-
Unknown A
There's a reason no one makes videos like me, because no one wants to live the life I live over in my head. They'd be miserable.
-
Unknown B
Are you happy?
-
Unknown A
Um, I. I'm gonna be honest. So far more unhappy than happy.
-
Unknown B
Well, has it ever crossed your mind to quit YouTube as a whole?
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, of course.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Are you?
-
Unknown A
Oh, boy. Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast. He is the biggest youtuber on the planet, and he's building empires.
-
Unknown B
I mean, is there anything this man can't do? Your business empire is much bigger than many people realize.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, I'm only 26, and we have a large YouTube channel in the world, and Beast Games is gonna shatter some pretty crazy records. And we do nine pairs of peaceful. But a lot of that stems from being a very cute child that's not fitting in. That feels like a freak. Plus, I really wanted to take care of my mom, because when I was 11, we literally went bankrupt and lost everything. Luckily, it worked out, and it's because I'm really good at obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet. Like lost tens of millions of skins. But it's about making season one as good as possible. And I just really love solving complex problems. Like, how many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa? Just on cocoa farms, it's 1.5 million. And so with Feast polls, we're trying to get over a million kids out of child labor.
-
Unknown A
But the ironic part is, the more I help people, the more I get. Like, I've read over 5,000 messages telling me to kill myself. I mean, there's definitely times where I would cry, but if my mental health was a party, I wouldn't be as successful as I am. This is the price you have to pay.
-
Unknown B
But when is enough enough? Honestly, this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, and I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week, we'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much, Timmy. We've really just only met, and you are already, to me, a bit of a Rubik's Cube.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
In so many ways. And I've been trying to piece the pieces together to understand the uniqueness of you because you're so unbelievably unique. We just drove over here in the car, and hearing you speak about the way that you view life, and speaking to you yesterday on the phone, I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people. I've never, ever met someone who has the perspective on life that you have. You're truly unique. What do I need to understand about your earliest years to understand who you are?
-
Unknown A
Oh, boy. Yeah, my earliest years. I. I'm just stubborn, man. I just never give up. I mean, there was. There's no world where I ever would have quit. I just ice. I mean, we're just jumping right into it. It's a great. No intro or anything, just boom. It's like old people. When I was 11, I just said, I'm gonna be a YouTuber. I'm gonna die trying. And I meant it. And there's like, even no one still watched my videos to say I would still be going, but. And so people hate it, but I'm just the most competitive, stubborn person you'll ever meet, and I just never give up.
-
Unknown B
Where did that come from?
-
Unknown A
I have no idea. To be honest. It honestly feels like it was just in my DNA, in my bloodstream. My mom hated it growing up. We'd always argue and, like, you know, she has this thing where, like, once Jimmy sets minus something, he just never stops. And it would always piss her off because when it was YouTube and she wanted me to be studying or things like that, but I really don't know. It's. It's just always been how I am. And I think a lot of people have these weird tendencies, and they tend to, like, try to, like, unlearn them. And, like, I had phases in my life where I was like, am I too extreme? Like, people are very intimidated by me because I just am so obsessed with work, and I'm so all in. And, like, is this, like, unhealthy? Should I try to be more like a normal human?
-
Unknown A
Especially when I was a teenager, it's a lot easier. It's funny when. When you're making lots of money, it's, like, admirable. It's respectable. It's like, look, those are traits we want, but when you're not successful, you know you're a lunatic when you have all these traits. And so back then, I'd occasionally be like, man, like, should I try to be more normal? But I just could never do it anytime I tried to. I mean, I mentioned this before. One of the like things that like I have a memory of that like really burning my brain is like people one time, like a high schooler told me when I was in middle school, like all you do is talk about YouTube. Like, do you like know how to do anything else? Like you're just like a freak. And I tried to like watch south park, you know.
-
Unknown A
Cause that's what a lot of people I school watch to fit in. And I just couldn't. I was like, this is such a waste of time. I don't like I could be working right now. And I tried to do all these things to like fit in. And I eventually just like stopped talking because I just didn't relate to anyone. And um, people used to call me mute. Like one of my teachers literally asked like if I was mute. Like. Cause that's how little I spoke. Because no one in the school I went to was entrepreneurial or wanted to build businesses and I just didn't want to do anything else. And yeah, eventually I started to succeed. Found out the lunatics and that life's great. But you know, I like to tell the story when I'm on podcast because if you have a younger viewer who's in that same spot, you're not the problem.
-
Unknown A
It's your environment and you just got to put yourself in a better environment.
-
Unknown B
What about your parents? Mum and dad? You talk about your mother a lot?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, no, I, I don't. I didn't get it from them.
-
Unknown B
What influence do they both have on you?
-
Unknown A
Well, I don't really talk about my dad much. That's, you know, long story, don't need to get into it. But my mom, honestly, it was, it wasn't, it's great now. Me and my mom have a phenomenal relationship, but on the come up it was, it was pretty rough because in 2008 they were over leveraged so we literally went bankrupt. And so they, you know, had properties that they used to get other properties and then when everything collapsed, they lost basically everything. So my mom was working two jobs and you know, barely getting buying. So we like, I didn't see her that much because when I was coming home from school she was doing her second job. So it was a lot because she was a single mom raising us. She's working all the time. You know, my, I don't talk about all this. You know, I have crohn's.
-
Unknown A
Disease. So I was very sick growing up. My brother also had issues as well. And so, you know, we're not the healthiest kids in our teenage year. She's just trying to get by and take care of us. And then, you know, she comes home and she just has this brat that's being annoying. And, like, I want to be a YouTuber and she's just begging me. Sometimes she literally cry and beg me to do homework. And I mean, I was. I was. I was like, I didn't. I didn't mean it in a mean way, but I even went to my. Literally told her, if you want my. My homework done, just do it, you know, like, that's. That's what I told my mom. What am I doing? I don't know. Like, I was just like, I don't. I don't care. Like, I just want to be successful with businesses.
-
Unknown A
And so it was like, bless her heart. Luckily it worked out. So now I spoil her. She's great. She has her second home. Anything she could ever want, she has. And so the first thing I did was take, you know, start paying my mom take care of her once I started making money, because she gave everything to, like, give me where I am, and I wouldn't be where I am now. But it was like. It was like me and her spoke different languages when I was younger. You know, she. She didn't want me to end up like them, you know, and, you know, get screwed and much money. And the path I was going down was just basically like, oh, I'm a homeless drug addict. And like, her brain couldn't compute the world I saw. My brain couldn't compute the world she saw. And it was constant friction.
-
Unknown B
Who was looking after you then? She was busy working and you were at home, and your dad's not around.
-
Unknown A
Who takes care of you? I just. Me and my brother, we were just there. I was just making videos.
-
Unknown B
You make videos? What age did that start the videos?
-
Unknown A
I started at 11.
-
Unknown B
11.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. So I'm 26 now. I can't really remember life before YouTube. Like, my earliest memories are basically when I started making videos.
-
Unknown B
You said earlier you don't talk about your dad much. Yeah, you don't have to tell me about it, but why don't you talk about your father much?
-
Unknown A
Ah, don't worry about it.
-
Unknown B
I know your mom has spoken about him before.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And it was a bit of a tumultuous relationship.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, exactly. They didn't have the best relationship. I mean, that's a Topic for another day, honestly. Kind of a sour way to start off. But yeah, it's. My mom is great. I love my mom.
-
Unknown B
She used to cry asking you to do your homework.
-
Unknown A
A lot of things. She, she would cry because I wouldn't put money away. When we started making money, she would, she thought it was too risky. And I mean, the thing is, nothing she would say was unreasonable, right? Looking back at it, she was perfectly reasonable in what she was doing. I'm just a deranged lunatic and was way too obsessed with building business and way too all in. Like, it's very cute. One time she, like, when we had, I don't remember, like some months or made like a hundred grand and I'm like, okay, perfect, I can spend a hundred grand this next month on videos. And she like took like 5,000 of it and put it away for me in my own bank account without telling me. But in case, you know, I ever went, you know, was over leveraged or went bankrupt like they did.
-
Unknown A
And I found out about it and she's like, please don't take this money. Just let me set aside anything. Stop spending everything on videos. And I was like, no, this is perfect. Now I can spend more. Like, this is awesome. Thank you, Mo. And like. But to me, I don't, I don't really feel risk. Like, if anything, it like, risk excites me and like, I have very high threshold for it. Um, so yeah, we just really weren't communicating the same language. But I don't remember what age it was. But eventually, after I took enough risks and figured it out, my mom just said to me, you know what? I'm gonna trust you. Like, I have faith. And everything got so much better after that point when, like, she stopped staying up all night worrying about me and worrying whether or not I was making the right decision.
-
Unknown A
When she's just like, jimmy, I. I trust you. I know this. You think about this all day. Like, I'm gonna just follow your lead. And our relationship has been perfect ever since then.
-
Unknown B
If I'd asked 10 year old Jimmy, how are you doing? What would he have said?
-
Unknown A
10? I don't know. But if you asked me at like 12 or 13, I probably would have been like, fuck. Like, no one watches my videos. I just really want to be a YouTuber. I gotta make this work.
-
Unknown B
Why did you want to really be a YouTuber? Because kids say that. But the extent to which you said it and the focus that you had on that particular goal of being a YouTuber, because there's many Things you could have focused on, you could have been a video game player, whatever. But YouTube is a particularly interesting thing because you're on camera, people are seeing it. There's a metric which decides how successful you are. Was there any element of the on camera part that was helping to solve for, like, the feeling of isolation that you seem to have at that time?
-
Unknown A
No. Yeah. I think it's more to do with just, I, I found out that when I was at a young age, probably around 11, that there were YouTubers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And I was just like, oh, that's it. Like, yeah, of course. Because back, back then we didn't have money and I really wanted to take care of my mom and just my family in general. So it was like everything, it was like, this is what I love doing. I've never had as much joy doing something as I do this. Plus I could see a path where I could actually retire my mom, take care of her, pay her back for, you know, all the nights she works along so we could live comfortably and things like that. So it's just kind of. The thing is, I've. One thing that hurts me is when people try to, like, put someone's motivation into like one little bucket.
-
Unknown A
Like, we're very complex creatures and like, you know, you have a girlfriend. I, I, I would never say, oh, you just like her because she's pretty, but you like her because she's pretty. But you probably also like her because she's smart. You probably also like her because, you know, she's fun to be around, she likes similar shows, blah, blah. You probably, if we sat at her 10 hours, she'd probably give me a thousand reasons why you like your girlfriend. So it's like, it's very annoying when people try to put why you like doing a certain job or building a certain business into one bucket. Oh, you just do it because of money. What if I do it because I like money and I enjoy it and it's a way to do this and it's a way to communicate with people and community and these other things.
-
Unknown A
You know what I mean? I think that's a common flaw we try to do. It's like, it's not that simple.
-
Unknown B
I think a lot of people can't understand someone being so relentlessly focused on something with the level of like, commitment and sustained commitment that you've shown.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And so, and I don't know how.
-
Unknown A
I agree because it's very weird, like how, like, I have extreme obsession to the point where, like, I just think about stuff the same. Like, for me, it's much easier to think about something 16 hours a day for seven days straight than it is, like, to, like, your ships. I'm, like, really good at just obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet. If I were to say, what's my superpower stat? I can just obsess endlessly about something, and I can just have the same thoughts over and over and over and over again. It's very weird. Like, it wasn't like, it was work for me, grinding YouTube for those 10 years or whatever, where no one was really watching it. It's just, like, kind of who I am.
-
Unknown B
It would have had to have been a deep obsession because you were doing it when no one was really watching or paying attention or really when the platform was.
-
Unknown A
There was literally a day when I was 19 or 20 where I got. I woke up, joined a Skype call with my friends and where we, like, reverse engineering, you know, why certain videos do well or whatever. And I remember that call being over 18 hours long. And then I hung up, went to bed, woke back up the next day, and instantly got back on the call and picked back, like, that was the level of, like, hours we were putting in. I mean, I didn't know anything besides just trying to make it happen.
-
Unknown B
Was there anything else that you shared out of obsession, too?
-
Unknown A
So at that age, no, from. I would say from 11 to. Well, 11 to 15. It was a mix of YouTube and baseball. But when I turned 15, I got Crohn's and I went from, like, 190 pounds down to 139. I lost all muscle I had. And so I was like, all right, I'm not playing baseball in college anymore. So then I was like, fuck it. It's just all in on YouTube and. And then up until really feasibles, it was basically just YouTube for whatever. I never thought I would find, like, this kind of love for building. I thought it was specifically video making, but I have found over, like, the last two or three years, just in general, I just enjoy entrepreneurship, and I've been really deeply loving getting, like, obsessed with feastables and other things, and so. Which is very weird. Like, when I first started a chocolate company, it was like, kind of a side thing.
-
Unknown A
But the more I started work on it, I got a lot of the same highs I got when I was making videos, just in different ways. And. And so now I'm like, I know way too much about the chocolate industry. I'm like, it's pretty crazy. I never imagined I would have put the thousands of hours I poured into building feasibles. And so I think just in general, I just really love solving consistent, complex, hard problems. I think that's, like, what gets me out of bed. And, like, the harder the problems, the more exciting it is.
-
Unknown B
Consistent, hard problems. I want to talk about that. Also feasible, but you mentioned Crohn's disease there. A lot of people don't know what that is and the impact it has on someone's life.
-
Unknown A
Are you aware of it?
-
Unknown B
I am, because I had a team member that had it. So in order to help support them at certain times when they had to leave and stuff like that, I got a little bit more aware of what it means and how it impacts you. But could you give me your perspective on that?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. So Crohn's disease is when your immune system attacks itself. So, yeah, When I was 15, I just started going to the bathroom eight, nine, 10 times a day, not digesting any food, because my GI tract is, like, literally just attacking itself. It's very weird. Your immune system in your gut thinks your gut is a foreign invader, and so it just starts attacking itself. Which, if you're just using Vatin 10 times a day, not digesting food, that's why you drop weight rapidly. And it hurts like crazy. Cause it gets very inflamed, and it feels like some stabbing in the gut with, like, a knife constantly when it's really, really bad, which is what I had. So I lost 50 pounds, which is crazy because I was already relatively lanky. Um, and we're just trying different medicine. And then eventually I'm on a pretty extreme medicine called vermicade, where just basically you nuke your immune system.
-
Unknown A
Which is why my voice sounds a little off right now. Cause I just got the flu. I got Covid six times. I got shingles. Like, I get sick all the time because for me to have my GI tract stop attacking itself, we basically have to shut down my immune system. So I have, like, a really weak immune system. So I just get sick all the time. Like, so I have, like, random rashes and things like that. So it's like, it was pretty. Pretty brutal, to be honest. And then it randomly flares up sometimes and just makes you very sick, very tired. Like, I just live life on hard mode, to be honest. Like, if someone. Like, if you wake up and you have energy, like, you're already leaps and bounds ahead of me. Like, I. You know, it's. It makes things way more difficult.
-
Unknown B
And so you still wake up with some days when you don't have energy, of course, which is really hard to believe for someone who's so productive for everybody looking on.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, it's. You just gotta really love what you do. I mean, and push through it. It's pretty brutal because then you compound that with always being sick. And I mean, yeah, like I just spent four days in the hospital in South Africa. Cause I got the flu and it just takes me a lot longer to recover from certain things. So it's brutal. And that's where it's like, if I didn't work so much, I would spend more time researching Crohn's because surely there's a better way to stop it than just destroying my immune system. And ideally, I don't do that deep into my 30s and 40s, so I see it as a little bit of a band aid. But, you know, I've met with the top Crohn's doctors in the world and so far they're like, this is just the answer. And you're just lucky your, you know, gut isn't attacking yourself.
-
Unknown A
Um, so. But I don't know, I feel like the medicine to give people Crohn's is kind of silly and there's got to be a better way to treat it. I mean, the ultimate solution is they just cut me open and cut out a large part of my GI tract and then there you go.
-
Unknown B
But, you know, I observed in it the team member that I had that had Crohn's just a bit of a mental rollercoaster as well, because there's an unpredictability to it.
-
Unknown A
Exactly.
-
Unknown B
Which makes life.
-
Unknown A
Oh, it's even worse when you're filming because you got this huge multi million dollar set and 200 people waiting on you. And you know, sometimes you don't know if you're have a flare, but you just gotta go fuck it and just down some caffeine and crank it out.
-
Unknown B
I got diagnosed with adhd.
-
Unknown A
You did?
-
Unknown B
Yeah, I got diagnosed with ADHD and made me think a lot about myself and the way that I am. It's not necessarily not the type of person to like, embody the label. Think it really means much. I am just the way I am. Have you. Are you in any way neurodivergent?
-
Unknown A
I've been told, yeah. By Dr. ADHD. I mean, I'm not surprised because I just sit and obsess over things constantly. But I think I'm happy with how my brain is wired. I don't really care to Change it. Like I said, I think one of my greatest superpowers is my obsession. And I think some people would view that as a weakness. But I just like, if you just think about solving problems three times more than everyone else, you're bound to come up with different solutions.
-
Unknown B
That's one of the things you mentioned earlier. You like solving hard problems. Consistently. When you think back over the last 10 years of your life and the success you've had solving some of these hard problems, if you want to break it down into some core components that you've learned, one of them is obsession that you've said. What are the others?
-
Unknown A
I mean, it's all the typical stuff. You are obviously who you surround yourself with. And, um, luckily I just got around the right people in my later teenage years because I. I feed off the energy of the people probably around me. It's so obvious. Like, I start to talk like them, I become interested in the things they're interested in. I mean, this is all obvious stuff I'm sure you've heard of a jillion times, so. But, you know, just gotta. I always have to be protective of the people around because whatever they say is what I started thinking on and that's what I started obsessing over. And, you know, one of the best things that happened with Feastables is I just reached out to all the fastest growing chocolate companies, all the fastest growing snack businesses and everything. Just became friends with a lot of founders and, you know, that's what would probably take me eight, nine years to like solve.
-
Unknown A
You know, after 18 months, it was probably one of the top 10 people in the world when it comes to running a chocolate company and understanding it deeply. Just because. Just cheat codes.
-
Unknown B
What about detail? Sweating the small stuff? One of the things that I saw, I was reading that handbook that was leaked on the Internet and one of the things I saw throughout that was this real obsession with the one percents. How do you feel about this, by the way?
-
Unknown A
I wrote that with some of my employees when I was probably 22. So there are some things that I'm like. I read, I'm like, oh, wow, I was an idiot. But for the most part, most of it still stands the test of time. And I do think it's very helpful. You know, it's funny, a lot of CEOs have actually told me that they make their employees read this, which is funny because I'm like, damn, I should make an updated version of it. So everyone. But yeah, the thing is, it's the core crux of it is like extreme ownership and don't make excuses. And, you know, people always. Yeah, I mean, damn, I'm getting a lot of deja vu when I was writing that. It was just a different time back then, too, because I just had no idea what I was doing when I was 21, 22.
-
Unknown A
And I just found that I was constantly telling, like, teaching the same or teaching people the same things over and over again. And it was always just like, take extreme ownership, take accountability. Like, sure, I guess it was out of your control, but it could have been in your control if you just thought through it more, if you just really cared. And that's what I was just trying to convey in it.
-
Unknown B
And the other thing that comes to this, but also all of your work is just this idea. Something I've learned from you, just from speaking on the phone yesterday, that nothing is impossible.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, exactly.
-
Unknown B
And watching Beast Games over the last couple of weeks, but also speaking to some of your team, there's clearly this through line with everything that you do of, like, extreme. What appears to me to be extreme ambition and doesn't appear to be extreme ambition to you in the same way that it appears to be extreme ambition to me?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, it's just. I mean, does physics allow it, then? Yes, it's possible. It just. Is it. Do we want to put the time in? I mean, it's. I feel like people overcomplicate a lot of things.
-
Unknown B
Is that something you've trained over time, or have you always thought that?
-
Unknown A
I think I've just. It's a good question. I've never. I don't know why, but when people tell me I can't do something, I. I don't know where this came from. It makes me just want to do it more, to be honest. If you tell me I shouldn't do something, that's fine. But if you tell me I can't, then I just. If everything in my body just wants to go fuck you, I obviously can. I just. I don't know if I should, but I can. And then, I don't know, it's like, the thing is, like, to go viral, you have to do something that's never been done before. I've told this story before of, like, you know, if you're driving down the road and you see a cow, who cares? It's a fucking cow. But if you're driving down the road and you see a purple cow, you're like, you've never seen that before and it's something you weren't expecting.
-
Unknown A
You're gonna go, holy shit. And you're telling your friends about it. You're gonna remember that you probably even think about it randomly once every couple years. Why the fuck was there a purple cow? And it's like, it's the same thing. Just one was a little purple. And like, you can apply that same, like, analogy to ideas. Like when you're scrolling through social media to find a video to watch, there's things that, you know have been done before you've seen. It's, you know, roughly similar to stuff before. You're just gonna scroll past it. You'll never think about it again. Just like you'll never think about a fucking cow inside the road. And then there are ideas that are like, the purple cow idea, which is what I try to do, which are things that make you go, what the fuck? I've never seen that. Like, I have to click this or I'm not gonna sleep tonight.
-
Unknown A
Because. Because, like, why is this video. No way they did this, right? But those typically are very hard. And usually to get that purple cow effect, they've never been done before. And something's never been done before. There's usually a reason because it's very fucking hard. So you just kind of have to train yourself to, like, not resent very difficult, complex, hard, original problems and actually run towards them because those are the ones that, you know, tend to have. The more the purple cow factor people have to watch it. If your shit's very exponential, it's way easier to get 50 million views on one video than it is to get a million views on 50 videos, right? And so, and because it, like kind of goes exponentially, it's like, you know, pretty winner take all on the top videos. Like, you just really have to lean into that purple cow effect, if that makes sense.
-
Unknown B
Makes perfect sense. If you, if you were to distill, then say we were coming up with a new how to succeed in Mr. B's production handbook. Now, what would be the top five? If I was applying for a job with you, what five characteristics would I need to demonstrate to be successful?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, be very coachable. Because whatever I teach you today is going to change, you know, a year or two from now. Always learning, always improving. Coachable. A big thing for me is you got to see the value in working here. Like, you really. I just, I don't. This isn't like a job. This is a career. Like, if you don't, you know, realistically see a world where you're working for me in 10 years, then it's pretty hard for me to invest into you at the level I want. Like, I'm not. I don't like training someone for six months. They work here for a year, and then I lose them. What I like is I train someone for a year and then I get nine years of dividends on the back end where they crush at their job. And I'm constantly paying them more because they're becoming more valuable with time.
-
Unknown A
Like that is like the eighth wonder of the world is investing heavily in employee. And then they stick around for a decade. You know what I mean? It's like, they're some of my top guys that I spent three or four years in the trenches with, training and working with. You know, they're like, Tyler, who writes a lot of my videos and directs them. I, you know, probably talk to him five, six hours a day, every day for four. Yeah, around four years. And now, because I can't spend. He spends a hundred percent of his time writing the videos, directing videos. Obsessive of that. Whereas I could theoretically, Max spend 5% of my time. So he's gonna naturally just shit on me on it, because he can spend way more time on it. And it's like, so, you know, I full faith in him, but the dividends that I get off of him after all those years of pouring all that time and effort into him, and now he knows exactly how I think, what I value, that I don't even really have to communicate with him.
-
Unknown A
Sometimes I just show up to film and, like, I just trust that it's good, you know, And I have a bunch of people across all my businesses like that, that it's, like, great. And if, you know, in a world where Tyler's still working here 10 years from now, I mean, the amount of value out of someone like that is unfathomable. It is quite literally the eighth one of the world for a business. And it's like, that's what I want. But you don't get those kinds of people that see the value for, you know, working for you. So they have to, like, deeply believe. Like, the more valuable I become to this company, the more I'll be rewarded. And they, like, actually want to dedicate their life to the business. So that's very important. Because if I really don't get that vibe, then it's not fair to both of us.
-
Unknown A
Cause I'm not gonna invest in you like I should. Because I don't think you're gonna be here in 10 years. And then you're gonna feel that. And it's crazy. So coachable, sees the value. Obviously Obsessed. I, I don't, I just don't like working with mediocre people. I mean, I really just can't stand it. It's the fastest way to make me depressed is if I have to work with someone who's just not all in and just loves what they do. There's just a lot of, you know, stuff like that. And I'm sure if you listen to like a Steve Jobs interview or something that he talks about, it's just the typical traits. Obsessed, coachable, all in sees the value.
-
Unknown B
What is the single worst traits?
-
Unknown A
Mediocrity. I mean it's just like because they're not bad enough when you fire them, but not good. The problem is like, I mean you see it in full effect. Great people just love working with great people. They do. And there's something about being around great people that pulls some kind of animal out of you that just makes you want to do more and push more belief things aren't possible. And I don't know, when you put me around a bunch of other successful entrepreneurs, I just turn into a different human than if you put me around, I don't know, a bunch of people who are just running small businesses that don't really care. I don't really have much ambition. I'm like two completely different humans. And you see that same thing in full effect. You put a bunch of A players around, more A players, they just build off of each other.
-
Unknown A
But you like put two or three C players amongst a bunch of great people and they'll start pulling them down, they'll start making them not want to work as much and make work not as fun. And so everyone knows get rid of the C players, right? Obviously get rid of people who aren't all in blah blah. It's the ones that are like they're not an A player but they're not a C player. So it's kind of hard because you still feed off the energy and if you get enough of them it just drags the overall culture down. So those are like the worst. And not everyone can be these like world ending monsters. You know, there are a lot of mundane things like I mean the book controller and accounting, I mean probably doesn't have to be the best in the world but you know, when it comes to like the mission critical things like making videos and things like that, like just the great people gotta be surrounded.
-
Unknown A
Like that's one of your number one jobs as leaders, just to make sure your great people are working with other great people. Cause that's like. That's like the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't money. You know, I mean, it's like number four on the list, don't ask me list model, remember? I just know the number one thing is do they enjoy who they're working with? And people leave their job because they hate working with people way before they'll ever leave because of money.
-
Unknown B
Have you ever been frustrated that the people you find don't match your level of obsession?
-
Unknown A
No, because I just find the people that do.
-
Unknown B
Are there people that do?
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah. There's so many people in my business. I mean, obviously you have to take care of them. Well, like, they're not the kind of people that just make the standard rate, but yeah, like people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and, you know, even people on our editing team. I mean, they're putting in most weeks, same amount of hours as me, and they're all in. See the vision. It's like, it's hard to find those kinds of people. But, you know, when you do, you gotta treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.
-
Unknown B
And you have almost 500, roughly 500 people probably.
-
Unknown A
I think the production company were around 300, Feastball's around 100, and then probably another 40, 50 scattered amongst everything else.
-
Unknown B
Most founders I speak to describe scaling headcounts as the kind of worst part of the job. More people, more problems, right?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, that's an understanding.
-
Unknown B
Especially as someone like you, who's a creative at heart and who is very focused and obsessed on, I guess, the show and producing, as you say, Often I want to produce the best videos we possibly can, of course. And then all this other shit comes with it, which is like, hr, which every founder I speak to hates.
-
Unknown A
I mean. Yeah. The worst part is I just have this very once in a. I just very rare opportunity where I have so much attention and so many people watch my content. And I wish. I just wish I had more experience building business. You know, I'm only 26, and this is my first real business of every. Every employee milestone we hit, it's my first time hitting that. Right. Like, When I hit 100 employees, that was my first time getting there. And this was my first time going from 100, 200, 200, 300. And like, with what I know now, I could have done it so much faster, obviously. And it's just, you know, it's a little brutal because, like, like, scaling feasibles from, you know, 0200 was way easier. Than doing my production company because I'd been through the ringer before and I learned a bunch and I get better with time and I, it's just the most, honestly the most annoying part is just ignorance, right?
-
Unknown A
Like, because a lot of things mistakes I make, I look back and I'm like, oh yeah, I probably should have brought in people with more experience working at a larger company earlier here I waited a little too long here. I probably should have. And it's just like brutal because if I'd known these things I'd be way further along. But that's just how you learn. Just got to make 10,000 mistakes.
-
Unknown B
Every founder says the same, Every founder spoke to says the same thing that unknown. Unknowns.
-
Unknown A
Exactly. It's just like. So that's where I mean my big thing recently has just been trying to find people who have successfully scaled businesses and like bring them to my organization and learn from them. Because I'm just so tired of like being like fuck, I should have known better. But I did it because I've never done this before. So I'm trying to find a lot of great people who have been through it so they can like kind of mentor me along the way so I make less mistakes. Which has been really good. We brought in a new C suite recently. Um, I, it's like always a hard balance because I try not to in the past I, I've like, you know, decisions are kind of like pendulums and I have a, a problem where like I'll identify something, I'll overcorrect the pendulum one way and I'm like no, I should just stop in the middle.
-
Unknown A
And then like my over correction in the past was like corporate people try to build too many systems and they kill innovation. And so I was very anti like people with too much corporate experience cause they're going to just destroy all the creativity. But you know, that's why we're making so many organizational fuck ups because we don't have anyone who actually built the business at this size. And so you know, the pendulum was on the right and I swung it all the way to the left of no corporate. And now I think we're in the healthy medium where you know, obviously the people in our C suite and the leaders should have lots of experience managing people at this size and scale. But it's just finding the right people who can do it and build systems in a way where it doesn't crush creativity and they actually value the product over ease.
-
Unknown B
The driver's, you know, I'm on the T shirt called Dragons in the uk and my stuff is significantly smaller. It's like a percentage of your viewership. But even I am slightly terrified with hiring people because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone that I work with to say that I did something bad. And in the early days of my first business, what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there and they ask them, what was he like? You have the same problem, you have the same conundrum where anyone has an incentive that works for you when they leave. So many different incentives to throw an arrow at you on the way out the door. How do you contend with this?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, you hit it on the head of, you know, I have four or five hundred people right now, but we've also worked with thousands of people in the past and I think it's just what comes with it. But at the end of the day, you know, as long as what we're doing is moral and ethical, like you said, they're going to throw arrows. But, you know, I'm just a problem solver. It's like whenever I see the metaphorical arrow, I just go, you know, what's the problem? And if we did something wrong, how do we fix it? Or if it's not an actual problem, it's just rumors. I mean, it is what it is. And so, yeah, I think it just comes with part of it. I mean, it sucks and it's unfortunate, but you also think like, most people don't like their jobs too.
-
Unknown A
And so it's not like this is even specific to our industry. Like, you know, just go ask 100 random Americans. Of all the jobs that worked in their life, how many did they deeply enjoy and would they have nothing negative to say? So I think it's just part of it, you know, it's almost like a pastime for a lot of people just to like trash talk their old jobs or whatever.
-
Unknown B
Has any of that stuff ever got to you? Any criticism?
-
Unknown A
Of course, yeah. I mean, criticism all the time does. But I mean, the thing is, independent of that kind of stuff, it's just like, I mean, for. We are averaging like 200 million views a video, like, you know, like most of it unique viewers. Like we're talking like 2 plus percent, sometimes 3% of humans alive watch every piece of content I put out, you know, depending on how well the channel's doing. It's like, I mean, like you could. I could upload a video and then with 365 days later, you could grab 33 random humans anywhere on the planet, such. Because we do dubs. You know, what's even crazier is our, you know, YouTube's not in China, so that's like 2 to 3% of humans alive, excluding China, or China's mixed in there. But if you just take people excluding China, it'd be more like 3 to 4%.
-
Unknown A
But you could just grab 33 random people on the planet, and one of them, on average, would have seen that video because the views are so far high. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of criticism that's thrown at me. And the thing is, even since our stuff's so global, sometimes, you know, transcends culture. Not everyone views everything, and so everyone has different opinions and stuff like that, which is why it would drive you crazy at our scale, if you try to make people happy. Because even if 99 of people are deeply happy, which is an insane hit rate, like, if you make a piece of content, 99 people that watch it, love it, that is wild. Which. That kind of stuff doesn't happen. But in our case, if just 1% happy, that's 2 million people, which is more than anyone else even gets on video views on video.
-
Unknown A
So. Which will feel like an insurmountable amount of criticism and feedback. And it's very easy to, like, trick your mind into thinking, damn, everyone hates me, because you just, you know, focus on the 1%.99. So I just came to the point where, you know, I just have to have my own internal guidelines of, like, do I think what I'm doing is good? Do what I think, you know, is moral, ethical? Do. Do I believe in what I'm doing? If so, fuck it. Like, I'm never gonna be able to make everyone happy. So I. And if you just. You let the whims of the Internet kind of decide what is okay and what's acceptable, and when you're being bad or good, then you. You. You don't have a smile, you don't have a back when you stand for nothing, and. And it will just destroy you mentally.
-
Unknown A
Um, and so, I mean, I don't know what age I was when I kind of got in that mindset, but I just was like, I'm gonna decide, and I'm not gonna let the Internet decide, you know, what is okay and what's not. And then ever since I got to that point, you know, people criticize me for something. I'm like, I don't agree. Then I have, like, it's easy for me to just Go, oh, I don't agree. Not gonna make everyone happy. I believe what I'm doing is right and just move on.
-
Unknown B
The brain isn't designed for this, though. No, this is what I've come to learn. So do the podcast. It goes well. It feels like at the start, everyone loves me, and then I get further down the line and it feels like everyone fucking hates me. Because you get attacked from. You can never do anything right.
-
Unknown A
I've probably read mess, like comments or tweets or I probably in my lifetime read over 5,000 messages or comments or something telling me to kill myself. I mean, you know what I mean? You know, just like. And what would possess someone to tell you to, like, leave a comment where it's like, fucking kill yourself? You know what I mean? So agree, like, we were not meant to receive this kind of feedback from basically anyone, anywhere in the world. You know what I mean? Just all, you know, consistently, day in and day out for, in my case, over a decade.
-
Unknown B
Has it ever really got to you?
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, it does all the time. Or it used to all the time.
-
Unknown B
Like I said, what does that mean in reality? If I'm a fly on a wall in one of those moments where you can recall it really getting to you?
-
Unknown A
I mean, back in the day. But I wasn't as confident in my ability to be successful. And, you know, when you're probably 20 and you're hiring all these people, you're. You know, I have high risk tolerance, but I'm reinvesting every dollar I make. I'm hiring my friends from school. I hired my mom. Like, these people really care about her, depending on me. And then, you know, I put a video that does bad, and then people, you know, I pour all my time and effort into it. But, you know, maybe it doesn't come across as well. Like some people might have interpreted as lazy. And you read a comment being like, wow, what a fucking lazy. Like, I thought you made great videos. Or this, this video sucked. And you read that and the video's underperforming and you're like, fuck, maybe I am being too reckless.
-
Unknown A
And, you know, I mean, there's definitely times where I would cry, you know, just because I would just be like, fuck, am I like, not doing this right? Or like, they don't understand I put a lot of time into this or whatever. Why? Why? Sometimes you're like, fuck, does the algorithm hate me? Am I being suppressed? Or whatever. Back in the day, when was the.
-
Unknown B
Last time it happened? That feeling of.
-
Unknown A
There Was like a month probably last year where I felt a little bit of that just because, um, you know, just sometimes, occasionally the rumor and drama mail gets spun up, but you just gotta snap out of it. And like I said, just go, do I believe in what I'm doing? Do I? It's like, it's hard because, you know, anytime I do anything good, it's, you know, people are always, like. They try to. We're, like, conditioned in America now. When someone does something good, there's always some ulterior motive.
-
Unknown B
And I've.
-
Unknown A
I've always been straightforward. Just said, a world where I help people is just better than a world where I don't, like. I don't try to come up with this crazy, like, story of how, you know, someone helped me when I was younger. And now I just want to give back and cry. I'm just like, yeah, I can make viral videos. And I think a world where I do viral videos that help people are better when I don't, you know, kind of as my answer. But it always does suck when people try to just like. I don't know. It's funny, the more good you do, the more people think you're secretly evil. And it's like, why can't I just help people? Because it's fun, you know, so occasionally those will get to me and I'll just be like, guys, you don't even know me, like. And, like, you would think sometimes you'd read, like, when I build wells in Africa or help blind people see or things like that.
-
Unknown A
You'd read some of these things online. You think I'm Hitler. I mean, it's crazy, like, how people portray it. And I just. I don't know, I wish people just understand, like, in my day, in a world where people just more fun than a world where I don't. And it's really not that deep.
-
Unknown B
The people around you, how does it impact them?
-
Unknown A
Oh, how does the drama and that kind of stuff impact them? To be honest, in my case, I don't think it hits them that hard because most things usually follow me and people want to go after me because I'm the guy that does good. The quote, unquote philanthropist. So usually I'm like the one that gets thrown under the bus quite a bit.
-
Unknown B
It's funny because everyone that knows you knows you.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Whether they're really successful people or people that you work with, that I've spoken to, everybody that knows you, know, who you are. And it's remarkable to me that someone who has done so much good in the world. I've looked at your philanthropy. I know what you're doing with feastables and the ethical sourcing of that. When I see someone that's done so much good in the world still be misunderstood, it almost makes me realize that I should never fight it.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, the ironic part is the more I help people, the more shit I get, to be honest. Like, it's so funny because, you know, like the same day I'll drop a video where I'll, you know, help a thousand blind people. See, some other YouTuber will drop a video where they just bought a new mansion. And it's like, everyone's like, yes. You know, get that mansion. Good job. And then they'll be like, fuck you for curing blind people, Jimmy. Fuck you. You're using them. And I'm like, no, I just want to inspire people to do good. I mean, I can buy a mansion if you really want me to. So it is funny. I. If you're trying. This is a weird sentence, but if you're trying to be liked, I actually don't recommend you, like, help people. Like, I actually think helping people will make the Internet like you less than if you just like, buy nice cars and do like the typical influencer path.
-
Unknown A
It's because they were just so conditioned in America to see it as like a shield. And like, no one actually does good because they just find it fun, apparently. But I mean, I don't care. Like I said, it's just more fun than if I didn't. So, I mean, people can shot me for helping people. I don't. Doesn't bother me anymore. But I wouldn't recommend you get into it if you want to be liked because I think it's negatively correlated now.
-
Unknown B
Interesting.
-
Unknown A
It is so fascinating. It is. I swear to God, man. Like, it's, it's. It's there. I could just, I don't know, do these like $1 versus videos where I compare like a $1 boat to a billion dollar boat and all these other things, and I help people and I just get away with shit. And it's. It's so funny because no one bats an eye when I post that. But when I give hundreds of thousands of people in Africa clean drinking water, it's like all hell breaks loose on my guys. I'm just trying to bring attention to a cause. I don't really. But the thing is, I'm just gonna keep doing it. And I mean, I think in my case, most people have realized I'm not gonna stop. So they're just kind of over, you know, getting out of me. And they're like, all right, Jimmy's just being Jimmy.
-
Unknown B
I think when the windmills as well, what it does is it helps you to really understand why you're doing what you're doing and understand yourself. And so when I've been attacked, like people I interview or whatever it might be, it's actually made me refocus on what my principles are. Yeah, because you have to be reacted to.
-
Unknown A
That's like I said, you have to know where your line is. And as long as you're on the right side of your line, then it is what it is. People on Twitter can say whatever they want. And I think, like, that's the only way to really survive at this scale without going crazy is you. You have to determine where the line is.
-
Unknown B
Not like the Internet workaholism.
-
Unknown A
Yes.
-
Unknown B
Can you give me a window into lost seven days of your life? Just give me. Paint me a picture.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yes, let me drink some water. Because my flu. Well, the. I don't know about the last seven days, but in general, we. So we're filming a video where we're doing the. I'm visiting the five most deadliest places on earth. So one of the places was a safari in South Africa. So I flew to South Africa to spend time in a cage surrounded by lines, sick content. It was really good, which that was a bitch to get to. And then I got the flu and so spent a couple days in the hospital there. And then we were going to go to Snake island to spend time there. Then the World's Deadliest Road. And then we have a couple other places, but that got postponed. So instead got outta the hospital, went to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge, then I went to or, no, went to North Carolina.
-
Unknown A
We had this guy where I built a gym and I told him if he loses £100 before he leaves the gym, it has a big red circle around it, I'll give a bunch of money. So I filmed with him, then worked on the coming up videos that a lot and then flew to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge, flew here, just landed. Filmed with the reunion that you were at with contestants for Beast Games. We're doing this podcast. What time is it?
-
Unknown B
Like one amps just off to 1am.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, 1am the latest podcast he's ever done. Lightweight. I always do my podcast at 1am My last podcast before this is like 4am, like a couple weeks ago. And then we're flying to San Fran to film with Steph. Then we're Steph Curry. Yeah, Steph Curry. Then I think I'm going to Snake island, then the Deadliest Road. And then I, I won't. I'll basically. I don't think I'll be home for another 16 days. So I'm just traveling around filming for the next 16 days and then, yeah, I guess then I'll get home and then they'll make me go my own.
-
Unknown B
How does everything else in your life in terms of like the gym. I know you've been working out.
-
Unknown A
It's been brutal. It's gone to shit the last couple months. It's. It's really killing me to be honest. It's. It was like so much easier when you're bro. If you don't travel constantly. Life is so easy when you just wake up in your own bed and like waking up in your own bed and working 15 hours in, you know, your office, whatever. So easy compared to like all this fucking bullshit where I'm like, I don't know the time zone. I mean, I don't know what place I'm in. I don't know where I'm going in two days. It's like, like, I mean, some days I'm going to be at 10:00am, other days I'm going to bed at 5:00pm and it's like, it's a mess. It's really. And I used to put up with it and it's just like. And figure out how to do the training, but it's just.
-
Unknown A
I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I need to. Truly, whatever's a priority you'll get done. I just need to make it a priority again. I really do miss it. It's just this. The hard part is putting putting Beast Games in the mix because I was already like basically working, you know, whatever, every hour my eyes were awake. But then Beast Games is such a monster of a project and I have to maintain the same YouTube upload schedule and then I do a lot of feastables now and then I have a couple of business. So I, I just. Honestly, something had to give and sadly it was working out, but it's fucking stupid. So I need to like reprioritize my life where I can get. I mean, it just only needs me 45 minutes, five days a week. It doesn't need to be hard.
-
Unknown A
But the bigger problem is I'm just not sleeping like I used to because we got so much going on. And so when I hit it hard in the gym And I don't get enough sleep then that causes pretty extreme fatigue the next day. So it's, I gotta fix the sleep first before that. But yeah, it's got a lot going on, to be honest. I'm dying. How are you feeling right now? Honestly? Fine. I'm jacked up on a lot of caffeine. I mean, just in this, the flu's not helping. It's making everything like 30% harder. So, you know, it's like life's like a roller coaster. There are going to be moments where like right now I'm going to answer this negatively, but I don't want something that's indicative of like, oh, every time you ask me this, it's going to be up. But because of the flu and the lack of sleep, I mean I'm struggling at the moment.
-
Unknown A
Just a lot of grinding, a little happy because we just dropped the ending of Peace Game. So it's like a little bit of emotional high. But after this I'm probably going to go crash, be tired as fuck in the morning tomorrow, which I hate. But yeah, I would say I like the lower end. I could use a couple good days to bring the energy back up quick.
-
Unknown B
One, I want to talk about something we all need to take seriously, which is cybersecurity. Whether you're a first time founder facing your very first audit or a seasoned professional who's been through it all, staying compliant is getting more critical than ever and more complicated, I have to say. And that is where Vanta comes in. Who is a sponsor of this podcast. Vanta takes the pain out of security compliance, automating the tedious but essential process of proving your business is secure across over 35 frameworks like SoC2, ISO 27001, centralize your workflows, answer security questions up to five times faster, and protect your business without losing focus on growth. And this is really a critical part of this. A new IDC white paper found that companies using Vanta save over $535,000 a year and it pays for itself in just three months. For a limited time, my community gets $1,000 offhand to vanta.com Stephen that's v a n t a.com Stephen For $1,000 off, how do you think about mental health?
-
Unknown B
I've heard you speak about your mental health before.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I don't. Well, the thing is, here's the problem. Like it's if my mental health was a party, I wouldn't be as successful as I am. I mean that's just like a sad Fact, I can obviously never bury myself for seven days. Seven days solitary, seven days on desert island, seven days, blah, blah. It's like, you know, being consistently uncomfortable and like being able to consistently suffer over long periods. It's like arguably one of the deepest modes. Like, there's a reason no one makes videos like me. Like, not even close. Because I want to live the life I live. I mean, there are, there are months where I'm, you know, I think there's one year I was flying like 200 days. Like I was on a plane. I mean, it was, it was a fuck fest. But, you know, to get these videos done and I do everything and it's like, you know, when I, when I wake up tomorrow, I'm gonna be pretty fucking tired and feel like shit.
-
Unknown A
I want to go. You know, something I always tell myself is how you feel right now is why no one else does what you want to do or does what you do. And if you push through this, that's just even, you know, more reason why no one ever be who you are. And so it's like, I think being able to push through unhappiness and do things you don't want to do consistently, year after year over the course of a decade is like the ultimate advantage. Like, I mean, I, I think we'll hit a billion subscribers and I don't think anyone will be anywhere near close because, like, once you make a couple million dollars, why would you live the life I live? Why. Why would you not take weekends off? Why would you not just film locally even if it means less views so you could be on the right time schedule?
-
Unknown A
Why would you not, you know, prioritize your sanity and that kind of stuff? It makes no sense. But that's why no one else does it.
-
Unknown B
You spoke to Colin in some guys I met recently, great, great guys, and you said to them, I'm miserable. A lot of times. I have mental breakdowns every other week.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I know. I've gotten a little better. Mental breakdown. Sounds extreme. It's more. I'm like, fuck, why am I doing this? This is so fucking hard. Because it's just a lot, man. You're just going constantly. It's like. Because what's funny is I think I said that years ago, but that was back when all I was really was doing YouTube. Now I run the Shopley company and we have the show and we have a couple other stuff. So I think the hardest part really is gear shifting, like. And so I try to bucket these things correct. Like if, if I'm on set. You know, I have a 15 hour film day. Like ideally the things I'm doing in between filming are like related to main channel because I'm in the frame of mind of that. And that's one thing that's really helped me not feel like my head's gonna explode.
-
Unknown A
Like if I'm in Chicago at the Feastables office and we're going to Feastables Marketing, like, and then you come in and you go, what do you think about this bit for this coming up main channel video? Then I have to like shift my frame of mind and like that constant gear shifting, it's like it'll make my fucking head hurt if I'm like bouncing around too much. I. And it's also just very not core to who I am. I love obsessing over certain things. I find, you know, obsessing over things within a business isn't like switching back forth between marketing product in a same business is pretty easy. There's a long way of saying, like one thing that's helped with that is like just really organizing my schedule in a way where it allows my natural state of mind to like obsess over a certain business, finish that and then move on to the next one.
-
Unknown A
Whereas before it used to be like 30 gear switches a day. And that's just visual. It's not even fun, to be honest.
-
Unknown B
I heard Elon Musk you spoke about quite often also someone I speak about quite often. I heard him say when he was on Joe Rogan that you wouldn't want to be in my head. And I think Joe Rogan asked him if he was happy or something and he doesn't even like consider the question to be important. Yeah, so two questions there. Do you think the average person would like to be in your head? And secondly, are you happy?
-
Unknown A
Well, no. The average person does not want to live the life I live or be my head. They would be miserable because you're just working all the time. And they would probably just ask themselves, why am I working all the time? Why don't I. Why don't I do literally anything else? I mean, because there, I mean, obviously I'm not a robot. There are times where I'm like, fuck, I really want to play the strategy board game. I want to do this thing. And I look at the schedule, I'm like, oh, maybe I could do that in four days. And you, you know, and the hard thing is you really have to like be delicate with the framing of your mind because it's very easy moments like that to go, fuck. I'm like a zoo animal. Like, I don't. I don't have free will. I'm like a little robot to my businesses.
-
Unknown A
And like. And so you have to, like, be very careful. And sometimes those emotions take over. And especially. Cause I'm a very defiant kind of guy. I'm like, but I really want to do this thing, but I can't. Cause I gotta go film this video, I gotta do this. I gotta speak at this conference, I gotta do this networking thing and blah, blah. And so, yeah, I think most people, when that feeling comes up of like, am I just a fucking animal? Like, do I have any free will? They would probably get very depressed and. But I've been able to, like, work through those and just. I always try to, you know, your brain, you just. You just gotta control your thoughts, be like, well, this is the life I chose. This is. You want success, you want to change the world. You want to do this, and this is the price you have to pay.
-
Unknown A
You should actually see this as a good thing, because this is why. Which is why I'm very diligent about how I frame things in my mind. Like, this is why no one else will do what you will do. And this is a good thing. This is what you are feeling right now is your moat. You're lucky. It's hard. Push through it and you'll be happy you did. You know, and so that's kind of how I try to view it. Um, but no, I don't think most people be happy living in my life. They would be like, oh, let's just grab a couple million dollars and be happy.
-
Unknown B
Are you happy?
-
Unknown A
Uh, it depends what day you ask me. Right now, I'm having a good time. Um, other, you know, when I was at the flu in Africa, sitting in a cage Alliance. Fuck no.
-
Unknown B
So what's your baseline? How would you describe your baseline?
-
Unknown A
Probably this year, probably so far more unhappy than happy. And it's just. There are just things you gotta do that just aren't fun, you know? But I. I think I. I really deeply enjoy working on feastables, and I'm trying to spend more of my time building it. The problem is, it's just, I. It's just opportunity cost because I'm the one who can be in front of the camera and film. And that's what's, like, brutal, especially with beast scans, is I'm just filming so much. It added so much shit to my yearly filming. Like doing this giant show on top of already having a large YouTube channel when I was already filming someone's 25 days a month. So I'm just like. That's just the rough part is because it's like, it just all rests my shoulders, and if I don't film, there's no content. Like, the channel just literally ceases, like, if I stop filming.
-
Unknown A
And so, you know, I found more and more than I'm finding more joy in entrepreneurial things and building business. And I do think I'd be happier if I could spend more time doing that. But it's just, like, weird because I could literally hire anyone in the world to do that, whereas I can't hire anyone to replace me on camera.
-
Unknown B
I always wonder someone who is doing so well on a platform like YouTube, but the algorithm's always changing. So many YouTubers I speak to say that they get burnout eventually. They get, like, creative burnout, and they just, like, click that channel. You've seen a lot of it recently over the last couple years where YouTubers hit 10 million, they just stop. Has that ever crossed your mind to stop?
-
Unknown A
Oh, of course. All the time.
-
Unknown B
Seriously?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. But, I mean, I feel like that's what half this podcast has been about, about how I don't want to do things, but I push through and do it. I think they're just reasonable humans. Like, they. You know, a lot of them are chasing goal of, like, oh, I just want this money so I can take care of these things. You know, it could be noble things like retire my mom or just not worry about money. And then they go, well, why would I suffer now? I'm good.
-
Unknown B
When was the closest you came to quitting?
-
Unknown A
Oh, probably countless times. I mean, when I was in solitary confinement for seven days and I was fucking miserable. I mean, I did quit a video. I've quit a lot of videos.
-
Unknown B
Like, no, I mean, as a crazy, um.
-
Unknown A
I mean, I guess I never truly would've quit. I mean, my biggest thing would be I just would've quit for, like, a week and been like, fuck, let me sleep nine hours a night. And, like. But, like, I spent the first we. We did a video. We spent seven days on desert island. First time we filmed it, on day two, I woke up on the beach, and I had literally. I didn't know Sam. Fleas were a thing. I had, like, 700 bug bites up and down my legs, all over my body. I was sunburned. I was like, a little bit of me. I was like, damn, I'm gonna die. Like, this is crazy how much, like, bug bites are Everywhere. And my skin was so red and I couldn't see straight. So I ended up quitting on day two, which is brutal. Cause you spend all this time and money and you have the crew out there and you flew out there and you know, it's opportunity cost.
-
Unknown A
It's like that's a seven day window which I got a video unloaded and now we don't like, it's, you know, canceling be like that is literally the worst thing that could happen from an opportunity cost perspective. And that was like, you know, when you have moments like those and it's like fucked. Like this isn't even fun. Fuck this shit, you know, but.
-
Unknown B
But what about YouTube as a whole? Because I feel like YouTube is like throwing coal into a train and you just have to keep throwing it in there. Once you solid it, you just never stop throwing it in.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, you're running on a treadmill cranked up to the max, especially if you want to get top tier career like me. And it's just like, who, who can stand on the treadmill the longest because it never slows down. If anything, you're making it faster. Um, but no, I mean, I don't think there's ever ironically time where I actually would have quit. It just breaks. Probably would have been nice.
-
Unknown B
And when you think forward that treadmill, can you see yourself doing it for the next two, three, four decades or.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, of course. I don't have any intention of stopping.
-
Unknown B
Okay. Love. Something that came into my life a couple years ago. You announced, I think over Christmas time that you had proposed. I think it was like Boxing Day or New Year's Eve.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, it was on Christmas Day.
-
Unknown B
Oh, Christmas Day.
-
Unknown A
Because her family was in town. So I proposed. Okay.
-
Unknown B
How does that fit into this craziness?
-
Unknown A
She's literally, you could probably count on your hands the amount of people on the planet that actually would make a good partner for me. And she's just, she's one of them. She really understands that work is what, you know, is what I live for, what keeps me going. And she supports me and she understands how important it is. And it's. The big thing is hanging out with Tia, my fiance, is so frictionless. We play the same video games, we watch the same shows, we're very interested in the same things. She loves learning like I do. So, you know, it's exciting to see what, you know, lecture she listened to online that day or like whatever weird book she's reading. And she just like everything about being around her is very frictionless. Which is great because, like, obviously I don't have much time at the house.
-
Unknown A
And so, like, the last thing that I need is to come home from work and there'd be friction. And so we don't. We don't fight. It's. I, you know, I. Sometimes I'm like, wow, this is like my best friend and she's hot. This is great. You know, and so it's like, it feels weird sometimes people.
-
Unknown B
I mean, anyone in a listening now that's in a relationship, I guess the question I'd be thinking is, like, when.
-
Unknown A
You spend time together, mostly at nights and that. But the beauty. She gears her schedule around mine. So, like, she's. She'll work when I'm working and then she'll just travel with me. And so honestly, a lot of it is on planes. A lot of it's in car rides or, you know, an hour before bed or in the morning, that kind of stuff. But it's like. Because there are pockets of breaks on set and things like that. So it's just, you know, having. It's really hard to find someone who is intelligent, actually has their own hobbies, things going for them, independent, that's also willing to mold their life around mine and not see it as a demeaning thing because, like, yeah, she was just like, well, I have this thing going on and I have to prioritize my life. I would never see her. But because she's willing to, you know, mold her life around mine and my work schedule, that, that, you know, is.
-
Unknown A
That's everything. And it's rare that someone's willing to do that while you know, being as. In my opinion, at least from what I've seen, as intelligent and independent as she is.
-
Unknown B
Parents always messaged me and say, steve, wait till you have kids.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, that's. And that's the thing. Like, my lifestyle right now would not work for kids. So I want to wait. I want kids, but I want to wait as long as possible because if I'm gonna have kids, I gotta be a great dad. Like, I really. I really, really enjoy mentoring people. I love mentoring, you know, younger entrepreneurs and, like, help. Like, I told this. I think I told this story in general. I helped one of my friends go from like 40k a month and rap you to 400k on YouTube. And I do kind of stuff like that all the time. I just, like, one of my other friends has a snack CPG brand and I helped them grow to eight figures in revenue just for fun. I just call them a couple times A month. And it's like, there's something so satisfying about helping other people succeed.
-
Unknown A
And so I would love to have a couple kids and just like, really mentor them into, like, you know, being badasses. But yeah, not anytime soon. Like, that would be so absent if we had kids. So just got to find that right time in the Venn diagram where I could actually be present in life.
-
Unknown B
And your business empire, I think, is much bigger than most people realize. I imagine the majority of people probably don't really understand the context of business. They don't really get it. They might see you as a YouTuber or a creator, but from the research that I've done, you run a very, very large business.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, we do nine figures of feasibles and we can say that.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, nine figures of feasibles. So the business must be worth several billions of dollars overall.
-
Unknown A
I mean, you could do something like that. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
I'm not going to get you to try and have the guess I'm chucking. No, but I'm not going to ask you to predict the.
-
Unknown A
But the business would be worth a lot of money.
-
Unknown B
Are you a billionaire?
-
Unknown A
On paper, yeah. But I mean, in my actual bank account, I've less than a million dollars.
-
Unknown B
So do you pay yourself at all?
-
Unknown A
A little bit, but I also, like, I have some assistance and things like that. So it's like I try to just pay myself what I spend, you know, personally a month just to, like, stay even.
-
Unknown B
How do you. How do you think about money and all of this? Because most, most people in their lives are pursuing money so that they can churn out retirement, but you seem to be pursuing it purely for the sake of reinvesting it back into the system.
-
Unknown A
Money is fuel to grow a business.
-
Unknown B
And then you make money from the.
-
Unknown A
Business and then they keep growing. Yeah. And then you find a business that you enjoy that you know is better for Mother Nature or other people, and there you go, you have a fulfilled life. That's my theory. I just don't. When I'm 70, I don't want to look back and have regrets.
-
Unknown B
You know, when is enough enough? Such a cliche question that I'm asked, enough?
-
Unknown A
Like building the business? Never. I mean, I just want to keep, like, building a business is like a video game. It's just fun, you know, like with Feastables right now, you know, we're the largest ethically for shopping company in America. And like, it's just fun to, like, look at something that's been done the same way for 100 years. And go, how do we just flip this on its head and fuck up this industry? And, you know, how can we pay our farmers living income, you know, not use child labor, et cetera, et cetera? And so it's like, you know, I think if I was just doing mundane things like everyone else probably. I probably would be bored as fuck. If I just sold chocolate like everyone else, made the same repetitive YouTube videos like everyone else, I probably would be like, all right, get me out of this.
-
Unknown A
I want to retire. But so we're doing, like, we're changing industries. We're impacting the world like this. This is the point of life, in my opinion.
-
Unknown B
You could do so much with the gazillion people that listen and watch your videos. You could, like, start almost any business and it'd be successful. You could have almost any social impact and it'd be profound and save a gazillion people's lives. Do you struggle with focus?
-
Unknown A
No. I mean, I do wonder, you know, sometimes, should we be doing more? But I've really found a good groove with feasibles. I'm very. I keep looking at Rick with Feast sitting over there. I do feel like I've hit a good groove with that and the ethical sourcing on it and. No, I mean, yeah, obviously I get a bajillion opportunities, but just now, right now, this, like I think I said earlier, this is one of the few things in life that I've. I've. It's scratched the same itch as YouTuber. Building Feastables is equally as fun as making videos for me.
-
Unknown B
It is so delicious.
-
Unknown A
Thank you.
-
Unknown B
It is so delicious. I'd really love to just spend a moment talking about the ethical sourcing piece, because I don't think that's something I didn't understand until I did some research on you.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Why. Why does that matter so much? When you say ethical sourcing? What's the difference between what you do and what normal chocolate is?
-
Unknown A
Big chocolate in America. Well, the big thing is when I got into chocolate, I didn't know any of these things. We used to source our cocoa from Peru, cacao, which. Ethical sourcing is not really an issue there, but the problem is majority of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa. And so as we got bigger, everyone's like, hey, you need to switch your supply chain to West Africa. I'm like, cool. And so then I started studying and reading up about it, and I noticed that 46% of labor in West Africa on cocoa farms, the child laboratory. And I was like, that's not. That can't be accurate. And then I started digging deeper and deeper, and I was like, holy shit. It's just almost half a labor is child labor. And so I started talking to all the big chocolate companies, or not all of them, but as many as I could get hold of.
-
Unknown A
And I was like, so what do you guys do about this whole child labor thing? They're constantly just telling me, like, it just is what it is. That's how chocolate always has been. I was like, whoa, you guys make like a billion dollars a year in profit? You don't. You don't see an issue with that being on the back of little kids? And they're like, no. And then I, you know, I. I had this crazy clip on kind of a documentary guy. I think you saw him, Jeff falls me around. Crazy clip where I'm meeting with like a big. I gotta be as big as possible. Cause they're gonna murder me. Like a big supplier. We'll just leave it big like that. And I asked them, I was like, so do you have any way I can pay extra to not use shot leave or anything like that or any options?
-
Unknown A
And they're just like, no. And I was. And my little documentary guys is, like, filming. And I'm in, like, this big boardroom, and I look at the camera. I'm like, holy shit. They just said that on camera. And. And so I did all this research, and it was just like, yeah. No. And especially in America, like, there. There's some European chocolate brands that, you know, try. But in America, like, really, no one really cared. I mean, there's plenty of options and plenty of time to fix it. Plenty of money to fix it. So that just kind of honestly pissed me off and like that. So then I just was like, how do we solve this? And so then it sent me down the rabbit hole. Everything points back to, like, you know, to the reason shots in America so cheap. Because there's no, you know, not the reason.
-
Unknown A
One of the reasons, they just pay the farmers. Like, farmers make less than a dollar a day. So, like, because of that, they're forced to use child labor because. And they literally just don't even have money to pay someone who's not a child. How many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa just on cocoa farms? You might have solved it now.
-
Unknown B
5,000?
-
Unknown A
No, it's 1.5 million.
-
Unknown B
You're joking.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, it's over a million. It's crazy. So what we need to do is we need to. In my head, get to a billion dollars a year in revenue as fast as possible while being ethically sourced and being profitable. A big part of it is we have to be profitable while doing it, because then I can point and go, look, we achieve scale ethically and we're making money. It's not that you can't do it. You just don't want to. And then, and maybe, maybe we'll give them the benefit of doubt. Maybe they just truly don't know how to do it at scale. And maybe you'll open their eyes and they'll be like, oh, I guess it is possible. And they'll start to change the ways. More than likely they won't. And I. But over time, I hope we can just shine a light on it using my platform and, you know, just show the model works.
-
Unknown A
And then, I don't know. Something I would love to do in the long run is like, you know how there's like the Fair Trade logo? Maybe I make my own version of it. I help other companies source their cacao ethically and, or something. And, you know, and I just educate people and like, if it doesn't have the symbol, it's probably using child labor and something. I. There's some way where I can play my cards. Over the next 10 years, we get over a million kids out of child labor on cocoa farms. And so I just got to connect the dots and figure out the correct way to do it.
-
Unknown B
This might sound like a real obvious question, but it won't be to everybody. Why don't you care so much?
-
Unknown A
Probably just like, I've been on these farms. I don't want to get rich on the back of little kids. I mean, it's kind of. I feel like it's kind of obvious. Maybe other people in chat, they don't care. But the first thing when I heard about, I was like, why? Why is this a thing?
-
Unknown B
It reminds me somewhat of, again, Elon Musk and what his mission was with Tesla. He kind of knew that if he was able to prove that you can have fast, nice electric cars, then the rest of the industry could give up their excuses that it's not possible.
-
Unknown A
Exactly.
-
Unknown B
What if someone comes along, though, and they say, okay, Jimmy, we'll give you 5 billion for feasible.
-
Unknown A
Hell no, I ain't selling that shit.
-
Unknown B
You're never selling it.
-
Unknown A
No, because the first thing they would do to up the margins is they just drop the ethical sourcing.
-
Unknown B
Have people come along and offered to buy your YouTube channel?
-
Unknown A
I mean, yeah, I've been offered a billion dollars here or crazy amounts of money there. But, I mean, it's. You know what's funny is Zuck got that famous billion dollar offer for Facebook and he said, what was it? He was like, why would I sell this social media platform? I would just take the money and start a new one. And I kind of like what I have, so why don't I just keep it? And every time I get. Which I haven't in a while, but, you know, back in the day, I used to, like, jokingly poke around just to see what people would offer me, and I would get those offers and I'd always just be like, yeah, I mean, I have to do the same thing I'm doing now, so I might as well just keep doing what I'm doing now. You know, the money won't really change anything.
-
Unknown B
Well done. And I don't think you've yet to get the credit you deserve for the lengths you've gone to with Feastables. But I think it's really important. I know you're not doing it for credit, or I know that you're doing it to get the message out there so that the industry changes. But I think, like, you with a platform that you have that's able to produce chocolate that is fucking delicious. They sent me a box of it about six months ago. And I thank so much.
-
Unknown A
I think I'm updating. Yeah, I mean, if you hand them to me, like, hand me a couple bars, there's a lot of stuff that the problem is, like, if you look at this and this, you know, from a distance, you can't tell really the difference between the flavors. Like, this is dark sea salt. This is just dark chocolate. So I'm about to update the wrapper, so we're gonna put like colored tips here so you can tell the flavors from far away. I think that's very important. Another thing too, that I. There's just a. You made a mistake. You put these in front of me. Now the other thing I want to. I want to. I've been experimenting and the newer renders are looking good. We're putting, like, right here. Every bite helps get kids out of childhood. Putting that on the front. And then I.
-
Unknown A
I'm, you know, we're messing around with different machinery. I feel like the images of the child on the front can be a little higher quality. The back is pretty ass. I want to, you know, put some more messaging on the back of it. There's a lot that needs to be like the white tips here. It just makes it so obvious from far away, what this flavor is, whereas all these blend in. And so, yeah, brutal. Got to fix it.
-
Unknown B
You talked about your friends calling you and asking you for business advice and you helping them drive their businesses up. But just watching you there pick apart your own business made me think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs that watch our show that early in their own businesses and many of them will be.
-
Unknown A
You'Re going to fail. You're going to fail a ton. I mean, when I first started chocolate, I mean it was, it was hilarious how bad I fucked up. Our original bars were like very thin. There's a reason why like chocolate bars have these like break points here where they like break easily. I didn't know that. And so mine was just one solid sheet of chocolate, but that's almost like a piece of glass. Whereas if you drop it, it just shatters into like a bunch of little pieces. And, and I also didn't know that there's a thing called a package. Engineer and Skitty, hand me a box of feasibles. My original chocolate box. When you pop these open and put it on a shelf, this, obviously the problem is fixed. But if, if this was sitting on a shelf when you grab this one, these would all slide forward and then they would fall out of the box and.
-
Unknown A
Or the box would fall off the shelf because of the weight, because there wasn't right balance at the bottom. And the lips here, this, this didn't used to be a thing. So these are open and they're just the bottom lip here. And so they would fall out like that. And then the bars, because we didn't have the natural breakpoints, would shatter like glass.
-
Unknown B
Who noticed that?
-
Unknown A
Oh, well, me. And the thing is I. This is a whole team of peacefuls. I would tell them like, there's too many broken bars. When I go to Walmart, I'm seeing too many that are broken. They told me like, ah, you're worrying about this too much. It's not that big an issue. It happens to everyone. And I got to the point where it was just fucking pissing me off because I hated like grabbing a bar off the ground or seeing on a shelf all these like shattered chocolate bars that I, I put like, I paid people to put GoPros in like a, like a bag of lace shifts pointed at because I couldn't get. I tried to get Walmart to even the security camera footage and they wouldn't. So I put hidden GoPros and bunch around Walmarts just to point it at the feastball bars just to see why are they fucking breaking so much.
-
Unknown A
There's so many shots of like, you know, like a mom grabbing a bar and then she'd be looking at it literally like this and you just see the box just go. And she could. And it just fall off the shelf and then they just put it up and you know, some of the bars would be broken and it just happened over and over and over again because we didn't engineer the boxes correctly. They didn't do anything wrong.
-
Unknown B
Do you know how atypical that is what you just said? That you put GoPros? Yeah.
-
Unknown A
People told me I was crazy the amount of people who tried 10 of those legal. I was like, I don't fucking care. I see no one in bars break here. And so I, that and you know, I did a bunch of just data and actually so there's a company called Acasa where you can pay people to go into Walmart. So then I, I started paying where every week I would send someone into every single Walmart in America to buy all the broken bars. Sticks up the boxes. It's pretty expensive I think. You know, it's like a hundred thousand dollars just to send someone into every single Walmart to clean them. $28 pop times 5,000 Walmart. And yeah, so I was sending people into Walmart to clean up the broken bars and then, but I was paying so much money, it was a hundred thousand dollars a week just to send people in.
-
Unknown A
And then I was buying all these broken bars because I just really didn't want people to go into Walmart. And to buy a broken diesel bar, like that is literally the worst, you know, consumer experience you can have. And yeah, and then I learned what a package engineer is. I was like holy shit, this is your full time job to make it where my boxes don't fucking fall over. Where have you been?
-
Unknown B
But on the point that I was saying your obsession with the detail of a product is completely atypical. If I was to compare this to a normal YouTuber and an e Commerce.
-
Unknown A
Brand, oh, they wouldn't give a fuck. Yeah, I probably spent thousands of hours obsessing over this product. I know it doesn't feel like it because it's just chocolate, but yeah, I mean it's a problem. From the ethical sourcing to every little thing about it. Like I don't, I don't do anything half ass.
-
Unknown B
And then you drive to a ton of Walmarts, don't you?
-
Unknown A
Oh, all the time. That's what I do every day. Oh fuck. We should Go to Walmart. We didn't even go, ah, you got plates. Gotta catch. Yeah, it's my favorite thing to do is like sometimes I'll spend a night in Walmart just scanning products and looking at the daily velocities and sales. It's, it's like I had a layover in dc, I live in North Carolina. Then I was like, wait a minute, I could just rent a car and hit like 30 Walmarts on the way home and just drive home. And so then I drove home from D.C. to North Carolina and visited every Walmart on the east coast in like the middle of America just to like go look at the chocolate aisle and see all the statistics and things like that.
-
Unknown B
I asked you earlier on, if you.
-
Unknown A
Struggle, I wish we could go visit a Walmart. You know how fun that would be? It's like, I would love to educate you on the chocolate aisle.
-
Unknown B
I want muscle open now. No, no. Okay, you can do another time.
-
Unknown A
Usually what I do is I just hang on the door and they let me in.
-
Unknown B
Of course, but what you just said there, I feel like I'm getting at something here because 99.9999% of entrepreneurs that I know that just have one thing to do just to run their business don't give that many fucks about the detail. And you have a gazillion things to do an Amazon show, which is like the highest future of whatever, of all time, whatever. And you have this massive channel, you have your philanthropy, you have all of.
-
Unknown A
This stuff going on followers on TikTok.
-
Unknown B
Hundred gazillion followers here. Gazillion followers. The numbers are just unfathomable. And you're still driving to 31 Walmarts to check if your chocolate is breaking.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, well, and I go in the back when I'm there, if it's on the shelf and I'll go scan it in and help the employees.
-
Unknown B
And is that the difference?
-
Unknown A
Well, you just gotta know everything going on. It's, I mean it's just first principles. Every if like I, I hate when someone in my business is like, tells me something that I don't agree with, but I'm too ignorant to be able to challenge them because then it's like, well, who am I to, you know, I guess I gotta take em on the word. But most people tend to pick the easiest route or conform to the status quo. And I wanna, if I wanna lead real innovation and like change the industry, then I gotta know every little facet of everything. And so I mean at the End of the day, you know, the shelf is where people buy it. So I gotta intricately know everything going on at the touch point of the consumer and you know, how it gets there, how it's being stored at the distribution centers and then the retailer and then on the shelf and what does it look like, what's the experience and everything.
-
Unknown A
Because all these little things add up.
-
Unknown B
Do you know, feel like you spend your whole life fighting people to raise their standards to your standards because you don't exist in the world of Mr. Beasts?
-
Unknown A
Well, that's the thing I used to think, which I've said a couple times, it was just content. I realized it's just everything I do. Like, I just want to be the best at it. And that's. It's weird, man, because you just look at the Shop of Art, you wouldn't. You'd be like, who the fuck cares? But that's the thing, that's what I've really enjoyed the last two years is I've gone as in depth on this as I have YouTube. And it's been every bit as fun. I mean, it's very, very fucking difficult and hard. Especially ethical sourcing. And like, I recently spent a week in West Africa and I went from the Bean all the way to the bar and like you worked on the farm and follow the entire QC supply chain and everything. It's not. It's like it's equally as hard as my YouTube channel, but it's also equally as fun.
-
Unknown A
And that was just. That was a big eye opener for me because I never thought I would enjoy something as much as my YouTube channel. And that's what I was saying earlier. I've come to realize I deeply enjoy building businesses and solving hard, complex problems, even though I know this is chocolate. But I get the complex thing from the ethical sourcing side just on a daily basis. Like, that's fun with Beast Games, with.
-
Unknown B
This, with all the other things going on your main channel, which is, I guess you probably still see your baby to some degree. It's still like the mothership, right? Because it's the source of.
-
Unknown A
It's what allows us to do everything. Like most people buying this aren't because of Beast Games.
-
Unknown B
Do you ever get paranoia when the views go down?
-
Unknown A
They haven't gone down yet. They've gone up every year for 14 years.
-
Unknown B
But you still get that. Do you still watch the video, go live and look at the back end?
-
Unknown A
No, I don't. No. I mean, because it's like we. I don't know, I Just uploaded a video and then the next day I look at the retention and the ctr and if we fucked up, I just, you know, what we do is we call them after action reports. I get all the smartest people in my company. Like, well, like we actually just did one. I wish I had it on me, but like, well, we. I paid this guy to just do a very in depth breakdown of like, here's the retention chart. Here's every time someone clicked away, here's where it was, the flat is. Here's where's the worst. You know, we'll take like. So if I upload videos 20 minutes, we'll take our last 10, 20 minute videos and we'll go, you know, the median retention on the last ten 20 minute videos was 10 minutes and 6 or 55 seconds is the median.
-
Unknown A
So if the retention on this new video is 11 minutes or above, we did a good job. If it's below that and we did below average and blah, blah, blah. And he just does like a giant, like, presentation. And so usually after two weeks, after we upload, we'll look at that with all my top people and then we'll just be like, what? We fuck up, what do we do? Well, cool. Move on.
-
Unknown B
And has there ever been a moment in recent times where you go, I think I need to spend more time on it again and get back in there and.
-
Unknown A
Because all the time, you know. But a lot of that stems from insecurity. I mean, because the thing is, of course we had a video recently. Every minute someone is eliminated. It didn't perform the best, you know, and they're like, our intro was a little repetitive. It was a little dark. We brought back like losers from Beast Games to compete in a main job. But the problem is some people thought it was Beast Games, like, oh, I've already seen this. There's just a lot of rookie mistakes there. And it's very easy for me to like, you know, get insecure and like, be like, fuck, this is why I need to be in leads. But the day, it's like, it's not like when I was calling all the shots, I was perfect either. So as long as it's like, as long as when people make mistakes, they learn from.
-
Unknown A
I have a saying like, that I tell people all the time, like, like whenever our new creatives fuck up, I'll look at Tyler. I'll go, Tyler's literally cost me tens of millions of dollars in bad decision. This isn't gonna be the first time you fuck us out of a Million dollars. As long as you learn from it, it's fine. And so as long as, like, that's where these after action reports are important. Because as long as we, when we mess up, we articulate why and it doesn't happen again, then it's just part of it. But yeah, I mean, if the same thing was happening over and over and over again, I'd be like, fuck, I need to get step in. But my guys are just good. Like, I don't make the same mistake twice.
-
Unknown B
Tell me about experimentation and testing, because people look to you as the real king of, like, testing and experimentation. How central is this to the success of everything that you do?
-
Unknown A
Very much. And that's the thing. Like that every minute video, like, it flopped, you know, and that was your. Your highest chance of flopping is when you do something new. Like really, really new. One of our bigger flops before that too is we did this video where it was like 10 minutes, this room will explode. We built this giant tower, had a guy start at the top. He had to make it. It was a real time shoot down, press a button. You know, it was just didn't perform that well. People didn't really like it. It was kind of complicated, blah, blah. And it's like, you have to be careful because, you know, I want. I want a culture where people feel comfortable experimenting and trying and feel fine failing. And so, you know, when that video failed or when, you know, every minute this, someone's eliminated, like, you know, I don't go and yell at people or call them idiots or anything like that.
-
Unknown A
I just am like, what did we do wrong? All right, here's all the facts. Just make sure it doesn't happen again. Not gonna be the first time you cost me a bunch of money. It's all good. You know, I see this as investing in you guys, and I'll just learn from it.
-
Unknown B
I was gonna say. Cause or else if. If there was a culture of that, then people would just make the same videos again. And a lot of YouTubers just turn out the same form.
-
Unknown A
I'm okay with my people failing. I'm okay with the video being 10 out of 10. Like, as long as we actually took an honest, good try at it, you know, and as long as we failed because we made the wrong shot call, not because we were lazy, not because we didn't put the effort in, et cetera. As long as it's just like we made an educated decision to test something or try something, and it just didn't work, I'm cool. With that, we can do that all day. And like, they know that. And I don't yell at people, you know, or get mad at them when they actually mess up like that.
-
Unknown B
I've invested more than a million pounds into this company, Perfect Ted, and they're also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using Matcha as my dominant energy source and that's where Perfect Ted comes in. They have the Matcha powders, they have the Matcha drinks, they have the pods, and all of this keeps me focused throughout a very, very long recording day, no matter what's going on. And their team is obsessed with quality, which is why they source their ceremonial grade Matcha from Japan. So when people say to me that they don't like the taste of Matcha, I'm guessing that they haven't tried Perfect Head. Unlike low quality Matcha that has a bitter, grassy taste, Perfect Head is smooth and naturally sweet. And without knowing it, you're probably a Perfect Head customer already if you're getting a match at places like Blank street or Joan the Juice.
-
Unknown B
But now you can make it yourself at home. So give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like Matcha. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give you 40% off our matcha if you try it today. Head to perfecthead.com and use code STEPHEN40. Or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland in Barra or the Netherlands at Albert Hein. And those of you in the us you can get it on Amazon. As you guys know, Whoop is one of my show sponsors. It's also a company that I have invested in and it's one that you guys ask me about a lot. The biggest question I get asked is why I use WHOOP over other wearable technology options. And there is a bunch of reasons, but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial feature.
-
Unknown B
Its non invasive nature. When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to WHOOP because it doesn't have a screen. And Will Ahmed, the CEO who came on this podcast, told me the reason that there's no screen, because screens equal distraction. So when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym, my Whoop doesn't demand my attention. It's there in the background, constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them. If you've been thinking about joining Whoop, you can head to join.whoop.com CEO and try Whoop for 30 days, risk free and zero commitment. That's join.whoop.com CEO. Let me know how you get on. You've just concluded today the biggest competition show, I think, of all time. Well, it is of all time. I think you've got 50 gigs, largest.
-
Unknown A
Sets in history, most world records in history, largest cash prize in history, most winners in history, most contestants in history, most cameras. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
And what, 50 Guinness World Records.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. That we know of. There's probably way more. But yeah.
-
Unknown B
You said something on stage which I found quite interesting. You said, I kind of feel a bit sad.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I know. Because every Thursday I gotta look forward to like seeing the Internet's reaction to these games. And now I'm gonna wake up next Thursday and I don't get to see what people think. It's over.
-
Unknown B
They describe them this in the Olympics as cold mental depression.
-
Unknown A
Really? Yeah.
-
Unknown B
They say, I think I might butcher these numbers. But 70% of people after the Olympics, even if they won a gold medal, experience depression afterwards because they've lost their North Star. That was given a meaning.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm not. I mean, I guess I'm playfully sad, but it's fine. I have so much shit going on, even really good to think about that kind of stuff.
-
Unknown B
And you're on to the next one.
-
Unknown A
Uh, yeah. So we'll Amazon. Let's get season two of the books already. Come on. Let's sign a contract. I can't really talk about it.
-
Unknown B
It is the most me and Jack were talking about earlier on. It is the most incredible thing that I think I've seen on tv. And I just think, I just. I think that's a joint of the day. I watch it knowing that unless you do another one, I will never see something on this magnitude.
-
Unknown A
No one wants to do something like that because it's fucking hard, man. Those sets. And the, the thing is the reason why a lot of reality TV doesn't feel that way. And we could have obviously done much better storytelling. We will when we do future iterations. But the, the at its crux, like what people don't see is like to have a thousand cameras recording the amount of infrastructure, like we broke a world record for most camera cables ran like, like the most miles of camera cables. And like, and the millions of dollars we had to spend on storage and millions of dollars in the control room and the millions upon millions of dollars of hardware to edit it and like having to bring in Adobe to custom change the Adobe Software where you could actually have that many multicans. It's like it is the. The actual infrastructure to actually be able to do that is incredibly, incredibly difficult.
-
Unknown A
And that's why usually what they'll do is they'll be like, all right, here's a one hour. Like if you're filming reality show, here's a one hour window. You know, they'll send out story producers, they'll put a camera on you. They'll be like, yo, can you say this line? You're kind of our villain. This is what we're looking for. They'll kind of tell you what to say and then they'll write the notes down and they'll catalog it for the editors. Whereas we're just like, fuck it. We're gonna be filming, you know, 24 7, all these cameras. You guys be yourselves. We'll just capture it. Because you don't know when someone's gonna do something weird. You don't know when someone's gonna whisper to someone in a form of an alliance. You don't know. So you literally have to just be rolling. And you need these be acceptable angles.
-
Unknown A
You need mult and a pcm, all this coverage which creates a monumental fuckload of footage. But that's what allowed us. That was. I mean, amongst many things, that's one of the biggest competitive advantages we have when filming these games is we put in the effort to set up all this infrastructure. We could actually capture it and just tell the story how it is instead of having to use story producers to put words in people's mouths. But it's a fucking nightmare, man. Like, I had over 150 people editing that. I mean, we were combing through unfathomable amounts of footage and everything and even things from like the computer network and our local it constantly crashing because there's just so much footage there. And like, if I were to send all the Beast games footage to just one editor, it would probably be like $300,000 of hard drives.
-
Unknown A
You know, if you have 150 editors, it's just impossible. So you spend millions dollars, you build a central server room and we have our own server racks and everything. And you have them remote in there. But even then, just due to the sheer volume of Adobe and everything was constantly crashing. And it's like it was a nightmare on the back end. But it's great because that's why we were able to tell what actually happened, why it feels different because we were recording non stop 24 7.
-
Unknown B
I was wondering as I was watching it if Amazon are aware of the fact that you're just going to give away some money like this, like when you flip the queen and it adds another 5 million.
-
Unknown A
That didn't affect them. I lost a ton of money filling the shell, so that came out of my pocket.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Yeah. We spent way too much money on it. I lost tens of millions of dollars on that shell. Really? Yeah.
-
Unknown B
I'm an idiot because the headlines came out, it was like, Amazon give MrBeast 100 million to do show. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm doing math and thinking in case he spent 20 odd million on the prizes.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, we give away. I mean, so episode one, we spent over $15 million on this towers building wall. Like, that was the most towers ever built, most hydraulic press or whatever use. I mean, that set was fucking crazy, man. We had to build a thousand towers that were 10ft tall, safety test them all, put like, get where they actually were. We had to literally hardwire them all and build like our own software where we could drop people and put up all the screens. I mean, that was. That. That was. That's like arguably one of the largest sets ever built in history. That was just episode one. And that's just like the construction of the set. That's not including. Like you said, we have way over $20 million. I think over 2 million was in episode one. And then episode two, we have the city, which that was a $14 million set build.
-
Unknown A
And that was huge because that's a real city that they were living in, you know, and then I, yeah, go. But just between the 20, whatever 2 million we gave away, plus those two sets, I mean, already, right there, you're probably right. Over $50 million.
-
Unknown B
How much did the whole thing cost?
-
Unknown A
That I have been advised not to say, because people look your big number and be like, oh, I could have made a good show if I had that kind of money. But the thing is, they couldn't because money isn't everything. Like building and managing it is, you know, infinitely harder.
-
Unknown B
But is it more than 100 million?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, well, I just told you how we spent 50 million and we're only two episodes in.
-
Unknown B
How out of pocket are you?
-
Unknown A
Tens of millions. Yeah. It was not a good financial decision to make these games. I lost money. I would have more money if I didn't fill it.
-
Unknown B
Any regrets?
-
Unknown A
No, no, it's great. I mean, for me, I was about making season one as good as possible. You know, I can't let the YouTube community down because you Know, creators don't have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms. And, you know, I'm getting 200 million views a video on average over the course of the first year. And I'm going to talk to streaming platforms and they're like, we've been burned by creators before. I'm like, bro, I'm not a tiktoker that dances. I have a production company and I routinely make spectacles. And even me, these streaming platforms, they weren't taking serious. I was like, fuck. Like, if I fail, it's over. Like, no one's ever, no stream flowers ever going to touch YouTube ever again. So my big thing was just making sure this is crushed. And, you know, now the doors are opening up.
-
Unknown A
I mean, I'm getting calls from creators left and right and they're like, oh yeah, streaming platforms. They wouldn't talk to me before. Now they're coming. Like, I would try to get a meeting with them and they're like, no. Now they're like begging to like, have meetings with them. And I already know of two creators that have signed deals just on the back end successive Beast Games. And probably, I mean, hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars is going to flow into creators pockets just because of Beast Games in the next year.
-
Unknown B
Well, the Unrotten Tomatoes, which is not an easy crypto games. No, it was like 90% approval from fans, which is pretty unheard of on Rotten Tomatoes. I know, but also I hear through the grapevine that it is on track to become one of Amazon's biggest shows of all time.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, see, the problem is I have to wait for them to do a press release, so.
-
Unknown B
Okay, yeah, well, I'm just a problem.
-
Unknown A
I got you. I told him I'd be a good boy and not leak things, so.
-
Unknown B
But for a YouTuber, quote unquote. YouTuber.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Well, they did release it as their number one unscripted show of all time. And then, yeah, I mean, it's. I don't think they mind me saying it's very. The show's very evergreen. Like, usually these shows get a lot of attention and kind of like teeter off, but ours is like, like over 700,000 new, unique viewers are watching it every single day. Like, which is pretty crazy because we maintain that, like, yeah, it's going to shatter some pretty crazy records.
-
Unknown B
And what's the upside for you to continue promoting it now that it's done?
-
Unknown A
Because I put all this effort in. I want to list it. Yeah, I don't get paid to, like, all the promotion I'm doing now, I'm not getting paid for really. But I mean. But I guess the upside would be the better season one does, you know, the more money I get for season 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
-
Unknown B
If I sit here with you in 10 years time, Jimmy.
-
Unknown A
Yep.
-
Unknown B
And everything went to plan. You're 36.
-
Unknown A
I already know what you're ask. Yeah, I hate that kind of stuff because if you ask me, the problem is if you asked me this like five years ago, I never would have said anything about Feastables or a lot of the stuff I'm doing now. And so the honest answer is, I don't know. I mean, I think in what I'm doing, you know, hopefully by then I have 2 billion subscribers on YouTube. You know, these games is bigger than we ever imagined.
-
Unknown B
Hopefully.
-
Unknown A
Feastables has got over a million kids out of child labor by then. And you know, I probably have two or three other businesses that I'm very passionate about that are hopefully crushing. And. Yeah, I just. I don't know, maybe I'll have a kid by then. I don't know. I mean, only time will tell. It's. It won't be until I feel like I could actually have enough time to be a good dad. But I don't even know, man. I don't think about my personal life. I just think about winning and gotta.
-
Unknown B
Build some photos I found I loved.
-
Unknown A
Oh, okay. Holy shit. Is this me or my brother?
-
Unknown B
This one as well.
-
Unknown A
Where'd you get these?
-
Unknown B
Internet.
-
Unknown A
These are on the Internet.
-
Unknown B
These are like the really iconic photos that I from some really interesting.
-
Unknown A
I don't think I've ever seen this one.
-
Unknown B
Really?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I don't.
-
Unknown B
Do you recognize anything in that photo?
-
Unknown A
No, I don't. I was just thinking like, what house am I even in? I might be at a military base potentially, because when we were younger, both my parents were in the military, so they were traveling a lot. So this might just be like some random house. Interesting. I do recognize this. This photo in the background. I'll show you photo up on screen. I think that that, that was. Yeah, that's on the hallway beside her bathroom. I haven't been to my mom's house in so long. Interesting.
-
Unknown B
You do so much for children. But if you could whisper in that child here, something about buy Bitcoin.
-
Unknown A
What was it, like two pennies back then? No, I know, because I wouldn't want. I wouldn't say anything if you gave me a microphone to talk to him because the problem is I'd be. I'd be worried that it would change, you know, the outcome of how I became. And, like, I'm very. Even though I know earlier on I probably sounded a little depressed because shit's hard, but, you know, I'm. I'm happy with the position I am in, and I would be worried that, you know, like, this is definitely a very confused child that's not fitting in, that feels like a fucking freak. Not this young one. I don't know what the fuck he's thinking. But this one right here probably is around the age where I was like, fuck, I'm just a fucking weirdo. I don't fit in with anyone. Why does no one want to build businesses and succeed?
-
Unknown A
But I think going through that journey was. Was important, and it's. Yeah, just give me a lot of conviction with things. So I probably. If I wasn't allowed to say by Bitcoin, I just wouldn't say anything.
-
Unknown B
What up to her?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, to my mom, I would. I mean, this was. What's funny is these are. These are two different photos of my mom. You have, like, this version of my mom. I don't think there's anything I could say that would. I mean, because she's. She's in the military, and they just beat, like, systems and order into your head. And she. This is probably right around the time where we lost everything and sort of this, you know, and she's at a very low point in her life. And so I think there's anything I could say that ever would have, like, convinced her that her lunatic son is heading down the right path. And, you know. But, you know, you can see the difference here where it's almost indicative where she's smiling in this photo. This is when I gave her a hundred grand. This after we made it.
-
Unknown A
This is after we had the whole conversation where she finally was like, okay, I'll trust you. You know, there's a. Whatever 12, 13 years between these two photos is a very hard journey, especially when I stopped going to college and I got straight zeros. And, I mean, she thought, his life's fucking over. I just wasted 18 years of my life, you know, so. Same thing. I don't. I don't think there's anything I could say that would have changed anything, if anything would have a heart attack.
-
Unknown B
Did she. Do you tell her now what she means to.
-
Unknown A
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah.
-
Unknown B
You get a break.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, she's. She's very happy and like, yeah, we're in a really good spot now. I love My mom. I mean, because obviously I wouldn't be here without her, you know, I mean, if she didn't work multiple jobs and do all the things she did to put me where I am. I mean, even little things, like, you know, she would give me like some months, like, you know, 20, 30. And then I would take that money and use that to, like, buy stuff to, like, help make videos or whatever. And. Yeah, even just the fact that we had Internet, you know, I mean, and things like that, which, you know, I mean, pretty basic. I wasn't as common back then. You used to get a phone call and you're like, house Internet. I don't know if you would go out. Yeah. And so, like, you know, it wasn't the best position, but she gave me all the tools I needed to succeed.
-
Unknown A
Not, you know, on purpose, but she'd.
-
Unknown B
Not be so shocked.
-
Unknown A
Well, she's used to it now, but yeah, I mean, when they come up, I mean, it was.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
I mean, imagine being her. You know, she used to. When I turned 16, like, she couldn't afford to buy me a car. She couldn't. She couldn't afford, like, the minivan we had, like, it was piece of, like, needed a repair. She couldn't afford it. Like, smoke was coming out the front of it, but she was an absolute mess. And then she comes home, and I'm just like, I'm making YouTube videos, math homework, mom. And, you know, and she's just like, she. I think she was making $40,000 a year because I. We didn't talk about finance much when we were younger, but I remember I got a $40,000 brand deal. And then she told me that's how much I'm making a year. And I was like, holy. I didn't. At the time. I was like, I thought you made way more than 40 grand a year.
-
Unknown A
And then I was like, why the fuck are you working? Like, I'm getting paid this per video now on brand deals. And so, yeah, what an incredible woman. I know from everything she went through to know she just needs to be happy. I try not to stress her out. She's been through enough stress. Like, her. Her job is. I've been making her not make. She wants to do it, but, like, exercise routinely, do all the, like system like body health scans and, you know, get on the vitamin grind and everything, because, like, I'm not having kids anytime soon. But obviously, when I do have kids, I really want her to be involved and she needs to be able play with them and things like that. So I'm like, you know, stress is going to kill you. You're not allowed to be stressed. You need to do all these health protocols.
-
Unknown A
You need to be like. Because, you know, you might be in your 70s when I have kids. Like, you need to be able to move around, which means you might potentially be 80 when they're like 14 or 15. Like, come on. Like, what you do now is indicative. Will represent how active you'll be able to be in my kids lives. So like, and we do have these conversations that are playful. So she's taking her health very serious for the future.
-
Unknown B
You're not man. That seems to have many fears, but that appears to be one of them. A fear that we both share.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, exactly. I mean, she'll just never die. My mom's gonna live forever. It'll be fine. Brian Johnson.
-
Unknown B
We have a choice institution on this podcast, but I'll ask guest users for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
-
Unknown A
Okay, do I get hit with the question first or.
-
Unknown B
You get hit with the question first.
-
Unknown A
Okay.
-
Unknown B
Would you rather die with a sound body or a sound mind?
-
Unknown A
Sound body or sound mind? Ooh. I assume if I chose body then like, that would be like dementia or something on the mind. That's hard. Sound body or sound mind? I mean, what are you if you don't have your mind? I would say mind, to be honest.
-
Unknown B
Amen.
-
Unknown A
Yeah.
-
Unknown B
Jimmy, thank you.
-
Unknown A
I doubt you write my question now.
-
Unknown B
You do. I want to say something to you, though. I have to give you a lot of credit because so many people like us, like our teams, we have stolen so much from you. We've stolen your principles, your mentality, and it's made us be better creators, which has allowed us to live the lives that we get to live and do these things that we love the most. And there's always a cost, I think, to being different and to being weird. There's an upside, but there's also a really, really, really big cost. You pay that cost most when you're younger and you have to fit into the system and you don't get to choose who you hang around with and stuff. But then as an adult, as you said, we all then clap for the unique ones, the weird ones, and we steal from them and we aspire to be them and we learn from them.
-
Unknown B
And you have in a very short amount of time that I've been speaking to you for like a week or something, have blown my mind open. I got to see the behind the scenes of these games and my entire mind as I sat on sofa. I remember where I was sat when I saw the behind the scenes just exploded. And you made me in that moment, realize how much I'd limited myself as someone that considers themselves to be really ambitious. I'd limited myself. And so I wanted to say thank you because you're not just doing that for me, you're doing that for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, all at the same time. And you're giving them the roadmap, but also a blueprint and a mentality and a belief that they too don't have to live the life that school or the system has told them to.
-
Unknown B
Exactly. Thank you so much, honestly, because we need more people like you and I'm your biggest fan.
-
Unknown A
Thank you.
-
Unknown B
I really appreciate you. Thank you.
-
Unknown A
All right, let's see if we can break into one more.
-
Unknown B
You're so funny. Some of the most successful, fascinating and insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table. And at the end of every conversation, I ask them to leave a question behind in the famous diary of a CEO. And it's a question designed to spark the kind of conversations that matter most, the kind of conversations that can change your life. We then take those questions and we put them on these cards. On every single card, you can see the person who left the question, the question they asked. And on the other side, if you scan that barcode, you can see who answered it next. Something I know a lot of you wanted to know. And the only way to find out is by getting yourself some conversation cards, which you can play at home, with friends and family, at work, with colleagues, and also with total strangers on holiday.
-
Unknown B
I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below. You can get yours@thediary.com.