It's cool to show off how much more storage gmail has or whatever but they only show the total number of conversations, not individual messages. Is there a way to see the number of total individual emails? (Yeah i know that doesn't really say much about storage but shh..)

Use an imap client like Thunderbird – that will tell you how many individual messages you have

But it will take forever to download.... there's no way to do this from gmail?

nothing

All Gmail views list conversations, not individual messages.