And that's it. Thanks for watching! You can support MrFudgeMonkeyz on Patreon. See you next time! Thanks for watching! See you next time! Thanks for watching! See you next time! Thanks for watching! So then that's acting as a flashlight. All right, that works. That works for me. Well, so Eli, your story began a long time ago. As a young child, and by the way, this is not something we hear all the time, that someone begins working for themselves at an age as early as 12. I mean, I wanna learn about that. I wanna know more. I know that we'll get some people intrigued here. And there's the other thing. I mean, some people's like, well, how could you possibly be working at 12? We're in the States, and we don't work at that age that early, and so all these questions, let's kind of bust those myths and get them out of the way, and then let's just make it happen. So what got you into it? And I'm sure you went to school with all that stuff, but that's something that's unique about you. Yeah, yeah, so my entrepreneurial spirit has kind of always persisted. It came to me at a younger age than most. I feel like just because I had a larger awareness for humanity and existence and society, based on the fact that I was just very curious, I asked a lot of questions. As long as I can remember, I have always just looked out at the world and been like, what the hell is going on here? We're all, I remember when I was watching kids play kickball at recess when I started school, and I was just like, we're all just like naked people wearing clothes, and we mowed down all these trees to build the school here. Like I was thinking very intensely about every little situation. So it just led me to eventually just realize that everything kind of revolved around money, and that if I can get some money in my possession, essentially I won't have to listen to anyone. And I was always about freedom. And my parents were, they were parents, they're telling me what to do and stuff, and trying to raise me how they saw fit. I had bigger plans. I looked at people around me, parents, teachers, authority figures who were trying to tell me who to be. And I would just look at all of them thinking, I don't want to be anything like any of you guys. So it was easy for me to really see through a lot of BS and realize that people were telling me things not for my own personal wellbeing or for the best of me, but at my deficit, it would work against me to listen to them and to essentially assimilate, throw my dreams away, graduate from a college and work for someone else, which is what I essentially have been rebelling against in my own personal life since the beginning. It didn't start out as like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to own a business. It was literally just, I want M &M's. M &M's were my favorite thing at the time, and those cost money. And I just knew that if I had enough M &M's, I'd be happy. And fast forward, fast forward 20 something years, and I can afford so many M &M's now that I don't even want them anymore. Now, I don't even, I try not to eat sugar. There's four other things, that's all. Well, so thank you for that intro. And I want to break some of that stuff down because you've touched on a lot of things that are important to our listeners. And our audiences are diverse. We have parents, we have younger crowds and people that have ambition and vision of their life. But you've touched on a lot of things. First of all, I love the wandering and pondering spirit of yours, whereby you question things. And I think that's something that's lacking in a lot of us. Unfortunately, not everybody has that ability to just question everything and ask why and always try to analyze what's going on. Why is this this way? And when you start asking questions, and technically what you find is like, sometimes answers that don't make sense. And it's the reality of things. I mean, if anybody right now listening to watching starts asking questions about everything that's going on around them, they're going to open their eyes to a point where they'd be like, damn, what the hell do I live? I mean, this is a whole different world that we're in. Because really that's what it is. We have this almost a veil that is upon us. And we are just conditioned to everything that's around us, the way it's been told to us all our lives. And most people will take it for granted. There's no questioning of things. Now, you started that at an early age. And I love the way he's like, why is the school this way? Why people are doing this way? We're all, and you see, asking questions. Now, someone at that age typically doesn't have that in their mind. I mean, and I love what you said about you wanted M &Ms and it revolved around money. Because if you have money, you can buy whatever you want. And at that point, that's what you wanted. And that's a big thing. And by the way, it is a trait that you have that is unique because not everybody has that. And then you said something very interesting that parents, and typically all people around us, listen, I'm a parent, I can tell you. There is a degree of that in all of us where we want our kids to have a certain way of growth and a certain way of future and try to almost guide them. And sometimes to your point, it's not really what they want and not understanding that specifically and not allowing them to be who they were or who they really wanna be, it's a problem, right? But you saw that early on, it didn't make sense that everybody, and I love the concept that everybody has this dynamic that we are almost conditioned to, it's robotic. We are born, you go to school, you're being told that you're gonna finish that school, you're gonna go to the next level, the next level, the next level, go to college, potentially get that master's or at least a bachelor's and hopefully that gets you a good job and then you wanna get more, you need to get more education and so on and so forth. Now we say the word education, I mean, ultimately today, you can have so much knowledge without having to go to school. That's two different things. I mean, being intelligent and intellectual versus being educated in a formal education format, those are two different things, but it's been the system. And then that system is geared towards creating labor employees. And those are the ones that actually do the job. And by the way, any entrepreneur out there somehow uses people to work for them and within their companies, but the concept is there. And everybody, for the most part, is getting that concept from the get -go. That's what you're being told since you're a kid. That's when I was a kid, same thing. My parents were like, you wanna go to school, you wanna do this, you wanna get this, or you can get a good job, and ultimately a good job will result into some money, and then you grew up and stuff. And I kinda bought in that Kool -Aid for a long time. You know what I mean? But you kinda challenged that status quo, and you basically, you were rebellious about it, and you did. And for our people, by the way, there's nothing wrong with going through that system. If that's what you want, if you're okay with it, then that's the system that you gotta go through. I find today, more than ever, people, because of the technology, because the access of knowledge, because of the smartphones and everything that we have available to us, and the platforms and the social and stuff, people can do a lot more things today, differently from what, like 20 years ago, period and out, right? It's just the way it is. So it's creating a whole opportunity for younger folks to do a lot more than, essentially, how it's been traditionally over the last century or so. So I just wanted to clarify that and break that down for our audiences here, because it is a very important piece where someone is already destined to be in the world of business, entrepreneurship, and whether it's a choice or not, how you wanna go about it. I mean, you wanted to go the other route and do stuff. Now, I still am not clear. I mean, did you actually go to school to do the same process, or you actually challenged that whole thing and did it in a different way? I went to college. I was actually trying to major in chemistry. I was pretty much just like, I'm just gonna go here to just say I went to, I like tried it out. And like I knew going in, I was gonna drop out. You went through the motions. I was just like, yeah, yeah. I just, and I started a Amazon store, which is like in the same vein of the eBay. So I've been pretty consistently doing e -commerce type stuff. And ended I up dropping out after like two or three years. And after that, I spent most of my twenties like traveling the world and just trying to understand other perspectives and just see as much as possible and just basically just understand why we're here. And pretty much figured it out. And now I'm just like, all right, I'll just enjoy living while I'm here. Well, hold on, hold on. So you said you figured out why we're here. I mean, that's a big question. I mean, are you able to share with us that enlightenment about why we're here? I mean, at least the way you discovered it, just curious. Cause that's a big question that I think we all are in the search for the answer, right? Like why are we in this world? What's the purpose? And it is a tough question. I mean, it depends what angle you go about it. I mean - Have you heard of the Sumerian tablets? Yes, but I'm not too clear about the details, but yeah. So the Sumerian tablets are the oldest document written on earth. And they essentially tell the creation story of humanity and can be corroborated with other ancient pieces of literature and texts that have been found on like every major continent. And they contain all the major stories in the Bible, like Adam and Eve and like all the old Testament stuff, like the great flood and the tower of Babel. And basically says that humans were created as a slave race for the Anunnaki to mine gold, which kind of is how the world still works today. Like we're all just a bunch of slaves that are trying to collect gold for our higher ups. It's essentially the same thing. Like humanity's just always been like this. It's just, it's a business unlike any other group of living things or animals. Humanity is innately tied to money and an economy and a mathematical algorithm of resources. And I think initially money did represent resources, but now I see money more as representing attention because, well, it can be both for sure. But the amount of money someone has is generally correlated with the amount of attention they have. Like any famous person you see, unless it's their first time going viral for anything ever, there's a good chance that they have at least a million dollars. Like anyone you hear talking, like I don't think this podcast is gonna be getting a hundred thousand plays for this episode, but if it was, we'd both be rich probably. You know what I mean? It's like there's - From your mouth to God's mouth, to Gazys as they say, right? You know, hey, you never know. This is a pretty interesting show. I think it's gonna have its own play. Well, I'm just saying that based on the fact that none of the podcasts I have done have gotten there. sort Not any of explanation for me or you as individuals, but I just think the attention factor translates into money very easily because that's why I'm trying to build up my following and do like branding and stuff. I just had my first clip hit a million views today on Instagram. So that was pretty cool. We need to talk about that, but yeah, we'll catch on that one. Yeah, yeah, that just happened today. So I mean, basically you keep pumping out a million plus views on your clips. That's gonna turn into money somewhere along the way. It's like you create a product or a service, subscribe to my Patreon for my podcast or my business that I'm gonna bring up now. It's called Golden Cricket, where I make cricket protein bars made of actual crickets because crickets are 65 % protein by weight. They contain all nine essential amino acids. They use 2 ,000 times less water to produce than whey protein. They're basically the food of the future. They are high in calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, potassium, and I'm also a standup comedian. So as a comedian, the worst thing you can have in the audience is crickets. So I figure we'll just kill them all and turn them into food. And there's revenge served in every bite. So there's a lot of layers to it. Oh, hold on. I gotta do this. I had to do it. It's crickets, Matty. Sorry. You just had that queued up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, man. Well, yeah. So like, you know, I build my following enough that I can pivot those sales to my product or not sales, pivot those audience members to my product page and convert that into a sale. Or - It's the right way to do it. Or I'm growing my music catalog and my podcast, like all these things. I'm creating a bunch of things that I can funnel people to once I build the audience. Which is, it's a weird thing to be trying to do, just to be consciously thinking about how can I appeal to the maximum number of people on the internet while maintaining my authenticity and integrity. It's a weird mental gymnastic you gotta do with yourself. And then I end up putting out stuff that I don't even like. That's what happened with this clip specifically. I made a stupid joke about being gay. And I was like, I haven't been putting up content much. I should just put one up. And I ran it past a friend. I was like, should I post this one? And they're like, yeah, it's funny. I'm like, ah, really? I don't really like it that much. I posted it. And I think that was three days ago and it's been gaining traction ever since I posted it. And it just crossed a million views like an hour ago. Instagram. Yeah. Ooh. And I've been posting a bunch of videos on YouTube shorts under Octavius Thunder. So if you like me talking now, then I do more of that on my page. But the YouTube shorts, there's something going on in the algorithm right now where it's just bumping people up. And I do these things where I film me talking to my dog and it has like a vine type of recording where you just hold it down and then it records and you let your thumb up, it stops recording. So I can flip the camera around and like have a conversation with my dog with his just like little face after everything I say. So I can make like these stupid jokes and then it'll be his face looking at me like that was a stupid joke. And I think that blueprint right there has made it for a very attractive piece of content that I can just do whenever. And so I'll put like 10, 15 of those a day out. Like minimal, minimal effort. Like I'll press record without even knowing what I'm gonna say. And I'll just make something up and it doesn't matter. And then they'll blow up and I'll gain like around 30 new subscribers a day. I'm up to like 1 ,637 subscribers right now on YouTube. And I've been doing this for like a couple months. Wow, very nice. So yeah, I've been trying to test out the social media virality algorithm for quite some time. And I just now feel like I'm gaining some success with it. So, but it's very up and down as is any success in life. There's one aspect of you don't wanna get too used to the stuff blowing up cause then it doesn't happen. You're like, oh, I suck. But then also like you shouldn't even care about it at all cause it doesn't mean anything if it doesn't turn into money yet. But also that's not true. You still have to care about it cause it's on the way there. So it just really jumbles up your priorities. Cause you've been taught your whole life to not care about likes and stuff, but then it's like, oh, well now it matters now. These are things like views and stuff. If you're running a media based business or you're measuring your marketing analysis, like these are key performance indicators that you would show to venture capitalists. Like these, it's important data that can affect financing.