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

Summary

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The Jordan Harbinger Show

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

Release Date: November 6, 2025
Guest: Oobah Butler (British filmmaker, writer, social engineer)
Theme: Turning deception, performance art, and pranks into cultural commentary and insight about trust, media, and the digital age.

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Episode Overview

In this engaging and offbeat episode, Jordan Harbinger talks with Oobah Butler, famed British filmmaker, social engineer, and professional trickster. Oobah is best known for transforming a shed into “London’s top-rated restaurant” and packaging Amazon driver urine as the #1 Amazon energy drink—all as part of elaborate stunts that highlight the blurred line between reality and deception in the digital age. Together, they unpack Oobah’s wildest projects, including his viral Vice documentaries, his infiltration of Amazon’s inner workings, his take on corporate loopholes, and why his performance art matters now more than ever.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Who is Oobah Butler? (03:27–03:59)

• Hard to categorize: filmmaker, writer, social engineer, provocateur, sometimes called “comedian” or “journalist” but sees himself as a hybrid.
• Early work leaned “nihilistic and fun”; now aims for deeper critique while retaining humor and absurdity.

"I quite like social engineer." – Oobah Butler (03:27)

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The Fake Restaurant: “The Shed at Dulwich”

Origins & Setup (06:09–12:51)

• Oobah got his start writing fake reviews for TripAdvisor, realizing how easy it was to influence rankings and public perception.
• Created The Shed at Dulwich—a non-existent, appointment-only restaurant—in the garden shed where he lived, complete with a burner phone and a fake website.
• The menu sold “moods” instead of meals, and all food photos were staged using everyday items (like “an egg on my foot” for a gourmet dish) to mock the superficiality of food culture.
• Sourced reviews from friends/family with a style guide emphasizing exclusivity and mystique.

Virality & Human Gullibility (19:09–27:02)

• Within weeks, The Shed soared from #18,000 to #1 on TripAdvisor with only 30–60 fake five-star reviews and zero real customers.
• Real people (locals, foodies, tourists, TV execs) started desperately hunting for reservations, echoing the narrative Oobah had seeded in the style guide.
• Eventually held a single “real” night: actual customers served microwaved supermarket food, dressed up with edible flowers, surrounded by actors who raved about the meal.
• Most guests avoided criticizing the food, unwilling to trust their senses over online hype.

"Maybe a fake restaurant is possible – not just a fake review. ... I turned my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor."
—Jordan reading Oobah’s narration (12:15)

"People were repeating the kind of terms of my mythology...parroting back to me like it was gospel."
—Oobah Butler (20:12)

Takeaways: The Nature of Truth and Influence (31:27–34:31)

• The experiment showed how easily social proof, fake scarcity, and manipulated reviews override direct experience—even among “savvy” consumers.
• Oobah’s work is cited academically and culturally as a warning of the digital misinformation age.

"It was about all of us... They were conduits for us to talk about the cultural environment that we’re living in."
—Oobah Butler (34:15)

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Exposing Amazon: Warehouses, Urine Bottles, and Dangerous Loopholes

Undercover in the Warehouse (39:34–44:35)

• Oobah worked covertly in an Amazon warehouse for Channel 4, documenting harsh conditions, scanning, NDAs, and stories of workplace injuries.
• Described as “dystopian”—employees under constant surveillance, facing punitive measures for sick time or accidents.

The Urine Bottle Energy Drink (48:14–55:13)

• Discovered drivers peeing in bottles due to unrealistic quotas, then discarding bottles outside fulfillment centers worldwide.
• Collected bottles, bottled and branded as an energy drink, and managed to list and sell it as “Amazon Driver’s Urine” on Amazon’s own platform.
• Became a #1 category drink, relying on the same viral/review/algorithm “juice” as with the fake restaurant.
• Exposed Amazon’s lack of consumer safeguards—dangerous/bizarre products can slip through.

“You would have thought that the biggest e-commerce platform on the planet might have infrastructure that would protect its consumers from that. Didn’t say nothing."
—Oobah Butler (55:13)

Loopholes with Age-Restricted & Dangerous Products (58:50–61:10)

• Demonstrated how Amazon’s fulfillment-by-Amazon allows children to receive prohibited items (knives, poisons) via lockers or unverified delivery, violating safety laws.
• Regulators, though legally able to fine Amazon, confessed to lacking resources to police or sanction violations—an imbalance repeated across other platform abuses.

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Critiques of Platform, Hype, and “Making It Rich”

Performance Art as Social Critique (05:23–05:49, 75:19–77:19)

• Oobah’s pranks—whether restaurant, Amazon exposé, or viral product—serve as lucid, darkly humorous commentary on how easily platforms, consensus, and hype can be manipulated.

“Million in 90 Days”—Chasing Viral (72:22–81:50)

• Channel 4 tasked Oobah to earn $1 million in 90 days by any means—exposing the get-rich/“hustle” culture.
• Attempted to create Hypebeast brands, fake education, and provocations in the style of companies like Mischief/Banksy.
• Discovered the reality behind Instagram/LinkedIn virality: millions of views and press don't guarantee real profits ("We sold one in the first 24 hours").
• Compared people’s fantasies (affiliate marketing, dropshipping, meme coins) with reality—true riches, he finds, come from leveraging artificial value and institutional loopholes, as practiced by the genuinely wealthy.

"The whole film is me almost asking myself the question, how much of this is bollocks?" —Oobah Butler (75:19)

“What the people with real money are doing is leveraging a scenario. They create value and borrow against it.” —Oobah Butler (80:15)

Tax Avoidance, Corporate Games, & the Real Lessons (67:19–71:32)

• Inspired by Oliver Bullough's Moneyland, Oobah uses Amazon’s own products/return policies to “help them pay taxes”—filling potholes with Amazon cement, refunding the purchase via an offshore Belize shell company—mirroring legal global tax avoidance.
• Learned: True business innovation isn't always clever products—often it's gaming the system.

“If you come after me [for fraud], you are yourself admitting that you're operating here too. Right. So you should be paying tax here.”
—Oobah Butler (71:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “How much we live in a just false reality... McDonald’s isn’t going to show how they actually make the burger, it’s gross. You wouldn’t put that in the commercial.” —Jordan Harbinger (18:07)
• “It's so easy to convincingly lie to people and to have that inform the way they feel about the world. Me included. I'm not saying I'm above this.” —Oobah Butler (32:29)
• "[With Amazon]… There’s so many benefits... If I'd have earned that million in the UK, I'd have paid 450,000 in taxes. If I'd have leveraged it and borrowed it…I’d have paid zero.” —Oobah Butler (81:26)
• "You just need a burner phone from the drugstore and a computer that can register a domain.” —Jordan Harbinger (15:25)

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Key Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|:--------------:| | Oobah on defining his craft | 03:27–03:59 | | Fake reviews & “The Shed at Dulwich” begin | 06:09–12:51 | | Constructing the fake restaurant reality | 13:31–16:59 | | The experiment grows; anticipation/phone | 20:12–22:19 | | “Opening night” and reaction | 27:02–34:31 | | Social proof/lines/hype | 34:31–35:47 | | Amazon warehouse infiltration | 39:34–44:35 | | Amazon driver urine “energy drink” | 48:14–55:13 | | Listing dangerous products, regulatory issues| 58:50–61:22 | | Tax avoidance with pothole stunt | 67:19–71:32 | | Commentary on get-rich-quick/influencer culture| 72:22–81:50 | | Lending/borrowing: the wealthy’s secret | 80:15–81:50 | | Upcoming projects/closing thoughts | 84:02–85:13 |

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Tone and Style Highlights

• Playful, irreverent, and self-aware: Oobah pokes fun at himself, his audience, and the systems he manipulates.
• Candid critique: Both host and guest shine a light on the structural absurdities and ethical gray areas of modern media, commerce, and “success.”
• Curiosity over cruelty: The tone is never mean-spirited or condescending; instead, Oobah’s pranks invite all of us to question our assumptions.

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Conclusion

Oobah Butler’s wild, controversial, and hilarious pranks are more than internet stunts—they’re powerful case studies on belief, identity, and exploitation in the digital age. This episode unpacks how platforms and perception can be gamed, why most of us are susceptible, and the uncomfortable truth that most “innovation” happens in legal loopholes, not tech. Oobah’s career, part viral prank and part philosophy, holds up a mirror to a world where fact and fiction are paper thin—and offers us an entertaining, essential warning.

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Recommended if you:

• Appreciate clever, subversive social commentary
• Want to see how easily digital trust can be manipulated
• Like learning through jaw-dropping, hilarious, but thought-provoking examples

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For more from Oobah Butler, visit the episode show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
Like the episode? Write a (real!) review, and keep questioning what you see online.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is sponsored in part by Strawberry Me. So I worked with a Strawberry Me coach recently. I ended that call feeling pretty reinvigorated. That's a good word for it. Way more aligned with where I'm headed and why. It's so easy to get caught up in the day to day grind. But that session reminded me just how powerful it is. Sometimes you just step back, refocus, get clear on where you actually want to go. Coaching is forward looking. It's not about what's gone wrong, it's about where you want to be and how to actually get there. And when it comes to your career, that focus can be transformational. Whether you're trying to move up, change paths, or find more purpose in what you do, a career coach helps you identify your strengths, set real goals, take concrete steps to reach them. Even the most successful people work with coaches. Eric schmidt, the former CEO of Google, he told me on the show episode 201 that all top performing executives in Silicon Valley, they all have coaches. If the guy who ran Google swears by it, it's worth paying attention to. Here's one thing I love about Strawberry that you take a quick quiz, they match you with a coach who fits your goals and personality and you start building real momentum toward the career that you actually want.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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 want to 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, UBA Butler. He's the guy who turned a literal garden shed into London's top rated restaurant, but built a best selling Amazon product out of, well, piss really. 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. Or 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 UBA'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 best ways I can think of. Here we go with UBA 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 makes it sound like you're an influencer, which sucks too.

[UBA Butler]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's fair.

[UBA Butler]

We've got a mutual friend, John Levy. He's a behavioral 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?

[Jordan Harbinger]

You don't do like stand up sets.

[UBA Butler]

No, no, no. It's its own thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[UBA Butler]

Then people will often say journalist and people will often say comedian. And I really think I'm either, but I'm simultaneously a little bit of both. Social 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. Because if you're a comedian, like there's kind of a path, right?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Do a bunch of clubs, make sure you move to New York, try and book bigger clubs, open for somebody famous, Knock it out of the park. Dot dot. Madison Square Garden. Yeah, right. But for certain creative niches. It's funny because John 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. 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.

[UBA Butler]

But.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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, you're good, you're doing fine.

[UBA Butler]

You're on a bad path. 99% of people, you're in the top 1%.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you can pay your rent and the police aren't coming after you for panhandling. So you're in kind of that bucket too, I guess.

[Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 want to talk about that a little bit, but you've done some shenanigans, sweatshop run by kids, fake restaurant, using Amazon's return policy to fill potholes. We'll get into all that. It's like performance art. Set up is a little bit of a scam that you use to expose something dark or uncomfortable about society. Is that fair?

[UBA Butler]

That's a really 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. 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. Explore. Okay.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You start off as, let me just embarrass other people and put it on Vice. And then it becomes deeper meaning. 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 the war in Gaza or something. Let's Start with the fake restaurant. So you used to have a job writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How was that a job, by the way?

[UBA Butler]

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 going to 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 going to 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 Carly Driving folk. No, I did it 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. Now news organizations, right? Clickbait, yeah. They don't need you anymore.

[UBA Butler]

The whole ideation, the coming up of an idea, I think it's helpful to have your eye on that because ultimately, if you want to 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. 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 going to 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 Sirius XM 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.

[UBA Butler]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Basically. And 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 and 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 in the style of whatever publication it was. And I was like, this person spent maybe 20 minutes on this, probably half that.

[UBA 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 don't know. But yeah, no, you're 100% right. And in that, my new film, I end up paying for a Forbes article in that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

And was like, forbes, Georgia.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, not the state, the country of Georgia. Georgia. Right. Okay. Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

But the vertical, you know, exists on there. If you search up my net, it's now been ingested probably by chat, GPT and everything. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it just says Forbes. It doesn't say like Forbes asterisk. By the way, this isn't the official one. Like when Forbes Sri Lanka is too expensive, Forbes Georgia has your back.

[UBA Butler]

But it was like me writing the headline, me writing business genius, uber 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 create 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 got my sucker for like the Wirecut 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 going to buy the pillow. I mean, so I'm part of the other group secretly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They haven't been paid officially, but they all got the pillow for free. And one of them is their sister's pillow. You're right. The Forbes thing cracks me up because 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, UBA is in the top 30 under 30 and I'd be like, that's impressive because 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 going to pick us. And it was like, pay us five grand. Pick the category of 30 under 30 you want to be in. And I was like, category? There were like a hundred.

[UBA Butler]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So I was like, oh, so there's 130 under 30 lists. 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. Things are like Brooklyn socialite. I mean, you can just sort of 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.

[UBA 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 want to 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, as featured in Forbes Business genius. As I said, like, that will be ingested by various sort of large.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Large language. Yeah. 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 Forbes.com/30under30,/categories,/ Brooklyn, slash social, slash fashion. And you're like, whatever.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I asked Chad GPT for the one podcast, and they said Jordan Harbinger. So you must be more popular than Joe Rogan.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

ChatGPT told you that. Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I heard your audience is bigger than Joe Rogan. And I'm like, now we'd be having this conversation on my yacht first.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I love Melrose Podcast, but I would own this place and it would have a cleaner bathroom. Okay.

[UBA Butler]

I don't know. It's New York.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 and 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?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, I lived in there. So I just moved to London. I came from the Midlands. I'm from a little village called Feckenham. You know, moved down to London and back then it was probably maybe 1400. For a cheap studio apartment, it would be $1400 a month. This was 20, 15, 16. And then 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

At least it was your sewage. Probably.

[UBA 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 out of 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Little bit more like we had that yard.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, there was junk in it.

[UBA Butler]

But, like, we had foxes like you get in London. There's an unbelievable amount of foxes everywhere. Particularly south London is crazy for it. Yeah, they're everywhere. And we had a family of them in the garden. And that was quite cute.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Foxes in a major city, I guess it's better than rats. But what do they eat?

[UBA Butler]

Rubbish. Like trash.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, that makes sense.

[UBA Butler]

They eat everything. They're omnivorous. I think foxes. Foxes are great. Do you get raccoons in New York?

[Jordan Harbinger]

In New York, probably not. Just.

[UBA Butler]

I've never seen them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, I've never seen one in New York.

[UBA Butler]

But you get them in la, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

So, right. I had an idea and I'd been doing stuff for Vice was kind of sat in this irreverent 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'd be possible to even get it registered on the website. I thought would be tricky.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Was gonna ask it. Don't they go, all right, we're sending a person out to make sure you exist? They're like, nah.

[UBA Butler]

That was what I suspected. That was what I thought would be step one. No. I just sent off a few things. Like, I needed a mobile number, I needed a website, I needed a concept. And that was basically it, really.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you can get, like a burner phone from the drugstore?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, that's exactly what I did. And it was shocking to me how little there was to stop you from doing this. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You basically needed a drug dealer phone and a computer that could register a domain.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. And then the concept for the restaurant was this thing called the Shed at Dulwich. It was like this gourmet food place that sold the menu was like, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Cotton bowl, Cotton bowl.

[UBA Butler]

The thread count was high. Yeah. And then the food photos on it, you know, it looked like Gourmet Mitch and Star Food. And that was the cropped images. But the uncropped images, which I revealed, you know, a year after, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And luckily, your foot is pasty enough to look like a ham hock.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, my foot is. Yeah. I've got hobbit feet, but without the hair, the hobbit feet, because I'm not that tall and they're like big feet. So I've got big ass, big head, big feet. Slam eggs on them. And there's something really funny about just getting the gourmet food crowd. We're all kind of suckers in a way, I think. And there was just Something funny about some people finding something so grotesque. Appetizing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You use, like, toilet bowl. Like the urinal cake.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like, ooh, let's pour some honey on this and drizzle that on there.

[UBA Butler]

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 out of control it was gonna get, to be fair.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 90s, maybe even the late 80s, a long time ago. So she 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 was like, oh, you couldn't eat the burger in the TV commercial because this is not actually meat. This is in the bun is real. But we pick one out of. I'll look at 100 or 500 buns. 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. 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, no.

[UBA Butler]

That is fascinating. I mean, it kind of just furthers that thing, doesn't it? Of how much we live in a kind of just false reality. Like, it's like, McDonald's isn't going to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Be like, how they actually make the burger. It's gross. You wouldn't put that in the commercial. Like here, he's squeezing the fake meat out onto the circular mold, slams it shut, and it cooks it air quotes immediately. Yeah. And then spray the black stuff on it to look grilled.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, they put it on the bun.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 Burger King.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Real Whoppers, like, stepped on.

[UBA Butler]

I remember that the Super Size 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 brought 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 just remained perfect. And the fries are completely perfect. And you just think, oh, dear.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 get the website, you got the fake cuisine. Did you need to learn how to cook things?

[UBA Butler]

No.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, explain that.

[UBA 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. The address that we put it was my street, my road, but it just didn't have a number. The idea was it was exclusive. It was fortunately or unfortunately, like, we're conditioned in such a way that we just want what we can't have.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

And that was basically it. And also, I lived in there, so if anyone showed up, the game was up.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Hey, why are you sunbathing naked in the yard? This fancy restaurant.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly. So it was an 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 them 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 eventually when you did, it was like unbelievable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, you like chef's table? You'll love this place.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, that was one of them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like, okay, that's what reviews sound like for sure. So you're not writing all the reviews yourself from your own home?

[UBA Butler]

No.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[UBA Butler]

I basically wrote a sincere kind of. I wrote him out to family and friends and just said, please could you leave reviews? And five star reviews, obviously. And at various points. So very quickly, it like it was 18, 000 restaurants in London. I'm TripAdvisor at the time, so that's crazy. And like, quite quickly, within six weeks, we were up to like number 1400 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 ask my family and my friends to reference to an appointment only restaurant. All the stuff they were parroting 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 he went up the rankings.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I saw these TV executives be like, I'm going to write for my BBC.com or whatever email addresses so that he knows I'm an important person.

[UBA Butler]

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 them 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 because 18,000 restaurants is such. It's a ton. And you make it to the top 1000 with no real restaurant, no food, no real customers.

[UBA Butler]

No, yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you just had 30 or 60, whatever it was, number of reviews. That just shows you that most restaurants just have no reviews at all.

[UBA 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 use.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look at this up and coming. 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.

[UBA Butler]

I started giving them addresses on the road for friendly people. That wasn't my house.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Hey man, can I use your mail? You're probably not going to get anything. Actually, we got a bunch of spices.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, I was back in London a couple months ago and I had someone wave me down in the street and they were like, I used to live next to you when 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. Thank you so much for the favor. I remember being very stressed about because we were close to getting to number one and there was a lot of moments where it felt like it was all going to 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 going to get in trouble with it, like, fine. And you're like, it's not illegal. You're not going to get in trouble. I promise you that. Okay. Were people prowling around the neighborhood being like, where's this place? I want to see it from the outside. Or like maybe knock on the door, see if we can get a table. Now that we found it, Surely that happened.

[UBA 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, have 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 do walk ins. Okay, we're going to 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because it's like, I really have to pee. Bye.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly what happened. And 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh my gosh.

[UBA Butler]

I just basically said, I'm sorry, I've got to get moving, I've got to 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what rank were you at this point when hundreds of people are trying to book the place?

[UBA Butler]

That was when we got into the top 50. I think 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 going to go.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How are you going to be God? What's the Indian place that everybody loves? And you wait for 90 years. How are you going to beat dishoom? It's not going to happen.

[UBA Butler]

No, it's not going to happen. And 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. You'd think there's somebody going, wow, this place went from 0 to 50 to 30. This is awesome. I work at TripAdvisor. I want to go check this place out. You got 89,000 views in search results results in one day. That's insane.

[UBA Butler]

That is insane. Yeah, that is absolutely insane.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So like, anybody, basically anybody who's searching for Restaurant London is seeing your.

[UBA Butler]

Seeing my restaurant. I've never heard that statistic. I don't think maybe I have. Maybe.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm pretty sure it's from like your movie.

[UBA Butler]

So was it from the movie?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It might have been the article. They called you and said, 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 checked out at your property. Right. And so you're worried about this and we just want to let you know you're now the number one restaurant. Congratulations.

[UBA Butler]

It was absolutely insane. Okay. Yeah, I remember now. So, yeah, it felt like they were basically taking more notice because we were so popular. I thought it was. The days were numbered. It was the first of November 2017. So that's eight years ago. Yeah, eight years ago. And yeah, it became the number one rated restaurant in London.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In London. So a Restaurant that by the way does still doesn't exist. Highest ranked restaurant in London and one of the world's biggest cities. Yep. On the Internet's at the time at least most trusted review site probably possibly still is. Was the plan just to expose how easy this is because you're not going to serve food in your shed. Right.

[UBA 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 be 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 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 is a little rough around the edges but we can give you a break on the.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The Shed in like Jamaica or.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I felt like that was the end of the story. The public had other 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 and that. 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 experience. How far could the bollocks go? And I borrowed some chairs and tables from a local cafe and some chickens. Don't forget about the chickens in this Wendy house. It's 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Slaughter them, but not really because they're somebody's pet chicken.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly. It was 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 microwavable 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 because it was a weird experience. Like, we met the real customers on the street and blindfolded them and then led them down the side and they.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Willingly were like, all right, sure. Yeah, okay. They were.

[UBA Butler]

I think it's like this, like, experience junkie thing. You know? I 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 their gut? Yeah, In London.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

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 the Seine in Paris. In Paris.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, at a real restaurant.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly. And now they were at the Shed. We had a table of four who were from a massive fashion agency in London. And then we had two locals who'd 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No. Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

My friend Phoebe, who now writes on, like, Ted Lasso and Four Weddings in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A funeral show, they're the social proof that's going to be like, oh, this is so cool. Oh, this is delicious.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly. Lolly Ada Fope was there now. It's so fun. Now she's so famous. She was in Shrill, the Hulu show. She's in Ghost. She's in loads of stuff. She was in that new Armando Nucci 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 hire the fake chef, fake waitress, so that they're dressing up the food really good. But what is the food? It's like instant noodles and cup of soup or whatever you call.

[UBA Butler]

And microwavable Mac and cheese, microwavable lasagna, but then, as I said, with these edible flowers and micro herbs to offset it. Part of the people that described our food as a wartime classic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes. If by wartime 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 mug. I love that, man.

[UBA Butler]

That's so funny.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. 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 going to 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 pages reposted this story and it's got a hundred thousand likes, you know what I mean? Or like in academic papers, in media. There was an Italian film that came out. The Italian director went on Netflix and he referenced me in his interview. And it's had such an impact now on culture. And I'm okay to say it goes against my British sensibility to like shit on myself, but it has been this significant thing that's happened culturally that really people use as a yardstick for how far we've come. And the thing is, look, this is seven years ago the film came out and we're so much further along now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What do you mean by that? Further along? What?

[UBA Butler]

I just think now, this was kind of almost like a forecast of where.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We were of just believing hyper bullshit over reality.

[UBA Butler]

We really are living in the golden age of. It is so easy to convincingly lie to people and to have that inform 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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, oh, this is a prank. They come in and go, wow, they nailed this. It really does look like some shitty garden lives in.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you're like, yeah, it does, doesn't it? We really pulled out all the stops.

[UBA Butler]

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, it was. One thing I was going to 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 want to 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 dumb.

[UBA Butler]

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. 100 million people watch that film, 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 because I felt bad about the time of theirs that I'd taken almost on their honeymoon.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And your list that you've given them. But you know what? It's got to be funny that surely they rewatch that and go, this is Roger being really polite. The restaurant. Yeah, it was a great, interesting experience. I mean, try something new. It's funny now, right, that it was too salty because it was a microwave.

[UBA Butler]

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 as 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. And that was almost like the perfect metaphor for what we were doing with the whole thing. I see it now because obviously I live in Manhattan and like you see it 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. 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Now you figure out how to go viral on TikTok 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly. People are doing all the work about the place before their food has even hit their mouths. And that was exactly the same with the shed scarcity.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Uber 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. It 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 Cyber security 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 Vasquez. 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 Cyber security 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 I've never been a skincare guy. It always seemed too complicated and a little bit, you know, unnecessary. I don't know, for somebody who just splashed water on his face and called it a day, I wasn't about to start researching products. But then my skin started feeling kind of dry. I mean, I'm old now. I'm 45. So I dip into Jen's stash and yeah, it didn't really do the trick either. And it kind of smelled in a way I didn't want to smell. Then I found caldera lab and I was hooked, man. They're high performance skincare made specially for men. Simple, effective and backed by science. In their study, 100% of guys said their skin looked smoother and healthier. 97% noticed better hydration. You know, I just can say it feels good. I don't feel dry anymore. That's kind of good enough for me, really. My favorite is the base layer. Their moisturizer. It's got plant stem cells, snow mushroom extract. That sounds very fancy. Because it is. But I guess it works because it goes on smooth, absorbs fast, leaves a clean matte finish. It's not shiny. I didn't like that about the girl stuff, you know, it wasn't greasy. Healthy skin. That feels great. They also have the good serum and the eye serum for tired eyes. I've given up on my eyes. But you don't have to. Everything's non comedogenic. I'm again not sure what that means. But you might care about that. It's cruelty free. I care about that for sure. And even plastic neutral. And I love that it doesn't have a strong scent. It's subtle, clean and honestly, it's the best thing I've ever used on my skin.

[Sponsor Voice]

Skincare doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be good. Upgrade your routine with caldera lab and see the difference for yourself. Go to kalderalab.com jordan and use jordan at checkout for 20% off your first order.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, pranksters, whatever you want to 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 at sixminetworking. Com. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills. It is non cringy. I guarantee that. It's down to earth. It's not awkward, it's not going to be schmoozy. It's going to make you a better colleague, a better connector, a better friend. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Even less, really. And by the way, many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to said course. 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 at sixminetworking. Com. Now back to UBA Butler. I want to switch gears a little bit. You infiltrated an Amazon warehouse, which I think I read about this in the news before we actually met, because I remember 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.

[UBA Butler]

So this was part of a film that I did, the first film I did for British television, which is Channel 4, which is like BBC Public Service broadcaster. We did our first documentary with them 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 there 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 great. I kind of just wanted to find out. 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. You're taking a risk, obviously. You know, you guys hear of. Is it the First Amendment, free speech, which should protect whistleblowers and things like that? We don't have that in the uk.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, you don't have that?

[UBA Butler]

No, we don't have a free speech.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I guess that's why we have that.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, you have to tear 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 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, 20, 21, work in car factories.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Where I grew up.

[UBA Butler]

Birmingham's kind of like the Detroit of the uk.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I've heard of that. I heard that, everybody. You don't have this, but I've heard that's like the most.

[UBA Butler]

The hated accent.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah.

[UBA Butler]

Ozzy Osbourne. That's his accent. Okay, so Ozzy Osbourne, Peaky Blinders.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm trying to be polite, but yeah, yeah, it's really hard. It. A trashy accent, maybe.

[UBA Butler]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You do have a lot of really specific 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're Jordan Harbinger. And he's 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 same guy. So I. This guy taking a piss next to me, he talked so similarly and so specifically like my audio engineer that I picked up that it was actually a guy from the same place. And he was like, oh, it's the same guy. Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

That's amazing. I love Sheffield. Sheffield's a. Sean Bean is from Lord of the Rings. Okay, there you go. There's your famous Sheffielder.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's just. It's so crazy that an accent could be that specific in one town where I go, you sound like my engineer. Oh, what's his name? Jason Sanderson. I know. What. Yeah, I mean, it's like the same guy, because if you hear a New York accent, you're not like, oh, do you know, Tom?

[UBA Butler]

Maybe that's why I do love it. I love that I can hear someone who's 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 accent comes from Mercian, which was a thousand 1500 year old. Completely different language.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I never heard about this.

[UBA Butler]

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 because nobody moved around. Yeah. So it's like you're in this little isolated village that trades fish or something for like a thousand years. Your English sounds weird and it's got Norse mixed in it or whatever. I don't know.

[UBA Butler]

It's definitely part of it. And like, you know, 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 okay, but my dad then, he's from Birmingham and Irish sort of family. But my dad's got a very thick brummy accent. 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Very understandable. Yeah. People I've met from small villages in the uk, so.

[UBA Butler]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Find your camera gear.

[UBA Butler]

I told them a pelvic screw smart. Which is not true, which apparently is legally also not great.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I lied about a medical condition to evade security equipment at my employer.

[UBA Butler]

But yeah, I mean, I saw people who were crying because the amount of.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Pain they're in just like standing around and moving boxes all day.

[UBA Butler]

Repeated strain and 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sorry for dying.

[UBA Butler]

There was a lot of things going on that I saw there that I, you know, I was caught on the third day I was there. Someone recognized me through the brown hair and the Cart Kent disguise.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm surprised. Although it must have been. I mean, given your restaurant chops. Maybe the dye job wasn't professional.

[UBA Butler]

I did it with spray.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Maybe get a Haircut next time?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, I think so. I think I could have done with a Groucho Marx mask or something like that. Yeah. So I kind of got kicked out and I got taken to one side. They kind of trying 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This was a little confusing to me as an outsider.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Workers were trying to unionize, and you need what, like, a certain critical mass. Oh, I see. So Amazon was like, cool, it looks like you're going to have over half unless we hire 200 more people this week.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. I mean, the reports were that they doubled the size of the warehouse, so it went from 1500 people to 3000. These temporary workers, I was one of them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And they need to get you to agree to unionize. And you're like, yo, I don't even know where the bathroom is.

[UBA 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. 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's like, another doctor, second opinion, also said, I have to. They're like, we don't care. He's 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 to quit, maybe. So they put him in an office that's not his normal office. He can't get into it because he's a wheelchair user. There's no accessible bathroom because there's one that has, like a step or something over it. And it's all right. I'm just going to. Just ran my wheelchair over this because I got to go to the bathroom. Someone had to let him out of the bathroom because 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 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 91 1.

[UBA Butler]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 BW 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. Then they have an adverse event and you're like, oh, well, don't cooperate. I mean, that's messed up, man.

[UBA Butler]

It's 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 having had a heart attack. She had apparently had two heart episodes at work. And. And I worked with another guy who 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 was like, me and him were doing some of the most strenuous exercise, you know, and I'm pouring with 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

He can't drive, but he can load 100 pound boxes onto a truck.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. In that he. It was crazy. You know, your story doesn't surprise 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 too, like you found out in the film. Tell me about that. Tell me how you started down this.

[UBA Butler]

Path, spending a lot of time going outside of their fulfillment centers. And I think it was actually in Glendale in California, where I bought this. But it was noticing how there were, outside of a lot of their film centers, bottles of. Of urine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How do you know they were urine?

[UBA Butler]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Their local fulfillment center, sniff out random bottles that you find outside. If it says Awkwafina, but it's yellow, open it up and take a good whiff.

[UBA Butler]

Or 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 targets, obviously, the app that they work through and their dsp, because technically they're not Amazon workers. They work for a separate third party.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I always see like on track or whatever.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, what is this? I mean, it's just the way the company does a lot of things. A lot of their warehouse workers are 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, we're going to hold you morally responsible anyway.

[UBA Butler]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like 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 lower.

[UBA Butler]

Absolutely. That is exactly what I know. A lot of the female drivers I spoke to Talked about getting UTIs from old nature holding in their pee.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, I didn't realize that.

[UBA Butler]

I know. So you've got the guys who are often. And I don't know if the girls using chiwis or whatever, but the guys are often urinating bottles. And then, which I will say, to be fair, slightly to Amazon, is a 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 40 odd dollars an hour or something like that. 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 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 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?

[UBA 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So 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.

[UBA Butler]

I don't think they encourage de urination of in bottles, but they don't want to know. You know, it's not like if you leave them in the cab, you're gonna get.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. It's like leaving 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 dirty. 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. Maybe throw your bottle in there. It says biohazard on it.

[UBA 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, you're in collection point outside the front and had a bin no one used it maybe security came. 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. I'm not getting out and getting that. It's also a little act of rebellion. You guys are going to make me piss in this bottle. I'm gonna throw it on your lawn. Yeah, 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.

[UBA 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 specific enough. All energy drinks both look and taste like recycled Amazon Driver urine.

[UBA Butler]

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's 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 driver's urine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it says in the ingredients like.

[UBA Butler]

Urine, urea, 97%, you know, all the. The composition of urine. But then it says in the description, this is made from the collected discarded bottles of Amazon driver's urine. You know, it literally says that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, did people buy it?

[UBA Butler]

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, yes, we did become number one. We became a number one drink on Amazon with a bottle of Amazon Driver's year.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, God. But you're not shipping a pallet of piss.

[UBA Butler]

We didn't. We had real people trying to buy the energy drink as well.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Come look at this new one. Yeah, exactly. Clever, the branding.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But we didn't send them. I canceled those. My lawyer was very worried about that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm pretty sure it's illegal to ship used urine in just random bottles to people who think they can drink it.

[UBA Butler]

Well, if there's any lawyers listening right in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, 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 say there's multiple issues with this particular.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, we're not misrepresenting it, we're saying it's urine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not false advertising I'm worried about. It's more of the shipping, a biohazard unapproved container and something that could actually hurt or kill people. Oh, for sure, there's a lot.

[UBA Butler]

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 Amazon driver urine, the number one drink on Amazon.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly. And you would have thought that the biggest e commerce platform on the planet might have infrastructure that would protect its consumers from that. Didn't say nothing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like fulldi glug. And 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. And you're like, oh, okay. People who are looking for the cheapest in a sorting by price, they're going to buy this. And there's just no way that this rechargeable battery pack for your iPhone is as good as a good brand.

[UBA Butler]

It's easier. If you've got like 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 place. So I don't begrudge the consumers for using Amazon.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, it's not 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.

[UBA Butler]

They've got a kind of like a pipeline of the relationship between sort of manufacturers in China and Amazon is so close. 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 patent or something they had has been completely taken over by a manufacturer and decided to sell it themselves. And then you're done or you're locked out of your account. There's something some problem or. I couldn't believe how clunky the whole.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Customer service the as a seller.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. And Moira Vagle, she's a professor at I think Northeastern. We speak to her in the film and she's got so many stories. I don't want to 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 banned 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 it 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 going to have to research this a little bit more but I'm going to 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 have to verify that's safe for people to consume. And since they don't do that, that means nobody's suing them into oblivion for having not done that.

[UBA Butler]

That we tried to find products that were sold and I think they have more liability when they sold and fulfilled.

[Jordan Harbinger]

By them for sure. Oh, that makes sense because then they're more hands.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly. Whereas the products that are by third.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Parties, I think they're just listing it. Yeah, they're just like ebay. 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 230 is the one for speech. I don't know 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, yeah.

[UBA Butler]

So there's a lot of products that we found on them. And this was all products that were sold unfulfilled by Amazon. They were all sold directly by them. Just to make it legally much clearer. Yeah. I had my nieces, Eve and Penny, who was, I think 5 and 7 or 5, 6 and 7 at the time, order different items that are in the UK at trading regulators. So your version of the 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.

[UBA Butler]

I think it was 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Knives, 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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. And these were things that were sold and filled by Amazon. 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They don't care about that.

[UBA Butler]

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 listed, the moment it's delivered and whether it's on the packaging. I think I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So if you. When you buy it, that's one. It's where it starts when they hand it to you, that's the other. And the third one is written on the packaging.

[UBA Butler]

Huh. 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 yeah, every single one of the Items we ordered 200 different orders and didn't get ID once for any of them. They all got sent to lockers. So the side of a massive, you know, whatever, highway something or highway supermarket you can go to there, you pick them up, you need is the code and Bob's your uncle, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Can'T find them because.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Why?

[UBA Butler]

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.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's all it is. 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, that's it.

[UBA Butler]

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 going to fine you. We'll take it out of your account. Or you can pay them directly and then prove it to us. Oh, we're getting fined? Suddenly we don't have the resources to put any of our people on this one.

[UBA Butler]

Sorry, folks, it's difficult to make that to help Amazon be better when there's no jeopardy for them, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

No. We have a 1 million pound fine. Huh? We have $150,000 lawyer that's going to argue this until the end of time. So we're going to negotiate that fine down to £100,000 and then just not pay it and wait for them to try and collect it and then dodge that. Jeez. Well, we just heard about how UBA broke into Amazon's inner sanctum and sold bottles of 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. You know what drives me crazy is bank fees. I get few. Honestly, few things get me fired up faster. I'm inches from getting arrested when I walk into the bank and complain about fees like I am inches from being detained rightfully, I get fired up. Why am I paying you a monthly fee? For the privilege of letting you use my money to invest and then making it annoying for me to deal with. Make it make sense. Overdraft fees, maintenance fees, maintain these. How about it anyway. It's like they're charging you for trying to be a functioning adult. That's why I like what Chime is doing. Chime actually gets it. Every dollar matters. When you set up direct deposit, you get real perks that make a difference. Getting paid up to two days early. Fee free. Overdraft. Up to 200 bucks on debit card purchases. Access to over 47,000 free ATMs. That's more than the top three national banks combined. No monthly fees, no maintenance fees. Getting paid early. One of those small things that really adds up, especially when life decides to hit you with the unexpected. My younger self would have benefited from that. So whether you're saving, spending, or just trying to keep your money where it actually belongs, Chime is the move.

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[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is also sponsored by CookUnity. I didn't grow up in one of those families that cook together, think bologna sandwiches and a pot of chili for like the whole week. So yeah, I didn't inherit any culinary skills. So Jen's the one keeping the six of us fed these days. And cookunity has been a lifesaver for all of us. These are small batch chef made meals, fresh, not frozen, delivered right to your door. You just heat them up and dinner's ready. We get stuff like Chef Dustin Taylor's roasted salmon and sauteed haricot verre with crisp. Why can't they just. Isn't that just green beans with crisp potatoes and creamy leeks with Miriam Milord's Milord's Apple pie Bread pudding. You have to say that with that accent. I think when her last name is Milord, it's, it's making me salivate just thinking about it. No flavor fatigue because there's over 300 options to choose from. It saves Jen a ton of time. It means we can actually spend that time doing the important stuff like building Legos with Jaden and playing babies with Juniper. Commitment Free subscriptions start as low as 11 bucks a meal. Skip deliveries, pause, cancel anytime. Get comfort and nutrition delivered in every bite. Thanks to award winning chefs at CookUnity. Go to CookUnity.com JordanFree or enter code jordanfree before checkout to get Premium meals for life. That is free premium meals for life by using code jordanfree or going to cookunity.comjordanfree maybe I should say Jordan Free a few more times, huh? This episode is also sponsored in part by Nutrafol. You've probably seen a ton of ads for hair products and you thought like, yeah, sure, that probably works. Whatever. I was skeptical too until I saw what Nutrafol did for Jen. She's been taking Nutrafol women for over six months now, way before they ever became a sponsor. And honestly, the difference is obvious. Her hair looks thicker, stronger, healthier overall. Every time my mom sees her she goes, wow, when did her hair get so long? Literally every time, every single day. Anyway, what I like about Nutrafol is that it's not hype. It's physician formulated, clinically tested and the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand. It takes a proactive approach targeting the root causes of hair issues like stress, nutrition and metabolism. Jen takes four capsules a day with a meal super easy. And when you subscribe, you save up to 20% free shipping, one on one consults and even a headspace membership is included. And you know, I don't know why somebody who leaves a pile of hair in the shower needs this, but obviously it works because the pile is twice the size.

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[Jordan Harbinger]

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment support our amazing sponsors. They make this show possible. All the deal's discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the [e-mail] deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't Find the code. We would love to help you with that. Just email us jordanjordanharbinger.com, happy to surface codes for you. Yes, it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with UBA Butler. Tell me how you tricked Amazon into finally air quotes paying taxes.

[UBA Butler]

So what I did was I'd read this book called Moneyland by Oliver Bullock. A brilliant book about corporate tax avoidance.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I did a show with Oliver about Moneyland on this. No way. Yeah, it was a while ago.

[UBA Butler]

Really?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

I love that book.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. No one is ever there. Yeah, just a wallet for this guy.

[UBA Butler]

The Kleptox Vitor, wasn't it? Yes, Kleptoxy tours.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's like, 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?

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, it's fascinating, the 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 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. Oh, probably 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 out of China. Yes. Here's 100 grand for your participation.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Good luck.

[UBA Butler]

Good luck.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. That's dark.

[UBA Butler]

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 2020Amazon 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 and infrastructure. And you Know, the idea being that, you know, Amazon use our infrastructure 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 going to deliver stuff, used trucks on the roads, then, hey, I'm going to cut out the middleman. And 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?

[UBA Butler]

Apparently not. I mean, we had other tips around what happens with their returns.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I assume they just weigh it. That's easy.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You just weigh a thousand packages.

[UBA Butler]

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 check of the packages that we sent back?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, man.

[UBA Butler]

Fraud. Yes, you're right. Before I'd done any of that, 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. There's nothing clever. You're in trouble. And what I'd done is, before I did any of that, I'd created 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So technically, this is also how Amazon dodges taxes. They have their headquarters in Ireland or something.

[UBA Butler]

That's right, yep. Luxembourg.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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.

[UBA 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like the irs.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Her Majesty's Revenue Collection or something.

[UBA Butler]

My Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was close.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah. And, yeah, basically, you know, you try and get anything out of these, 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 here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's interesting. So, man, were people stoked you filled the potholes.

[UBA 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 get. Massively popular. And whenever, you know, in the street now, people always come up to me and ask me about the Amazon pothole. Is that usually normally the fake restaurant thing or. I presented Catfish on mtv, the UK version.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, you did? That's such a good show.

[UBA Butler]

So if I'm like in the middle of the country, people 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, to me, quite complicated, but is worthy of people's attention. It was the first thing I'd done for television on my own. I'd done myself. I EPed it, I wrote it with my two collaborators, and I was really proud of it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The 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.

[UBA Butler]

Is out on British television. Okay. It's going to be out in the US It'll be out at some point, 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. Because it's shot here, a lot of it's shot in New York.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You basically told Channel 4 or something like that, which is a UK production.

[UBA Butler]

Like the BC, okay, so you said.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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, things like that. And then. And you end up. I don't know. Is it fair to say skimming money from Wall street banks? Not exactly that, but yeah.

[UBA Butler]

I mean, the film kind of ended up being. It sort of was about moving here and the cultural difference between London and New York and how I was fascinated moving here, how the difference of ways, the kind of money. Men talk about money and breathe money and believe in it. And 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, I 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, they want to be billionaires, and that's fine, but I don't think that is going to necessari end up with more thrifty kids. I think it's just the dream is almost just marketing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is. One of the things I found strange and disturbing in the film was you're talking to these guys on the street. What do you want to be? And the guy's 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 or whatever you've got to sell as an affiliate to make a billion dollars? It's in the name billions of dollars worth. And it's just absolutely ludicrous. You run out of people on earth before you can become a billionaire using affiliate marketing. Yeah. 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, because 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 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.

[UBA Butler]

The whole film is me almost asking myself the question, how much of this is bollocks? Yeah. Yeah. I make a Hypebeast brand, you know, based on the methods of someone like Banksy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[UBA Butler]

I'm going to do publicity stunts. I'm going to build up a brand, and I'm going to try and sell it after 90 days. And I'm going to hope that I can sell it for a million. I would do one drop. It gets covered. I get profiled in GQ around it completely legitimately. I was like, how? This is crazy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I usually have to lie to get this kind of coverage.

[UBA Butler]

We get millions of views on the teaser clips for the brand. We have influencers talking about it. It works. Making a legal child sweatshop is deliberately provocative. That's the point. There's a company called Mischief that does stuff like this. That 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my God.

[UBA Butler]

They would. 666 pairs of them sold for a thousand dollars each. And then what that does is it raised 22 million. And they're a cool company. But my plan was 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 going to work. I built up the. The size of the thing. I launched my own educational platform, did a trailer for it. Two million people watched the trailer.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it was like, I'm gonna teach you how to make money online. Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Which is funny because that's as credible as most people teaching money.

[UBA Butler]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How to make money online.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You just pulled it out of your ass.

[UBA Butler]

I 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 6, $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. Two million people watched that. We sold one in the first 24 hours.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my God. Conversion is low.

[UBA 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. I think people should see the Instagram vs reality of 2 million views coverage in all this. Don't know this. That was the one I paid for the Forbes article.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And one sale.

[UBA Butler]

One sale, 24 hours. So we did all this stuff and there's a kind of character guy that I met doing this called Ikram, 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 my ideas, I think, are a bit too raunchy for him. And while I'm there, he tries to get me in on his meme coin that he makes, which is called Jelly, My Jelly. You know, I kind of think, well, you know, I don't really want to do that. And if I had, according to him, if I'd have done that, I'd probably have invested $400. I couldn't fact check this, but I'd have made a million if I'd have done it that time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you'd sold at the top of the whatever hype coin, which is basically impossible, it's difficult.

[UBA Butler]

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 illegal, but.

[UBA Butler]

But maybe not anymore because it's not security.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, that's. Yeah, that's true.

[UBA Butler]

He made, you know, he had the number one true meme coin on the planet, on Solana. And I could have been involved with it if I'd have been able to drop my ethics around money.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Maybe.

[UBA Butler]

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 Ikram is he just. Anything that happens to him, he sells as a win. And that's an interesting way of living your life. You'd 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 where 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 of the offer gets to somebody.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[UBA Butler]

Yeah, 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 our mutual friend John about it, and he said that would have been such a good deal for. Yeah, but at the time, I was so desperate that I couldn't see it. We signed the contract, we agreed to it. And 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 going to do it because 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 venture capital.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you sold to her and the contract was on a. The back of a napkin, and then you leverage that somehow. Yeah, tell me.

[UBA Butler]

I 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.

[UBA Butler]

We got access to 8 million from the bank. Yeah. And that would have been. Which was, again, like I said about the thing with Moneyland and Oliver Bullock and things like that. When I started the film, I was interested in the difference of how an average person would think about how to make a million versus how an average.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Person is like, I gotta make a lot of tacos.

[UBA Butler]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My food truck has to do or.

[UBA Butler]

Affiliate marketing 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.

[Sponsor Voice]

It.

[UBA Butler]

That's a smart way of doing it. There's another guy who's in the film as well. Jim. I think you might. He's awesome. 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's the appropriate response.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly. I said, it's the equivalent to like $20 for me, please, gonna 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 want to buy a social media platform and you want to get access to a lot of lines of credit, you want to buy other big ticket things and you can put down, you know, say for me it would have been the valuation of that company which had been established by the offer that I'd been attracted. 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 zero.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 need to sell the stock and then pay the taxes on the stock.

[UBA Butler]

Exactly that what you're saying now is it like the Oliver Bullock 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 got a profile I do in the the London Times I did yesterday. And having to conceptualize and think about it for the first. It's a cinema verite type of film. It follows me doing something. There is 90 days I've got to make a million. And those are the terms of the film. Very different to I'm going to fuck with Amazon or I'm going to make a number one restaurant. It's actually more similar to that but. But there's a lot of weird kind of cul de sacs and dead ends that happen in it. And that's what we bargained for. And there was this book that I read by Mountain Amos called Money. It's about a character, it lives between London and New York and just dealing with the ethics of money and more egalitarian, but grotesque. And 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 or I from federal prison. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh yeah.

[UBA Butler]

Do you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And there's a lot of that on this show, possibly present company included, depending on how this film shakes out.

[UBA 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.

[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 prosecution to get the evidence together because it was international and Spain wasn't interested in putting the resources, didn't have a case. And so now that guy just gets. Gets to keep $50 million.

[UBA Butler]

Isn't that crazy?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is actually insane.

[UBA Butler]

I feel like that there's something very New York, specifically, there's something quite interesting about the way that, like, white collar 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 don't know. 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 here, what's the next thing you want to expose?

[UBA Butler]

I am working actually on a. I can't actually say details, but I'm working on a show here for American 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, 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.

[UBA Butler]

But, yeah, other than that, 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 am interested by. And there's a lot. We're 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 out of New York. Is that right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Fair to say the United States? Yeah. Yeah. This is a unique place.

[UBA Butler]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, looking forward to that, man.

[UBA Butler]

Thank you very much.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thanks for coming on the show.

[UBA Butler]

No. 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 UBA 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 and 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 UBA Butler will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support this podcast, [e-mail] deals please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser comes out almost every Wednesday. It is highly practical. It is wisdom from these episodes that you can read and apply right away. It's a two minute read in fact, and you can apply it that same day pretty much in mostly every case. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a really good companion to this show. Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking on the website at sixminutenetworking.com I am jordanharbinger on Twitter, Instagram, or hey, hit me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlauskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know someone who's interested in these types of performance art pranks, maybe just learning what Amazon driver urine smells like, I don't know. Share this episode with them. If you know a person like that, you should make better friends. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

[UBA Butler]

Here we have the Limu Imu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

[UBA Butler]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Only pay for what you [e-mail].

[UBA Butler]

Liberty.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.