler: kind of like a pipeline of the relationship between sort of manufacturers in China and Amazon is so closed and there's countless stories, which Amazon is such a, like a wild West.

It's such a hard platform to get your head around as someone who sells on it. Like the amount I spoke to different people who lost their whole livelihoods overnight because there's been some sort of pattern or something they had, has been completely. Taken over by a manufacturer inside selling it themselves and then you're done or you're locked outta your account.

There's something, some problem, or I couldn't believe how clunky the whole customer service the, as a seller. Yeah. And Moira Vagal, she's a [00:56:00] professor at, I think Northeastern, we speak to her in the film and she's got so many stories. I don't wanna get this wrong, but it's, can't remember someone who was in Virginia who.

Tried to raise something with Amazon because they were selling a ban substance that was technically poisonous to consumers. And by the time they took it down, it Moira estimated that something like 25,000 more of that product had been sold to consumers. For a company of that size, the platform just can't keep up.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there's too many sellers. There's no way to verify at all. They don't have any pass through sort of liability. You know how you can post anything on Facebook, even if it's a complete lie. Amazon, I'm gonna have to research this a little bit more, but I'm gonna go ahead and just assume that they don't have product liability from every seller because that would be impossible to manage.

Additionally, I can guarantee they don't because they would be much more careful about, Hey, I want to go on there and sell vape cartridges that are made with a poisonous substance. They would've to verify that's safe for people to consume. And since they don't do that, that means [00:57:00] nobody's suing them into oblivion for having not done that.

Oobah Butler: We tried to find products that were sold and I think they have more liability when that's sold and fulfilled by them for sure. Oh, that makes sense. 'cause then they're more hands drawn. Yeah, exactly. Whereas the products that are by third parties, I think they're just listing it at that point. They're just platform.

It's like eBay.

Jordan Harbinger: If you sell something weird on eBay and the person sent it to you and it's covered in dog poop, it's, look, man, we just list product. I didn't see it. I don't expect it. There's no reps and warranties. There's, I think it's section two 30 is the one for speech. I don't know if, if it's expanded to products, but there's a similar sort of, Hey, it's not our fault, not our problem kind of thing.

You found other problems with Amazon. You had your, was it your nieces ordering all kinds of things?

Oobah Butler: Yeah, so there's a lot of products that we found on them, and this was all products that were sold and fulfilled by Amazon. They were all sold directly by them, just to make it legally much clearer. Yeah. I have my nieces e penny, who was I think five and seven, or five, six and seven at the time.

Order different items that in the UK are trading regulators. So your [00:58:00] version of the UM, FTC, is that the regulator for trade?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Federal Trade Commission. Yeah. Yeah. It depends. But there's also like FDA for food. I think it was

Oobah Butler: FTC. I think that as is called trading standards. There's different things like certain blades, you know, loose blades, things like aerosols, rat, poison, what else did we buy?

Yeah, just huge weapons and things like that. Knives,

Jordan Harbinger: saws, rat poison. Things that were like, not small pocket knives, but there was one that was like a carpenter knife. And I looked at it and I was like, wow, that's. Really dangerous.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. And these were things that were sold on Phil ba. The one was Amazon branded.

The thing is with these is that technically for every single one of these, they should have a minimum fine of 5,000 pounds or whatever that is. They don't care about that six or $7,000. Yeah. That's technically what they should be fined. If they're one of these sales goes through, and you can prove it because we had them all sent to lockers, or majority of them sent to lockers.

There can be no age verification within that process. There's three opportunities for age verification. The moment it's [00:59:00] listed, the moment it's delivered, and whether it's on the packaging, I think. I see. So if you, when you buy it, that's one. It's where it starts

Jordan Harbinger: when they hand

Oobah Butler: it to you. That's the other.

And the third one is

Jordan Harbinger: written on the package. Huh?

Oobah Butler: It's not even on the mailman because the packages weren't. Packaged in a way that communicated that there was something inside needed ID to serve. That's kind of the way it works. And uh, yeah, every single one of the items, we ordered 200 different orders and didn't get idd once for any of them.

They all got sent to lockers. So other side of a massive, you know, whatever highway super, they're supermarket you can go to there, you pick 'em up, all you need is the code and Bob's your uncle. Wow. You get yourself a weapon. You know, we went to the trading standards, the regulator, and they said, yeah, this is great.

You've got a case here. We don't have the capacity to go after them. You know, they said we can't find them because Yeah. Why? Because we just don't have the resources. It's kind of a weird sort of catch 22, right?

Jordan Harbinger: You're subject to a fine. Okay. We did it thousands of times. Well, I don't have time to give you the ticket.

Yeah, [01:00:00] exactly. That's what it, imagine if a cop pulled you over and said, do you know how fast you're going? Yeah. I was going 150 miles an hour over the speed limit. That's right. I'm all out of paper though, so you're in luck today. I don't have my book with me. Yeah,

Oobah Butler: that's it. Another thing I saw when I was kind of working in this space for a little bit was just different smaller sellers who would get fined and it's just a little sad, you know, that these kind of behemoths from my experience can act a little bit with impunity,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

So the Amazon probably helped them get fined these small, Hey look, we got noticed that you delivered something. We're gonna fine you, we'll take it outta your account. Or you can pay them directly and then prove it to us. Oh, we're getting fined. Yeah. Suddenly we don't have the resources to put any of our people

Oobah Butler: on this one.

Sorry folks. It's difficult to make that, to help Amazon be better when there's no jeopardy for them,

Jordan Harbinger: right? No, we have a 1 million pound fine. Huh? We have $150,000 lawyer that's gonna argue this until the end of time. So we're gonna negotiate that fine down to a hundred thousand pounds and then just not pay it and wait [01:01:00] for them to try and collect it and then dodge that.

Geez. Well, we just heard about how Oobah broke into Amazon's inner sanctum and sold bottles of, uh, liquid commentary. This on the other hand, coming up is completely legal, doesn't involve industrial espionage and might even make your life easier. Go figure. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Chime.

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Happy to surface codes for you. Yes, it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of [01:06:00] my conversation with Oobah Butler, tell me how you tricked Amazon into finally air quotes, paying taxes.

Oobah Butler: So what I did was I'd read this book called Money Land by Oliver Bullough. A brilliant book about Oh yeah.

Corporate Tax Avoidance. Yeah. I did a show with Oliver about Money Land on the Show. No way. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: It was a while ago. Really? Yeah. I love that book. It was great. The memory that stands out is he used to give tours of London and be like, this is the Prime Minister of Nigeria's House. It's worth 150 million pounds.

No one is ever there. Yeah, exactly. Just a wallet

Oobah Butler: for this guy. The Kleptocracy Tours, wasn't it? Yes. Kleptocracy Tours and it's like,

Jordan Harbinger: wait, why does the guy whose salary is $40,000 a year own a 150 pound mansion in South Kensington that he doesn't live in?

Oobah Butler: Yeah, it's fascinating that rabbit holes of global finance.

I loved that book and it really stuck with me. And there was one bit of it, the Chinese kleptocracy getting money out of China by using Japanese surrogates. They would basically pay [01:07:00] like a Chinese lady to have their child and then technically they would have a Chinese Japanese child and that way they could give them some of the money that they had in China.

Crosstalk: Oh, I see. Probably

Oobah Butler: get their money off the child before they turned 18 and then it was fine, you know? But it's absurd.

Jordan Harbinger: So I don't really have parents, I was just a person who made so that they could transfer $800 million outta China. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Here's a hundred grand for your participation. Exactly.

Yeah. Good luck.

Oobah Butler: Good luck. Yeah, that's dark. It's really dark. And I read that book and I was really struck by the corporate tax avoidance really bothered me. And you know, in 2020, Amazon had paid zero in corporation tax in the uk and I just wanted to do something that would be a way of, it's quite a dry subject, right?

Like me and you are enthusiastic about it. I imagine a lot of listeners right now aren't, it's quite hard to communicate about in a way that really paying taxes is like a difficult thing to communicate about. But what I focused on was like a part of where your tax money goes, which is actually something that gets people motivated, which was potholes [01:08:00] and infrastructure.

And you know, the idea being that, you know, Amazon use our infrastructure that that tax money pays for, but they don't contribute in a proportionate way. So why don't I help them out with that? If they're gonna deliver stuff, used trucks on the roads, then hey, I'm gonna cut out the middleman. And uh, what I did was I ordered a load of cement from Amazon that was sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

I actually did it in California and I did it in the UK and filled in a lot of potholes that were driving people crazy viral potholes. And then what I did was I filed for a refund, said that I didn't want it after I'd used it and filled the package with sand that I got from the beach and then sent it back to Amazon and they gave me my money back.

Jordan Harbinger: So they don't open the packages on returns, I assume.

Oobah Butler: Apparently not. I mean, no. We had other tips around what happens with their returns. I assume they just weigh it. That's easier. Yeah. You just weigh a thousand packages. That's what I heard. Yeah, that's what I heard. Yeah. I mean, there was sand pouring out of it really.

So it couldn't have been a great [01:09:00] check of the packages Yeah. That we sent back. Oh man. Fraud. Yes, you're right. Before I'd done any of that, my, I have a lawyer that I'm talking to in the film, and the lawyer says, yeah, that's fraud. That's not clever. Don't do that. That's not big or clever. You're in trouble.

And what I'd done is, before I did any of that, I'd create a, an offshore company in Belize where they have this ultra secrecy and privacy around their offshore companies. And I created a business, made an Amazon business account for that business, and then ordered all of the cement via Belize. So technically this is also how

Jordan Harbinger: Amazon Dodges taxes, they have their headquarters in Ireland or something.

That's right. Yep. Luxembourg. So you're, you made a shell company. So when they go after you for fraud, they find that you live in Belize and that you're nobody.

Oobah Butler: I just did a freelance gig for this company. You can't come after me. I just did a little gig. The company is called Whole Maintenance and Repair Corp, which is an acronym is HMRC, which is the name of the British Tax Service.

Oh, it's

Jordan Harbinger: like the IRS? Yeah, exactly. For Majesty's revenue collection or something. My

Oobah Butler: Majesty's revenue and customs. I [01:10:00] was close. Yeah, you were. It's a guess. And yeah, basically, you know, you try and get anything outta Belize, you can't. They're very private and secretive and yeah. So if they wanted to pursue that, the idea was that the film itself is an admission, but it was to make a point, well, if you come after me, then you are yourself admitting that you're operating here too, right?

So you should be. Paying tax year.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. So man, were people stoked? You filled the potholes.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, they loved it. Yeah. Yeah, they absolutely loved it. It was really popular when this film came out in the US about a year ago, this went to the front page of Reddit, massively popular. And when I, you know, in the street now, people always come up to me and ask me about the Amazon pothole.

It's usually normally the fake restaurant thing, or I presented Catfish on MTV, the UK version. Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: you did? For Three Seasons. Oh, that's

Oobah Butler: such a good show. So if I'm like, from the middle of the country, people will know me from Catfish. But here it's, yeah. This kind of esoteric point about corporate tax avoidance and, and that kind of, as I said, with the piss bottles or, or the egg on the foot or whatever, it's trying to create images that stick in people's minds and communicate about something that's, [01:11:00] to me quite complicated, but is worthy of people's attention.

It was this first thing I'd done for television on my own, that I'd done myself. IE ped it, I wrote it with my two collaborators and, um, I was really proud of it. The

Jordan Harbinger: last film that you made? Million in 90 Days. When is that out? Because I watched it, but I don't think that was the final release that

Oobah Butler: is out on British television.

Okay. It's gonna be out in the us It'll be out at some point. Okay. But there'll be clips and things coming out. There's press, there's this, there's different things that I'll be putting out. 'cause it's shot here. A lot of it's shot in New York. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You basically told Channel four or something like that, which is a UK production, like

Oobah Butler: the bc

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

So you said, Hey, I'm gonna make a million dollars in 90 days. They're like, how are you gonna do that? You're like, don't worry about it. I'll figure that out later. And then you attempt to make money through somewhat legitimate means and it's like really hard. Go figure. And one of the things you do is you start a sportswear company run by children.

So sweatshop essentially, and it involves a cigarette brand and crypto scams I guess. Uh, things like that. And then, [01:12:00] and you end up, I don't know, is it fair to say. Skimming money from Wall Street Banks. Not exactly that, but

Oobah Butler: yeah, I mean the film kind of ended up being, it's sort of a, was about moving here.

The cultural difference between London and New York and how I was fascinated moving here, how the difference of ways the kind of moneymen talk about money and breathe money and believe in it. That lines up with the cultural moment of people being insecure with their incomes. Everyone's struggling and the biggest celebrities and the arbiters of our cultures at the moment are like people who talk about making money and discuss how to make it easily and how do you keep it, how do you, you know, it feels like everyone's got a twist of that.

Well, here's my supplement, here's my educational class. I get it or get it. But I always just felt curious because I don't think we're any better off because of it. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a rock star, and now it feels like kids that wanna be billionaires and that's fine, but I don't think that is gonna necessarily end up with more thrifty kids.

I think it's just the dream

Jordan Harbinger: is almost just [01:13:00] marketing. It is. One of the things I found strange and disturbing in the film was you're talking to these guys in the street, what do you wanna be? And these guys like a billionaire and you're like, how? And he goes, affiliate marketing, which for people who don't know, is like when you get an email that's like, Hey, have you tried this new brand of air filter?

Click here to buy it. They get a small percentage of that. It's like, you know how many. Dick pills. Yeah. Or whatever you've gotta sell as an affiliate to make a billion dollars. It's in the name, billions of dollars worth, and it's just absolutely ludic. You run out of people on earth before you can become a billionaire using affiliate market.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's just the dumbest. You realize when you hear that kid, he's only learned about this from TikTok and Instagram and has absolutely no idea how to even do the math on this. No. 'cause you're not even going. The idea that you could even make a million dollars affiliate marketing. I know affiliate marketers that make millions, this scale of what they do is enormous really.

And it's information products. Their industries barely exist anymore. These guys were experts at what they did 15 years [01:14:00] ago, and there's not that much room at the top because you need hundreds of thousands of leads. You need to be able to generate them at a cost that's lower than what you're making. I mean, it's a real business.

Oobah Butler: The whole film is me almost asking myself the question, how much of this is bollocks? Yeah. Yeah. I make a Hype Beast brand, you know, based on the methods of someone like Banksy. Yeah, I'm gonna do publicity stunts, I'm gonna build up a brand and I'm gonna try and sell it after 90 days, and I'm gonna hope that I can sell it for a million.

We do one drop, it gets covered. I get profiled in GQ around it completely, legitimately. I was like, hell, this is crazy. I usually have to lie to get this kind of coverage. We get millions of views on the teaser clips for the brand. We have influencers talking about it. It works. Making a legal child workshop is deliberately provocative.

That's the point. There's a company called Mischief that does stuff like this. They're great. They did this thing where they had these thing called the Satan shoes, which were like copies of night sneakers that had a drop of Lil Nas X's blood in each set. Oh my God. They were 666 pairs of them sold for a thousand dollars each and then wow.

[01:15:00] What that does is it raise 22 million and or cool company, but my plan was that I could probably do something like that. I could manufacture controversy like a Banksy and sell this company at the end of this period. Which probably could have worked. But look, we did one drop. I made $13,000 off it. It wasn't gonna work.

I built up the size of the thing. I launched my own educational platform, did a trailer for it. 2 million people watched the trailer. Oh. So it

Jordan Harbinger: was like, I'm gonna teach you how to make money online. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, which is funny 'cause that's as credible as most people teaching money.

Yeah. How to make money online. Exactly. You just pulled it out of your ads and filmed it. I

Oobah Butler: did, yeah. No, the trailer I made for it was how to trick an art collector into buying a stick from your garden for, it's 500 pounds, but six, $700 or whatever. Now I do this thing and it's a great clip, like it was one that I wrote.

I'm good at writing viral clips. 2 million people watch that. We sold one in the first 24 hours. Oh my God.

Jordan Harbinger: Conversion is low.

Oobah Butler: Look to me like that, me putting it in that film is not good for me. It makes me look bad, but I think for a public service, it's good. [01:16:00] I think people should see the Instagram versus reality of 2 million views.

Coverage and all this and all this. That was the one I paid for the Forbes article. For in In one sale. One sale, 24 hours. So we did all this stuff and there's a kind of character guy that I met doing this called Iram, co-founder of Venmo. He's in the film a lot. You know, we kind of, at one point we're making a company together and then he disappears because he, my ideas I think are a bit too raunchy for him.

And while I'm there, he tries to get me in on his mean coin that he makes, which is called Jelly. My Jelly. You know, I kind of think, well, you know, I don't really wanna do that. If I had, according to him, if I'd have done that, I'd probably have invested $400. Couldn't fact check this, but I'd have made a million if I'd have done it at that time.

Well, if

Jordan Harbinger: you'd sold at the top of the whatever hype coin, which is basically impossible,

Oobah Butler: it's difficult. But when you've got the person who starts the coin, you know, saying he

Jordan Harbinger: could tell you when to sell it, which is he could illegal, but

Oobah Butler: whatever. Sure. But maybe not anymore. 'cause it's not security. Oh that's, yeah, that's true.

Yeah. He made, you know, he had the number one trend, meme coin on the planet, on Solana. And I could have been involved with it if I'd have been able to [01:17:00] drop my ethics around money. Maybe I have another experience with the crypto companies. I end up not receiving some of the money for the work that I did with them.

And one of the things I learned from Iram is he just, anything that happens to him he sells is a win. And that's an interesting way of living your life. You've be living your business and we end up doing this kind of auction for 10% of me, for the rest of my life in a penthouse in the city. And we, the reserve is a million.

We have all these private equity people, these venture capital people in the room. It feels like it could be a humiliation, but I'm confident we make 200 in the room, hit the reserve, and then. Word, the offer gets to somebody.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I know her. She's a very smart person and she is, it's very sweet. Yeah. So she decides to make you an offer.

Yeah.

Oobah Butler: Yeah. But the offer is contingent. This person works in the crypto space. It's contingent on me getting involved too. You know, I talked the other day to, uh, mutual friend John about it, and he said that would've been such a good deal for her. Yeah. But at the time I was so [01:18:00] desperate that I couldn't see it.

We signed the contract, we agreed to it. Then I kind of have a crisis of confidence. I talk to her. We actually lost the scene where I go back and we talk about why I'm not gonna do it. 'cause she's, I don't look at crypto like that and I kind of wish that we'd left that in a little bit. She's awesome and I would love to work with her on something else.

It was just that specific offer, big

Jordan Harbinger: venture capital. So you sold to her in a contract? It was on a, the back of a napkin and then you leveraged that somehow? Yeah. Tell me, so I

Oobah Butler: leveraged that with, I can't say the name of the bank, but a bank on Wall Street who, based upon that offer that I'd made was a legitimate offer from a hedge fund that we both know the owner of.

Yeah. We made the offer and I was able to get access to 80% of the value that that offer had established me. A very low interest loan.

Jordan Harbinger: If the offer was 1 million for 10%, the valuation is 10 million and

Oobah Butler: we got access to 8 million from the bank. Yeah. And that would've been, which was again, like I said about the thing with Money Land and Oliver Bullough and things like that.

When I started the film, I was interested in the difference [01:19:00] of how an average person would think about how to make a million versus how

Jordan Harbinger: an average person is like, I gotta make a lot of tacos.

Oobah Butler: Yes, my food truck has to be realistic. Or at marketing, yes. Or whatever, you know? But what the people with real money are doing is leveraging a scenario.

They create value and they borrow against it. That's a smart way of doing it. There's another guy who in the film as well, Jim, who I think you might mention, Jim McKelvy. Yeah. He's awesome. From Stripe. Yeah. A big fan of Jim. We were texting about it. He loved the idea because he's obviously in a bracket of.

Finances that. He's a billionaire. He's a billionaire and he's in the film and I ask him very politely for a million and he just laughs in my face. Yeah, that's the appropriate response. Yeah, exactly. I said, it's the equivalent to like $20 for me, but he can have it. And he's, no, but he said that there's massive benefits to doing it as well because if you're going in, say you wanna buy a social media platform and you wanna get access to a lot of lines of credit, you wanna buy other big ticket things and you can put down, you know, say for me it would've been the valuation of that company, which had been established by the offer that I'd been attracted.

[01:20:00] But at the same time, you can earn interest on the stocks that you leverage in order to get that. So it's, there's so many benefits and you know, if I'd have earned that million in the uk, I'd have paid 450,000 of it to taxes. If I'd have leveraged it and borrowed it like I wanted to, I'd have paid

Jordan Harbinger: zero.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So if you have $10 million in stock. I'm using round numbers. Instead of selling all of it and having to pay cap gains, you borrow against it and you say, look, my stock portfolio is the collateral. I want this $5 million house. Give me a $5 million cash loan. And then you have bought that, and then all you need to do is service the principal on that and the interest, ideally.

But yeah, you don't

Oobah Butler: need to sell the stock and then pay the taxes on the stock.

The, exactly that. What you're saying now, is it like the Oliver Bullough thing was what I was trying to explore with this film. It's a weird film. You know, I've just started doing interviews about it. I've got a profile I do in the, um, the London Times that I did yesterday and having to conceptualize and think about it for the f it's a cinema verite type of film.

It follows me doing something. There is 90 days, I've gotta make a [01:21:00] million. And those are the terms of the film. Very different to, I'm gonna fuck with Amazon or I'm gonna make a number one restaurant. It's actually more similar to that, but there's a lot of weird kind of cul-de-sacs and dead ends that happen in it.

And that's what we bargain for. And there was this book that I read by Mount and Amos called Money. It's about character. It lives between London and New York and just dealing with the ethics of money and more egalitarian but grotesque. The kind of people that I met on my journey were fascinating, you know?

And I feel like I'm constantly talking to people who are one degree of separation away from federal prison. Yeah. Oh yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of that and

Jordan Harbinger: there's a lot of that on this show, possibly present company, including depending on how this film shakes out.

Oobah Butler: Yes. But yeah, I mean you have to walk a fine line, but like the fine line on one side is smart business, the other side is a jail cell.

Jordan Harbinger: It's very close. And sometimes you see people cross the line and you go, how did you get away with parole? Or a fine or, oh, it was too many resources for the [01:22:00] prosecution to get the evidence together because it was international and Spain wasn't interested in putting the resources. Isn't crazy, didn't have a case and it, so now that guy just gets to keep $50 million and it's, yeah.

Isn't that crazy? It is actually insane.

Oobah Butler: I feel like that there's something very New York specifically, there's something quite interesting about the way that like white color crime. People will go away for something for a couple years, a year or two, maybe two or three years, they'll get a Rikers or whatever.

They're out and they're back to it immediately. And as someone who's just, I moved here 18 months ago, two years ago, there's something fascinating about that. I dunno, I'm, look, I, I'm not saying that Britain is any better, I'm just saying it was something that, this is the first film I've made since moving here, and it doesn't strike me as weird or a coincidence that it's about this stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: In closing

Oobah Butler: here, what's the next thing you want to expose?

Mm-hmm. I am working actually on a, I can't actually say details, but I'm working on a show here for American [01:23:00] media. I genuinely don't feel like any industry, any institution is completely clean from this stuff and, and a lot of it for me is like the excitement of figuring out how stuff works.

And sometimes you get it wrong and it is way better than what you thought. My educational platform, there's a moment where we get 2 million views and the clip kind of goes viral from it. I thought, wow, I'm, this might be it. I might make a million legitimately, maybe

Jordan Harbinger: except for the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about in the videos.

But yeah, other than that, they

Oobah Butler: might, I might sell enough. The whole thing for me comes from a place of curiosity as well. And so there's an incredible amount of stuff here that I really. I'm interested by, and there's a lot, we are way more different culturally, the Brits and the Americans than I and I, well, I actually can't talk to America.

I can talk to New Yorkers because I live here. I feel like it's very different when you get outta New York. Is that fair to

Jordan Harbinger: say?

Yeah. The United States. Yeah. Yeah. This is a unique place.

Oobah Butler: So I can talk about New York and I feel like the show that I'm making will, there'll be a couple of other places that I'm intrigued by to go and, and have a look at.

But yeah.

I [01:24:00] see.

Jordan Harbinger: Looking forward to that, man. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming on the show.

Oobah Butler: Cheers, Jordan. It was great. I appreciate it.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. That's our show for today. I am really glad Amazon was not sponsoring this episode. Big thanks to Oobah Butler for taking us on a tour through the weird, wonderful, and occasionally kind of pretty gross underbelly of internet fame from a shed that somehow became London's hottest restaurant to the nonsense that made corporate policies look like Swiss cheese.

If you enjoyed hearing how smoke and mirrors actually becomes a business plan, do me a favor rate, maybe even write a very real review of this podcast if you haven't done so yet. In the meantime, all things Oobah Butler will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support this podcast.

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