Article by Marcus Siu

Kris Spiros was just a mere 13 years old when he made his very first video on his subject and beloved dog, Coco. At least for a promising young teenager, it seemed like a brilliant idea: use an iconic tune such as “Clocks” by Coldplay to kickstart the video where absolutely nothing happens for a good ten seconds and then have letters C-O-C-O flashing every eight seconds…. Brilliant!

“I’m just going to play it…you’re going to suffer through this with me. It’s like, the worst hook in history.”, Spiros confessed, as he presented it to the audience right before showing the world premiere of “CwoC” (Chicken without Chicken), which closed out the evening at the very first inaugural “Create for Good” social event at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

The event gathered media enthusiasts, storytellers, and builders in the Bay Area where content creators premiered their short films on different topics hosted by Spiros. “We are going to focus on three of them today.” Spiros announced. “That is, that people should be free of poverty and disease, powerful AI needs to be kept safe, and animals shouldn’t be abused.”

“We just want to have a community for altruistic content that’s trying to help the world in some way”, Spiros announced, “but also, what if we could have a community that gathered once or twice a year to brainstorm and share ideas, collaborate on content, watch videos and learn from each other, and show that just because we’re making content to try to help the world doesn’t mean it has to be lame or boring or like cringe?”

As the founder of Fauna, the cultivated meat nonprofit, Spiros has a vision that in the near distant future, that we would be able to have a world where carnivores can enjoy chicken, beef, pork, fish, or whatever meat of one’s choosing, but not have to slaughter any animals in the process.

The following “Lab Meat Explained in 56 Seconds” video explains how this would be done.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DQCiUhyEXtz

Obsessed at a young age with the idea of making real meat from animal cells, instead of killing animals (lab-grown meat) , Spiros published a paper on the subject, and it would become the most read student paper at Harvard that year. He dropped out of college to devote and start his own non-profit, CAS – Cellular Agriculture Society, dedicated to advancing cellular agriculture, the production of animal products from cells rather than entire animals. During this time, he spoke to millions around the world about cultivated meat and even started the first ever University course at Stanford University.

Along with Spiros, speakers at the event included Aric Floyd and Chana Messinger whom addressed the complex issues of AI safety. Both belong to the nonprofit organization 80,000 Hours, that helps people find careers with a large, positive social impact. Justin Portela discussed reducing and hopefully, eradicating global poverty from Giving What We Can, a non-profit organization dedicated to effective philanthropy, and ​Shimoi Kalra, a 16-year old wonderkid, scriptwriter and producer, who really should be called the “Greta Thunberg” for animal rights and also a huge advocate of cultivated meat works alongside Spiros at Fauna.

YOUTUBE INFLUENCERS

“10 million new YouTube channels are started every single year…and if you’re anything like most of us, your content will fall in this bracket.”, Spiros declared. “90% of first videos on YouTube will get 0 to 9 views up to 1,000 views. The next 8%, 98% gets up to 10,000 views, their first video. And then up to 100,000 views, it’s now basically like, you’re looking at the smallest percentages, 0.1% of people get videos, their first video to get over 100,000 to 300,000 views.”

Justin Portela, an influencer on social media who started his YouTube channel about four months ago is one of the 0.1% of the content creators. He made a long form video on malaria that has well over 380,000 views, which is pretty impressive considering it was his very first video and that YouTube is the hardest platform to get views on.

That video has saved hundreds of real lives in the real world.

“Ultimately, the thing I take away from this is that two things”, Portela summarizes. “One, you can take something exceptionally uninteresting, lame, cringy, boring, over there, (e.g. the people are poor, I don’t care, it’s too sad) and if you apply the kind of attention economy rules to it, you can get people to enjoy it, right?

“You can get people to like it, not because they’re doing something good for the world, but for the exact same reason that they like a Vox video…because it is entertaining, because it ‘provides them value’ and people, if they feel urged on, if they feel some sense of activation or sympathy or they want to do good in the world, they will…people want to help other people.”

Sixteen year old Shimoi Kalra premiered her very first video at the event, which was shot two weeks earlier, and as the head of marketing at Create for Good, she’s the reason why they have millions of views on social media and 500 seats sold at the event, according to Spiros. Not only is she a scriptwriter and producer, but she has built the world’s most used cultivated meat AI chatbot. In addition, she’s also an author of “Modern Meat”, the first cultivated meat textbook made just a couple of years ago.

“I didn’t know anything about gestation crates or how chickens were raised or conditions for slaughterhouse employees or land use or antibiotics…and I most definitely could not have told you anything that we all just watched on that screen”, Kalra said, “Even when I was making that video, there were moments that I couldn’t bring myself to look at the screen because I was learning something so new and something to me, which was pretty horrific. But, eight-year-old me still judged.”

CwoC (Chicken Without Chicken)

The evening concluded with Spiros five minute “world premiere” of “CwoC“ (Chicken Without Chicken).

“We film a chicken and then we sort of composite all this together to create scenes like this one.” Spiros continued, “This is our attempt to try to explain how cultivate meat is made, give a little bit of emotion and awe and try to inspire some people.”

It made me realize that awareness videos not only can be very educational, but can be wildly fun and entertaining at the same time. Content creators are making terrific “documentary-like” films that hope to change attitudes of the public and make a difference in the world we live in. They are not just well-versed speakers but they are all equipped as being talented filmmakers.

I found “CwoC” not just eye-opening, but also fun, comedic and very enjoyable, just like any other live-action short that might play at the Sundance Film Festival. According to Spiros, the video will be released very soon on YouTube and I am pretty certain it will go viral. I have a feeling that fans of Chris Martin will also help push this video to the magic 0.1% level of YouTube videos.

I mean, how can you watch a chicken cross the road and not be entertained by it?