'Supernatural' actor Misha Collins wants you to join the world's biggest scavenger hunt

The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES) wants to make this year's event the best yet, but that's no easy feat for an event that has already set seven Guinness World Records and even had a mountain on Mars named after it.

With a little more than a month until the mayhem begins, Supernatural actor and GISHWHES host Misha Collins is staging the organization's first registration telethon, in hopes of recruiting more participants than ever. 

The telethon will be live streamed on Saturday, and those who tune will catch a rare glimpse inside GISHWHES HQ so viewers can see exactly what happens there on a daily basis. 

Fans of the weeklong event, now in its fifth year, probably already know that what happens there is the creation of scavenger hunts with directives such as "make Maxi Pad art" and "get a picture of a Stormtrooper cleaning a pool next to a sunbather enjoying a cocktail." It may not be your average office. 

"I guess my goal would be for it to keep growing like this until all beings of all species are participating." 

"As you know, we at GISHWHES have long held that transparency is one of the biggest pitfalls of an open-market democracy," Collins tells Mashable. "We have a long-standing corporate culture of shady backroom dealings, unsavory business practices. Our employees consume excessive amounts of hard candy. These are things we do not wish to expose the outside world to. However, we just finished a pretty sweet remodel and we just had to show off our new digs." 

The live telethon will feature special guests and performances, crazy art projects, and a look at the office's "dessert-related disciplinary action."

Collins admits that open access to his office space could also risk leaks of his plans for world domination. "Hence the ball gag," he says. "Sorry, gag order. Hence the gag order."

Collins hopes the telethon will motivate more people to join next month's global collaborative scavenger hunt, which in recent years has gained massive momentum, attracting thousands of participants from more than 100 countries, according to the organization.

"The thing that is amazing to me about GISHWHES participants is that the vast majority of them come back each year," Collins says. "GISHWHES causes people to lose sleep, to cover their friends in butter, build strange contraptions, go on road trips, persuade NASA to do bizarre things… It’s exhausting, difficult and humiliating, and yet the people who survive it end up making friends; they come back wanting more. And since the vast majority of GISHWHES participants return the following year, and since they recruit their friends, we have been growing almost exponentially each year. I guess my goal would be for it to keep growing like this until all beings of all species are participating." 

While Collins and Co. are still hammering out the details of the GISHWHES 2016, which takes place from July 30 to Aug. 6, he says this year's challenges will "run the gamut." 

"There will be simple items that encourage couch surfing, and slightly more complex items that change the course of the upcoming American elections," Collins says. 

Proceeds from GISHWHES support Collins' charity, Random Acts, which recently broke ground on a free high school in Nicaragua and recruited Supernatural fans to form a crisis support network.

The GISHWHES telethon is scheduled to live stream on Collins' Facebook page Saturday at 9 a.m. PT.

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