Ramble.
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$1 billion.
That's how much Jeff Bezos wants to spend on his new little project.
It's the Three Body Problem Project.
The Three-Body Problem is this science fiction series written by a Chinese author, and it's also one of Jeff Bezos' favorite books.
But more importantly, this book has the chance to go up against HBO Max.
Amazon Prime Video is trying to build up their streaming service, but all everyone online, everywhere can talk about for years upon years, just year after year, is the Game of Thrones series on HBO Max.
That's it.
That's the topic of discussion.
Or perhaps it's the Marvel Cinematic Universe that's grossed close to $30 billion.
Or Star Wars sitting at $11 billion.
Harry Potter at $10 billion.
So Jeff Bezos, he's going to put a billion dollars on the line to make the next big series.
Side note, it's not just a money pit.
If it's executed well, it's going to be very lucrative.
Some sources state that the Game of Thrones franchise made HBO Max about 31 billion in just subscriptions, which is about double what it costs to produce and make the whole show.
So that's a pretty good return.
That's like a $1.5 billion return.
And then just the future retention of subscription-based clients that are going to stay on the platform after the show is over.
I mean, it's huge.
On top of that, Jeff Bezos is worth over $200 billion.
So spending a billion dollars would be the equivalent of if someone has 200 and they spend a dollar.
Or if you have $2,000, you're spending $10.
But a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.
And if they pull all of this off...
It's going to be one of the most expensive series to create of all time.
So for eight months, Jeff Bezos has his top team on the deal in order to spend a billion dollars to create a multi-season sci-fi show and to bring more viewers to Amazon Prime Video.
There's a few obstacles.
There's a few hoops that they have to jump through.
First of all they have to get the licensing rights to the English adaptation of The Three-Body Problem.
The owner of the copyright, so the owner of the intellectual property.
The IP is a Chinese gaming company called Yuzu Gaming.
It is one of the biggest gaming companies in all of China.
Once they secure the rights, which is probably the trickiest part, because Amazon is reportedly going up against Disney and Netflix, who are all basically racing to try and create the next Game of Thrones series, all fighting for the Three-Body Problem rights.
But once they get past that massive hurdle, then they got to go into production, which is a whole other mountain, finding the right producers, the right directors, the right cast, and to do all of it in a timely manner and stay under budget, which are like a billion dollars.
Shouldn't it be easy?
Apparently, it's a very difficult feat.
And they're this close.
Amazon is this close to closing the deal.
The CEO of Yuzu is flying in from China, from Shanghai to Los Angeles for an in-person meeting.
And from what Amazon can tell, I mean, he seems he seems ready to sell them the rights.
The Amazon executives.
They're waiting in this massive conference room in LA for the Yuzu team to arrive.
And of course, the CEO of the Yuzu gaming company, billionaire Lin Qi.
He's the founder and CEO and one of the youngest billionaires in all of China.
A few minutes later, the door to the conference room slams open.
A whole entourage of Chinese men walk in and the Amazon executives.
They're staring at each other because and again, this has nothing to do with race but it looks like the CEO of Yuzu.
But it doesn't look like the CEO of Yuzu.
Why is he dressed like a full-on gangster?
This is how they described it.
Gold chain, tight shirt, black blazer, expensive basketball sneakers and a million dollar Richard Mill watch on his wrist.
The CEO of Yuzu.
Looks like gangsters.
Yeah, they said they look like gangsters.
The CEO of Yuzu, 38 year old Lin.
He sits down at the head of the table.
And this probably does not help with the whole gangster idea.
But he sits back on one of those conference wheelie chairs and he kicks his feet up onto the table.
No way.
It is so unexpected.
The Amazon team is so confused, but also they got to act like it's just another normal Tuesday for them.
Their legal team pulls out the paperwork.
Eight months almost three quarters of the fiscal year have been working on this deal, and it's all about to pay off.
All CEO Lin of Yuzu, all he needs to do is sign on the dotted line like we all agreed upon, right?
Amazon makes some pleasantries with CEO Lin.
Likely they're promising him how seriously they're taking this project, how they're going to bring the three body problem to the global audience and it's going to do the series justice.
And Lin's got this pen in his hand.
Jeff Bezos is about to have a really good day.
I mean, they're one signature away from closing this deal.
When Lin, Yuzu's CEO, leans back in his chair and he says, let's do a joint production instead.
And boom, game over.
He just blew up the deal because he just asked let's co-produce the show and you don't get the rights to the English adaptation.
We'll do it together.
The meeting is over.
The Amazon team has to now go tell Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, that he indeed is not going to have a good day.
But they're not the only ones having a bad day.
They realize, as they're walking out of the conference room, the Yuzu executives.
They look kind of surprised.
They look beyond maddened at CEO Lin's last minute idea.
And it's very interesting, because it seems like the Yuzu team was also taken by surprise too, that their CEO was just going to blow up the deal like that.
So he flew in here like under the premise of, oh, this deal is closing.
But for whatever reason, he just decided not to do it.
Last minute.
But he flew in here.
And went through most of the meeting.
Right.
Yes.
So he changed his mind like last minute.
And it seems like the whole user team that also flew in with him, they seem surprised too.
It seems like that was not the conversation that they had up until this very last moment in this meeting.
Got it.
The Amazon executive said there was thick tension in that Yuzu executive group.
A year and 11 months later, the same CEO, CEO Lin, would be interviewed and asked because the three body problem was going to make an English adaptation, not through Amazon, but through Netflix.
So he's going on this whole press tour and he was asked what do you think you're going to think about on your deathbed?
And he responded.
I guess the only thing I don't want to think about is I don't want to ask myself how did I destroy the three body problem?
Billionaire Lin Qi, CEO of Yuzu Gaming, owner of the three-body problem, IP billionaire of China, would be mysteriously murdered three months after signing an exclusive deal with Netflix.
Later, when an insider at Amazon was asked about his death, they said yeah well, I wasn't that surprised.
¶¶
We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to support World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that is at the front lines.
They help provide fresh meals to survivors of disasters and humanitarian crises and, as of right now, their focus is providing fresh meals to Palestinians in Gaza.
This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team of dedicated researchers and translators.
We would also like to thank our listeners for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates of these causes.
As always, full show notes are available at rottenmangopodcast.com.
And before we get started, a few quick disclaimers.
I am not a physics expert or a science fiction enthusiast, even though I am trying to be recently.
I did try my best to research the three-body problem, plot and universe and a lot of the central themes and concepts, but we did mainly focus our research on the crime of today's case and not necessarily on the book itself.
So please, if there's anything that is summarized a bit much or not exactly how it's presented in the book, please let me know.
And with that being said, let's get started.
Christmas day 2020.
Most of shanghai is pretty quiet.
It's middle of lockdowns, it's holiday season, so most of the commercial buildings, the spaces, they're completely shut down, doors are locked, lights are off, Except one single building in the middle of the financial district in Shanghai the headquarters for a massive gaming company called Yuzu.
Every single floor of this building, every single office, the lights are on.
And if you were to get binoculars and look through the floors, you would see people office workers just scrambling from room to room holding papers, holding their phone.
They look distressed.
They're scrambling to get it together because if they don't, their stock is going to plummet to the ground and billions of dollars are going to be lost.
But what is there to say, right?
Their founder and CEO was killed.
But don't worry, guys.
Everything's going to be OK.
We're going to publish a new game.
He might have been murdered by someone inside the company.
But don't worry.
Don't panic.
We've got everything under control.
But absolutely nothing is under control.
The founder died without a will.
That means his three underage children are going to automatically inherit majority shares of the company.
But they're underage.
So then does that mean that his ex-wife, the mother of the three children, is going to take over?
She's never even been in the business before.
And as the chaos just keeps going and going, an influencer shows up at the office with a small baby in her arms.
And she's like, hey, this is the dead CEO's baby.
And I think I deserve a piece of you two.
The stock prices keep plummeting and they're tanking because in China there is a saying a country cannot be without a king for a day and a company cannot be without a head for a day.
11 years before Lin's murder and the panic of Yuzu's share prices, there was this tiny old little bookstore right next to the train station.
And a woman named Song thought yeah okay, I might as well pop in and see if I can find anything interesting for my long train ride.
She walks in and the first thing that catches her eye is this illustrated magazine called Sci-Fi World.
It's a collection of all these random sci-fi stories.
I mean, imagine a little magazine with 10 chapters from 10 different sci-fi novels, and they've illustrated it.
So you're going to be very engaged.
It's just one chapter a month.
So the next month you buy the same magazine and you get the next chapter to all 10 sci-fi series.
It's fun.
It's low commitment.
I mean, if Song hates a story, she's not stuck with it for the only source of entertainment for the rest of the train ride.
She can just skip to the next story.
Song grabs her bag.
She grabs her new little magazine, hops onto the train, finds a seat, and she starts reading.
Now, you know those stories that are so good, you forget where you even are?
You don't even feel like you're on the train until somebody bumps into your arm and they're just like walking past the aisle and you have this moment of like.
Oh my God yeah oh, I'm on the train.
It's probably as close to teleporting as humans can get right now.
Song's body is on the train, but she is deep.
She is in the thick of the three body problem universe.
What do you mean all the top scientists are dying?
This is the premise of the three body problem.
When the first world renowned scientist self exits the scientific community, they go into mourning.
They're grieving.
But then another one, another scientist dies, and then another scientist and another scientist, in rapid succession back to back.
At this point, the United States Air Force NATO CIA, the UN, the United Nations, they all start taking notice.
It's a moment of pause of okay, just numbers wise in this quick timeframe.
That doesn't even make sense.
Their deaths need to be connected somehow because what are the odds of this?
Maybe they discovered something that is so life shattering that they can't proceed.
Or perhaps maybe there's a company that sells scientific tools like testing tubes, and they're all been poisoned with hazardous material.
They realize that the exact opposite has happened.
The science that the scientists already know no longer makes sense.
It no longer works.
Imagine you wake up one day and everyone is telling you two plus two does not equal four anymore.
We don't know how, but it just doesn't.
We don't even know how it used to be four, but it's no longer four.
We don't know what it is.
We don't know what two plus two is anymore.
One of the scientists even left behind a note.
All the evidence points to a single conclusion.
Physics has never existed and will never exist.
There wasn't even a signature on it.
A brilliant mind just gone after writing those weird, ominous words.
Like, what do you mean?
Physics never existed.
Yes, it does.
And somehow all of these scientists' deaths, all the roads, they lead to a woman named Ye Wenji.
Wenji is a brilliant Chinese astrophysicist and she takes after her dad, which she did before he was murdered in front of her face.
Wenji's dad was a physics professor at the top university in China Tsinghua, which was not something that was appreciated during the Cultural Revolution.
So the book does kind of take some inspiration from history.
And maybe he could have continued his research discreetly in private.
But his own wife and one of his own daughters, Wenji's sister, betrayed him, turned him into the authorities and reported him for teaching materials in his class that went against the rule of the country.
He was murdered in front of his family as punishment and also as a warning to everybody else.
And for not betraying her father, like her own mother and sister did.
Wenji had to watch her father get murdered.
She was labeled as a traitor and thrown into a prison.
And she's going through this very vulnerable moment.
She has an overwhelming sense of betrayal from her own mother and sister, her country and her dad.
And the only one that she might have been able to go to for comfort.
The only person that she could have perhaps turned to was a professor, who also served as like a mother-like figure.
But when she goes to her office, she finds out she has also been killed.
And it's just back to back.
Wengie is going through it.
I mean, the worst things imaginable just happened like a normal Thursday for Wengie.
And then in prison, Wengie is forced to denounce her father as a crazy man with conspiracies and not a brilliant physics scientist.
But she refuses, which results in freezing cold water being dumped on her and her almost freezing to death and dying.
And so from there, from prison, Wengie is recruited to work at this very secret military base located in the mountains.
The only thing there is this giant satellite at the very tip top of the mountain, a giant radar dish.
And this is very interesting, because she is imprisoned for her knowledge but they also want to utilize it and use it for their purposes.
The military sector that she is, to a degree, forced to work for, their purpose is top secret.
It is to search for extraterrestrial life.
It's to look for aliens.
Wengie being the smartest person there, she discovers the best way to send messages into the universe, like hello for other forms of life to hear and try to communicate with is to amplify the message by using the sun.
Think of it this way.
They're throwing out messages into the universe, but nobody's responding because it's not going far enough.
They're still staying in their solar system.
So they need to make it go further.
And they use the sun almost like a magnifying glass, almost as a messenger.
She keeps sending message after message to the sun.
And finally, eight years later, Wengie gets a message back.
She starts freaking out, but she doesn't tell anyone else on the base, or even her superiors, that somebody responded, that they just received a message.
Instead, she silently opens it herself.
And the message is nothing like what she expected for the past eight years.
I mean, what do you expect from aliens to say?
For eight years, you just say, hello?
The message reads three lines.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
Wenji is holding her breath.
She's waiting.
She doesn't know what that means.
And then another message pops up.
This world has received your message.
I am a pacifist in this world.
It's the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message.
But I am warning you.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
There are tens of millions of stars in your direction.
As long as you do not answer, this world will not be able to ascertain the source of your transmission.
But if you do answer, the source will be located right away.
Your planet will be invaded and your world will be conquered.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
Do not answer.
Wengie doesn't know it yet, but this is a message from the San Ti, which directly translates to three bodies.
They are aliens that no longer have a stable planet to reside on, and now they want to take over Earth.
The green message is flashing on her screen and Wengie is strangely excited.
She's shocked.
She's scared.
I mean.
For eight years she's been sending message after message to the sun and she had I don't know, maybe the world's first confirmation right here on her screen that the universe is not empty, that they're not alone in this galaxy, which means whoever is sending this message to her right now is, if her calculations are correct, 400 light years away.
Even if they travel at top speed to Earth, they will arrive 400 years later.
Wenji hesitates.
What does that mean?
Like, what is she going to do with this information?
But she has this realization that humanity will never save itself from itself.
All humanity does is justify their actions and focus on their own pain.
When Wenji saw her mom again after her dad's murder because her mom betrayed their father, when she saw the guard that actually murdered her father, they both felt justified.
Neither of them apologized to Wenji.
They both felt like it's normal to inflict pain on others because they themselves are in pain.
Humanity is selfish.
Humanity is incapable of solving its own problems.
Humanity is actually beyond saving.
Unless... Unless someone from the outside can help.
So she clicks send.
The message she sends reads, Come here.
I will help you conquer this world.
Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems.
We need your force to intervene.
And now...
Start the clock.
The extraterrestrials are coming for Earth, and who's to say that they're gonna listen to Wengie?
Who guarantees that they even care about our civilization's problems?
And that's it.
That's the end of the chapter.
And Song, the woman on the train reading this, she's getting frustrated.
The other little chapters in this little magazine.
They don't even compare to what she just read in The Three Body Problem.
What's going to happen?
I mean, I don't even understand.
The rest of the train ride.
She's just waiting for the train to stop so that she can run off, find the nearest bookstore and buy the whole freaking novel, read it, start to finish, analyze it, get into the story.
Hi, I'm looking for the novel called Three Body Problem.
The bookstore clerk says, sorry, never heard of it.
You can try an older bookstore if you need, but I don't think that sounds like a new book.
Song runs out there and goes to the next bookstore.
Hi, I'm looking for the novel called Three Body Problem.
Oh, never heard of it.
We don't carry that book.
Sorry.
Song is losing her freaking mind.
She just needs to know what happens to Wenji.
What happens to Earth?
What are the aliens going to come?
What happens when they come?
Is Wenji going to be alive when they arrive?
I mean, she's so desperate.
She begs for a copy of the book online.
She's going to sci-fi forums.
I'm willing to pay.
I'm willing to pay whatever you need.
She finally gets some sort of response.
I don't have the book, but I have a full set of the sci-fi magazines that you were reading.
And I guess you could purchase them all from me and you would be able to kind of piece together most of the story.
Song agrees.
She pays several times the original price to get her hands on this freaking book.
Her husband notices how obsessive she's becoming, and he's kind of intrigued.
Over dinner, that's all she can talk about is the three body problem.
What do you think is going to happen, honey, when the aliens come?
She's laying in bed talking to him about how genius this whole storyline is.
And she would excitedly tell him yeah okay, I'm reading a book on how aliens are going to come to Earth in 400 years, which honestly fine great.
Sci-fi, it doesn't have the most relatable plots out there.
But this is what everybody says about the three body problem.
It feels like I'm reading a book on myself about the nature of humans, rather than just really crazy alien storyline of an alien invasion.
It feels like I'm reading about us.
Wait, why did they not think about this before?
This is the greatest idea ever.
The couple are laying in bed and they decide we should purchase the rights to turn this random little novel that nobody knows about into a movie.
Coincidentally, the couple are in the entertainment industry.
Song, the wife, the woman on the train, is a screenwriter, and the husband is a director.
Okay, they're nothing impressive sorry, no offense, but they do have enough money to buy the rights from the author, or at least try to.
Song calls the magazine customer service line to ask for the author's contact information and they go to meet up with him.
There is a factory in the mountains of China where a man named Liu Cixin has been working for the past 25 years.
We're going to call him LC.
Well, define LC. working.
He was employed in the factory in the mountains.
He was getting paid, but he wasn't really working.
You know, that's what some sources say.
He was assigned to his position by the government and everyone was assigned a computer to work on every single day, but nobody knows what they're doing.
They were just assigned this random job, but also their managers don't know what they were doing, because they were also assigned their managerial jobs.
So nobody knows what they're doing in this factory.
All the employees would do is come in, sit in front of their computers and just tippy tappy away.
They would look like they're doing some legitimate work.
And as long as you don't look suspicious, nobody's going to investigate what you're typing away on your screens.
And it's likely that while Elsie is sitting there, he starts kind of losing his mind.
He's going to plop over from boredom and under stimulation.
He's just thinking up random ideas and he comes across the three body problem plot in his mind.
It just kind of comes to him and he doesn't think much of it.
And he said it started off like a short story, but it just kept growing and expanding in my mind like a plant.
And he would start tip tapping away on his work computer, just writing his book.
And he said I especially really liked those low quality monitors at work where you can tilt the angle of your screen just a tiny bit and nobody can see what you're doing.
Allegedly, that's how he wrote the three body problem book.
He published the first book to the series, the trilogy the three body problem, in 1999, and then nothing.
The sales were underwhelming and he just kept working away at the factory.
Nobody knew that this would be the book that former President Barack Obama Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Game of Thrones creator George RR.
Martin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be absolutely fascinated by.
Former President Barack Obama would say, this series is wildly imaginative.
I mean, just really, really fascinating.
The sheer scope of the book was immense.
It's made day-to-day problems with Congress at the time seem fairly petty.
The book written in the factory in the mountains would go on to sell 9 million copies worldwide.
But at the time, Elsie did not know any of that.
He was barely making any money from the books and he just got laid off from his job.
And he is about to get taken advantage of now.
I would not feel too bad for this author because he has made some really unhinged comments that i can't even really dive into, because some of our relatives that live in the area that has asked us not to comment because my comments can impact their lives.
Yeah, don't feel bad for this guy is what i'm trying to say.
So at this point in time in elsie's life he has no idea that everything is about to change.
If he just sticks it out for perhaps another year that he's going to be known as the father of science fiction in china.
Instead, He makes a deal with who I imagine he believed would be the closest to the devil at that point.
In 2009, right after being laid off by the factory.
This is 10 years since he published The Three-Body Problem.
Elsie's got no money to feed his kids.
He's got nowhere to go if they get kicked out of their home.
He's pretty much hit rock bottom when this random couple calls him.
The husband is a director.
The wife is a screenwriter.
I don't know.
He's never heard of him.
And they start offering him random figures for the IP, the intellectual property, for the three body problem.
They know that this guy is struggling.
They know that the author just got laid off.
And they know that even when he was working in the factory, he was making like $100 a month.
That's $1,200 a year.
Now, I just want to put a disclaimer here.
It is not publicly known how much the couple paid for the IP.
But it is rumored to be around the ballpark of...
15,000 USD.
$15,000.
That is like nothing.
And the couple probably knew that, since they work in the industry and they know that the author really, really needs the money.
Song and her husband, they get really aggressive with it too.
So they purchased the IP for all of the movie and TV rights for all three books of his three-body trilogy.
The Three-Body Problem, Dark Forest, and Death's End.
The author hadn't even finished writing the third book yet, and they wanted the movie rights to the future work.
So to clarify, the author has other series that he's written that have also become super successful.
He maintains the royalties off the book sales of The Three-Body Problem.
He's just selling the movie and TV rights, as well as merchandising rights like the intellectual property, to turn it into games, to turn it into a theme park if they so wish.
So this couple, they're getting the deal of a lifetime, right?
People liken it to picking up a rock on the street just a random rock, dusting it off only to discover it's a 10 carat diamond.
Like, what are the odds of that?
Do you know what the Fermi paradox is?
Imagine you're in your front yard watering your flowers.
Your family is inside your house dancing to music while they're cooking up a breakfast.
Your dog is running around in the backyard.
You're busy swatting away all these bees and, oh my God, you see this cute little bird on your bird feeder and there is just so much life on your house outside, on the lawn, inside your house.
But then when you look to your left, where your neighbor is supposed to be if you had one it's just a barren desert land.
You have green grass.
You've got all these cute little animals and birds flying around.
You've got all of this.
And to the right is just a barren desert land.
And then you look to the other side, to the left.
More barren desert land.
So one day you get curious.
You send a drone out for as long as the drone goes.
And you send it all the way down what would be probably down the neighborhood.
Nothing.
There's nothing.
Just barren desert land.
So then you hook up the drone to the biggest battery you can find and send it all the way out and it comes back and it's just barren desert land.
It doesn't look abandoned.
It doesn't look like someone was there and then left.
There's just no signs of life anywhere outside of your tiny little lawn and your tiny little house.
So your house is in the middle of the desert.
Yeah.
And you're the only one with green grass and all these animals and plants that are thriving.
But that doesn't make any sense, because what are the odds that you found the only patch of livable area?
Like that doesn't even make sense that your house is the only thing in the entire universe that has life.
So the paradox is, if that doesn't make sense, that means there is other life out there.
But then how come we don't see them or hear them or know about them?
Why don't they reach out to us?
The scary answer would be, we don't see them because they're hiding.
The dark forest theory, according to the three body problem, is a very dark take on the Fermi paradox, which is each civilization's goal.
Ultimately is survival, nothing else.
There are questions between humans about are humans inherently good or are we inherently bad?
Are we evil or are we moral people?
But if you really look at the infinite unknown universe at the universal scale, none of that really matters is what the dark forest theory says.
The only thing that matters to humanity and all life out there in the universe is survival.
At the end of the day, good and evil mean nothing.
So the dark forest theory goes as follows.
The universe is a dark forest.
Every civilization is a hunter with a gun.
They are armed hunters, stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path, and they try to move without creating sound.
Even breathing is done with care.
The hunter has to be careful because everywhere in the forest there are stealthy hunters like himself.
If he finds another life, if he finds another hunter, an angel or demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod.
There is only one thing the hunter can do.
Open fire and eliminate them.
Because in this forest, hell is other people.
It does not matter if you think the hunter you're staring at in the dark forest is good or evil, weak or strong.
The only thing that makes sense in this split moment is to shoot and eliminate the hunter.
Because if you do not, they will do it to you.
They're going to turn around and they will shoot you.
Because in this dark forest, the only thing that matters is survival.
The struggle for survival rules over everything else, which translates to shoot first, apologize later, which is basically what the couple did when they purchased the rights from the author.
Within a year of selling the film and TV rights to the trained couple, three body problems starts blowing up.
Everyone wants it to be turned into a movie and the couple are foaming at the mouth.
They start hosting press conferences in Beijing where they invite representatives from the top film production companies and they have their two lawyers just standing right next to them, ready to sign an eight-figure deal that nobody wants.
Like if the couple were just trying to sell the IP for the three body problem, no strings attached.
There would have been a massive bidding war.
But the couple present a deal that nobody wants to take on.
The couple state, we have to be involved in the three body problem production.
The offer is we want to have six episodes, a six film series, with an investment of around 25 million for each of the movies.
We want to be heavily involved.
The husband will be a thousand percent the director and the wife will be a thousand percent the screenwriter.
So they want a bunch of people to invest money for them to make this crazy six part movie.
Yes.
Like the next Harry Potter series.
There's a saying in China where if there's a man laying on the couch, no matter how much you want them to stand up, no matter how much you're trying to drag them, if they're just like limp dead weight on the couch, you're not going to get them to stand up.
It doesn't matter how much blood, sweat and tears you put into that person.
They're going to stay laying on that couch.
They're going to stay horizontal.
The couple's skills are basically non-existent.
Even if they had Jeff Bezos' resources, they would not be able to pull this movie off unless they use those resources to fire themselves and hire new screenwriters and directors.
I mean, no offense.
OK, like they're they're that bad.
Just subjectively speaking.
The husband, the director he had never directed anything of this kind of magnitude with this kind of budget.
It's like giving a person who's only recreationally kayaked.
Maybe they kayaked once or twice in their life, giving them the steering wheel to a mega yacht or a massive cargo ship and then expecting them to do a good job sailing the boat.
Nobody's going to have a good time.
It's going to be rough waters.
And that's not my personal opinion.
You know how movies and shows are reviewed and they're rated on a scale of one through 10.
Even if you were to take every existing work that the couple had already completed, they had, I think, two TV shows, four movies prior to all of this.
If you added up all of the scores, it would still not hit the two digits.
It would not hit 10.
I mean, they're all rated horribly.
I think the highest rating that they ever got was like a five.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
The investors, entertainment companies, production companies, nobody wants it.
Not even the fans.
They're terrified.
They were all over social media at this point.
Because remember the part in Three-Body Problem where the main villain, Wenji of the series gets a message from the aliens saying do not answer, do not answer, do not answer.
Well, fans responded to the couple's multi-million dollar proposal with the words do not film, do not film, do not film.
Because they'd rather no movie than a ruined movie.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Nobody wants the three body problem bad enough to put up with this couple, except billionaire lin chi.
He is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in china.
At this point he was worth 22 billion dollars.
He built his fortune off of knowing what people want and then giving it to them, which in this case big chested woman in video games.
No Yeah.
Okay.
So his company, Yuzu Gaming, had some very large assets in their games.
Yes.
One of their biggest games to date is called League of Angels, which features very exaggerated characteristics in their design process.
Lin knows what his audience is looking for, and he delivers on it.
And it made him a billionaire, right?
We can't hate on that.
So, within just three years of finding Yuzu Games, he becomes one of the youngest CEOs of a publicly traded company.
And at 33 years old, he becomes a billionaire.
In 2020.
Just the first three quarters of the year, from January to the end of September, Yuzu's revenue was over 500 million.
In the US, there's only about a thousand companies that make over $500 million a year.
This is like the top of the top of the game.
But I will say that Yuzu's games are not necessarily seen as a world-class standard for gaming.
If anything, their games are kind of pooped on by the online community.
Some netizens would go as far to say, if the goat of gaming is Blizzard, Yuzu is the goat shit.
Yeah, apparently a lot of Yuzu's games would just pull from other games.
They would take the plot details, fight sequences, even digital aesthetics, just taking bits and pieces from other games, and then Frankenstein them, release them to the public.
But even then, some people would enjoy it.
They said it's the type of game that you don't waste too much time or money on.
You don't get too invested.
It's just a silly game that you play on the toilet.
But that's Yuzu's strategy.
You target the lower-end players.
You focus on making affordable but fun games that don't require gaming computers to play because it's so high quality.
You keep it cheap to develop, cheap to play for the masses.
I mean, there's a large market for it, clearly.
I mean, he's a billionaire.
He was not oblivious to what people thought of his games either.
He said something along the lines of...
When an affordable shoe brand starts releasing shoes as long as they can be worn, walked in, they're gonna sell, even if they start leaking after a rainy day.
Insinuating.
Not everybody has money for Gucci footwear, but also don't expect the world's best shoes without paying that price.
There's a market for everyone.
Before Lin went on to run one of the most successful, profitable gaming companies in China, he was just a little kid working in a coal mine.
I'm serious.
There was one day he worked there 14 hours in the dark, scary, dangerous coal mines.
He came up after his shift, just coal all over his face.
He sees the sunlight again, breathing in that fresh, crisp air after 14 hours of dust swirling in his lungs.
And he tells himself I'm never going to be in a situation ever again where I have to work in that coal mine, which he wouldn't ever have to ever again, because his parents own the coal mine.
Yeah, Lin is the son of a wealthy businessman who owns a few coal mines, and they made him work one singular day in the coal mines as a wake up call.
To give you some context, Lin's parents have money, but they also have zero time.
So Lin's whole childhood.
He doesn't really remember his parents, but he does remember that they would send him living expenses every single month.
And by living expenses, I mean allowance for takeout food.
He would have to buy takeout every day for him and his little sister.
He was likely one of the wealthier kids in the neighborhood, but every day he was starving.
He was forced to beg his neighbors and family and friends for cash.
What happened to the money that your parents sent to you?
What are you talking about?
You need money.
He used it all to play video games at the arcade.
Lin said he got really, really good at the art of negotiating, the art of yapping at this point because wealthy family son blows money on video games.
I mean, who's gonna wanna lend him money?
Nobody, unless he can somehow convince them.
He gets by for a while before somebody tells his parents what's going on.
So his parents, they pull him out of class one day, throw him into the coal mines.
And they did not actually initially plan on letting him work in the coal mines.
They just wanted to take him down there and be like, see, you got to do this.
And they're screaming at him.
If you don't study hard, you're going to have to dig coal in the future.
Is that what you want to do?
Lin has the audacity to look at his parents and say, I think coal mining sounds pretty good.
I'm quite interested, actually.
So after 14 hours, he's practically crying at the sky, kissing the ground.
And he said I will never forget that kind of coldness and that kind of darkness coming back up seeing the light.
It felt like heaven.
So he snaps out of it.
And since that day, all he does is study for the college entrance exams.
He missed Tsinghua University, which is like the Harvard of China by two points.
He ends up at the Nanjing University instead, which is still a really impressive school.
He's majoring in computer information management and he's just back to his old ways.
He's smart enough to get by with minimal effort.
And the rest of the time in college, he's in his dorm room.
All the curtains are closed.
He's playing video games and eating cup lemon every single day.
That's all he's doing.
After college, he's spending a good chunk of his time kind of rotting in his bedroom.
During the day, he was working for... At first, he started at like the AT&T of China.
Then later, he moves to Huawei.
Huawei.
Which is like the Apple of China, right?
But the corporate life, not really his vibe.
He doesn't like it.
He likes to do things his own way.
He doesn't like to ask his manager for permission to do things that he already knows more about than his manager to begin with.
So he starts raising capital.
In 2005 he gets 55000 in his account and he decides I'm going to develop a property management software company.
It's definitely a case of he's following where he thinks the money is going to be.
But it's clear he's just not into it.
Within a few years, company goes bankrupt.
Then he does it again.
New company goes bankrupt.
Then again, new company goes bankrupt.
Three failed companies.
And Lin has no clue what he's going to do next.
But he's like, you know what?
One thing's for sure.
I'm not going to be coal mining, okay?
I'm not going to get a job either.
He basically said at this point, I like the idea of printing business cards with my name on it and being my own boss and calling myself a founder.
So let me just try to do something fun.
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Subject to change, terms apply. comes his fourth idea.
He's thinking, everything I thought was going to make money ended up not making money.
So why don't I just do whatever the hell I want to do?
He founds Yuzu Gaming in 2009.
I mean, he technically I guess you could say has 20 years of experience in gaming, because he would do that like 15 hours a day.
And he starts working.
Back then there used to be games where you would have to purchase the CD for which i i still believe exists.
But you would have to get a cd, put it into your computer and then you would play the game on the cd and it was just a lot.
But around the time that yuzu was founded, it was the beginning stages of internet games, where you would just get on your little computer and instead of going to the store buying a cd, you would just type in tetriscom and, without going to the store, you would be able to play tetris on your computer without a cd.
Yuzu was one of the bigger web game companies for a while.
They were like part of that trend, the initial trend.
The first game that they ever released was called 36 tactics.
It was a strategy game which surprisingly did really well outside of china.
Yuzu starts catching on to that very quickly and they start catering their games to people outside of China using Chinese aesthetics.
So they released a game called A Sword in Ten Years, which was influenced by Chinese traditional martial arts, but it was digestible for foreigners.
So it does really well.
By 2011, the company was consistently launching games every month or every other month.
And by then, Lin's personal net worth broke a billion dollars.
He's at the top of the wealthy list in China.
And I will say a lot of people were not the most fond of yuzu or the most fond of lin.
He was someone who really appreciated the finer things in life.
He's one of the youngest ceos on the billionaire list and he definitely was not afraid to spend money.
I guess you could say that this man really knew how to live life the wealthy way.
If he liked something, he wanted the highest quality, the best version of it.
All the time He had this obsession with tea, specifically Pura tea, which is fermented tea.
It's pretty intense.
It's actually known as one of the teas that you really only see very serious tea drinkers or collectors drinking.
They call it the champagne of tea, because it's really only grown in one region of the world, in the Yunnan province of southwest China.
There are other places that can harvest this type of tea leaf, if I'm not mistaken, but it would be called something else.
The tea leaves go through natural fermentation.
It can last for months or even years, depending on the tea leaf.
Apparently, the longer the tea ferments, the more flavor there is.
They say it ages like fine wine.
And some of the tea leaves for this specific tea can be over a thousand years old.
Like the top of the line can easily go for $5,000 a pound of tea leaves.
Yeah, it's like a huge thing.
Yeah, one enthusiast described it as like a perfume.
The way the tea hits you, the way it hits your mouth, the way that it trails after you swallow it.
The feeling is akin to exhilaration.
Lin would send his assistants or his tea collectors specifically to that region in China that makes that tea to purchase it on site, because he doesn't want to just get a random bag of tea.
They need to pick the specific tea leaves.
He was very serious about the things that he liked.
He also very much likes wine.
So he created his own little wine fund where he invested 5 million just to acquire the world's finest wines.
He even constructed this massive kitchen next to the Yuzu headquarters, where he had two Michelin star chefs sitting around just on standby ready to cook a meal for him whenever he has a little craving.
I mean, he truly was a character.
The CEO of Meituan, which is like the Uber of China, said this about Lin.
He's got the strength of a dragon and the fierceness of a tiger.
He's full of energy.
He's a force to be reckoned with.
And, you know, more on that, like more on the fierceness of the tiger aspect.
Apparently, Lin is incredibly hot tempered.
He's got this short fuse.
There's allegations that he could not even go 10, 20 seconds without interrupting someone.
But other people said, well, not really.
I mean...
I mean, I guess you could put it that way, but it's more of the fact that Lin is super direct and he's very intense when he's expressing his thoughts compared to other people.
People who are not used to his level of passion, they would call it a bad temper.
That's a very nice way of putting it.
I mean, perhaps both are true at the same time, but all I know is Lin is a very polarizing figure.
Either people love him and respect him, or they love respect and fear him, or they hate him, despise him and fear him.
Because one way or the other, how do you not fear a billionaire?
Some of his other billionaire friends said, I just think that the public is scared of his ambition.
He was always there holding a glass of expensive wine, talking about his imaginative thoughts for the future.
The guy is full of dreams.
And his next ambition was to globalize the Chinese entertainment industry.
Eventually, Lin wants to pivot Yuzu away from affordable online games to real content.
He said, in the early days, Yuz's team goal was simple and pure, get things done.
To be honest, I'm a very realistic person, but my reality is different from ordinary reality.
I think games can make me wealthy and enable me to create value.
Only when you have money can you realize your ideals and dreams.
And his dream was to create a new IP that would live on even after he's gone.
A whole legacy.
Create a whole universe that would rival the likes of Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings.
I mean, isn't that crazy?
One person or a few people, they think of something in their minds.
They create like this fake universe.
And it's so good that it becomes part of the real universe.
That everybody loves this world.
That it becomes part of the real world.
That's deep.
That's what lin wants and he wants to bring chinese culture and talent into it.
He said our movie industry is still dominated by hollywood.
Every time aliens attack earth, the globe, why is it that only american soldiers save earth?
He wants to become the world's leading provider of entertainment services, create the chinese marvel.
And the only way to get there that he felt, build a whole universe around the ip of a famous series is the three body problem.
In the three body problem series, the Santee, the aliens who want to invade earth, they send a collective message to all the humans, to all of humanity, before they arrive on the planet.
Three simple words.
You are bugs.
You are bugs.
We are bugs.
We are bugs.
Humans are bugs to them.
Now, seven years after the couple acquired the IP for the three body problem, they purchased it from the author.
Lynn, billionaire Lynn, licenses it from them.
So he's not buying the rights.
He's saying, okay, I'm going to co-produce a six-film series with you.
Like, let's start with the first movie.
Finally, somebody wants to work with the couple after seven years.
Lin even has the author come onto the project as an executive producer.
He's willing to hire the top VFX, special effects teams from Hollywood.
A lot of the big names at the time were casted to be part of this series.
And when they finally wrapped filming...
They had the first version of Lin's hopes and dreams basically on a disc in their hands.
He's so excited.
He invited his closest friends and family over and some of the top film critics in the whole nation, to come and witness the first ever viewing of the first ever film of the Three Body Project.
After they watched the movie, the whole room was silent.
I mean, nobody even knew what to say about it.
It was just so, The ones that were a bit nervous around Lin.
They came up to him and they said It is so, so good.
So moving.
So touching.
I mean, captivating, really.
Yeah.
However, I do think it's a little bit too forward thinking for the mainstream audience.
You know, they're all kind of dumb and this is too artistic.
I think I'm scared that this type of art, this level of craft and creative expression is just going to go over the general audience's heads.
You know, it's just almost too good.
The other people, the ones that weren't scared of Lin, so probably just his friends and family they looked at him and just said bluntly are you sure that was a movie?
That felt like a PowerPoint, like a PowerPoint presentation.
The movie was filmed with 50 screenwriters.
They would go scene by scene, 50 screenwriters to write a two hour movie.
I mean, think about it this way.
Game of Thrones for like all, I don't know, eight seasons only had seven screenwriters.
Seven.
Wow.
Yeah.
So 50, I mean, each scene is probably written by a different screenwriter.
So the whole tone, the messaging, the plot, it's all lost.
Every two seconds, a whole new vibe, a whole new mission, a whole new direction.
And they're not even communicating well.
It's like they stitched together the worst group project ever.
Just relay racing this shit.
Each screenwriter would write a few minutes, stop randomly.
I wouldn't even be surprised if they stopped mid-sentence.
Then it would be passed on to the next screenwriter.
Then the next.
I mean, to give you an idea, again, seven screenwriters for Game of Thrones, they're using 50.
It just makes zero logical sense.
I mean, it doesn't, more does not mean better.
I don't know.
I guess they thought more the better.
The more the better.
The couple were interviewed.
The couple, the director and the main screenwriter, the one that owned the rights to the IP.
They were interviewed during a press release for this movie, or at least the announcing of the production for this movie.
And the husband.
The director said that his biggest challenge for this film would be the special effects.
He said he spent years learning green screen technology.
Green screen?
Just adding green screen in the back?
Yeah precisely, which is also very interesting because a lot of the editors working on this movie, allegedly mass, walked out on their jobs.
They were having to sit there 20 hours a day editing the green screens.
So let me give you an idea.
Let's say my background is a green screen.
It would have to fit the whole frame, right?
And then you would put a little background on it.
The director did not buy a green screen that was big enough.
Even if the editors had put in a background the edges of the frame would still not be green screened.
And then there were parts in the middle that were not correctly green screened.
I mean, it was crazy.
So the editors had to sit there, crop out green and then place green in the parts that were not green screened.
And then they could overlay a background on it.
It was absolutely horrendous.
And also remember the special effects company that they wanted to work with in Hollywood, one of the biggest names, I believe.
They worked on Harry Potter.
They declined the footage.
They declined it.
So they get the raw footage of the three body problem and they said, what is this?
Like, that's not what we're supposed to be doing.
Apparently the couple did not know that if you're working with a special effects company, before you send them the footage, they work with you collaboratively.
They make sure that you get the right raw footage that they need in order to do the special effects.
You can't just send them random footage.
Like I can't just send them this video and be like okay well, can you special effects like an alien invading right now?
Thank you so much.
Like you can't just do that.
They thought you just use it like a dry cleaner.
You show up after your shirt is covered in stains and they fix it.
That's not how it works.
Also, I don't think that the special effects company wanted their name anywhere near this project.
By all accounts, it was probably the worst movie made in that budget range to date.
The couple end up taking the footage to a domestic special effects company, which I'm sure they're great, but they're no world-class leader in special effects.
Also, they go bankrupt before they can finish editing the three-body problem.
The special effects company.
The second company?
Yeah.
Went bankrupt?
Went bankrupt.
What is going on?
Exactly.
So a lot of the edits had to be done in-house which, like I said, the editors are flipping their desk, walking out on this job.
It's just nothing is going right which honestly, maybe the editors wouldn't have walked out on their jobs.
Just maybe, if the movie had been interesting, it could keep them somewhat entertained, somewhat incentivized to focus on this big mission while they work.
But the writing, the dialogue, the plot line was so horrendous.
You couldn't even say that this was the three body problem.
It felt like a fanfic.
Apparently, the wife that owns the ip the main screenwriter.
She added so much of her own original content to the script that it was no longer the three body problem.
She managed to turn a masterpiece into literally the worst wattpad that you could imagine.
She refuses to listen to anybody, including the author himself, who created the universe.
There were a lot of creative changes that were made which, by the way, when you make a show, a live action of a book that has a cult following, you have to be so thoughtful and intentional with any of the changes that are made, because people are married to that book.
They're married to that idea, that vision.
And when you start altering stuff, you're going to hurt a lot of people's feelings.
People want to see that book come to life, not a whole new book.
Suddenly there's an alien that comes to earth in the movie that can point a finger at you, like et, and throw you 20 feet away like it felt like a mash-up of avengers meets three, body problem meets et and it's a whole new story and it's not a good one.
Lin is understandably very pissed.
I mean, he went into this project thinking that the director would direct and the screenwriter would write and maybe it wouldn't have been a masterpiece.
But what is this PowerPoint presentation of a movie?
If he releases this movie, it's game over.
Everything he envisioned for himself is down the toilet.
He's going to be the laughingstock.
Everyone on the internet will tell him to stick with shitty games.
His whole plan of breaking into the entertainment industry with films, with universes, highly valued IP is going to crash and burn, which means the only other option is to not release this movie and take a loss of tens of millions of dollars.
That's exactly what he's going to do.
But Lin is not going to give up on the three body problem at this point.
He still wants it.
He just wants to make sure that the couple stay 10 feet away at all times from the set, from anything.
Stay 10 feet away from the book itself.
Don't get involved.
Don't be around.
Get lost.
Lin now wants to go in and buy the IP, the whole movie and TV rights, all of it from the couple.
They're not going to direct anything.
They're not going to write a single word for the script, nothing.
They're going to take their money and walk away entirely, which means it's just now a matter of exactly how much money are we talking?
$27 million.
That is what the couple is asking for, on top of the money that they already caused Lin to burn through.
About $55 million on the PowerPoint presentation they called a feature film.
A lot of the production companies that wanted the rights to the IP felt like the couple were like bugs.
Pesky, annoying, refusing to leave, not helping anyone but themselves.
What is the point of your existence?
But there is something you have to remember about bugs.
It's a quote from The Three-Body Problem.
Look at them.
The bugs.
Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them out of disgust.
Every kind of poison bug sprays pesticides, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize bugs, drowning them in water.
Every family has bug spray.
Every desk has a fly swatter.
This long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization.
But the outcome is bugs are still not extinct and their numbers are no less than that of humans.
Insects roam heaven and earth just like the true masters of the planet.
Hmm.
One big problem with the couple the bugs is.
I'm sure a lot of people would do the same thing if they were in the couple's shoes.
I would hope not.
But I feel like you know when money is involved, they just really did not care for the three body problem.
They were willing to die with this series if that's what made them the most money.
It feels like they don't care if the fans hate whatever they produce.
It feels like they don't care about the integrity of the story.
They want to kill the entire trilogy and universe by releasing shitty live action movies, if they can profit off of it.
They're like, if the IP is going down, I'm going to go down with it.
It's honestly kind of wild.
I mean, just the principle of that, that is not what Lin can get behind.
He already blew 55 million on the couple and now they want another 27.
At this point, they're so close to closing the deal.
The couple come back and they say, we change our minds.
We want closer to 30 million.
We want more money.
Mind you, they've already somewhat taken advantage of the author and purchased the IP rights for allegedly 15000.
And they're going to make $27 million from $15,000?
That's crazy.
But they're coming back and saying, actually, we deserve more for this?
Lin is aggravated at this point.
Technically, a million dollars is nothing to somebody like Lin, and he's losing sleep over this whole situation.
It really comes down to the principle.
It's infuriating him.
So one day, his friend pulls him aside and nicely tells him, you're gonna lose your mind, okay?
You really are.
Here, take this card and call this guy.
Who the hell is this guy?
He's known as the master negotiator.
If you want a deal done, you go to this guy.
He's a closer.
They say that he can whip up a deal out of thin air.
If you ask him to handle it, nothing ever goes wrong.
Lin agrees to call the master negotiator, but he's a billionaire.
He's going to run a few background checks first on the guy.
The guy's name is Xu Yao, a lawyer.
We're going to call him Xu, or at least a lawyer is what everybody thinks he is, right?
That's what he claims to be.
Nothing is for certain without a background check.
A full investigation into a so-called master negotiator.
The results come back and Xu really is the real deal.
He really is a lawyer.
And he was responsible for helping facilitate over $14 billion in deals.
He works for a company called Fosun.
And they acquired the Chase Manhattan Plaza, number one.
They acquired a 16% stake of the Millennium Bank of Portugal.
They acquired the German H&A Private Bank.
They acquired Japan's Hoshino Tamamo Resort, Brazil's Rio Bravo Investments.
This guy's resume is impressive.
He facilitated most of those deals.
He studied law in France, then went to the US, worked for the Hong Kong office for the top US law firm at one point, and now he was the general legal advisor for the Fosun Group, a huge conglomerate in China.
He was rumored to be the president of Fosun Group's right-hand man when it comes to mergers and acquisitions.
He leads the in-house legal team and under his guidance they won Asia's best legal team of the year.
So I don't know, maybe Lin's friend was right.
If anybody's gonna get him the three body problem IP, it's gonna be Shu.
Lin books a meeting with Shu and he just cuts to the point, okay?
2.5 million a year.
You know what?
Make it closer to 3 million a year. leave your firm and come work for Yuzu as in-house counsel.
That's the deal Lin is offering Shu.
He's trying to poach the guy and he's becoming very aggressive with it.
On top of the 3 million a year.
If you get this deal done, you can be the president of the subsidiary of Yuzu, the three body problem universe.
Oh, so he wants him to work for him for 3 million a year and also be the president of three body problem.
Universe.
You will be one of the highest executives in Yuzu, running one of the world's greatest IPs.
I mean.
That's pretty good.
How do you say no to that deal?
Within 120 days, four months of joining negotiations, Shu closes the deal instead of the over 27 close to 30 million dollars the couple originally asked for.
In 2018, yuzu purchases the ip for the three body problem for 16 million dollars.
The three body problem ip was now linz and shu was officially the president of the three body problem universe.
In order to understand the three body problem, i think you have to understand the two body problem.
Let's say we have two stars.
They're both moving and interacting with each other.
Based on mass gravitational pull and a whole list of other factors, you can kind of predict the location of both stars at any given point, even maybe five years down the line.
Disclaimer technically, our solar system is not a two-body problem.
But for simplicity's sake, just imagine Earth and the Sun.
Earth orbits around the Sun at a certain speed and distance.
It's predictable to a degree, and for a certain period of time, it's going to be the same route.
You can calculate it mathematically.
But then you add in a third body.
Let's say you add in another sun, the same mass as the sun that we have right now.
You've got these two giant masses, the suns that are almost, in a way, fighting to bring our earth into their orbit.
They're just fighting.
And we're just getting flung around between the two suns.
But then you can add another sun.
And now you're flinging around between three suns.
The three-body problem is a real problem in physics.
It's not a problem that the book came up with.
It's considered a mathematically chaotic system.
You cannot analytically with much accuracy predict the future of the three-body system.
Because even if you change the environment, even if the smallest increment of distance has been altered, the whole system goes completely chaotic.
And the result becomes exponentially different from what you have calculated, which makes the three-body problem mathematically unsolvable.
Santee, the aliens in the three body problem book, which translates to three body.
The Santee are basically an alien race that are faced with a three body problem of physics in their universe.
They live in a three star solar system.
And because their tiny little planet is orbiting around three suns and they're all fighting for the gravitational pull, they're just getting flung around.
Their planet is not in any sort of stable orbit.
They can't even predict where their planet's gonna be in a hundred years, let alone two years down the line.
Sometimes they get flung too close to a sun and their whole planet goes into drought and it's on fire.
Then they get flung too far from the sun because of all these different gravitational pulls.
And now their planet is completely frozen over.
And every time they go through one of these chaotic eras, they have to start from fresh.
Civilization resets itself.
All development, all technology, everything resets.
Except there was one recent time period where the Santee were able to technologically advance to the point where now all of them most of them have left the planet.
They're like nomads, space nomads.
They live in their vans.
They live in their space orbital UFOs.
And they're roaming around looking for a new planet to take over.
It will take the Santee 400 years to arrive on Earth, but when they do, they will take over.
At Yuzu and the newly formed subsidiary company Three Body Problem Universe.
There was actually a lot of cleanup mess to be done.
When they started production for the PowerPoint movie Three Body Problem, they were doing press releases.
Everyone and their mom in China knew about this movie.
They were even announcing when they wrapped filming.
All three body problem fans are waiting for some sort of answer.
Like, why would you not release when you've already finished filming?
Like, what's going on?
And so when they took too long, people netizens kept saying like don't touch me what you can't handle.
I mean, just stick to shitty games.
It's too big.
You bit off more than you can chew.
The whole sci-fi community was just betting on their failure at this point.
There's a lot of negative publicity pressure, and it's not just the three-body problem that's counting on this going well.
Like I said, Lin has a whole vision of overtaking the entertainment industry globally, so the first thing he does cannot be a massive flop.
He decides to fully scrap the $55 million project and start fresh.
He said to the public, there were various objective factors that led to the failure of the three-body problem in the past.
Today, I have to face those problems alone and bear the responsibility.
We have to start from scratch.
There is a blank sheet of paper and no baggage now.
The new plan now is start the universe with three movies, two Chinese drama series, one English drama series, three seasons of animated versions of The Three-Body Problem audiobooks, podcasts.
The films alone, Yuzu is estimating spending close to $190 million to produce six films.
Then eventually they can head into VR, video games, art music publishing, even offline experiences like exhibits, art installation, theme parks, three body problem themed escape rooms.
The objective here being cover every single demographic.
The three body problem has a lot of fans now, but create a cult like following.
That's the plan.
In order to execute, they're going to need a full team, but also some strong leaders.
Lin, the CEO of Yuzu, will be heavily involved.
Shu, the lawyer turned president of the three body problem universe, will also be heavily involved.
And Lin brings in the third guy Zhao, a young, experienced executive who will serve as the vice president of the three body problem universe.
But like I said, the problem is three bodies are chaotic.
And now, Yuzu has a three-body problem.
September 2020, a lot is happening in the three-body problem universe.
The IP is finally going somewhere, okay?
It's been, what, two years since they purchased the IP, and now it's doing something.
There's at least three main big, big projects in the works.
A live-action drama series, 3D, 30 episodes shot in China by a Chinese company, Tencent.
It's like the meta or Facebook of China, if you will.
They're going to release it mainly to the Chinese speaking audience, because it's fully done in Chinese.
Then another Chinese production, an animated version of the series for Bilibili, which is like the YouTube of China.
Lastly, probably the most exciting news for Yuzu and CEO Lin.
Three-Body Problem was going to be made into an English sci-fi drama.
After months, potentially even close to a year, of non-stop negotiations meetings, phone calls, weird meetings with Amazon executives attorneys, Netflix beat Disney and Amazon and secured the rights for The Three-Body Problem.
Not a co-production, they secured the rights.
I mean okay, a bit more about this Netflix deal, because when it was signed it was a pretty big conversation amongst Three Body Problem fans and China, since it's a Chinese series.
It is believed that Netflix paid Yuzo around 16 million just for the rights for the English adaptation of the series.
And they're going to spend another 20 million per episode, with eight episodes in total, to create season one.
That is $160 million for season one.
That's just the production cost.
To give you some context, Netflix spent about 25 million per episode to produce Squid Games, one of its most profitable shows.
The Witcher and The Crown were allegedly reportedly said to have a budget of around 10 million an episode.
Three-Body Problem is going to be double that.
It's a little bit more than One Piece, which had the budget of $18 million per episode.
And one of the only shows that top that budget is Netflix's most expensive show to date, Stranger Things, which had a budget of around 30 million per episode.
Showrunners that did the whole Game of Thrones series for HBO industry legends at this point, David Benioff and DB.
Weiss, They're going to be the showrunners for the three body problem universe in English.
Side note, most of the Game of Thrones had a budget of 10 million per episode.
It wasn't until like the final I want to say one or two seasons.
It was 15 million per episode.
So this is this is a lot more than that.
Every single episode of three body problem is going to be more expensive than Game of Thrones, which most of that cost, i'm assuming, was allocated for special effects.
Later on, when the show was released, people who worked in special effects they said no, don't get me wrong.
Three body problem is a great show, really cool.
Watching it, though because i work in the industry is like watching people or someone pile up a million dollars in cash and then light it on fire.
You're just burning through money for a few minutes of cool effects.
Every few minutes, it feels like, okay, that's $300,000.
Okay, there goes a million dollars for a two-minute clip.
Okay, that's another half a million.
Just burning money.
So think about that next time you watch a sci-fi show.
David Benioff and D.B.
Weiss, the Game of Thrones showrunners that are now handling the whole project.
Interestingly enough, they've actually worked with Yuzu Gaming in the past.
Yuzu was licensed to create a game based off the HBO series and they made Game of Thrones.
Winter is Coming the video game.
So Yuzu worked with them.
I don't know how directly they worked with you know Benioff and Weiss, but they did work together to a degree.
Now, there are some layers of public reactions about Netflix acquiring the English rights.
September 2020, there were so many conversations.
So, first of all, in the past few years this feels like one of the biggest projects, most expensive projects to bring a.
A lot of Chinese fans were super excited and super nervous because there's so much nuance in the Chinese culture and history and how it's going to be depicted.
Nobody knows.
Netflix does end up changing a lot of the characters.
They describe it as globalizing the story.
Their argument being that it's not necessarily just an in China story.
I mean, the aliens are invading Earth.
Every country is involved.
Apparently the author agreed to it and they wanted it to feel more inclusive to the west, but still a lot of chinese netizens were upset because only a third of the cast of one of the most significant chinese sci-fi series were of asian descent a third.
There were also some mixed feelings about having the game of thrones showrunners be in charge of three.
Body problem, i mean.
Most of the reactions, i would say, were positive because they're influential iconic yes, great.
But other netizens were hesitant, considering the last season of Game of Thrones is known to be one of the most disappointing seasons in TV history.
But it does seem like they're taking it seriously.
The Game of Thrones showrunner said It's one of the first things we'd come across since Game of Thrones, where we were actually scared.
Like we knew that this was going to be hard and that's why we knew we had to do it.
Wow.
Another interesting aspect to the Netflix production is there is a lot of elements of not just Chinese history in this book, but also so much physics.
I mean, it's science fiction, so of course it's not real and it's fiction.
But this series is so heavy on the science part.
It's not even the fun stuff.
It's straight up physics.
Apparently, netflix offered a physics 101 class for almost everybody that was working on the show.
They had an astrophysicist as a consultant for the show.
He was just on speed dial for any and all questions.
Just the sheer amount of science that is pertinent to this plot of this series is crazy and it's going to make the show very, very difficult to create on a visual scale.
I mean, think about it.
It's one thing to read about how something starts as 10 dimensions, Imagine 10 dimensions in your head, and then it folds, collapses into nine eight seven, six you get it until two.
How do you show that visually from a visual standpoint?
Like what does it look like inside of a particle accelerator when atoms are colliding?
David Benioff said for me, there were so many scenes in the book that I read and I thought I really want to see this.
Throughout the whole trilogy there were so many scenes that are so thrilling to read, but also as a TV writer and producer, it's deeply intimidating because you're thinking how are we going to show multiple dimensions on screen?
How is that going to work?
I literally can't visualize some of the things that are described in this book.
But overall the news that Netflix was going to adopt an English version of the three body problem I would say was good.
Most people in China were very happy.
Everybody seemed really, really ecstatic, especially Lin.
This has been his project for the past.
I don't know five years of his life and it's going somewhere.
Three months later, after the news of Netflix was released, Lin ends up in the hospital.
December 16th, 2020, Lin's alarm goes off.
He shuts it off.
He's laying in bed staring at the ceiling, which already seems kind of odd, because Lin is typically the type to jump out of bed, get the day started.
But his whole body feels like it's made out of the bruised parts of an apple.
That's what his whole body feels like.
Soft, painful, sore everywhere, fragile.
His entire body is in pain.
He takes a deep breath.
He swings his legs over to the side of the bed and the whole room is spinning.
He's so dizzy.
His face is completely puffed up, swollen.
And it's strange.
I mean, maybe it's the stress.
But when Lin tries to get up, It feels like there's an earthquake.
His whole body is vibrating, just trembling, and the whole room is stable.
He's trying to walk to the restroom, but his body is jerking forward.
His body is very erratic.
His hands can't seem to stay still.
He can't seem to control any of his muscles.
He quickly grabs his things and he starts walking.
He walks out of the residence onto the street, and perhaps he thought that fresh air would do him some good.
He starts walking towards the private hospital.
It takes him about an hour to walk the very short distance to the hospital and once he's in through that door his state has already rapidly deteriorated.
He can barely breathe, he's throwing up, he's having explosive diarrhea, doctors are rushing him to the icu and eventually he goes into full cardiac arrest.
His whole body is shutting down on him.
In the three body problem book There's a fascinating concept called chain of suspicion.
Let's say there are two civilizations, two worlds and the only two worlds with life on it, in the entire universe.
Let's just say that.
Civilization one, let's call it Earth.
It's us.
And then there's civilization two.
The two planets are 400 light years apart.
So for us to get to civilization two, it's going to take 400 years and vice versa.
And Earth just discovered civilization to exist.
We just discovered there is another life out there.
Civilization two, as of right now, has no idea that Earth exists.
They don't know that there is life outside of their planet.
The problem here is Earth knows about two.
But other than the fact that we know that they exist, we don't know anything else.
We don't know if they're good or bad, what kind of civilization they are.
Do they just like to destroy things?
I mean, I guess we could try and talk to them to figure out, but then we would be exposing ourselves and our location to civilization too.
And who's to say that they'll even tell us the truth and who's to say that they won't kill us on impact, like immediately after finding out we exist?
So Earth must, at least to a degree, wonder if maybe we haven't found any other civilizations.
What if it's because Civilization II has been out here annihilating all sense of life?
And what if they find out about Earth?
They're going to annihilate us too.
So now there's a few ways that this could play out.
The first way would be guarantee Earth's survival and the survival of all humans on Earth, and destroy Civilization 2 before they know Earth exists.
It's only a matter of time before they find out about Earth.
Then what?
We just bet and hope that they're not going to kill Earth.
For the same reason, Earth wants to kill Civilization 2 for peace of mind, for guaranteeing survival.
But let's say humans can't do that.
We want to know more about civilization too.
You know, then we'll figure out what to do next.
So we reach out.
Now civilization too knows about earth.
Perhaps they kill earth instantly or perhaps they interact with earth.
Now the problem is there are so many things that make this very complicated, because there's so much more now that we have to factor in like a technological explosion, right.
So the way that Netflix describes it is it took humans 90000 years to get from hunter-gatherer to farmer.
And then it took humans another 10,000 years to become industrialist.
Then 200 years for atomic power.
Computers, the information age, another 50 years.
Meaning, on the scale of the universe, the amount of time to get from hunter-gatherer to where we are now.
It feels slow.
It feels very gradual.
But on the scale of the universe, it's like a burst, a technological explosion.
And who's to say Earth does it the fastest?
So with that in mind, if Earth reaches out to civilization too, they discover one of two things.
Maybe they discover that civilization too is weaker than Earth and they seem nice.
But what does that even mean?
You can't just take that for face value when you have the whole weight of humanity's survival on your shoulders.
That means right now, civilization too is weaker than Earth.
But after Earth reaches out, that might be the perfect catalyst for them to have a technological explosion.
Because according to the book, quote, staying alive is not enough to guarantee survival.
Development is the best way to ensure survival.
On Earth.
It took 300 years, but there's no reason why humanity should be the fastest of all cosmic civilizations.
Maybe there are others whose technological explosions are even more sudden.
I'm weaker than you, but once I've received your message and know of your existence, the chain of suspicion is established between us.
If, at any time, I experience a technological explosion that suddenly puts me far ahead of you, then I'm stronger than you.
And on the scale of the universe, several hundred years is the snap of a finger.
And it might be that my knowledge of your existence and the information I received from our communication was the perfect spark to set off my technological explosion.
That means, even though I'm still just a newborn or a growing civilization, I'm still a big danger to you.
So it's saying that anybody, even if they're weaker, they can surpass you.
Yes.
And become a threat.
It's the incentive of the stronger to kill the weaker at this point.
Because at any point, they can become stronger to you.
And who's to say that they operate on the same ethics and morals as you do?
Got it.
So even if someone's like little, yeah, okay.
And very soon they could be more powerful, more advanced than you.
And sure, they seem nice, but it's the chain of suspicion.
It's basically game theory.
You're predicting outcomes based on multiple participants.
Civilization 2 tells Earth, we're good people.
We're weaker than you and we're very good people.
We're nice.
If Earth believes them and decides not to kill them, Civilization 2 lives.
But now Earth is left wondering, what if Civilization 2 lied?
Or what if they get more evil as they grow more technologically powerful?
Then we need to annihilate them while we still can.
Or what if they're good, but they later turn evil?
Then we need to annihilate.
Or what if they're good, but they think we're bad?
They don't think that we're also good.
So, being good, they need to technologically explode and then they're going to kill us because they think we're bad.
But civilization too is also having the same thoughts.
Maybe earth is nice, but they don't trust that we're good.
So they're going to kill us, which means we need to kill them before they kill us.
Do you see the chain of suspicion?
It's very complicated.
It goes on and on.
And ultimately the chain of suspicion, there's only one correct answer.
If survival is the only thing that matters, you kill on sight.
Because, according to the book, there is no universal moral code that living beings abide by in the galaxy.
It reads on Earth, humankind can step onto another continent and, without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease.
But when they gaze up at the stars they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by some universal, noble moral constraints.
Insinuating.
If humans can't even be good, why would they expect any other life in this universe to be good and treat us with kindness?
That is the chain of suspicion.
And in the Yuzu office, there is a chain of suspicion taking place.
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The doctors initially guessed that Lin came into the hospital December 16th 2020, that he had a heart attack.
Lin had a heart attack from overworking, stress, bad lifestyle habits.
But very quickly, they think, wait, maybe it's not.
Maybe something bad happened.
Now I'm not too sure how they came to this conclusion, whether it was from recent experience symptoms, a gut feeling or the fact that the patient is a billionaire.
I have no clue.
But they believe that Lin was poisoned by pufferfish.
To test this theory, the doctors run a few labs and Lin was found to have high, high levels of tetrodotoxin.
He has way more than the lethal amounts in his body.
Now, textrodotoxin is often called nature's most powerful neurotoxin.
There's not many effective antidotes and it's found naturally in pufferfish.
That's why they can be very poisonous.
And once there's a lethal amount inside the body, it results in typically paralysis of muscles.
If it's serious, it leads straight all the way to respiratory death.
That is what the doctors believe Lin was poisoned with.
Pufferfish poison.
He has had no contact with pufferfish recently.
And because Lin spends most of his time at work, that leads doctors to believe that he was poisoned at work.
Authorities come and they just tear Yuzu headquarters inside out.
They've taken out anything that could have been tampered with water cups teacups supplements, anything Lin used daily and came in contact with.
They're checking the water fountains on each floor.
Everything that has the potential to be evidence.
Everything is being booked and checked and checked over and over, including employee hair samples, blood samples.
They were also taken in for toxicology reports.
And in total, four people around Lin were found to be poisoned.
But interestingly enough, only two of them worked in the office.
They were found to have heavy amounts of mercury in their system.
Lin's personal assistant and an executive from the three body problem universe.
Now, out of the two people that were poisoned inside the offices, the police, they start mapping out who has access to all these people and who would have the opportunity to poison them.
And out of everybody, the chain of suspicion comes down to one person.
Lin's whole motto throughout the whole three-body problem acquisition has been the three Fs.
Film-free fans.
Films create movies everybody's gonna love.
Free let fans use the IP to a degree.
So, instead of going after a random super fan who spent weeks creating an animated short story using the characters and the plot and the likeness of the brand, or a superfan that develops a game off the three-body problem and everybody loves it, instead of suing them for copyright, Lin's vision was let them create and even encourage them.
He said, whoever can make a good game should have the right to use the IP for free.
In the grand layout of IP.
It is the people who are competent and talented that keep it alive, not the people who have money.
But that's not to say anything.
I mean, the ultimate end game for him is still money.
So once he does that, he's going to see an explosion in fans from all over the world that he can acquire and sell merchandise to sell a theme park ticket, to make more movie admission tickets for.
You repeat the cycle over and over again, release movies, merchandising experiences.
They are going to spend money on it.
It's the 3F model.
Lin said the fans, especially for something like the three body problem, they need to be respected.
He said every day before you go to bed, you talk to your users.
Otherwise, you don't know what's going to happen when you wake up tomorrow.
That's the spirit of the Internet.
And the internet, they want things fast, okay?
Lin is really aggressive with the development of the three-body problem which, from a business standpoint, it does make sense.
Reportedly, he's already sunk $71 million into the first failed film, plus the rights to the IP.
That's just surface level.
There were attorneys, personnel, staff that were all involved in this massive deal.
Their paychecks have to come from somewhere.
They're being paid to work on this.
Right now there's a new subsidiary of Yuzu that was formed for the three-body problem universe, being run by Shu, and they've got a whole office, a whole team of employees that are trying to get this thing off the ground.
Every day, every single employee on payroll, keeping the lights on every single coffee pot that they drink is technically sinking money, which I'm not saying he doesn't have the money to spare, but from an accounting business standpoint there is a lot of pressure for him to make this work.
They need to start making money from this IP ASAP, or else Yuzu shares are gonna drop and nobody's gonna have a good time and a lot of people are gonna be out of jobs.
But for a full year, nothing happens.
It's radio silence inside the three-body problem building.
When was this, you're saying?
2019.
A year after they acquire the rights, nothing is happening.
Nobody knows what the hell they're doing and what the hell is going on.
What do you mean you don't know what's going on?
I don't know.
I don't even know who I'm supposed to be reporting to.
The whole thing is chaos.
Everything is stalled because the head of the company is a lawyer who has zero experience in the entertainment industry.
He has no idea what he's doing.
Nobody wants to listen to Shu because all of his contributions as of right now are misinformed or dumb because he's just a lawyer.
What does he know about this business?
Everybody's kind of doing their own thing.
There's no head of any project, no one is leading the march.
One employee said at one point she spent more than two hours asking random employees in the break room about their advice on making it work in the entertainment industry.
Aren't you supposed to know that?
One former employee said we would have these meetings and everybody was super passive.
Everybody was just a bystander.
Nobody even knew who was in charge, so the result just was not good.
When Lin realizes that everything at the three-body problem universe is stalled, he marches into the office and he's got a meeting with Shu.
They're going to continue to have daily meetings moving forward from this point.
Lin is desperate.
He's practically begging, screaming at Shu.
We got to turn this IP into money soon.
We got to monetize now or else the ship is going to sink.
Shu is calm.
He always is.
That's his trademark.
He's in his three-piece suit, polished leather shoes, and he just looks at Lin and he suggests...
Well, the solution is we just release the first PowerPoint movie that you already made, so that we can make some money back.
The freaking PowerPoint movie?
Lin blows up.
I mean, that's crazy to even suggest.
I mean, it's going to ruin the name of the brand, everything.
It's shit.
The whole movie is shit.
People are going to scream at us all day that it's shit and we will never get out of this mess.
From that point forward, it is said that the two would argue every single day in the office.
Former employees said you could hear them arguing nonstop.
Sometimes, when Lin the billionaire would get extra passionate, he would pick up cups with water tea, whatever's still in them, and throw them, chuck them at Shu.
If it was particularly emotional of a fight, he would pick up a chair and chuck it at the wall.
Everybody tried to act like they didn't see what was going on, but they were really loud.
Sometimes they would hear billionaire Lin screaming at you.
You are a stray dog that I brought in from the street.
I fed you.
I took care of you.
But you can't even do anything.
You can't even do the basic.
It was really bad.
An anonymous employee said, that's just how Lin is though.
You could be at any level of the company and Lin would scold you in front of everyone and even break things if he was really frustrated.
His management style is quite rough.
Every day it felt like the tension between Lin and Shu is building up to some big, catastrophic event.
I mean, it was just so blatantly tense.
At a strategy meeting.
Once Lin asked an open question to the employees about their experience at the company, and Shu, without hesitation, spoke up.
I feel wronged in the workplace.
I feel a deep sense of disparity working here.
People knew that things were just gonna get worse from here.
There were even rumors floating around in the office that the two, Lin and Shu, were destined not to be able to work together.
So, first of all, The Chinese character for Lin is actually two symbols placed together and they spell out wood wood wood, but it's pronounced Lin.
Now Xu Yao, the spelling of the character Yao.
The way he spells it spells out earth earth earth, three earth.
And if you look at the five element charts in China, which include water wood fire, earth and metal, with the belief that, depending on where you were born and the elements, they're gonna greatly impact you one way or the other.
Wood and ground are on the opposite sides of each other, which is quite a complicated way of saying they're destined to not be compatible.
But even if you don't believe in the elements and the charts, employees said it was pretty obvious, like their managing styles, their personalities it wasn't going to work.
Lin is not a traditional CEO.
He's young.
He likes to run things in a very extreme all or nothing kind of way.
Shu, on the other hand, He's very elitist, very academic.
He wears suits and ties for every meeting.
He expects everyone to have the same level of corporate professionalism that he has.
They said Shu could not handle the, quote, barbaric culture of Yuzu.
They said Shu is thin-skinned.
His self-esteem is definitely going to get hurt.
And out of the two, by first glance, a lot of the employees actually liked Shu more.
They said he's soft-spoken, he's quite nice to his subordinates, so the people that work under him you know he's nice to them.
If you do something wrong to Lin, he's gonna throw a teacup at you.
If you do something wrong to Shu, he's going to, in a very corporate way, tactfully express his disagreement with your actions.
You open up the dictionary and you look up corporate executive, it's going to be a picture of Shu.
He has the power of three.
Right now, he's got high education, high income, high position.
He does have a pretty elitist air to him.
One of his employees said he's stern and he sets boundaries and he has to.
But other than that, he's an easy person to get along with.
However, at the same time, it is not easy to break the barriers into his close circle of friends, aka he's as professional as it gets, he's that employee.
You will never know what's going on in their personal life.
A colleague who worked closely with both of them said if i had to compare the two, i would say that lin is very internally driven person.
He will try to solve problems by improving himself and it's all about what's going on inside.
Shu, on the other hand, is a very externally driven person.
The environment, his peers, the surroundings he's in have a great influence on him.
Lin is kind of like a loud car making noise down the street.
Dangerous, loud, but you see it coming and you hear it from a mile away.
Shu, he's silent, but he's powerful.
He's like a volcano.
You just never know when he's going to explode.
He feels unpredictable.
Really?
The quiet one?
Yeah.
Now, there were a few odd instances with Shu.
One colleague remembers they were in the break room once together having a super casual conversation.
And Shu just offhandedly said that he really really likes reading novels about poison masters and dark magic.
Witch doctors, he called them.
The employee thought it was interesting, since they know that President Xu is a lawyer and he seemed very, by the books, like a very straight edge, rigid kind of guy.
So it was surprising in that sense, but maybe it's not.
It's just a little unexpected.
But more alarming was the incident with his secretary.
Everyone in that office that day likely remembers it was just such a strange moment.
Shu was going out of town for a business meeting.
His secretary is staying in the office.
She gets off the phone with him and runs to the bathroom crying.
Apparently, Shu had gotten to the airport.
He's about to board the flight, but the flight attendant is like, oh, sorry, sir, you can't board.
What do you mean I can't board?
Yes, I can.
I'm going to board the freaking plane.
No, sir, you cannot board because this plane is not even headed where you would like to go.
You're at the wrong gate.
Xu himself had walked to the wrong boarding gate inside of the airport.
He missed his flight by going to the wrong gate, called his secretary and screamed at her for 45 minutes straight.
It is said the words he used were so vile that it is out of a normal person's imagination.
The dirtiest, most filthy words were sprayed all over the sky is how it's described.
Wow.
After he hung up, his secretary broke down in the office completely and submitted her resignation letter, which he rejected because he profusely apologized.
He told her, I am just under a lot of pressure at work, as you can tell clearly.
So the emotions have gotten the better of me, but it's never going to happen again.
I would love if you could forgive me and come back to work.
I will make sure that this never, ever happens.
But you know the kind of pressure, right, that Lynn has been putting us under, right?
Lin feels like every single day that she was president.
They are throwing money into a fireplace and lighting it on fire.
On top of that, to add fuel to the fire, in 2019, a movie called Wandering Earth is released.
That was like, it was number one.
It broke all the records.
So The Three-Body Problem is one series of the author's book collection.
And that is the IP that Lynn owns now.
But the movie Wandering Earth is the author's newer series that was adapted into a movie written by the same author of The Three-Body Problem.
And...
I mean, this is probably the biggest Chinese sci-fi movie at the time.
It grossed $673 million in Chinese theaters.
At the time that one movie broke almost every single film record in China and it kickstarted a whole sci-fi trend.
Before this movie, sci-fi was big in China, but it was not mainstream.
Everyone and their mom wanted to see wandering earth, they wanted to see aliens.
At this point, it was, by all accounts, a massive success and every day lynn comes into the office, he opens up the news reports and he is tomato red three body problem universe is technically bigger of a series than wandering earth.
They have a bigger fan base and they're sitting on the rights of the biggest series ever and they're sitting on a golden egg.
And right now is when everybody wants to see it.
They don't want to see it five years from now, when the sci-fi trend is over.
They want it right now.
Even if they start filming now, it's going to take years to hit theaters.
What if the sci-fi trend is over, huh?
Lin would take it all out by screaming at Shu.
You are a useless general and you're exhausting our whole army and resources.
Now there is a Chinese saying, one mountain cannot fit two tigers.
One throne cannot fit two kings.
Lin brings in another person, a third body.
Everyone, please meet the newest vice president of three body problem, Zhao.
Lin brings in a younger, more experienced vice president into the company and it is very, very clear what Lin is planning.
Zhao is Shu's replacement and he's breathing down Shu's neck every single day, asking him why they have nothing to show for the three body problem IP.
Lin doesn't even hide the fact that he favors Zhao.
Zhao is basically acting as the president of the three body problem and just starts making executive decisions, ignoring and disrespecting Shu completely.
Shu has no real power at this point.
He just has a title.
He doesn't even have his salary anymore.
Most of Shu's $3 million salary comes in the form of a bonus at the end of the year.
But in 2020, Lin is telling Shu don't even expect a bonus, because what have you done to warrant a bonus?
Without a bonus, Shu's salary is about $500,000 a year, which to him is nothing.
It is not nearly enough to put up with the emotional trauma every single day of having cups thrown at you, chairs thrown at you.
He feels like he's being used as a punching bag.
And as Shu's life and career are falling apart and it feels like everybody in the office is laughing at him when he walks in Zhao, the VP is living the dream that Shu feels like he was promised.
Yuzu games and Netflix signed their deal.
She was not even part of the conversation.
He's not even mentioned once in a single article or in any of the press conferences.
His name is nowhere on that project, not even in passing, even though he's technically the president of the three body problem universe.
It is announced that Lin and Zhao are going to be executive producers on the show, alongside some of the most iconic showrunners in TV history.
Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B.
Weiss.
Brad Pitt and Rosamund Pike are also, regardless of how you feel about them personally, but like in terms of names in the show business, Brad Pitt holds a strong name and we love Rosamund Pike.
Wait, Brad Pitt is part of Three Body Problem executive produced.
Oh, rad pitt and rosamund pike, who plays gun girl.
I think that's how you'll know her.
They are also involved in this big project even though they are not casted.
So on the production side, i mean this is gonna be a big big, big big deal, but shu is going to get nothing.
Shu doesn't even have any shares in this business.
So as the universe grows he's really getting nothing, But he's not fired.
He's still in the company.
Yeah, but it's only a matter of time.
December 17th, Xu is arrested at a law conference in Beijing.
It said that he was desperately trying to get a meeting with the vice president of the three-body problem universe Zhao, his own replacement, presumably to try and poison him.
That's what the police think.
So they arrest him.
Wait, 17 is after the hospital?
Yes, Lin is in the hospital.
When?
17th?
Yeah, no, he was in the hospital 16th, the day after.
Oh, the day after.
He's still alive.
Right, so Lin in the hospital, really sick.
And the next day, the police arrested Zhao.
16th, Lynn is in the hospital really sick.
They suspect poisoning.
They start searching the offices.
Two other employees are discovered to have been poisoned.
The next day, December 17th, they arrest Shu.
Because they're like, there's poison in the office and someone's poisoning them.
And we think it's Shu.
Oh, because they fight all the time.
Yes.
So they arrest him.
Now, Shu was working as the three body problem president, but he was also a Japanese CEO.
A Japanese CEO?
He's Japanese?
Well, he's Chinese, but he owns a company in Japan, a chemical import and export company.
Well, not really, but he did recently register a company in Japan along with 160 new phone numbers.
He started ordering poison off the dark web and sending them to Japan to his holding company.
Then slowly he would have someone import all the poisons from Japan to China.
They probably didn't even know it was poison.
He would have them shipped in different packaging at different times, to different locations, until they all made it to his tiny little warehouse in a quiet, distant suburb of Shanghai where the rent is somewhat affordable.
The houses are spread far enough that you can actually get some privacy.
You can walk around in your underwear in the back shed and probably hopefully, nobody will notice.
Shu leased a house there in the suburbs so that he could create his own breaking bad lab.
That's his favorite show.
Shu purchased over a hundred poisons on the dark web and he was not even there just to see which one he liked.
He was mixing combining, creating new poisons.
He kept detailed logs of how much each poison reacted to others being combined with other toxins and the size of the poison needed, the amount the powder or liquid like symptoms of each poison and how deadly it is and how deadly it is combined with other poisons.
It's a lab.
What?
Xu was out to create his own little poison blend, if you will, his own concoction, mixture.
And his test subjects were stray animals.
He would catch stray cats, dogs, rats off the street, test the poison on them first.
And it's said that he killed hundreds of animals during his testing phase.
So this is happening during the whole like off work.
Like he's going home and mixing poisons.
Yeah.
Like beginning of 2020.
Wow.
He's planning this for months.
Wow.
Eventually, he settles on a few toxins, but his main ones would be pufferfish poison, mercury.
And the plan was Shu would poison Lin and Zhao, the VP of the three-body problem IP, with mercury through their coffee whiskey, water and tea.
Now the plan was small quantities, frequently over a long period of time, to make it very hard to trace back to him.
The vice president of the three-body problem universe Zhao.
He had 10 times the safe levels of mercury in his body.
He had to be hospitalized.
He had to be treated with dialysis to clean the toxins from his blood, which is not a fun process, but it worked.
He was discharged, but he did bring a cup of tea with him home from work.
His wife had taken a sip and she also had alarming high levels of mercury in her system.
She survived, but she had just given birth and was breastfeeding.
She had to stop breastfeeding because of the mercury levels.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Now, the curious part is Lin's personal assistant was also poisoned.
Like Lin makes sense.
He's targeted by Shu.
The vice president makes sense.
He's targeted by Shu.
His wife makes sense because she took a sip of his coffee and he's targeted by Shu.
You get it, right?
But what about the assistant?
Did she wrong Shu?
Not exactly.
Earlier in December, because again, he was hospitalized 16th.
Earlier in December, Shu had walked into Lin's personal assistance room with a little bottle in his hands.
He places it on the desk.
She looks at him, confused.
Probiotics.
They're from overseas.
They're probably the best I've ever had.
Highest quality.
Great for digestion and stress.
Tell Lin that they're from me.
The assistant takes the bottle in her hands.
And before Shu walks off, he tells her, actually, can you make sure that he takes it every day?
You know how he's so forgetful.
Shu decides that he wanted to kill them now.
The mercury, it was just taking so long.
They're too young.
They're too healthy.
He needs to give their bodies a big push.
So he puts puffer fish poison with a blend of other poisons into the probiotic capsule.
Now, the original plan was to try and kill Lin and the vice president at the same time with probiotics.
But at this point Shu and the vice president are fighting so much even more than he's fighting with Lin that if he were to give him a bottle of probiotics right now, or even to his assistant, they'd be in the trash.
So only Lin would receive the probiotics, and there were a total of 30 pills inside, and only one or two of the capsules were poisoned.
What?
So it's like he's going to take it every day, but you don't know when it's going to hit.
It's like playing Russian roulette with his life.
But that still doesn't explain how Mercury got into the personal assistant system, because she didn't have puffer fish poisoning.
She had Mercury.
She didn't take any of the probiotics.
But remember the tea that was tainted with Mercury?
Well, Lin only drinks the finest teas, and sometimes he wouldn't finish the whole teapot because He would have this little teapot with tea left over that he didn't pour into his tea glass.
And the assistant instead of washing it out, she would pour it into a thermos and take it home to drink, because it's like 5000 per pound of tea leaves.
When else is she going to get money like that to drink this kind of tea?
Is she okay?
Is she alive?
Yeah, she's fine.
She's alive now.
But I mean, fine as in she probably went through a lot, but she's alive.
The tea was poisoned with mercury.
Now, the police now know who tried to kill Lin and how they did it.
But they have one last thing.
What are the other toxins inside the capsule?
There's a rule of thumb.
If a snake bites you, you kill the snake and bring it to the doctor.
This is not some sort of like eye for an eye punishment or anything like that.
But chances are back then.
If the doctors know exactly what snake and which venom you have in your system, the chances of saving your life are exponentially higher.
I think it's just a saying.
I think if anything, most snakes are not venomous.
And if they are, I think a picture would suffice.
But...
You get it.
It's just if you know what poison it is, it's so much easier to save a life.
Now, Shu has been arrested.
Lin is in the hospital.
He's practically comatose at this point.
His organs, his brain, they're shutting down.
And every second counts.
The doctors have tried everything.
They've already tried performing every single life-saving measure that they could think of.
Lin underwent four liters of blood transfusions, which is a massive transfusion.
Typically, this is only done in severe blood loss cases.
To give you some more context, the total blood volume in an average adult is about five liters.
They've pretty much swapped out all of his blood.
They want to get rid of as much toxins in his body as possible.
And for a second from December 16th, since the blood transfusion.
They thought it was kind of working.
His state was becoming more stable, but out of nowhere it just starts deteriorating again, just downhill.
He becomes in a comatose state.
Doctors believe that Lin was poisoned with a variety of toxins and they're still attacking his body.
They're attacking him while he's in a weakened state after the blood transfusions.
So all they need is to know which toxins are inside of Lin so that they can try their best to either get it out or find an antidote.
Proceed with the smartest course of action.
Shu refused to tell the doctors what he poisoned Lin with.
He will die if Shu does not tell the doctors.
Shu remained silent.
Till the very end.
December 25th, 2020, 39-year-old Lin Shi was pronounced dead.
When his body was autopsied, they found at least five different toxins in his body.
He had high, high levels of mercury and about 10 times the lethal amount of mercury.
That was severely just damaging his internal organs.
And then five other smaller toxins.
And it said that they were eating away at his organs like termites eat dry, rotting wood.
I will say Lin is not the perfect victim here.
He's a billionaire, which already raises ethical concerns.
On top of that, he undoubtedly created some pretty hostile work environments.
It's likely that he at least screwed over one person during his career, if not many people.
He worked his employees to the bone at one point.
He was very, very temperamental.
He could turn on someone in the fraction of a second and you wouldn't even see it coming.
And it seems like people either really really loved him or they had some really harsh things to say about him while he was alive, that is.
His friends said that he was definitely a more misunderstood character.
They said that he was very tough and passionate to the point of being aggressive.
The words his friends used to describe him were enthusiastic but also very righteous in what he believed in.
Not saying what he believed in was always the right thing.
Just if he had an opinion about something, he was very passionate about it.
He wasn't evil, is what the friends say, or trying to hurt people.
He was just someone that didn't treat anything casually.
He didn't treat anything indifferently.
Like he was emotionally invested in every little thing.
And that emotional investment would translate into this very aggressively passionate conversation.
Even when he played games, he was really aggressive.
He liked games that were zero downtime.
So games where you're just shooting the gun nonstop.
There's no moment of rest.
There's no walking around.
There's no building something like you're fighting someone nonstop.
When Lin's teammates would drop the ball and the whole team would lose, he wouldn't even scream.
He would just get very serious and say, again, let's go again, again.
Hmm.
He had this very intense big brother vibe about him.
He would yell at you during lunch about how your business idea was stupid and it's never going to work and you're dumb for thinking that it's going to work and you need to stop being so stubborn about the stupidest things.
But then on your way out, he would pat you on your back and hand you a bottle of whiskey.
You drank two glasses during lunch.
It seems like you enjoyed it.
Here, take a bottle with you.
You go home.
You look it up.
It's a 50-year-old bottle of Yamazaki whiskey that costs about $100,000.
What?
He would stay updated on all the projects Nanjing alumni would have students who graduated from the same university as him, and he would invest one to two million dollars per project that he was intrigued by.
The head of PR said, when my daughter applied to an American college, the busy founder, the busy CEO himself wrote a letter of recommendation for her.
One time a random employee went to a meeting with Lin, where he probably yelled at everyone during the entirety of the meeting.
During a quick break in between meetings, Lin turned to him, Did you eat lunch yet?
Uh, no sir, I haven't had the time yet.
Lin broke off half the hamburger in his hand and handed it to the employee and they shared a little meal together.
And they said that the man was incredibly smart.
A friend of his said they had gone on a business trip together once and Lin turned to him.
What books have you been into recently?
The friend recommended one.
And during the two hours on the plane ride Lin finished the whole book.
That took the friend much, much longer than that.
And he was able to really have these thought-provoking conversations about the book.
He really absorbed it.
He did not just skim it.
He was able to grasp all the concepts and ideas.
But again, he's a very intense guy.
His idea of working through an idea was to argue about it.
To him, brainstorming was screaming at someone and having a fight about it.
To the employees, he was straight up bullying them at times.
And once he was set on an idea, he would bulldoze through everyone and anything to make it happen.
But regardless, he was a father to three children and he should have been here to see them grow up.
And they're all minors.
One Yuzu staff member wrote on social media You saw through what was imperfect, but still believed in beauty.
Encountered unkindness, but still believed in kindness.
Goodbye, youth.
We will be together and continue to be kind.
Believe in goodness and continue to fight against all that is unkind.
One of the employees posted from Lin's account to all of his 2000 employees at Yuzu and I'm sure it was approved by his family.
But it's a quote from Steve Jobs that apparently Lin really liked, which reads I would trade all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.
Goodbye, kids.
Before Lin's death, a month before he was asked in an interview about the three body problem, about life and death.
And it was a pensive conversation about how he views his legacy.
And he said what I think about more is how to say goodbye to the world in 10 20, 30 years or even when I'm 90 years old.
Legend has it that your mind will be very clear when you're about to die.
And you will have this extreme moment of clarity.
You know, and at that moment, it's how do you say goodbye?
I'm very afraid that I'm going to be laying there thinking before I die how did I destroy the three body problem?
Wow.
And this is a month before.
Yes.
Lin would never make it to 90 or even to the next year.
He would be killed the next month because Lin is in a coma before his death.
He would also never get to have that moment of supreme clarity that he had been hoping for.
He had been robbed of it.
The Three Body Problem by Tencent in China was released in 2023.
It was a massive hit with a super high ranking of 8.7 out of 10.
The animated version that was released on streaming platform Bilibili in China, was approaching the 100 million views mark.
Netflix's Three Body Problem was released a few months ago, March 2024.
And Lin would never get the chance to see any of those projects come to life.
Some netizens stated, think what you want of Lin.
He's a billionaire.
You know, he seems incredibly temperamental.
I guess he's loved by his family and friends, but he's feared by most of his subordinates and most of the business world.
But in the end, one thing is pretty undeniable.
He did seem to genuinely care for the quality of the three-body problem.
Lin is credited as an executive producer on the recent three-body problem release in Netflix posthumously.
So post-death.
Now, there was nothing in Shu's plan that indicated that he was trying to get away with this murder.
Everyone in the office knew that Shu was on the out.
He was hated by both Lin and Zhao.
He had been humiliated.
His ego was wounded.
An employee said it was very clear that Shu made the whole three-body problem deal his whole personality and he based his whole self-esteem off of it.
They said he would practically puff up his chest and proudly state...
Other people have tried to take on this project, but none of them took it forward after touching it, except me.
We closed the deal.
We legal professionals are here to put out fires, break up deadlocked negotiations, but we must also have the courage to be change makers.
And now all of that is going to be gone.
He feels like it's going to be taken away from him.
In return, Xu would give Zhao and Lin gifts.
Tea, coffee, whiskey, a bottle of probiotics.
And that's just the surface level.
If anyone digs even two seconds deeper, they would find 160 phone numbers registered to his Japanese holding company.
The house he was renting had evidence of poison that he bought off the dark web.
He's objectively an intelligent person.
He's likely going to know that he's going to get caught.
So what?
He's going to burn himself just to burn them?
The dark forest, press the button, destroy everybody?
Like, what does that mean?
Most netizens don't think so.
They think that Shu genuinely believed that he was going to get away with murder.
Xu, to give you some context, went to school in France and the US.
A lot of netizens think that that's influenced the way he's handled his own murder trial, because he's on trial for murdering Lin.
According to some Chinese netizens, they felt that he had a very Western approach to his defense.
He's betting on three things.
Don't talk.
Hire an expensive legal team the top of the top and get expensive psychiatric evaluations that will state that you are not mentally in your right state of mind.
It's reported that Xu had a bunch of books at home about psychiatric evaluations and he also allegedly looked online about how to avoid punishment by claiming insanity.
He had reviewed previous cases where foreigners, mainly in Western countries, escaped punishment because of the insanity plea.
He provided his own psychiatric evaluations with doctors of his choosing to the court and they were all rejected.
They had state appointed doctors to evaluate him and they stated that he's definitely trying to act crazy.
So it's very clear that he's putting on a whole show.
Ultimately, a lot of netizens believe that this tactic of his ended up backfiring, mainly because he had the chance to save Lin's life and tell them which poisons.
But he stuck with the don't talk, lawyer up and claim insanity.
It just shows how cold hearted he is.
It doesn't show anything else.
His decision not to say ended up being life or death for Lin and he died.
And ultimately that decision is going to be life or death for Shu too.
March 21st, 2024, this year, the three body problem was released on Netflix.
March 22nd, 2024, the day after, Shu was sentenced to death by the Shanghai courts.
Wow.
The vice president, now chief executive of the three-body universe Zhao, said on his WeChat justice has been served.
And that is the story behind Netflix's three-body problem.
Wow, that is crazy.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was just so crazy because I was looking to see if there were any reactions from even the Netflix production team of the news that he died because it was immediately after they signed the deal.
And even the Game of Thrones showrunners, they don't even know how to react.
Their statement was, I mean, you see a lot of things in this business.
You just never expect to see that happen.
Like I think no one knew the appropriate reaction even because it's so bizarre.
Yeah, but you said at the beginning it was Amazon?
Yes.
They did say something?
Yeah.
So an insider that was allegedly at the Amazon meeting said that years later, two years later, when they found out that Lin was killed by Shu, they said yeah, I'm not surprised.
Like the amount of tension in between that Yuzu group was just out of this world.
Like I'm not surprised that someone killed someone.
Ah.
Yeah.
Wow.
And I mean, what are your thoughts?
Have you guys watched The Three-Body Problem on Netflix?
It's actually not doing well compared to the budget that they spent on it.
Really?
There's not even conversation about yet, at least if it's going to be renewed for season two, which is kind of crazy.
What are your thoughts on it?
Let me know in the comments and please stay safe.
I will see you guys in the next one.
