50 Cent Discusses His 'El Chapo' Podcast and How His 'Audience Is Changing'

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50 Cent may have dominated hip hop with seven No. 1 singles in the 2000s, but nowadays he is looking to climb the charts of a different kind — with his podcast.

The "In Da Club" rapper recently spoke to PEOPLE about his growing interest in true crime and his latest project, his Surviving El Chapo podcast.

"I like true crime, period, the entire genre," says 50 Cent (born Curtis Jackson). "If you don't read the news, if you're not in the current events, [then you should]. I do."

In recent years, Jackson, 47, has put making new music on the back burner while expanding his profile as an actor and producer. Jackson found success acting on the Starz series Power from 2014 until 2020 and has a role in The Expendables 4 next year. As a television producer, he helped bring the crime drama Black Mafia Family to life and saw his Hip Hop Homicides series premiere on AMC earlier this month.

But his new podcast — about El Chapo and the Chicago twins who helped bring him down — is his latest passion. The series focuses on twins Pedro and Margarito Flores, who grew up in the drug business and went on to become two of the most powerful traffickers in Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera's hierarchy. To avoid extensive jail time, the twins flipped on Guzman in 2008. Their testimony and secretly taped conversations with El Chapo helped authorities slam a life sentence on the cartel kingpin.

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The twins still received 15 years in prison, according to The Chicago Sun-Times, which was considered a very lenient sentence for smuggling roughly 71 tons of cocaine and heroin into the country. The twins are now reportedly on supervised release from prison, but not without risk: A judge warned the brothers to be on the lookout for Guzman's hitmen. Both Jackson and co-host Charlie Webster tell PEOPLE that Surviving El Chapo producers went through intricate steps to get the brothers in the same room for interviews, hosting their talks in a discreet "safe house" with security posted outside.

According to Webster, "We did speak to them separately, but to get them in this house, we thought it was so important to really show who they are by them being together."

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Throughout eight episodes, the Flores twins — helped along by narration and questions from both Jackson and Webster — tell their story, from how they were raised in the drug business by family members to becoming two of the biggest narcotics dealers in the United States and later connecting with El Chapo. Jackson delivers personal anecdotes about his own history dealing drugs, and even reveals that at one point he met the Flores twins in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project when he was an up-and-coming star and before they got involved with international drug trafficking.

Says Webster: "We also wanted to tell the reality of what so many young kids get brought up in and how it can turn out."

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True crime storytelling, Jackson says, is stirring up new ideas for the rapper-turned-podcaster. "This is just the first one for me and Charlie," he vows. "You're going to see more."

Jackson admits he has no plans at the moment for a follow-up album to his 2014 Animal Ambition but says he's working on "new music ideas" for songs in television and film. Nowadays, Jackson finds his focus more on creating new TV series and podcasts.

"I mean, I really enjoy the music," Jackson says, "But the audience is changing. My core audience was in college in 2003. They're grown now and they may have the drink that you would have in the nightclub in the privacy of their home now. They are my television viewership now. That's who's watching."