AI transcript
– Let’s go.
– So here we go.
I have it here.
This is the Mr. B’s secret.
– I don’t know if I should be concerned.
– And I guess you faked going to college?
– Oh, that’s a juicy one.
– On your hundredth video, you wrote your stats.
– I didn’t do that, I remember that.
– It’s not like at a hundred you were rich and famous.
– People say it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
And I’m like, that’s when you start.
– But you know like nobody does this, right?
– I don’t understand why.
– So we want to do an exercise.
– To see.
– If I can come up with a viral idea.
– But with a budget of $1,000.
– Yeah, exactly.
– So we’re going to do a random word generator.
– They’re going to think this is rigged.
– All right, so they gave us the word grandmother.
So what’s a viral idea with a grandmother?
I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega-manger.
♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
♪ On a road less traveled never looked back ♪
– What’s up?
– How’s it going boys?
– Hey, how you doing?
– Let’s go.
So it’s been two years.
Lots to update people on then.
I think your business has grown like 10X since then.
– Probably something like that, yeah.
– Yeah, it’s wild to see.
In fact, actually, this is kind of where I want to start
because you walk in, we’re in your office.
This is like Jimmy’s actual office
and it’s easy to see the size and scale.
And now it looks like, of course, you know, like,
this is all, yeah, this is all happening.
But I like to see that journey.
And I actually want to play a clip for you.
– So we’re starting off with the origin story
that sounds like.
– You’re going to hate this.
– This letter room.
– You’re going to hate this.
– Let’s, this is from a video on your YouTube channel
called Quitting.
– Oh God.
– I don’t know if you remember this.
– Oh God.
– Do you know what you’re about to hear?
– I remember uploading this video.
I cannot, I do not remember a single thing
I said in this video.
– You guys make it really hard to quit.
It’s been a month since I uploaded to YouTube.
And to be honest, I was pretty sure I was done with YouTube.
I kind of want to start uploading.
Like I feel like my YouTube channel has so much potential.
I made over half a thousand dollars in money
off of this channel.
I feel like this channel could grow like money aside,
just I could become famous,
which would be awesome in and of itself.
So I don’t know.
I might start uploading it.
– Is this AI?
– This is you dude.
– I don’t remember saying any of that.
Whoa.
– How loud is that dude?
– Oh my gosh.
I was making $500 a month.
Why would I quit?
– And in the thing you’re talking about,
you’re like, you know, I’ve been busy with sports
and I just haven’t been as consistent.
And then what you said was you were like,
the comments have kept me going.
– Yeah.
– You’re like, I logged in today.
I wasn’t planning to upload, but I saw 20 comments.
And you know what?
I think I might keep uploading.
(laughing)
– Man, that’s crazy. – What a fork in the right.
– Yeah.
That was also around the time I got Crohn’s disease
’cause I was really into baseball
and I wanted to play baseball in college.
And so I was all in on baseball
and there was constant tug and pool
where like one day I’d wake up and I’d be like,
I want to be trying to play in the MLD,
which I had zero shot of, I never would have.
But you know, you’re delusional when you’re a little kid.
And then the next day I’d be like,
you know, I want to be a YouTuber
and this is more realistic and I can make money.
And then I got Crohn’s and I went from 200 pounds
and I was weightlifting every day down to 139
on the verge of dying and I lost every ounce of muscle I had.
I was like, well, I just made this easier.
You too.
I was probably like 14, 15 at the time.
And then yeah, that’s so–
– Sometimes life is working for you.
– Yeah, that was probably around that time there too.
So I was probably going through Crohn’s during that
and trying to figure out like, am I doing YouTube?
Am I doing baseball?
‘Cause I’m a very all in kind of guy.
Wow.
And so, I mean, just to hear you be like–
– $500 a month, that’s crazy.
– No, no, no, no.
Half a thousand.
– Half a thousand.
(laughing)
I don’t even heard that, that’s amazing.
– I was richer than I thought back then.
So I mean, no, I was definitely capped in.
I was not making $500 a month.
Or maybe I had one month I made $500 and I was like,
okay, maybe someone from school might see this
and I want to flex.
As I was like, when I graduated from high school,
I was making nothing.
I was not making $6,000 a year back then.
– Dude, you had this great quote.
You go, I started making videos when I was 11.
No one watched when I was 11.
No one watched when I was 12.
No one watched when I was 13.
14, is anyone ever gonna watch these things?
16, nobody’s watching.
17, oh, I’m about to graduate high school.
Still, no one is watching my videos.
– Yep, and 18, no one watched though.
I think it was around 19
where I started to really figure it out.
– And I think, so why are we doing this episode, right?
Our audience is not trying to be YouTubers.
It’s mostly business, founders, investors.
– It works for you.
– Yeah, yeah, I’m kind of a YouTuber now.
You got me.
What I like about you is that your approach
to whether it’s YouTube, selling chocolate,
losing weight, whatever it is,
you have a certain mentality.
I think you were wired differently.
I think in 20 years, I’m gonna be able to look,
I’m gonna show my kids and be like, yeah,
before Jimmy was president, you came on my podcast.
We sat at this little table.
So I honestly think you’re wired differently
and I wanna share those with audience
that anybody can use, whether you wanna be a swimmer,
you wanna be a YouTuber,
you wanna be a business person, whatever.
I also called your assistant.
– Called your thumbnail guy.
– Are they didn’t even tell me that?
What?
– And so here we go.
I have it here.
This is the Mr. Beast secrets.
And so.
– I don’t know if I should be concerned.
– We’re gonna go through these.
These are nine of what I consider to be your rules.
Now you could tell me if these are both.
– Are you making this a game?
He’s laying in front of me.
– Here you go.
So we’re gonna play this game.
And each one of these is to me a rule of Mr. Beast.
It’s something we’ve seen about the way you operate.
And I want you to kind of talk about these.
So this is number one.
– Okay.
Burn the boats.
Burn the boats.
So burn the boats.
Your mom wanted you to go to college.
And I guess you faked going to college.
You pretended to go.
What is the story?
– Oh, that’s a juicy one.
So well, first off,
we didn’t have the kind of money to go to a real college.
So it was just like a free community college.
But yeah, my mom, because she grew up pretty traditionally,
the military worked her whole life.
But then in 2008, she lost everything
when the real estate collapsed.
And so lost all her savings and stuff.
Like we went bankrupt and had to file for bankruptcy.
Like, so she’s like very paranoid.
She just wants her kid to like go get a job
and like not fuck up and not do any,
if she’s very risk adverse.
And so that was a constant tug and pull
’cause I’m like, I’m gonna be a YouTuber or homeless.
And she’d be like, maybe you could be homeless.
And I’m like, okay, I mean, it is what it is.
I don’t care.
I’m gonna be a YouTuber.
And she just never clicked in her head to her.
It’s like, if he doesn’t get a college degree,
he’s like, my son’s a failure.
I just wasted 18 years.
Like he’s, he’s not gonna be able to provide.
So for her, it was like either college or my life’s ruined.
Cause that’s just how her brain’s wired.
And because she went through so much.
And so when I was like, I don’t want to go.
She was just like, then leave, get out of the house.
Like I can’t, I just can’t bear the sight of my son
just sitting around and in, you know,
just throwing his life away.
And I didn’t have enough money to move out.
So I was like, frick.
And luckily the community college is so cheap.
It’s not like she was wasting money on it.
So I was like, okay, I’ll go to college.
And then I mean, I just flat out lied to her.
Like I was like, I’ll do it.
But you know, I had no intention of actually doing it.
And so I went just to see what it was like.
And I was like, well, maybe I’m like being a little dramatic.
And I went to class for like a week.
Horrible. It was so boring.
I mean, I swear like the teacher was just reading out of the book.
And I was like, why, why do I have to,
I could just read the book.
Like what are we doing?
You know, and I said that to some of the people around me.
And they’re like, yeah, that’s what education is.
Stop complaining.
And I’m like, I just was my head hurt.
And so then I was like, it is what it is.
Like I have like a six month time clock
where I have to make enough money where I can move out
because once my mom knows,
I’m screwed.
She’s going to kick me out of the house.
Honestly, I would want to leave the house
because I know it’s going to make her depressed and very sad.
So you just didn’t go after that?
Yeah. So I would go every day, go.
And then I would just sit in like this,
like I had a really old, like Dodge Durango
that was super used a lot of miles.
And I would just sit in the Dodge Durango and like edit videos.
And I film at night and I’d come home.
And would you come back and be like, school was great now?
Yeah. I was just like, yeah, you know,
she’d make house college.
And I was like, you know, and then we went on.
And I just wouldn’t tell her that I’d stop going.
But you burned the boats. You’re like, all right,
I got six months. Exactly.
I got to either make it or she gets through.
And somehow I figured it out.
I don’t even remember, but we,
I had a month where I made 20 grand right before it was time,
like the window was almost up.
And then I just told my mom, I was like,
I haven’t been going, I’m failing.
I found a place down the road, it’s 700 bucks a month.
Sorry. She’s like, all right.
Hey, real quick, I’m trying something special
for this episode. Let me know if you like it.
We were talking to Jimmy and before these episodes,
I do 30, 40 hours of research and prep.
And I make detailed notes that for me,
make it super easy to remember all the key takeaways.
But for the first time,
I’m actually going to give those notes to you
so you can get them for free in the description below.
It’s my notes, the key takeaways from this episode.
Go ahead and grab it.
It’s down in the description below.
Is this kind of a strategy for you where you’re like,
I don’t think it’s a strategy to support my personality.
I’m a very obsessive person.
Like if you told me to like do a hundred things,
I would struggle at it.
But if you told me to think on this one thing
every second of the day for the next 10 years,
like I can do that pretty easily.
So I like to just obsess over something.
I like to dream about it, wake up, think about it,
think about it, think about it, think about it,
think about it, more work on it, work on it,
work on it, think about it, think about it,
dream about it and just do that every single day.
Like that, to me, it comes very naturally.
What was your observation?
We just went to Walmart with Jimmy.
You did.
Jimmy, we haven’t talked about this.
Most of your items probably doesn’t even know.
I sell chocolate.
We have a feastable since the childhood company
and I’m sure we’ll go into that at some point.
Yeah.
So this episode has brought you by feastables.
So I took him to a Walmart
just because it’s my favorite thing to do.
At my free time, I go walk up and down chocolate aisles
in different retailers and so I brought him along.
He was telling us everything about merchandising,
everything, not just about feastables
but about competitive chocolate companies.
He was showing us like talking numbers of sales.
Dude, I thought like influencers,
it’s just like you give them a product.
They’re like, oh, this, okay guys, hey, buy this.
You know the chocolate game inside and out.
He was in the aisles, like reconfiguring the SKUs,
making everything straight.
I like landed in DC for a layover
to then fly to North Carolina.
And then I got off the plane to go to my connective flight
and I was like, wait a minute.
And then I just opened up like Google Maps
and I searched Walmart and I was like,
I can just drive there and hit 25 Walmarts on the way home.
And so then it was like 10 a.m.
And then I just skipped my connective flight,
just rented a car and I drove from DC,
visited every Walmart on the way to North Carolina.
I didn’t get home till like 9 p.m.
And I just like, it was like–
– I wonder if the CEO Hershey’s has done that.
– Probably not.
– I wonder if he’s doing it.
And then the guy–
– It’s a problem.
– Your friend who was like,
have you gone to Walmart with him?
They’re like, yeah, I don’t know.
Jimmy has like a badge.
Like if something’s out of stock,
he just goes in the back and restocks it himself.
Do they give you like, do you have some way of like–
– Well, it’s a vendor’s license.
So a lot of people have vendor’s license like beverage,
like Coca-Cola, so they have a direct sales network word.
You can fit like theoretically 10,000 chocolate bars
in a palette.
You can only fit 500 Coke cans.
So it’s like a lot harder to store 10,000 cans of Coke
than it’s 10,000 chocolate bars.
So for that, they have Coke charts that some Walmart’s,
they go to every single day
and they’ll just take the product
and go put it in the back for the Walmart employees
and then they’ll go stock the shelves and everything.
So Walmart’s pretty transparent about that,
which I was, when I first got into the CPG game,
I was like, no shot.
Like they’re just gonna let us do it.
But yeah, if your product’s out of stock on the shelf
and you have a vendor’s license,
you can go in the back, scan it in and put it on the shelf.
– Smart.
– Yeah, I mean, you could argue it’s not a good use
for your time and I don’t know why I do it.
It’s kind of therapeutic.
I just love going to Walmart to fix the product
and I like just observing it,
like what it looks like on the shelf,
seeing what the competition’s doing,
just seeing who’s grabbing it and buying it.
– It’s like those memes, like men won’t go to therapy,
but they’ll do this.
(laughing)
This is your thing, right?
– Organize a chocolate aisle in Target or Walmart.
– So let’s do rule number two.
This one, go ahead, we can reveal this.
I think you know what this one is.
– Rule of 100.
I know.
– I gave it a name.
So this is, I’m gonna quote you on this.
So this was somebody, you know,
I’m sure you could ask this a million times.
– Okay.
– What advice do you have for me as a YouTuber?
How do I be successful on YouTube?
And you said this thing that to me was like,
every creator should print this and put it on their wall.
– Oh God, what did I say?
– This applies to everything.
You go, look, your first videos,
not gonna get views, period.
– Make 100 videos, improve something every time
on the 100th one, then ask questions.
– To me, that’s the rule of 100.
Is before you come ask for advice,
it’s like have you made 100 videos
and every time try to make one thing better.
And that’s like also very achievable too.
It’s not like some insurmountable thing to do.
It’s like, all right, I’m gonna make my intro better.
I’m gonna make my editing better or whatever it is.
And the beauty of what you said was,
I think the way you said it, you were like,
if you do that a hundred times,
and I say, come talk to me after you’ve done the hundred,
people, 900% of people just don’t do it.
And then the 1% of people who do,
they don’t need me after that.
Like you figure it out, which is-
– And it’s more of a metaphorical mindset
because that’s the thing.
It’s most people who like need advice
is just go do it and learn to failure.
I’m a big fan of just trial by fire,
go do it, fuck up a bunch of times
and like get 0.1% better
and then do that for a couple of years.
– I have a couple other pictures to show you.
So this is one, this is one of your thumbnails.
– Oh God.
– During your ride-
– That’s still on my channel.
– So I went and I looked at your first hundred.
I was like, all right, he said the rule of a hundred,
let me go look at his first hundred.
And I saw this and like today you’re probably known
as like one of the best, smartest thumbnail people
in the world, right?
– Black Ops do shotgun gameplay
with commentary PS4 or Xbox.
– I suck at making thumbnails,
which is honestly dope because most people,
if they feel like they’re bad at something,
they just don’t do it.
– Yeah.
– They shy away.
– Yeah.
– And then you have this other one,
which is like your hundredth video.
On your hundredth video, you wrote your stats.
You go, subscribers.
– I did do that.
I remember that.
– 730 subscribers.
So on your rule of a hundred,
it’s not like at a hundred you were rich and famous.
– Yeah.
– Right.
– And honestly, yeah, probably 150 of them
are me asking people on Xbox Live to subscribe.
Like when I be playing Call of Duty and like a game chat,
I’d be like, “Yo, subscribe to my channel.”
So.
– What do you see people get wrong
about the rule of a hundred?
– Most people just aren’t as obsessed
with improving things.
They get like pigeonholed in the box
and they’re like, “Oh, I just need to improve.”
I mean, this applies to everything,
but I guess specifically content.
They’ll be like, “Oh, I just need to write better jokes
or I need to have better camera or this.”
And then it’s just a mindset.
Like every single thing can be improved.
There’s no such thing as a perfect video.
You know, from, I mean, you can go as low as you want
to like the coloring, to what you’re wearing,
to how you speak, to how long the video is.
I mean, there’s nothing that you can’t improve.
And so like just having that mindset
where you’re always trying to get better
and like applying that to everything across the board,
not just narrowing in on this one little thing.
But also with this, honestly,
a lot of people are mentors, they just don’t listen.
So they’ll ask me for advice
and like the ones who will listen,
they’ll take their revenue from like 30K to 400K a month
or their goal subs or whatever it is.
I can show them how to hit it.
But a lot of times just people ask for advice.
I’ll say it’ll be like in one ear and out the other.
And like, so those are the worst.
– I use this because I was studying Seinfeld recently.
And I don’t know if you know,
Seinfeld has this daily thing.
Seinfeld is now like 70 years old.
He’s still like in the stand-up comedy game.
He’s the only stand-up billionaire like ever.
So he’s the only comedian who’s a billionaire.
It’s pretty crazy.
And so I was like, all right,
what can I learn from Seinfeld?
And one of the things he did was he was like,
every day for like the last 45 years,
I wake up and my first two hours of the day, I write.
He’s like, I write jokes.
He’s like, guess what, if you want to get good at jokes,
you write jokes every day.
And he’s like, every day
I just try to make it one better than the other.
They talk about writer’s block.
He’s like, that’s nonsense.
He goes, my rule is I sit down, I don’t have to write.
I just can’t do anything else.
And he’s like, and then that makes me write.
And I’ve been doing that.
And he has this yellow legal pad
of all the pages he ever did.
And he literally laid them out on a road.
And he like paved the whole road.
It became like a yellow brick road basically.
It’s incredible.
– Do you know how many hours that is?
Two hours a day for 45 years?
30,000 hours, right?
– Yeah.
– That’s the thing.
People say it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
And I’m like, 10,000 hours, that’s when you start.
That’s the mindset you need with like the rule of 100.
It’s not, because 10,000 hours, what is that?
It’s only like eight hours a day every day for four years.
– Yeah, exactly.
– It’s not that, they get crazy.
But to a lot of people, that’s the saying,
10,000 hours in your master.
I think it should be 100,000 hours to be honest.
I think 10 is too easy.
– So if Seinfeld is like locking himself in a room.
In something, I can’t do anything but write jokes.
Do you ever have to do that?
Or is it just–
– No, this is what I live for.
– Yeah.
– So I mean, I just, I wake up, I walk in the studio
and normally this whiteboard over here,
we erased it, I guess it wouldn’t be leaked,
but it have all the businesses, all the piles,
all the bottlenecks, anything I could do
to push things forward.
And it’s all listed out.
And there’d be probably three or 400 things.
And then we’d go through at the start of each week
and we’d just pick what needs to be done to,
what should we prioritize, et cetera, et cetera.
So it’d be like feastables.
It’s like, you know, ethical sourcing.
Here’s three things that need to be done.
Here’s all the major bottlenecks that if you stepped in,
you could push it forward.
Content, toys, lunch, whatever.
So that’s more how I structure my days is like,
’cause we just have a lot going on.
And it’s just like making sure what I’m working on
is the most efficient thing.
Because if there’s like 10 people sitting around
waiting on me to make a decision to go work,
that shouldn’t be a Friday thing.
That should be a fucking Monday at 9.01 a.m. thing.
You know what I mean?
So it’s very even just,
just figure out what I need to accomplish in a week.
And then even the order of what we do is very important.
– You wanna do this?
– Yeah, you wanna do it, Jimmy?
Let’s see this bad boy.
You can make anything viral.
– So in your, can we talk about your leaked?
– Yeah, of course.
– The document.
– How to succeed.
– Yeah, you did a podcast on it.
– So we wanna do an exercise.
– Exercise is a challenge.
– A challenge.
– A challenge.
– To see if I can come up with a viral idea.
– Yeah, exactly.
– Okay.
The problem here, I’m down for this.
The only, the ironic thing is,
the only one here who will actually know if it’s viral or not
is me.
(laughing)
– You’re grading yourself here, right?
– I know.
– It’s that meme where Obama’s putting the medal on himself.
– Exactly.
‘Cause you guys could be like,
– I don’t think they’ll get a hundred million views
and I’ll just go, no.
(laughing)
– But here’s the stipulation.
Take a normal thing.
– Yeah.
– Make it an interesting viral idea,
but with a budget of a thousand dollars.
– A thousand dollars.
– ‘Cause it’s easy to say, oh,
Mr. Beast would just put a million dollars on the line.
– No, you can make it 10 grand.
– Okay, 10 grand, 10 grand.
– Okay.
– And you said you used to use random word generators.
– Oh, I did all the time.
– So we gave you a random word generator.
If you hit, I don’t remember what you said.
– Generate random words.
– You can pay, you can flip through a few until you find a word.
– Right, that got hundreds of millions of views.
Me laying in a coffin, it’s like, holy shit.
Put a coffin 10 feet on the ground,
cover with 20,000 pounds of dirt.
I’m literally in a coffin for a week.
That’s cool.
That’s viral.
That was seven days of me laying down.
I theoretically could have, instead of doing that,
laid in just a bathtub for seven days.
No one would have gave a fuck.
Like that video wouldn’t have,
but in theory, it’s the same amount of time,
at least from a film and perspective.
Logistically, maybe not.
But in theory, both for me just laying down for seven days.
But one is super fucking viral.
The other no one cares about.
And so that’s like the power of ideas.
Like an idea, with the right idea,
you can do the exact same amount of work
as a different idea, but get 50 X to return.
So that’s why I’m so adamant about generating good ideas.
All right.
So I just hit random, create random words.
– Choc.
– Choc.
– Choc, that’s easy.
– They’re gonna think this is true.
– Here you go.
– Send chocolate.
This is a random word generator, bro.
They’re not gonna,
they’re gonna think this whole thing’s safe.
– Let’s do a new one, non-chocolate.
– Grandmother.
All right, so they gave us the word grandmother.
So what’s a viral idea with a grandmother
that could be done for $10,000?
I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega-manger,
I would do, I completing a hundred year old’s bucket list.
– Oh, so you would meet a grandma?
– Yeah, I’d find a grandma.
I mean, if you really wanted to,
I wouldn’t say I would do this,
but if you wanted like a viral, viral video,
I’d find a grandmother who’s like,
terminally ill and I’d take her and her grandkids
and come, you know, do everything in the bucket list for them.
Like, bro, that-
– That’s a cool idea.
– Like, don’t do this title,
but she will die in 30 days.
So I fulfilled all her wishes that you’ve clicked that.
– Dude, that’s so good.
Hold on, we gotta do another one.
Okay, you passed.
– You passed the test.
I just, I-
– All right, bro.
This is a lifestyle.
I can make things better.
– I like the magic tricks.
– Drawing, you wanna do that one?
– Yeah, drawing.
Okay, the next one here was drawing.
I mean, well, so you want it for 10 grand.
‘Cause the first thing I thought of is for drawing
is drawing the world’s largest picture,
but that would be more than 10 grand.
Actually, weirdly enough,
a lot of videos go viral on YouTube
where people are just like customizing phones
or things like that.
I, depends, if I’m like a really good artist,
I would do like TikToks go super viral
where they like find a guy, a couple on a street
and they like sketch them.
– Stop them.
– But they sketch them like really ugly,
but they like stop really beautiful people
and then they turn the artwork around.
They’re like, “What the fuck?”
And those do really well.
Like, it’ll be like a very handsome guy,
but they’ll do their face like really round
and like with buck teeth.
And it’s always, those do really well on TikTok.
Like I’ve seen some get a hundred million views.
So that would be one way you could do drawing.
I mean, even it’s just, if you’re good enough artist,
like, and if you’re not,
just get good and study and be good.
I would like, you could design like a hospital floor
or something for like make-a-wish kids
and like do like cool artwork or something.
If there’s like some film you could put up over
draw it and like do a design
that they just peel off a couple of days later.
Like that wouldn’t be that expensive.
And that’d be cool.
Like I surprised make-a-wish kids
with their favorite characters or something.
Yeah, I mean, the, how many do you want?
– When you’re brainstorming,
are you usually just kind of by yourself?
Are you like, what’s your career?
Like if I said, “Jim, you gotta come up with something.
What would you do to set yourself up
to come up with great ideas?”
– Yeah, ’cause in transparency, I have teams now.
And so I don’t, I’m not as like,
I used to do this all myself.
Now I pay a lot of people to do it.
And I just like work with them on the back 10%.
But I mean, yeah.
If you really want to come up with like great ideas,
you need to surround yourself
with other very creative people.
I mean, I’m not gonna say their names,
but I have at least five people
that if I really needed to solve something,
I would call, I’d fly them down.
It’d be boom, boom, boom, boom, me in the middle.
And we could solve anything like creatively
in terms of virality or anything like that.
They’re just like really, really good.
Like once good with thumbnails,
once like the smartest guy I’ve ever met
when it comes to titles, another,
he’s just a fucking freak.
And he says the craziest stuff,
but it’s very like inspirational.
And so you need like that like shotgun
that’s just constantly shooting out stuff.
And then like another guy,
we would describe him more as like a sniper.
Like he’s not gonna say much,
but when he says it, you’re like,
“Dang, that’s good.”
So yeah, I just have like my go-to people
who are like very creative and like,
yeah, they just pull the best out of me.
It’s very important you have that like,
I think Ben Steve Jobs called it in like creative ink,
like his think tank.
And they had a thing where they were like a Pixar,
they have a book called “Creativity Ink.”
– “Creativity Ink,” yeah.
– And he said, people think,
“Oh, we just come up with the best ideas right away.”
He goes, “No.”
He goes, “The creative process is taking something
“that sucks and removing suck.”
And so he’s like, “Yeah, we sit there,
“we watch the first version and it sucks.”
And then we trust each other enough to be like,
“Yeah, that kind of sucks, but here’s what sucks about it.
“Go back, try again, try again, try again.”
He’s like, “By the end, by the 10th thing,
“we’ve just removed all the suck
“and all that’s left is the good bit.”
– Yeah, I was just–
– Do you buy that, is that?
– Yeah, it was just that Pixar is at the Steve Jobs building
and I was just with some of the employees
while they were working and just seeing how they go about it.
And they were doing daily reviews over there,
which is like, every day what they work on,
they’re showing to the director and stuff
and getting real-time feedback.
And they’re very like, ego-less.
And it was very cool to see their culture
and how they go about it.
‘Cause in terms of animated films, they’re second to none.
– Right.
I remember a couple of years ago when we talked to you,
you said that coming up with ideas,
was still the thing that you felt like
you had the most trouble handing off to anyone else.
It was like the thing that you still just like,
excelled most at and couldn’t get anyone else to just leave.
– Oh, I’ve trained so many great people at that now.
– Okay.
– Yeah, I mean, I have enough ideas for the next five years.
So that’s not a bottleneck at all.
I have too many.
I would just start listing them off,
but then the problem is everyone’s stealing them stuff.
– Yeah, yeah.
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All right, back to the episode.
– Okay, great.
Let’s go to the next one.
All right, so we have, that’s three of the rules.
Number four, I’ll flip this one, cloning.
– Yes.
– All right, so the backstory of this one is,
last year when we were doing our camper event,
it’s basically a room full of business people,
billionaires, all of whatever.
And you started describing how you run your company.
And you were 25 years old at the time,
you’re now your 26.
– Well, these people double my age
in 20 times the experience of me.
– Correct, and so they were listening and were like,
so who is this guy?
Well, this guy’s been following you around all day.
Who is this and how do you run this?
How do you train people?
And you were like, you describe this process of cloning.
And I swear, I saw like five billionaires
make a note to themselves.
So can you describe what is your cloning principle
and what does that mean?
– Well, the thing is like as a founder,
because I assume a lot of your viewers run this.
– Founders and investors.
– Yeah, like you’re constantly having to put out fires,
you’re constantly having to do things.
And that’s a flaw.
You’re always gonna be putting,
like having to work on stuff,
but you should view any type of you have to work on things
as a flaw.
And it’s like, how do you,
what’s the fastest way to stop working on something?
Every time you work on it, have someone on your hip
and have them learn how to do it,
essentially clone you to do that task.
And so anytime, I don’t ever work alone anymore,
because anytime I’m doing something, that’s a problem.
And like someone should be doing this in six months.
And so that’s just like the cheat code to doing it.
– And it’s cloning, not training, why?
– Well, we would call,
now that I have hundreds of employees now,
I think we’re probably closing on 500.
So it’s a lot more training,
but clones are more like the all in people
who are gonna like run your company one day
and make, like, and have the upside to like live with you.
And, you know, ’cause like someone who’s making $40,000,
you’re at the back gonna live with you
and follow your own 15 hours a day.
– Right, but early on you had that.
You had people literally like-
– Yeah, I still have people like that,
but it’s like, that’s just a small subset of it.
So yeah, on the core team, yeah, 100%.
It’s just like, the thing is,
the more you know about everything going on, the better.
‘Cause a lot of what you do in one part of,
one vertical business in finance or in this or that,
affects other parts.
And so the more you understand the whole business,
the more you understand the ripples you create across things,
the better efficiently and better,
you can do these kinds of things.
And so just having a clone who knows everything
about the whole business, as opposed to just one section,
just makes it where they can just make decisions
so much faster and they can cut through red tape.
And it just makes it so much easier for you to just like,
’cause like when you’re in hyper growth scale,
you don’t know like what the next fire is gonna be
or the next things is to fix.
And so you just have a couple versions of yourself.
It’s just so nice.
‘Cause it’s like,
oh, this thing over here and editing is falling apart.
All right, clone that you’ve followed me around
for the last three years, you know what I would do,
just go fix it, you know what I mean?
So I don’t have to go fix it.
– Every part of a company is not like,
it’s not like you look at a thing, you’re like editing.
Editing is its own thing.
No, editing is people editing, right?
Everything is people.
And so what I liked about the way you were doing it was,
I think on the outside, people hear this like,
follow you around all the time, live with you.
That’s crazy.
You know, that’s harsh.
I met the people doing it and they were like,
this is the greatest opportunity.
– Exactly.
– I came here for this.
I want to be great.
He’s given me the opportunity to be great.
Not everybody wants it, but I really want this.
– You can either go to college for like,
it’s not even for you.
Go to college for three years
or you can follow Sean around for three years
and like just all day, every day.
And the version of you that follows Sean around
for three years will make way more money.
You’ll be way more experienced, way more valuable to him.
Or you could just go to any one of his competitors
and you’ll make 10 times more than if you got it.
– Have you ever heard of Warren Buffett cloning story?
– No.
– So Warren Buffett, when he was young,
he wanted to learn investing, right?
So he goes to the guy who wrote the book
on investing Benjamin Graham.
And he’s like, Mr. Graham, I’m Warren Buffett.
I’m a big fan of your work.
I want to work for you.
I will work harder than anyone you know.
And you know what?
I’m willing to work for you for free
because this matters so much.
I want to learn from you.
And then Graham goes, son, your price is too high.
And he was, Warren was like surprised.
And then later he’s like, he was so right.
I got so much more out of working every day
at Ben Graham’s hip than him getting my free labor.
Actually the value exchange was like completely,
he was correct.
And that always stuck with me because it’s so true.
Like dude, how do you, if you want to learn,
that’s the best way you could possibly learn.
And as a founder, ultimately you want judgment to scale.
So it’s like, if people in your company can think,
what would Jimmy do and get the right answer?
Now you got two jimmies, right?
You know, like for the most part they can make decisions.
And then other times it should be like,
what would Jimmy do?
Okay, Jimmy’s not always right.
In this instance, he’s an idiot.
Let’s go call him out on it.
What will he say when I tell him
what I’m actually going to do?
Yeah.
And then they think even one step further,
which is like my like long-term clones are great.
They’ll be like, okay, well, Jimmy’s going to want data back.
He’s not going to care about an opinion.
So I’m going to just go do all the research
and grab the data.
And then they’ll ask me something and they’ll say,
blah, blah, blah.
And they’ll be like, I knew you were going to say that.
And I’ll be like, oh, great.
Hey, by the way, it’s not just you.
Even other people, there was like a guy,
he was also cloning people.
He was like, yeah, I’m the main guy
for this part of the business.
So I need to be training people.
So this is how I’m doing it.
Zero to one is so difficult, but then one to three,
you know, like it’s so much easier.
So that’s like the hard part is like training that for,
like downloading, I’ll pick a random thing,
like writing the videos, right?
Like obviously I used to write all the videos myself,
taking all that and getting it where someone else
could do it without all keeping the essence of like,
what makes it viral and what makes it good.
So I’m going to do that.
The essence of like, what makes it viral
and what makes it good and not feeling too corporate
and scripted because we’re not scripted, et cetera.
Like going from zero to one, that took like five years.
But then, you know, him training the next two people
is great cause I don’t have to do it.
And he trains those two and those two train the next.
And so it’s just like that first clone is so imperative.
And then they can do the rest.
That’s great.
You want to do the next one?
Sure.
Possible is possible.
Fuck yeah.
Impossible is possible.
All right.
So this is, I asked your, I’m friends with Rohan,
the guy who runs your Tik Tok.
Yeah.
I go, tell me the thing where you realize
like this guy’s built different.
This guy thinks differently than a normal person would.
And I was like, that’s the story I want.
And he goes, he goes, I don’t know how to explain it.
This is the quote, Jimmy will give you an impossible mission
but he’ll say it in a way that makes it seem totally possible.
And then he leaves the room and you’re like,
God damn, this is impossible.
He goes, for example, Jimmy came to me and said,
I need 10 million Tik Tok followers a month Rohan.
He goes, and every month I told Jimmy,
it’s impossible like a hundred times.
And he told me, do it 500 times.
He told me to do it 500 times.
I think we had two months or again, 10 million.
That’s what he told me.
He goes, he goes, I didn’t do it most months,
but I did do it like, you know, two months.
And we got way further than we ever would have got,
had he not laid down like kind of this impossible gauntlet.
So that’s one story.
I’m sure there’s like a thousand of these,
but like, do you live by this?
I guess, how would you talk about that?
Well, I don’t try to just give people KPIs
that I think aren’t possible, just to torture them.
I just like, I think most people,
when you ask them to do something
like very incredibly difficult.
Like what I first did,
I want to bury myself alive for a week.
Like people’s first inclination is just, that’s not possible.
And like technically almost anything is possible.
It’s so it’s just like,
so my first thing is just like, why do you say that?
Like, let’s go through the gambit.
And then they’ll always be like, well, it’s just not possible.
And then you just have to be like, go do the fucking research.
And then they’ll come back and it’s like,
is it too expensive?
Cause we can figure out ways to, is it too unstable?
We can navigate safety or whatever it is.
And so it’s like,
I hate when people tell me something can’t be done.
Just tell me the cost and like what the problem is.
Where the bottleneck is.
Yeah. And then if like,
then let’s look at those and objectively,
if it’s too expensive or something
that’s not worth investing the time into or what,
then that’s fine.
And then I’ll kill it, but just tell me something.
Cause like half the stuff I did,
if I just listened to people and they told me it wasn’t,
like I wanted the Eiffel Tower for a video.
Not possible.
Why, why is that not possible?
Go get the fucking Eiffel Tower.
Like until the head of the president of France
tells you no, it’s possible.
Like I don’t,
– Then when he says no, ask his kids.
See if they have some sway.
– Well, that’s a given while you’re on the phone.
Like we just filmed a video where we had
the three pyramids of Egypt and we were like,
you know, spinning like we were there for a hundred hours.
This crazy video, we explored the pyramids.
Like my favorite video ever, same thing.
Like you can’t just have the three pyramids.
I’m like, did Egypt tell you that?
Like, what do you mean?
Go make some phone calls, you know what I mean?
And it’s just constantly, even today,
when I’m not with my core group that I’ve trained very well,
it’s just always like, you can’t do that or no,
or they’ll go make a phone call.
Or okay, fine, Jimmy, we’ll go try to get the pyramids.
They’ll go away, they’ll come back a day later.
You can’t have the pyramids.
I’m like, who’d you call?
This tourist guy who like works at the pyramids.
I’m like, okay, call the head of tourism.
Like how do you get their number?
Okay, well that’s different.
You didn’t ask me how to get the head of tourism’s number.
You asked me, you just told me it was not possible.
Like so now, like please don’t do that again.
Like we gotta figure out what the problems are.
Let’s figure it out.
And then we make calls and you figure it out.
Next thing you know, it’s, and so it’s just like,
that’s a big thing that you have to like,
if you really, in my opinion, want to innovate
and do things that are, you know,
I’ve never been done before in push boundaries.
You have to like have a mindset amongst your people
that it’s not, nothing is impossible.
It’s just how much does it cost?
How do you do it?
And then you just make an objective decision.
– It seems to me like when you solve
these impossible problems, you have to think
on like a lower level rather than a higher level.
Have you heard the story of Elon getting his rockets
from Texas to Florida where they launched them?
– No.
So the normal way everyone gets their rockets
to Florida is on a barge, right?
But it takes like three months and costs a bunch of money.
– Didn’t he fly it there?
– He drove it there.
I was like, no, we’re going to drive it instead.
And they’re like, well, it’s way too big.
– Well, first answer was–
– It’s impossible.
– Can’t do it.
And he said, let’s go, and he has a great line,
which is physics are the only laws.
Everything else is a suggestion.
And it seems like, is it physically impossible
to get it to Florida?
No, okay, we agree on that.
Great.
Now let’s continue to figure out where the bottleneck is.
And it’s like, oh, the boat, too long, too expensive,
whatever.
And so the, you know, oh, well, it’s impossible
to get it through overpasses.
And so he’s like, well, what would be the shortest way
to get there without encountering a single overpass?
So they go, they do this like extremely circuitous route
all on back roads.
And they’re like, but even if we do that,
there’s still problem with power lines
and telephone wires.
And so they have like some of the smartest people on earth
driving in a van in front of these rockets
with big poles and they just push up
the telephone wires that we can go under.
– And then they go to the next telephone wire.
And it’s just like, you just have to like approach it
like a caveman almost to like to beat the impossible.
Do you find that’s the case a lot?
– Yeah, quite a bit.
And a lot of it is just a willingness.
It’s just people who have to love what they do.
And people who really love problems solving
will, you know, figure these things out.
And so it’s just having the right person,
the right seat at the right time who like actually wants
to go deep and like people, there are certain people
where you give them something that seems impossible
and they will be giddy.
And they’ll be like, yeah, I can’t wait.
Like I have people like that where I could call
and be like, what’s something.
They don’t wake up until it’s, until it’s hard.
– Well, it’s like, I guess if I wanted
a different world wonder if I was like,
I want the Taj Mahal for a week, right?
And they’re like, people are coming to my call
and said that, like, I promised you they would smile.
And he’s like, okay, like they can see that as a challenge.
They’d go to war to figure it out.
And then not in my company, but just there are other people
that you would say that, oh my God.
You know, and so you just got to get the right people
who just deeply enjoy solving problems
and like see it as a challenge.
And like, like there are people built that way.
And those are the people that really succeed
in that environment.
– And even a different example,
that’s not getting the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower.
One of my favorite videos of yours where I,
the first time I was like, all right, respect.
It was before I met you.
And I was like, okay, respect was,
Ben was telling me about you.
And he goes, he made a video said,
I’m going to cut through this table with a plastic knife.
– Oh my gosh.
I remember this weirdly very well.
I was sitting in high school and I just like,
I had a, I don’t know, after lunch,
I just had a, I put the plastic knife in my pocket
for somebody that I don’t remember why.
And then I just put my hand in pocket.
I was like, oh, plastic knife.
And then I just started like scraping against the desk.
And I was like, oh, well, I’m like kind of like,
I can cut this desk in half.
Like just like your stupid little high school desk.
I just did this for like five minutes
till like the teacher was like,
what the fuck are you doing?
Stop.
And then I just was like looking at the little invention.
I was doing the calculation in my head.
I was like, it would take me like 10 hours
to cut through this according to my math.
I was like, fuck it.
I think that would be like a video
where people would be interested.
So I went to the store on the way home
and I bought like a thousand plastic,
like the cheapest plastic knives I could find.
And then I just got this like $20 foldout table
and I just went in my room, hit record on the camera
and I just went to town
’cause the plastic knives would get dull after like a minute.
And I just couldn’t do it.
And I think that, I think that took 12 hours
to cut through the table with plastic knives or something.
– But that’s what I’m saying.
It was no money.
It was no money.
It wasn’t Taj Mahal.
It was like creativity or well, first boredom.
Boredom is the key.
It was like how Einstein discovered relativity.
– But that video did so well
and it’s like so dumb.
– It was just like how many leases does it take
to get to the center of relativity?
How many plastic knives does it take to cut a table?
People were like, what a fucking idiot.
– Did you do it with one by the way?
Or did you go through like a video?
– No, no, no.
Probably thousands, yeah.
– That’s insane.
By the way, that’s a spoiler.
I think that one we kind of copied number eight,
which is no doesn’t mean no way.
And there’s a big difference between no and no way.
– And possible is possible
and no doesn’t mean no, exact same thing, yeah.
– I like the clarification you had, which was like,
you’re not just like the asshole boss.
That’s like, I need this impossible thing done.
You know, whatever.
It’s more like, hey, I wanna do this impossible thing
or I wanna do this great thing.
No, okay, let’s get curious
before we just like make a decision here.
Why?
Well, let’s try to understand it.
And if it truly is no, which it rarely is, fine.
But it’s usually not.
And then the cool thing is if you do that in the company,
do it once.
People are like, oh wow, that was interesting.
Do it twice.
By the third time you do it, people are like, all right,
like that’s the way, right?
It’s contagious, right?
– 50 of time, yeah.
You know, it’s like a religion.
People start to believe when they see it, right?
– I mean, you’re in place.
For me, it tends to take a couple of dozen times
for a decision. – Well, I’ll keep pointing at it.
I’m like, guys, remember what we said and then what happened?
Let’s like, again, let’s take that and rap.
That’s a rally cry for us now.
Like we could do all these things, right?
Let’s immortalize that.
– So I’m obsessed with being transparent about money,
particularly with ultra high net worth people.
The reason being is that there’s not a lot of information
on this demographic.
And so because I own Hampton,
which is a community for founders,
I have access to thousands of young
and incredibly high net worth people.
We have people worth hundreds of millions
and sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton.
And so every year we do this thing
called the Hampton Wealth Report,
where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs
and we ask them all types of information
about their personal finances.
We ask them about how they’re investing their money,
what their portfolio looks like.
We ask them about their monthly spend habits.
We ask them how they’ve set up their estate,
how much money they’re gonna leave to charity,
how much money they keep in cash,
how much money they’re paying themselves
from their businesses.
Basically every question that you wanna ask a rich person,
we went and we do it for you
and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people.
So if you wanna check out the report,
it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
Just go to joinhampton.com, click our menu,
and you’re gonna see a section called Reports
and you’re gonna see it all right there.
It’s very easy.
So again, it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
Go to joinhampton.com, click the menu,
and then click the Report button.
And let me know what you think.
All right, we got three more to go.
All right, here we go.
Consultants?
Or is he good?
Yeah, and honestly, ’cause I wrote this,
they’re referencing my thing I wrote a couple of years ago.
I would update that just say like,
experience people or cheat codes, the right ones.
Like, ’cause it doesn’t,
’cause like my handbook, I guess,
if that’s what you would call leaked on Twitter,
and like–
Here we go, who’s your handbook?
Yeah, by Production Bible.
So many people were like,
consultants, and even consultants
are like putting this on their website.
Even Mr. V.
Endorsed on LinkedIn.
Yeah, I know.
They’re like, so many consultant tweets,
they’re like, yes, he validated our industry.
And I’m like, well,
I always specifically talking about McKinsey, you know?
It’s just more like, you know,
it was special with us,
’cause we do so many random, weird things.
I mean, what did I say in here?
Consultants are literally cheat codes,
needed to make the world’s largest slice of cake,
start off by calling the person
who has made the previous world’s largest slice of cake–
Exactly.
LOL.
He’s already done countless tasks
and can save you weeks worth of work.
I really want to drill this point home
because I’m a massive believer in consultants
because I’ve spent almost a decade of my life
hyper-obsessing over YouTube.
I can show a brand new creator
how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month.
On their own, it would take them years to do it.
Consultants are a gift from God.
Please take advantage of them.
In every single freaking task assigned to you,
always, always, always ask yourself first
if you can find a consultant to help you.
Exactly, ’cause we do so many weird, different things.
Like, oh, we’re gonna bury me alive?
Call David Blaine.
He buried himself alive.
You know what I mean?
Like, ’cause–
How’s that phone call go?
Uh, great.
They’re usually like,
“Well, we don’t have David Blaine’s phone number.”
And then I’m like, “Okay, I’ll DM him on Instagram.”
And I’m like, “Here’s his phone number.”
Call him, figure out how he didn’t die, you know?
Well, you do these things like one night,
I was just hanging out at my house,
get a call, North Carolina number, pick up.
Oh, yeah.
I go on walks and then I just like,
I will literally just close my eyes
and like flip through my contacts
and then I’ll like stop and, you know,
when it’s on S, you’ll be there.
And I’ll just be like, “Hmm, just have a random name.”
And I’ll be like, “Teach me something.”
Sometimes the calls are one minute,
other times are 20, and yeah, it’s like,
you’ve got to always be learning.
I feel like you’re saying that almost like
it’s a normal thing.
You know like nobody does this, right?
Like that’s like a-
I don’t understand why that’s-
I kind of started to steal it
’cause I was like, “Why not?”
I’m also like, I’m obsessed with learning.
Yeah.
And there’s something like maybe the mechanics of it,
I was confused.
Like so I call these people and then I just say like,
“Hey, stop, teach me something.”
What’s something that’s come out of that?
What’s funny is the more you do it,
the more people will come to expect it too.
So like, I’ll call someone,
they won’t answer and then they’ll be like,
“Let me guess, you’re on a walk, sorry, I’m busy.”
And then I’m like,
I don’t even have to respond to just get it.
Like, you know, ’cause at the start,
you’ll go on a walk and you’ll call 20 people
and you’ll have conversations with 10
’cause these high caliber people are always busy.
And then the other 10 will call you
throughout the next 24 hours
and it’s like a new sense ’cause you gotta be like,
“Oh, I just bought on a walk, I just bought on a walk.”
So, but now everyone just gets it.
It’s a protocol.
Yeah, they’re just like-
You just call us.
Yeah, so it’s like so funny that I’ve become known for that
and like people will answer
and like sometimes I don’t even say anything
they’ll be like, “Ah, all right, here’s what I’ve learned.”
It’s like, great.
‘Cause then I just like, these are people who are,
you know, some of them running companies
that are doing billions of dollars a year in revenue
and they’re learning tons of things.
They’re always experimenting
and I just get this five minute brain dump
of everything they learn, suck it out of them.
And then I’m like, here’s what I learned
’cause I always, a big part of this,
if you wanted to go well is you have to add as much value,
ideally more than what they’re given to you.
So I try to help them in any way I can
and then you hang up and you go to the next one.
Another one that is in the kind of consultants
or cheat codes is we do these talks at our event.
So at our basketball event,
it’s kind of like play ball all day
till we’re like dead tired.
And then at night, it was like, we’re hanging out.
And the first year we did it, I remember,
’cause I created the events, I was kind of the host.
I was like, I don’t wanna be like forcing
like a conference vibe.
I was like really like tiptoeing around.
I was like, I don’t want this to be awkward,
but it was actually more awkward
’cause nobody knew who anyone else was.
You do this great thing, you like grab the chair,
you put it in the middle of the room,
you’re like, hey, sit down real quick.
And you go, all right, who are you?
What’s your story?
And then they would like start
to tell like a long-winded story.
But what I liked was you would have questions.
So like, we had a real estate guy.
And instead of being like, all right,
teach me about real estate,
which the guy doesn’t know how to start.
You were like, if I had $10 million,
what would be the best way to turn it into a hundred
for real estate?
– Yeah.
– And then he talks for like five minutes,
you’re like, cool, God,
I should just give it to somebody like you.
Big sense.
(all laughing)
On to the next.
And I was like, I love the power of kind of like
the right question, the right person.
– And honestly, in group settings like that,
another thing too is just not being afraid
to cut people off.
Because some people are just so not aware
that like there’s 20 people
and even rambling for 30 minutes.
And I’m like, I feel like they got another 15 in them.
(all laughing)
Three of those people are on their phone.
Those two are checked out.
Those five are too nice to say anything.
I’ll be the one who it’s like, hey, we get it.
– All right, I got the next one.
Block out the noise.
Okay, block out.
You want to do block out the noise?
– Sure.
So here’s the quote.
When you’re small, people say you’re too obsessed.
You’re a weirdo.
Get a life, be realistic.
This is from you.
People will try to convince you
that you’re out of your mind for wanting to do this.
Then when it works, yo, you’re dry.
You’re tenacity.
That was great.
(all laughing)
– Everything you guys have been flattering me with
throughout this podcast are the exact same things
I got low key bully for in high school.
(all laughing)
It’s like, hilarious that now these grown men are like,
yo, this is fucking awesome.
You’re like, all in impossible is not possible.
No, it doesn’t mean no.
And you just like love this shit.
And like, and in high school, that’s what a fucking nerd.
Get a life, like loser.
Yeah.
That’s why you call it block out the noise, right?
Because the same things that people admire
when you’re successful are the things
that people are gonna try and tell you to stop.
– If you had listened, you wouldn’t be Mr. Beast, right?
Like we wouldn’t be here right now.
– Everyone else, and yeah, just a normal job.
But the thing is, it’s like, the big takeaway is
it just means you’re not around the right people, right?
‘Cause like, obviously I was around you guys
when you were younger.
I’m sure you guys wouldn’t have been like,
oh, what a weird, obsessed nerd.
You wouldn’t have been like, oh, this is sick.
Let’s grow together or we’re, you know,
maybe when we were 18,
we wouldn’t have that much emotional intelligence,
but we would have like flocked together.
So it’s also just finding the right people to be around.
And if you’re having to block out a lot of noise,
then you’re just like, you have a serious problem.
– It’s a signal.
– Yeah, like you really gotta change your yard
because that’s, it’s really, I mean,
if you’re the smartest person you’re hanging around,
make, you know, the one with the most ambition
and everyone else is just bringing you down.
Like you’re literally just going through
your entrepreneurial life with like a 10 pound weight
shackled to your leg.
– Yeah, last one, let’s go into reinvest everything.
– Yes, sir.
– Can I give you my version of this?
I think people know you reinvest a lot of money
to almost a comical extent.
It’s like, we made a hundred grand last month.
Great, we’re investing a hundred and one this next month.
It’s like, yeah, Jimmy, where’d you get the extra?
– I got the largest unscripted streaming deal in history
and somehow lost a ton of money on it.
– These games?
– Yeah, yeah.
– When we were here the first time,
somebody was like, you know,
what do you think is kind of like his edge?
I go, his edge is that he takes all the money he makes
and then he reinvest it.
He takes all the hours he has and he invests it
into the channel.
Then he gets the best people
and he gets them to believe that they should invest it.
And he doesn’t ever want to quit.
I don’t think this guy’s going to get rich and retire
like every other YouTuber.
I was like, that’s like a kamikaze level of commitment.
I don’t think–
– That’s right.
You used to call it a kamikaze commitment.
– ‘Cause how do you, what do you do?
What do you do with somebody who’s willing to just plow it
all back in?
That’s not the person I would want to compete against.
So that’s kind of, I guess that’s why, to me,
this is–
– I mean, you just described it perfectly.
I don’t even have to say anything.
– Yeah, I mean, ideally you find the passion that you love
and you’re all in and it’s, you know,
you shouldn’t have to like force yourself to go get up
and write it.
It should just be what you love to do, you know?
– What’s the CFO telling you as you just, at the beginning?
Now it’s kind of known, but at the beginning,
when you were describing your approach,
CFO was like your mom at the beginning, right?
– Yeah, well, I mean, at the beginning,
it was me and my mom and a couple of friends
are high school, so she was 10 jobs, I was 20 jobs.
I mean, now they just start, I mean,
people kind of normalize to your weird craziness.
So they’re more–
– But that’s now, what at the beginning,
what was that like?
– I mean, I thought I was deranged.
You know, like, oh, why do you,
like, ’cause I mean, everyone, you know,
a big bunch of YouTube videos used to be 10 grand.
I was the first one to ever spend a million dollars
on a video and two million.
– This is probably the best example, right?
– Yeah, I got a brand deal for 10,000 dollars.
I’ve broke, you keep saying CFO,
like I had a CFO back then.
You know, this was me and like paying a guy,
I went to high school with like 10 bucks an hour
to help me.
But I, I, and me going, mom, what are taxes?
– Right.
– I didn’t make money.
Do I pay taxes?
And she’s like, yes.
I’m like, fuck.
But yeah, we, I got a brand deal for 10,000 dollars.
And then I just went outside.
Like this, I used to live like two minutes.
Like the $700 a month apartment I was talking about,
or duplex, was like literally two minutes
down the road from this.
And so I just got the 10 grand.
I was like, why are we the money?
They wired it, we drew it and gave it to this homeless guy
on the side of the street.
– Were you not tempted to like have money for the first time?
– Pocket five, give it away five.
– So I pocket five, spend on a different video?
What else do, what else do you do with the money?
– It’s like, there’s a story of Zuck
when he got offered a billion dollars
for Facebook early on.
And they were like, Mark, we should talk about this.
– And he’s like, oh, if I got this money,
I would just start a new social media platform.
And I like the one I have.
– I like the one I have.
This is like legendary.
– Yeah, that’s the same thing here.
It’s like, I could pocket it,
but I just make different videos
and I just want to film this one.
I mean, it’s literally the same thing.
– It reminds me a lot, reading about Walt Disney.
This is what he was famous for.
‘Cause his brother, Roy, was like-
– I loved your podcast on it.
– Thank you, it was like the business manager.
– This is almost done, make sure you watch it out there.
– Hot take over the world, yeah.
– And Roy would like pull his hair out of like,
Walt, can we please just like save some money?
And he had like a compulsion almost to take all the money.
He like felt bad keeping any money.
He’s like, no, it has to go into making better shows.
– Yeah.
– Do you feel that like, does it-
– It has nothing to do with like wanting to keep-
It really has nothing to do with money itself.
It’s just, I want to make the best product possible.
And so it’s like, here’s the product that I want to make.
And I’m always having to settle
because we can’t spend $10 billion on a YouTube video.
You know what I mean?
‘Cause I would love to go buy everything
in every single store in this entire city
and donate it all to charity.
You know, that’d be $200 million.
So I can’t, but so it’s just like, it’s more, you know,
like this is what I want to make,
but I have to dial it back.
And it’s like, well, now we have a little bit more money.
So I just dial it back less.
There’s nothing, I don’t really care.
You know what I mean?
Like, so.
– By the way, you just came up with that number.
– Yeah, I was like, he’s done the math.
– Well, you look at this.
– Well, I know it costs $15 million
to buy everything in a Walmart, but yeah.
– 15 million?
Have you done that?
Is that one of the things you’ve done?
– We’re going to.
– Yeah, nice.
– I think that’s a fucking banger.
And we’re donating it all to charity, so it’s cool.
– What’s your like ambition, right?
So it’s like, Ben in 40 years is doing the pod on you.
– Don’t ask me 40.
Ask like 10, 40’s too far.
You’re gonna give me anxiety.
– Okay, what’s like the, what’s the dream dream?
– Right now I can’t do 40, but for the next five,
the big thing I’m focusing on,
which I was telling you guys about in the car,
is just feastables.
Why people listening.
– What can you explain about your business empire?
Can you break it down?
– Yeah, well, so specifically like chocolate,
but it seems so random.
Why is the largest YouTube in the world selling chocolate?
Well, right now, 70% of the world’s cocoa
comes from West Africa, Cote de Vare and Ghana.
And a majority of the people who work on those farms
are actually kids or child labor.
So it’s like 46% of labor.
So I guess it’s not the majority.
So I should correct this statement.
46% of labor is illegal child labor, right?
Yeah, get to your feastable work.
– I’ll eat this while you talk to her.
– Yeah, so when I got into selling chocolate,
I just learned about that.
And I talked to like exacts a big chocolate company
as I was like, so what I hear like this child labor thing,
like, is this just like, we’re just cool with this?
And they’re like, well, it’s just how it’s always been.
And there’s not really anything you can do about it.
I’m like,
– That’s the way things have always been.
– I’m like, I literally, I said to one,
I think I don’t remember the exact,
I’m gonna butcher, but I was like, Elon’s gonna put people
on Mars and you’re telling me we can’t not have little kids
farming or chocolate.
We can’t just find people over the age of 18 or whatever.
And they’re like, well, it’s not that simple.
And I’m like, what the fuck?
So that kind of like pissed me off and sent me down.
I’m like, yeah, what you mean to say is that would hurt
the billions of dollars in free cash flow.
You’re spitting off in your margins.
But anyways, so I was like, I went down that path
like two years ago.
I was like, okay, well, I don’t.
– You actually went to West Africa.
– Oh yeah.
– But before even that, it’s just like,
so then I was, we’re gonna start referencing
our piece of paper here.
So then consultants are cheat codes.
So I was like, what is the largest
ethically sourced chocolate company in the world?
Who’s the one’s doing it right?
Have you heard of Tony’s Chocolonii?
– Yeah, yeah.
– Yeah, so they’re great.
It’s a European brand, but they’re like a reporter
used to call out big chocolate and be like,
there’s a lot of childhood with you guys
aren’t ethical and like they would just ignore them.
And so then he’s like, fuck it.
– He started it, right?
– Yeah, and he started a chocolate company
and that’s Tony’s Chocolonii.
‘Cause it’s like the lonely–
– And it became like a $200 million business.
– Yeah, it’s doing pretty well.
And so I was like, let me get in contact with these people.
And I just started talking to them.
I flew them here to Greenville like the next week.
And we were just like, I was like,
teach me everything about child labor,
how we can remediate it,
what should we be doing on our farms, et cetera.
And like, I just had like phone calls with them
every single day, studied.
And then the next five companies
that are also doing ethical things,
I just absorbed everything they were all doing
into my brain.
And I was like, cool.
All right, I know what we need to do.
Step one, like the main reason why there’s child labor
is just poverty.
Like most of these farmers are making a dollar less a day.
So like, if you’re getting paid a dollar,
how can you hire someone
that’s over the age of 18 to work in your farm?
So you end up just using kids, ’cause they’re cheap or free.
So step one is you just have to pay them a living income.
So 100% of our farmers are paid a living income.
So I can go super deep.
I’m gonna keep this mile high
’cause I know not everyone is as passionate
about the child’s industry as me,
but this is what I live and breathe.
But so what is a living income, right?
Because obviously a living income in America
is completely different than in West Africa.
So there’s a living income reference price
where they look at the cost of like bread
and living and inflation.
And it’s like, you know, if a farmer sells you
like a metric tons of cocoa,
they need to make this for them to be able to live
roughly and be able to.
So we pay 100% of our farmers
a living income reference price.
So there could be an instance where you’re a farmer,
you give us a shipping container of cocoa
and you’re like, you know, we want $1,100.
I’m like, no, you want $1,300.
It’s $1,300.
Now make sure there’s no kids on your farms.
You know what I mean?
Like, or kids in illegal child labor.
And so that’s, I mean, I’m oversimplifying everything.
None of the, this is a very complex thing.
And there’s, we’re talking about tens of thousands
of farms, there’s millions of farms there.
And this is not, none of this is as simple
as I’m portraying it,
but I’m just doing my best to generalize it all.
So you pay your farmers a living income,
all our beans are fair trade certified.
And then we work with CLR and MERS,
which is the child labor remediation system.
And then they routinely audit the farms,
interview the parents, interview the kids,
see if the kids are going to school,
working on the farm, et cetera.
And then if, you know,
they identify cases of child labor following up
and getting the kid out of the child labor
and stuff like that, which all the,
and then we also, just little things,
because it’s, since it’s all a route of poverty,
the more money you help them make,
the easier it is for them to, you know,
stop using a little child labor on the farm.
So we have coaches that will like represent 200 farms
and they’ll help them get more yield
and like educate them on things they could be doing
to grow more for trees or have more trees or, well,
you know, occasionally give them wheelbarrows
or things like that.
So they can just, I mean, a little,
something as simple as a wheelbarrow,
I mean, it’s a big difference between
carrying 10 kakao plots theoretically,
again, generalizing everything,
or being able to carry 40 in a wheelbarrow.
Like that statically makes you four times more efficient.
It’s not, again, maybe you have numbers.
Yeah, so like goal is just to make feastables,
the largest ethically-sourced chocolate company in the world.
And, you know, if we can do a billion dollars a year
in chocolate sales ethically while being profitable,
then I can use that as a model to, you know,
on my videos, talk about being chocolate
and all the unethical things they’re doing
and just be like, look, it’s possible to be profitable,
to not do it at scale.
There’s no excuse, besides they just don’t care.
And then, you know, we’ll see what happens
when I get to that point.
– Last year when I was here,
I asked, I think you’re right-hand guy at that time,
I was like, what’s y’all’s focus for the year?
And most people don’t have an answer
at the tip of your tongue.
His was like, instantaneous he goes,
I think, you had a number of the number of YouTube videos,
22 or something like that. – 26 videos.
– Maybe 26 bangers sell a lot of chocolate, get jacked.
And he said it like that fast.
– Every day, all three.
– And you got in great shape from the last time, can you?
– Yeah, was I still fat last year,
or was that the first year?
– No, it was first.
– First year was, I mean, I wanted to try fat,
but like, you know-
– Bro, I was a fucking walrus, that was 240 pounds.
Yeah, I’m, right now I’m 190.
So I probably-
– But you had started lifting at the last one we did.
And in this year, you’re like-
– Yeah, so year one, I was 240 pounds, year two,
I was probably 215, 220 pounds, and now I’m 190.
So yeah, I’m like probably 25 pounds lighter.
I can’t wait to ball.
– How did you, what’d you do?
Like, what was your approach to getting jacked?
Or like, how’d you approach it?
– I’m very heavily influenced by the people around me.
Like, if I spent too much time with you,
I’ll start speaking like you,
acting like you, thinking like you.
So I’m very cautious of that.
So I just put a lot of jacked people around me.
And then, like, my metric of success was like,
how frequently are random people just handing me chicken breasts?
Or like, you know, something high in protein?
Like, you know, ’cause like, they’re, you know,
all the, like my old friend group, you know,
all the time they’d be like,
oh, we just ordered pizza or this or that.
And it’s like, it just makes accomplishing my goals
so much harder.
Like the ratio of people ordering pizza
to the ratio of people ordering protein was just way off.
I mean, this is just how I analyze my life
because I, like, I’m so all in on business.
Like, I don’t think about this kind of stuff.
So I need an environment that just makes being jacked
very natural.
Like the weightlifting is pretty easy.
You just go to the gym 45 minutes, five days a week.
But it’s the, yes, the food that, that is a,
that’s not a thing you turn on and off.
That’s the thing that you have to be consistent on
for a very long period if you want to achieve results.
And like, I just, I can’t think about, like,
that every single day.
And I just, and it’s like, there are just times
where I’m at low points
and it’s just a lot harder to be disciplined.
And I just know if like, you know,
I always have people who are just eating healthy.
It’s just, it takes something that feels hard
and kind of makes it fun.
Like when you’re doing it together and like, you know,
and it’s just so, just surround myself with other people
trying to accomplish the same thing,
just like anything in life.
– This is what, I was living in Australia
and I literally bought a plane ticket
with no plan one way to San Francisco
because I was at this Tony Robbins event
and he said proximity is power.
– Dang, love it.
– Did you like hire anyone too
to help you, do you have like a trainer around or a coach?
– Yeah, he follows me around all day every day.
He’s a jack dude sitting downstairs.
You’ll notice he’s the one who looks like
he could be on a bodybuilding stage.
– Yeah.
– He’s usually in a tank top, you know.
– Somebody just sent me this.
You posted TikTok an hour ago.
– Yeah.
– I just got out of a meeting
with a bunch of billionaires.
TikTok, we mean business.
This is my lawyer right here.
We have an offer ready for you.
We want to buy the platform.
America deserves TikTok.
Give me a seat at the table.
Let me save this platform TikTok.
– Yeah.
– Are you gonna buy TikTok?
– I tweeted out yesterday
that I was thinking about buying TikTok.
And honestly, kind of as a joke.
And then I had even a lot of people coming to this event.
So many billionaires text me.
I mean, I’m probably up to like 35
who have like unironically reached out
and like, I want to put money in, I want to do it.
And then like two separate groups
that have like very serious bids together for it.
Also like, go get involved in this.
And then I’m like, my phone just blew up
ever since that tweet.
So then I made that TikTok ’cause it’s like,
yeah, I was joking, but now it’s like, oh, okay.
– I’ll predict it right now.
This, I think this is going to happen
because I think it should happen.
It’d be smart, right?
Any ownership group that’s doing this
would be smart to have you involved.
– As long as TikTok’s willing to sell.
Yeah, everyone interested in buying it
wants to get us involved.
– Yeah, I don’t know the political side
like how that’s all going to impact it
to be forced to divest, but if they are.
– Yeah, it’s gonna be banned if they don’t.
It’s just a question of like,
is TikTok gonna sell or not?
– Yeah, what would you do?
– Oh God, bro, we just, we’re winding the podcast down.
Are you really about to start another five hour talk?
Truthfully, I would have to surround myself
with like the 10 greatest algorithms
to make people in the world
and I’d have to spend like a week with them
and just like absorb.
Like I have no idea what I would do right now.
– Jimmy, this has been a pleasure.
– It’s been fun.
– Thanks for doing it, man.
I’m excited to hoop.
I hope it pays tonight.
– So on basketball camp five,
we’ll do another one every two years.
So what are we doing?
– We’re like the Olympic Cycles
like every two years in our face.
– Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberger
in the other room, we gotta crank out this podcast
and I’m gonna ball with them.
– All right boys, we did it.
All right, great out of here.
– Thanks Jimmy.
– Hey boys.
♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
♪ On the road, let’s travel never looking back ♪
– Hey, Sean here.
A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
So he started Twitter
and before that he sold a company
to Google for a hundred million dollars
and somebody asked him.
They said, Ev, what’s the secret man?
How do you create these huge businesses,
billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is
that you take a human desire,
preferably one that’s been around for thousands of years
and then you just use modern technology to take out steps.
Just remove the friction that exists
between people getting what they want.
And that is what my partner Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has
managing your money
and being able to do your financial operations.
So they’ve removed all the friction
that has existed for decades.
No more clunky interfaces.
No more 10 tabs to get something done.
No more having to drive to a bank,
get out of your car just to send a wire transfer.
They made it fast, they made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business.
You don’t have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two,
but six of my companies right now.
And it’s used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you want to be like me,
head to mercury.com, open them an account in minutes.
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All right, back to the episode.
– So here we go.
I have it here.
This is the Mr. B’s secret.
– I don’t know if I should be concerned.
– And I guess you faked going to college?
– Oh, that’s a juicy one.
– On your hundredth video, you wrote your stats.
– I didn’t do that, I remember that.
– It’s not like at a hundred you were rich and famous.
– People say it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
And I’m like, that’s when you start.
– But you know like nobody does this, right?
– I don’t understand why.
– So we want to do an exercise.
– To see.
– If I can come up with a viral idea.
– But with a budget of $1,000.
– Yeah, exactly.
– So we’re going to do a random word generator.
– They’re going to think this is rigged.
– All right, so they gave us the word grandmother.
So what’s a viral idea with a grandmother?
I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega-manger.
♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
♪ On a road less traveled never looked back ♪
– What’s up?
– How’s it going boys?
– Hey, how you doing?
– Let’s go.
So it’s been two years.
Lots to update people on then.
I think your business has grown like 10X since then.
– Probably something like that, yeah.
– Yeah, it’s wild to see.
In fact, actually, this is kind of where I want to start
because you walk in, we’re in your office.
This is like Jimmy’s actual office
and it’s easy to see the size and scale.
And now it looks like, of course, you know, like,
this is all, yeah, this is all happening.
But I like to see that journey.
And I actually want to play a clip for you.
– So we’re starting off with the origin story
that sounds like.
– You’re going to hate this.
– This letter room.
– You’re going to hate this.
– Let’s, this is from a video on your YouTube channel
called Quitting.
– Oh God.
– I don’t know if you remember this.
– Oh God.
– Do you know what you’re about to hear?
– I remember uploading this video.
I cannot, I do not remember a single thing
I said in this video.
– You guys make it really hard to quit.
It’s been a month since I uploaded to YouTube.
And to be honest, I was pretty sure I was done with YouTube.
I kind of want to start uploading.
Like I feel like my YouTube channel has so much potential.
I made over half a thousand dollars in money
off of this channel.
I feel like this channel could grow like money aside,
just I could become famous,
which would be awesome in and of itself.
So I don’t know.
I might start uploading it.
– Is this AI?
– This is you dude.
– I don’t remember saying any of that.
Whoa.
– How loud is that dude?
– Oh my gosh.
I was making $500 a month.
Why would I quit?
– And in the thing you’re talking about,
you’re like, you know, I’ve been busy with sports
and I just haven’t been as consistent.
And then what you said was you were like,
the comments have kept me going.
– Yeah.
– You’re like, I logged in today.
I wasn’t planning to upload, but I saw 20 comments.
And you know what?
I think I might keep uploading.
(laughing)
– Man, that’s crazy. – What a fork in the right.
– Yeah.
That was also around the time I got Crohn’s disease
’cause I was really into baseball
and I wanted to play baseball in college.
And so I was all in on baseball
and there was constant tug and pool
where like one day I’d wake up and I’d be like,
I want to be trying to play in the MLD,
which I had zero shot of, I never would have.
But you know, you’re delusional when you’re a little kid.
And then the next day I’d be like,
you know, I want to be a YouTuber
and this is more realistic and I can make money.
And then I got Crohn’s and I went from 200 pounds
and I was weightlifting every day down to 139
on the verge of dying and I lost every ounce of muscle I had.
I was like, well, I just made this easier.
You too.
I was probably like 14, 15 at the time.
And then yeah, that’s so–
– Sometimes life is working for you.
– Yeah, that was probably around that time there too.
So I was probably going through Crohn’s during that
and trying to figure out like, am I doing YouTube?
Am I doing baseball?
‘Cause I’m a very all in kind of guy.
Wow.
And so, I mean, just to hear you be like–
– $500 a month, that’s crazy.
– No, no, no, no.
Half a thousand.
– Half a thousand.
(laughing)
I don’t even heard that, that’s amazing.
– I was richer than I thought back then.
So I mean, no, I was definitely capped in.
I was not making $500 a month.
Or maybe I had one month I made $500 and I was like,
okay, maybe someone from school might see this
and I want to flex.
As I was like, when I graduated from high school,
I was making nothing.
I was not making $6,000 a year back then.
– Dude, you had this great quote.
You go, I started making videos when I was 11.
No one watched when I was 11.
No one watched when I was 12.
No one watched when I was 13.
14, is anyone ever gonna watch these things?
16, nobody’s watching.
17, oh, I’m about to graduate high school.
Still, no one is watching my videos.
– Yep, and 18, no one watched though.
I think it was around 19
where I started to really figure it out.
– And I think, so why are we doing this episode, right?
Our audience is not trying to be YouTubers.
It’s mostly business, founders, investors.
– It works for you.
– Yeah, yeah, I’m kind of a YouTuber now.
You got me.
What I like about you is that your approach
to whether it’s YouTube, selling chocolate,
losing weight, whatever it is,
you have a certain mentality.
I think you were wired differently.
I think in 20 years, I’m gonna be able to look,
I’m gonna show my kids and be like, yeah,
before Jimmy was president, you came on my podcast.
We sat at this little table.
So I honestly think you’re wired differently
and I wanna share those with audience
that anybody can use, whether you wanna be a swimmer,
you wanna be a YouTuber,
you wanna be a business person, whatever.
I also called your assistant.
– Called your thumbnail guy.
– Are they didn’t even tell me that?
What?
– And so here we go.
I have it here.
This is the Mr. Beast secrets.
And so.
– I don’t know if I should be concerned.
– We’re gonna go through these.
These are nine of what I consider to be your rules.
Now you could tell me if these are both.
– Are you making this a game?
He’s laying in front of me.
– Here you go.
So we’re gonna play this game.
And each one of these is to me a rule of Mr. Beast.
It’s something we’ve seen about the way you operate.
And I want you to kind of talk about these.
So this is number one.
– Okay.
Burn the boats.
Burn the boats.
So burn the boats.
Your mom wanted you to go to college.
And I guess you faked going to college.
You pretended to go.
What is the story?
– Oh, that’s a juicy one.
So well, first off,
we didn’t have the kind of money to go to a real college.
So it was just like a free community college.
But yeah, my mom, because she grew up pretty traditionally,
the military worked her whole life.
But then in 2008, she lost everything
when the real estate collapsed.
And so lost all her savings and stuff.
Like we went bankrupt and had to file for bankruptcy.
Like, so she’s like very paranoid.
She just wants her kid to like go get a job
and like not fuck up and not do any,
if she’s very risk adverse.
And so that was a constant tug and pull
’cause I’m like, I’m gonna be a YouTuber or homeless.
And she’d be like, maybe you could be homeless.
And I’m like, okay, I mean, it is what it is.
I don’t care.
I’m gonna be a YouTuber.
And she just never clicked in her head to her.
It’s like, if he doesn’t get a college degree,
he’s like, my son’s a failure.
I just wasted 18 years.
Like he’s, he’s not gonna be able to provide.
So for her, it was like either college or my life’s ruined.
Cause that’s just how her brain’s wired.
And because she went through so much.
And so when I was like, I don’t want to go.
She was just like, then leave, get out of the house.
Like I can’t, I just can’t bear the sight of my son
just sitting around and in, you know,
just throwing his life away.
And I didn’t have enough money to move out.
So I was like, frick.
And luckily the community college is so cheap.
It’s not like she was wasting money on it.
So I was like, okay, I’ll go to college.
And then I mean, I just flat out lied to her.
Like I was like, I’ll do it.
But you know, I had no intention of actually doing it.
And so I went just to see what it was like.
And I was like, well, maybe I’m like being a little dramatic.
And I went to class for like a week.
Horrible. It was so boring.
I mean, I swear like the teacher was just reading out of the book.
And I was like, why, why do I have to,
I could just read the book.
Like what are we doing?
You know, and I said that to some of the people around me.
And they’re like, yeah, that’s what education is.
Stop complaining.
And I’m like, I just was my head hurt.
And so then I was like, it is what it is.
Like I have like a six month time clock
where I have to make enough money where I can move out
because once my mom knows,
I’m screwed.
She’s going to kick me out of the house.
Honestly, I would want to leave the house
because I know it’s going to make her depressed and very sad.
So you just didn’t go after that?
Yeah. So I would go every day, go.
And then I would just sit in like this,
like I had a really old, like Dodge Durango
that was super used a lot of miles.
And I would just sit in the Dodge Durango and like edit videos.
And I film at night and I’d come home.
And would you come back and be like, school was great now?
Yeah. I was just like, yeah, you know,
she’d make house college.
And I was like, you know, and then we went on.
And I just wouldn’t tell her that I’d stop going.
But you burned the boats. You’re like, all right,
I got six months. Exactly.
I got to either make it or she gets through.
And somehow I figured it out.
I don’t even remember, but we,
I had a month where I made 20 grand right before it was time,
like the window was almost up.
And then I just told my mom, I was like,
I haven’t been going, I’m failing.
I found a place down the road, it’s 700 bucks a month.
Sorry. She’s like, all right.
Hey, real quick, I’m trying something special
for this episode. Let me know if you like it.
We were talking to Jimmy and before these episodes,
I do 30, 40 hours of research and prep.
And I make detailed notes that for me,
make it super easy to remember all the key takeaways.
But for the first time,
I’m actually going to give those notes to you
so you can get them for free in the description below.
It’s my notes, the key takeaways from this episode.
Go ahead and grab it.
It’s down in the description below.
Is this kind of a strategy for you where you’re like,
I don’t think it’s a strategy to support my personality.
I’m a very obsessive person.
Like if you told me to like do a hundred things,
I would struggle at it.
But if you told me to think on this one thing
every second of the day for the next 10 years,
like I can do that pretty easily.
So I like to just obsess over something.
I like to dream about it, wake up, think about it,
think about it, think about it, think about it,
think about it, more work on it, work on it,
work on it, think about it, think about it,
dream about it and just do that every single day.
Like that, to me, it comes very naturally.
What was your observation?
We just went to Walmart with Jimmy.
You did.
Jimmy, we haven’t talked about this.
Most of your items probably doesn’t even know.
I sell chocolate.
We have a feastable since the childhood company
and I’m sure we’ll go into that at some point.
Yeah.
So this episode has brought you by feastables.
So I took him to a Walmart
just because it’s my favorite thing to do.
At my free time, I go walk up and down chocolate aisles
in different retailers and so I brought him along.
He was telling us everything about merchandising,
everything, not just about feastables
but about competitive chocolate companies.
He was showing us like talking numbers of sales.
Dude, I thought like influencers,
it’s just like you give them a product.
They’re like, oh, this, okay guys, hey, buy this.
You know the chocolate game inside and out.
He was in the aisles, like reconfiguring the SKUs,
making everything straight.
I like landed in DC for a layover
to then fly to North Carolina.
And then I got off the plane to go to my connective flight
and I was like, wait a minute.
And then I just opened up like Google Maps
and I searched Walmart and I was like,
I can just drive there and hit 25 Walmarts on the way home.
And so then it was like 10 a.m.
And then I just skipped my connective flight,
just rented a car and I drove from DC,
visited every Walmart on the way to North Carolina.
I didn’t get home till like 9 p.m.
And I just like, it was like–
– I wonder if the CEO Hershey’s has done that.
– Probably not.
– I wonder if he’s doing it.
And then the guy–
– It’s a problem.
– Your friend who was like,
have you gone to Walmart with him?
They’re like, yeah, I don’t know.
Jimmy has like a badge.
Like if something’s out of stock,
he just goes in the back and restocks it himself.
Do they give you like, do you have some way of like–
– Well, it’s a vendor’s license.
So a lot of people have vendor’s license like beverage,
like Coca-Cola, so they have a direct sales network word.
You can fit like theoretically 10,000 chocolate bars
in a palette.
You can only fit 500 Coke cans.
So it’s like a lot harder to store 10,000 cans of Coke
than it’s 10,000 chocolate bars.
So for that, they have Coke charts that some Walmart’s,
they go to every single day
and they’ll just take the product
and go put it in the back for the Walmart employees
and then they’ll go stock the shelves and everything.
So Walmart’s pretty transparent about that,
which I was, when I first got into the CPG game,
I was like, no shot.
Like they’re just gonna let us do it.
But yeah, if your product’s out of stock on the shelf
and you have a vendor’s license,
you can go in the back, scan it in and put it on the shelf.
– Smart.
– Yeah, I mean, you could argue it’s not a good use
for your time and I don’t know why I do it.
It’s kind of therapeutic.
I just love going to Walmart to fix the product
and I like just observing it,
like what it looks like on the shelf,
seeing what the competition’s doing,
just seeing who’s grabbing it and buying it.
– It’s like those memes, like men won’t go to therapy,
but they’ll do this.
(laughing)
This is your thing, right?
– Organize a chocolate aisle in Target or Walmart.
– So let’s do rule number two.
This one, go ahead, we can reveal this.
I think you know what this one is.
– Rule of 100.
I know.
– I gave it a name.
So this is, I’m gonna quote you on this.
So this was somebody, you know,
I’m sure you could ask this a million times.
– Okay.
– What advice do you have for me as a YouTuber?
How do I be successful on YouTube?
And you said this thing that to me was like,
every creator should print this and put it on their wall.
– Oh God, what did I say?
– This applies to everything.
You go, look, your first videos,
not gonna get views, period.
– Make 100 videos, improve something every time
on the 100th one, then ask questions.
– To me, that’s the rule of 100.
Is before you come ask for advice,
it’s like have you made 100 videos
and every time try to make one thing better.
And that’s like also very achievable too.
It’s not like some insurmountable thing to do.
It’s like, all right, I’m gonna make my intro better.
I’m gonna make my editing better or whatever it is.
And the beauty of what you said was,
I think the way you said it, you were like,
if you do that a hundred times,
and I say, come talk to me after you’ve done the hundred,
people, 900% of people just don’t do it.
And then the 1% of people who do,
they don’t need me after that.
Like you figure it out, which is-
– And it’s more of a metaphorical mindset
because that’s the thing.
It’s most people who like need advice
is just go do it and learn to failure.
I’m a big fan of just trial by fire,
go do it, fuck up a bunch of times
and like get 0.1% better
and then do that for a couple of years.
– I have a couple other pictures to show you.
So this is one, this is one of your thumbnails.
– Oh God.
– During your ride-
– That’s still on my channel.
– So I went and I looked at your first hundred.
I was like, all right, he said the rule of a hundred,
let me go look at his first hundred.
And I saw this and like today you’re probably known
as like one of the best, smartest thumbnail people
in the world, right?
– Black Ops do shotgun gameplay
with commentary PS4 or Xbox.
– I suck at making thumbnails,
which is honestly dope because most people,
if they feel like they’re bad at something,
they just don’t do it.
– Yeah.
– They shy away.
– Yeah.
– And then you have this other one,
which is like your hundredth video.
On your hundredth video, you wrote your stats.
You go, subscribers.
– I did do that.
I remember that.
– 730 subscribers.
So on your rule of a hundred,
it’s not like at a hundred you were rich and famous.
– Yeah.
– Right.
– And honestly, yeah, probably 150 of them
are me asking people on Xbox Live to subscribe.
Like when I be playing Call of Duty and like a game chat,
I’d be like, “Yo, subscribe to my channel.”
So.
– What do you see people get wrong
about the rule of a hundred?
– Most people just aren’t as obsessed
with improving things.
They get like pigeonholed in the box
and they’re like, “Oh, I just need to improve.”
I mean, this applies to everything,
but I guess specifically content.
They’ll be like, “Oh, I just need to write better jokes
or I need to have better camera or this.”
And then it’s just a mindset.
Like every single thing can be improved.
There’s no such thing as a perfect video.
You know, from, I mean, you can go as low as you want
to like the coloring, to what you’re wearing,
to how you speak, to how long the video is.
I mean, there’s nothing that you can’t improve.
And so like just having that mindset
where you’re always trying to get better
and like applying that to everything across the board,
not just narrowing in on this one little thing.
But also with this, honestly,
a lot of people are mentors, they just don’t listen.
So they’ll ask me for advice
and like the ones who will listen,
they’ll take their revenue from like 30K to 400K a month
or their goal subs or whatever it is.
I can show them how to hit it.
But a lot of times just people ask for advice.
I’ll say it’ll be like in one ear and out the other.
And like, so those are the worst.
– I use this because I was studying Seinfeld recently.
And I don’t know if you know,
Seinfeld has this daily thing.
Seinfeld is now like 70 years old.
He’s still like in the stand-up comedy game.
He’s the only stand-up billionaire like ever.
So he’s the only comedian who’s a billionaire.
It’s pretty crazy.
And so I was like, all right,
what can I learn from Seinfeld?
And one of the things he did was he was like,
every day for like the last 45 years,
I wake up and my first two hours of the day, I write.
He’s like, I write jokes.
He’s like, guess what, if you want to get good at jokes,
you write jokes every day.
And he’s like, every day
I just try to make it one better than the other.
They talk about writer’s block.
He’s like, that’s nonsense.
He goes, my rule is I sit down, I don’t have to write.
I just can’t do anything else.
And he’s like, and then that makes me write.
And I’ve been doing that.
And he has this yellow legal pad
of all the pages he ever did.
And he literally laid them out on a road.
And he like paved the whole road.
It became like a yellow brick road basically.
It’s incredible.
– Do you know how many hours that is?
Two hours a day for 45 years?
30,000 hours, right?
– Yeah.
– That’s the thing.
People say it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
And I’m like, 10,000 hours, that’s when you start.
That’s the mindset you need with like the rule of 100.
It’s not, because 10,000 hours, what is that?
It’s only like eight hours a day every day for four years.
– Yeah, exactly.
– It’s not that, they get crazy.
But to a lot of people, that’s the saying,
10,000 hours in your master.
I think it should be 100,000 hours to be honest.
I think 10 is too easy.
– So if Seinfeld is like locking himself in a room.
In something, I can’t do anything but write jokes.
Do you ever have to do that?
Or is it just–
– No, this is what I live for.
– Yeah.
– So I mean, I just, I wake up, I walk in the studio
and normally this whiteboard over here,
we erased it, I guess it wouldn’t be leaked,
but it have all the businesses, all the piles,
all the bottlenecks, anything I could do
to push things forward.
And it’s all listed out.
And there’d be probably three or 400 things.
And then we’d go through at the start of each week
and we’d just pick what needs to be done to,
what should we prioritize, et cetera, et cetera.
So it’d be like feastables.
It’s like, you know, ethical sourcing.
Here’s three things that need to be done.
Here’s all the major bottlenecks that if you stepped in,
you could push it forward.
Content, toys, lunch, whatever.
So that’s more how I structure my days is like,
’cause we just have a lot going on.
And it’s just like making sure what I’m working on
is the most efficient thing.
Because if there’s like 10 people sitting around
waiting on me to make a decision to go work,
that shouldn’t be a Friday thing.
That should be a fucking Monday at 9.01 a.m. thing.
You know what I mean?
So it’s very even just,
just figure out what I need to accomplish in a week.
And then even the order of what we do is very important.
– You wanna do this?
– Yeah, you wanna do it, Jimmy?
Let’s see this bad boy.
You can make anything viral.
– So in your, can we talk about your leaked?
– Yeah, of course.
– The document.
– How to succeed.
– Yeah, you did a podcast on it.
– So we wanna do an exercise.
– Exercise is a challenge.
– A challenge.
– A challenge.
– To see if I can come up with a viral idea.
– Yeah, exactly.
– Okay.
The problem here, I’m down for this.
The only, the ironic thing is,
the only one here who will actually know if it’s viral or not
is me.
(laughing)
– You’re grading yourself here, right?
– I know.
– It’s that meme where Obama’s putting the medal on himself.
– Exactly.
‘Cause you guys could be like,
– I don’t think they’ll get a hundred million views
and I’ll just go, no.
(laughing)
– But here’s the stipulation.
Take a normal thing.
– Yeah.
– Make it an interesting viral idea,
but with a budget of a thousand dollars.
– A thousand dollars.
– ‘Cause it’s easy to say, oh,
Mr. Beast would just put a million dollars on the line.
– No, you can make it 10 grand.
– Okay, 10 grand, 10 grand.
– Okay.
– And you said you used to use random word generators.
– Oh, I did all the time.
– So we gave you a random word generator.
If you hit, I don’t remember what you said.
– Generate random words.
– You can pay, you can flip through a few until you find a word.
– Right, that got hundreds of millions of views.
Me laying in a coffin, it’s like, holy shit.
Put a coffin 10 feet on the ground,
cover with 20,000 pounds of dirt.
I’m literally in a coffin for a week.
That’s cool.
That’s viral.
That was seven days of me laying down.
I theoretically could have, instead of doing that,
laid in just a bathtub for seven days.
No one would have gave a fuck.
Like that video wouldn’t have,
but in theory, it’s the same amount of time,
at least from a film and perspective.
Logistically, maybe not.
But in theory, both for me just laying down for seven days.
But one is super fucking viral.
The other no one cares about.
And so that’s like the power of ideas.
Like an idea, with the right idea,
you can do the exact same amount of work
as a different idea, but get 50 X to return.
So that’s why I’m so adamant about generating good ideas.
All right.
So I just hit random, create random words.
– Choc.
– Choc.
– Choc, that’s easy.
– They’re gonna think this is true.
– Here you go.
– Send chocolate.
This is a random word generator, bro.
They’re not gonna,
they’re gonna think this whole thing’s safe.
– Let’s do a new one, non-chocolate.
– Grandmother.
All right, so they gave us the word grandmother.
So what’s a viral idea with a grandmother
that could be done for $10,000?
I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega-manger,
I would do, I completing a hundred year old’s bucket list.
– Oh, so you would meet a grandma?
– Yeah, I’d find a grandma.
I mean, if you really wanted to,
I wouldn’t say I would do this,
but if you wanted like a viral, viral video,
I’d find a grandmother who’s like,
terminally ill and I’d take her and her grandkids
and come, you know, do everything in the bucket list for them.
Like, bro, that-
– That’s a cool idea.
– Like, don’t do this title,
but she will die in 30 days.
So I fulfilled all her wishes that you’ve clicked that.
– Dude, that’s so good.
Hold on, we gotta do another one.
Okay, you passed.
– You passed the test.
I just, I-
– All right, bro.
This is a lifestyle.
I can make things better.
– I like the magic tricks.
– Drawing, you wanna do that one?
– Yeah, drawing.
Okay, the next one here was drawing.
I mean, well, so you want it for 10 grand.
‘Cause the first thing I thought of is for drawing
is drawing the world’s largest picture,
but that would be more than 10 grand.
Actually, weirdly enough,
a lot of videos go viral on YouTube
where people are just like customizing phones
or things like that.
I, depends, if I’m like a really good artist,
I would do like TikToks go super viral
where they like find a guy, a couple on a street
and they like sketch them.
– Stop them.
– But they sketch them like really ugly,
but they like stop really beautiful people
and then they turn the artwork around.
They’re like, “What the fuck?”
And those do really well.
Like, it’ll be like a very handsome guy,
but they’ll do their face like really round
and like with buck teeth.
And it’s always, those do really well on TikTok.
Like I’ve seen some get a hundred million views.
So that would be one way you could do drawing.
I mean, even it’s just, if you’re good enough artist,
like, and if you’re not,
just get good and study and be good.
I would like, you could design like a hospital floor
or something for like make-a-wish kids
and like do like cool artwork or something.
If there’s like some film you could put up over
draw it and like do a design
that they just peel off a couple of days later.
Like that wouldn’t be that expensive.
And that’d be cool.
Like I surprised make-a-wish kids
with their favorite characters or something.
Yeah, I mean, the, how many do you want?
– When you’re brainstorming,
are you usually just kind of by yourself?
Are you like, what’s your career?
Like if I said, “Jim, you gotta come up with something.
What would you do to set yourself up
to come up with great ideas?”
– Yeah, ’cause in transparency, I have teams now.
And so I don’t, I’m not as like,
I used to do this all myself.
Now I pay a lot of people to do it.
And I just like work with them on the back 10%.
But I mean, yeah.
If you really want to come up with like great ideas,
you need to surround yourself
with other very creative people.
I mean, I’m not gonna say their names,
but I have at least five people
that if I really needed to solve something,
I would call, I’d fly them down.
It’d be boom, boom, boom, boom, me in the middle.
And we could solve anything like creatively
in terms of virality or anything like that.
They’re just like really, really good.
Like once good with thumbnails,
once like the smartest guy I’ve ever met
when it comes to titles, another,
he’s just a fucking freak.
And he says the craziest stuff,
but it’s very like inspirational.
And so you need like that like shotgun
that’s just constantly shooting out stuff.
And then like another guy,
we would describe him more as like a sniper.
Like he’s not gonna say much,
but when he says it, you’re like,
“Dang, that’s good.”
So yeah, I just have like my go-to people
who are like very creative and like,
yeah, they just pull the best out of me.
It’s very important you have that like,
I think Ben Steve Jobs called it in like creative ink,
like his think tank.
And they had a thing where they were like a Pixar,
they have a book called “Creativity Ink.”
– “Creativity Ink,” yeah.
– And he said, people think,
“Oh, we just come up with the best ideas right away.”
He goes, “No.”
He goes, “The creative process is taking something
“that sucks and removing suck.”
And so he’s like, “Yeah, we sit there,
“we watch the first version and it sucks.”
And then we trust each other enough to be like,
“Yeah, that kind of sucks, but here’s what sucks about it.
“Go back, try again, try again, try again.”
He’s like, “By the end, by the 10th thing,
“we’ve just removed all the suck
“and all that’s left is the good bit.”
– Yeah, I was just–
– Do you buy that, is that?
– Yeah, it was just that Pixar is at the Steve Jobs building
and I was just with some of the employees
while they were working and just seeing how they go about it.
And they were doing daily reviews over there,
which is like, every day what they work on,
they’re showing to the director and stuff
and getting real-time feedback.
And they’re very like, ego-less.
And it was very cool to see their culture
and how they go about it.
‘Cause in terms of animated films, they’re second to none.
– Right.
I remember a couple of years ago when we talked to you,
you said that coming up with ideas,
was still the thing that you felt like
you had the most trouble handing off to anyone else.
It was like the thing that you still just like,
excelled most at and couldn’t get anyone else to just leave.
– Oh, I’ve trained so many great people at that now.
– Okay.
– Yeah, I mean, I have enough ideas for the next five years.
So that’s not a bottleneck at all.
I have too many.
I would just start listing them off,
but then the problem is everyone’s stealing them stuff.
– Yeah, yeah.
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All right, back to the episode.
– Okay, great.
Let’s go to the next one.
All right, so we have, that’s three of the rules.
Number four, I’ll flip this one, cloning.
– Yes.
– All right, so the backstory of this one is,
last year when we were doing our camper event,
it’s basically a room full of business people,
billionaires, all of whatever.
And you started describing how you run your company.
And you were 25 years old at the time,
you’re now your 26.
– Well, these people double my age
in 20 times the experience of me.
– Correct, and so they were listening and were like,
so who is this guy?
Well, this guy’s been following you around all day.
Who is this and how do you run this?
How do you train people?
And you were like, you describe this process of cloning.
And I swear, I saw like five billionaires
make a note to themselves.
So can you describe what is your cloning principle
and what does that mean?
– Well, the thing is like as a founder,
because I assume a lot of your viewers run this.
– Founders and investors.
– Yeah, like you’re constantly having to put out fires,
you’re constantly having to do things.
And that’s a flaw.
You’re always gonna be putting,
like having to work on stuff,
but you should view any type of you have to work on things
as a flaw.
And it’s like, how do you,
what’s the fastest way to stop working on something?
Every time you work on it, have someone on your hip
and have them learn how to do it,
essentially clone you to do that task.
And so anytime, I don’t ever work alone anymore,
because anytime I’m doing something, that’s a problem.
And like someone should be doing this in six months.
And so that’s just like the cheat code to doing it.
– And it’s cloning, not training, why?
– Well, we would call,
now that I have hundreds of employees now,
I think we’re probably closing on 500.
So it’s a lot more training,
but clones are more like the all in people
who are gonna like run your company one day
and make, like, and have the upside to like live with you.
And, you know, ’cause like someone who’s making $40,000,
you’re at the back gonna live with you
and follow your own 15 hours a day.
– Right, but early on you had that.
You had people literally like-
– Yeah, I still have people like that,
but it’s like, that’s just a small subset of it.
So yeah, on the core team, yeah, 100%.
It’s just like, the thing is,
the more you know about everything going on, the better.
‘Cause a lot of what you do in one part of,
one vertical business in finance or in this or that,
affects other parts.
And so the more you understand the whole business,
the more you understand the ripples you create across things,
the better efficiently and better,
you can do these kinds of things.
And so just having a clone who knows everything
about the whole business, as opposed to just one section,
just makes it where they can just make decisions
so much faster and they can cut through red tape.
And it just makes it so much easier for you to just like,
’cause like when you’re in hyper growth scale,
you don’t know like what the next fire is gonna be
or the next things is to fix.
And so you just have a couple versions of yourself.
It’s just so nice.
‘Cause it’s like,
oh, this thing over here and editing is falling apart.
All right, clone that you’ve followed me around
for the last three years, you know what I would do,
just go fix it, you know what I mean?
So I don’t have to go fix it.
– Every part of a company is not like,
it’s not like you look at a thing, you’re like editing.
Editing is its own thing.
No, editing is people editing, right?
Everything is people.
And so what I liked about the way you were doing it was,
I think on the outside, people hear this like,
follow you around all the time, live with you.
That’s crazy.
You know, that’s harsh.
I met the people doing it and they were like,
this is the greatest opportunity.
– Exactly.
– I came here for this.
I want to be great.
He’s given me the opportunity to be great.
Not everybody wants it, but I really want this.
– You can either go to college for like,
it’s not even for you.
Go to college for three years
or you can follow Sean around for three years
and like just all day, every day.
And the version of you that follows Sean around
for three years will make way more money.
You’ll be way more experienced, way more valuable to him.
Or you could just go to any one of his competitors
and you’ll make 10 times more than if you got it.
– Have you ever heard of Warren Buffett cloning story?
– No.
– So Warren Buffett, when he was young,
he wanted to learn investing, right?
So he goes to the guy who wrote the book
on investing Benjamin Graham.
And he’s like, Mr. Graham, I’m Warren Buffett.
I’m a big fan of your work.
I want to work for you.
I will work harder than anyone you know.
And you know what?
I’m willing to work for you for free
because this matters so much.
I want to learn from you.
And then Graham goes, son, your price is too high.
And he was, Warren was like surprised.
And then later he’s like, he was so right.
I got so much more out of working every day
at Ben Graham’s hip than him getting my free labor.
Actually the value exchange was like completely,
he was correct.
And that always stuck with me because it’s so true.
Like dude, how do you, if you want to learn,
that’s the best way you could possibly learn.
And as a founder, ultimately you want judgment to scale.
So it’s like, if people in your company can think,
what would Jimmy do and get the right answer?
Now you got two jimmies, right?
You know, like for the most part they can make decisions.
And then other times it should be like,
what would Jimmy do?
Okay, Jimmy’s not always right.
In this instance, he’s an idiot.
Let’s go call him out on it.
What will he say when I tell him
what I’m actually going to do?
Yeah.
And then they think even one step further,
which is like my like long-term clones are great.
They’ll be like, okay, well, Jimmy’s going to want data back.
He’s not going to care about an opinion.
So I’m going to just go do all the research
and grab the data.
And then they’ll ask me something and they’ll say,
blah, blah, blah.
And they’ll be like, I knew you were going to say that.
And I’ll be like, oh, great.
Hey, by the way, it’s not just you.
Even other people, there was like a guy,
he was also cloning people.
He was like, yeah, I’m the main guy
for this part of the business.
So I need to be training people.
So this is how I’m doing it.
Zero to one is so difficult, but then one to three,
you know, like it’s so much easier.
So that’s like the hard part is like training that for,
like downloading, I’ll pick a random thing,
like writing the videos, right?
Like obviously I used to write all the videos myself,
taking all that and getting it where someone else
could do it without all keeping the essence of like,
what makes it viral and what makes it good.
So I’m going to do that.
The essence of like, what makes it viral
and what makes it good and not feeling too corporate
and scripted because we’re not scripted, et cetera.
Like going from zero to one, that took like five years.
But then, you know, him training the next two people
is great cause I don’t have to do it.
And he trains those two and those two train the next.
And so it’s just like that first clone is so imperative.
And then they can do the rest.
That’s great.
You want to do the next one?
Sure.
Possible is possible.
Fuck yeah.
Impossible is possible.
All right.
So this is, I asked your, I’m friends with Rohan,
the guy who runs your Tik Tok.
Yeah.
I go, tell me the thing where you realize
like this guy’s built different.
This guy thinks differently than a normal person would.
And I was like, that’s the story I want.
And he goes, he goes, I don’t know how to explain it.
This is the quote, Jimmy will give you an impossible mission
but he’ll say it in a way that makes it seem totally possible.
And then he leaves the room and you’re like,
God damn, this is impossible.
He goes, for example, Jimmy came to me and said,
I need 10 million Tik Tok followers a month Rohan.
He goes, and every month I told Jimmy,
it’s impossible like a hundred times.
And he told me, do it 500 times.
He told me to do it 500 times.
I think we had two months or again, 10 million.
That’s what he told me.
He goes, he goes, I didn’t do it most months,
but I did do it like, you know, two months.
And we got way further than we ever would have got,
had he not laid down like kind of this impossible gauntlet.
So that’s one story.
I’m sure there’s like a thousand of these,
but like, do you live by this?
I guess, how would you talk about that?
Well, I don’t try to just give people KPIs
that I think aren’t possible, just to torture them.
I just like, I think most people,
when you ask them to do something
like very incredibly difficult.
Like what I first did,
I want to bury myself alive for a week.
Like people’s first inclination is just, that’s not possible.
And like technically almost anything is possible.
It’s so it’s just like,
so my first thing is just like, why do you say that?
Like, let’s go through the gambit.
And then they’ll always be like, well, it’s just not possible.
And then you just have to be like, go do the fucking research.
And then they’ll come back and it’s like,
is it too expensive?
Cause we can figure out ways to, is it too unstable?
We can navigate safety or whatever it is.
And so it’s like,
I hate when people tell me something can’t be done.
Just tell me the cost and like what the problem is.
Where the bottleneck is.
Yeah. And then if like,
then let’s look at those and objectively,
if it’s too expensive or something
that’s not worth investing the time into or what,
then that’s fine.
And then I’ll kill it, but just tell me something.
Cause like half the stuff I did,
if I just listened to people and they told me it wasn’t,
like I wanted the Eiffel Tower for a video.
Not possible.
Why, why is that not possible?
Go get the fucking Eiffel Tower.
Like until the head of the president of France
tells you no, it’s possible.
Like I don’t,
– Then when he says no, ask his kids.
See if they have some sway.
– Well, that’s a given while you’re on the phone.
Like we just filmed a video where we had
the three pyramids of Egypt and we were like,
you know, spinning like we were there for a hundred hours.
This crazy video, we explored the pyramids.
Like my favorite video ever, same thing.
Like you can’t just have the three pyramids.
I’m like, did Egypt tell you that?
Like, what do you mean?
Go make some phone calls, you know what I mean?
And it’s just constantly, even today,
when I’m not with my core group that I’ve trained very well,
it’s just always like, you can’t do that or no,
or they’ll go make a phone call.
Or okay, fine, Jimmy, we’ll go try to get the pyramids.
They’ll go away, they’ll come back a day later.
You can’t have the pyramids.
I’m like, who’d you call?
This tourist guy who like works at the pyramids.
I’m like, okay, call the head of tourism.
Like how do you get their number?
Okay, well that’s different.
You didn’t ask me how to get the head of tourism’s number.
You asked me, you just told me it was not possible.
Like so now, like please don’t do that again.
Like we gotta figure out what the problems are.
Let’s figure it out.
And then we make calls and you figure it out.
Next thing you know, it’s, and so it’s just like,
that’s a big thing that you have to like,
if you really, in my opinion, want to innovate
and do things that are, you know,
I’ve never been done before in push boundaries.
You have to like have a mindset amongst your people
that it’s not, nothing is impossible.
It’s just how much does it cost?
How do you do it?
And then you just make an objective decision.
– It seems to me like when you solve
these impossible problems, you have to think
on like a lower level rather than a higher level.
Have you heard the story of Elon getting his rockets
from Texas to Florida where they launched them?
– No.
So the normal way everyone gets their rockets
to Florida is on a barge, right?
But it takes like three months and costs a bunch of money.
– Didn’t he fly it there?
– He drove it there.
I was like, no, we’re going to drive it instead.
And they’re like, well, it’s way too big.
– Well, first answer was–
– It’s impossible.
– Can’t do it.
And he said, let’s go, and he has a great line,
which is physics are the only laws.
Everything else is a suggestion.
And it seems like, is it physically impossible
to get it to Florida?
No, okay, we agree on that.
Great.
Now let’s continue to figure out where the bottleneck is.
And it’s like, oh, the boat, too long, too expensive,
whatever.
And so the, you know, oh, well, it’s impossible
to get it through overpasses.
And so he’s like, well, what would be the shortest way
to get there without encountering a single overpass?
So they go, they do this like extremely circuitous route
all on back roads.
And they’re like, but even if we do that,
there’s still problem with power lines
and telephone wires.
And so they have like some of the smartest people on earth
driving in a van in front of these rockets
with big poles and they just push up
the telephone wires that we can go under.
– And then they go to the next telephone wire.
And it’s just like, you just have to like approach it
like a caveman almost to like to beat the impossible.
Do you find that’s the case a lot?
– Yeah, quite a bit.
And a lot of it is just a willingness.
It’s just people who have to love what they do.
And people who really love problems solving
will, you know, figure these things out.
And so it’s just having the right person,
the right seat at the right time who like actually wants
to go deep and like people, there are certain people
where you give them something that seems impossible
and they will be giddy.
And they’ll be like, yeah, I can’t wait.
Like I have people like that where I could call
and be like, what’s something.
They don’t wake up until it’s, until it’s hard.
– Well, it’s like, I guess if I wanted
a different world wonder if I was like,
I want the Taj Mahal for a week, right?
And they’re like, people are coming to my call
and said that, like, I promised you they would smile.
And he’s like, okay, like they can see that as a challenge.
They’d go to war to figure it out.
And then not in my company, but just there are other people
that you would say that, oh my God.
You know, and so you just got to get the right people
who just deeply enjoy solving problems
and like see it as a challenge.
And like, like there are people built that way.
And those are the people that really succeed
in that environment.
– And even a different example,
that’s not getting the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower.
One of my favorite videos of yours where I,
the first time I was like, all right, respect.
It was before I met you.
And I was like, okay, respect was,
Ben was telling me about you.
And he goes, he made a video said,
I’m going to cut through this table with a plastic knife.
– Oh my gosh.
I remember this weirdly very well.
I was sitting in high school and I just like,
I had a, I don’t know, after lunch,
I just had a, I put the plastic knife in my pocket
for somebody that I don’t remember why.
And then I just put my hand in pocket.
I was like, oh, plastic knife.
And then I just started like scraping against the desk.
And I was like, oh, well, I’m like kind of like,
I can cut this desk in half.
Like just like your stupid little high school desk.
I just did this for like five minutes
till like the teacher was like,
what the fuck are you doing?
Stop.
And then I just was like looking at the little invention.
I was doing the calculation in my head.
I was like, it would take me like 10 hours
to cut through this according to my math.
I was like, fuck it.
I think that would be like a video
where people would be interested.
So I went to the store on the way home
and I bought like a thousand plastic,
like the cheapest plastic knives I could find.
And then I just got this like $20 foldout table
and I just went in my room, hit record on the camera
and I just went to town
’cause the plastic knives would get dull after like a minute.
And I just couldn’t do it.
And I think that, I think that took 12 hours
to cut through the table with plastic knives or something.
– But that’s what I’m saying.
It was no money.
It was no money.
It wasn’t Taj Mahal.
It was like creativity or well, first boredom.
Boredom is the key.
It was like how Einstein discovered relativity.
– But that video did so well
and it’s like so dumb.
– It was just like how many leases does it take
to get to the center of relativity?
How many plastic knives does it take to cut a table?
People were like, what a fucking idiot.
– Did you do it with one by the way?
Or did you go through like a video?
– No, no, no.
Probably thousands, yeah.
– That’s insane.
By the way, that’s a spoiler.
I think that one we kind of copied number eight,
which is no doesn’t mean no way.
And there’s a big difference between no and no way.
– And possible is possible
and no doesn’t mean no, exact same thing, yeah.
– I like the clarification you had, which was like,
you’re not just like the asshole boss.
That’s like, I need this impossible thing done.
You know, whatever.
It’s more like, hey, I wanna do this impossible thing
or I wanna do this great thing.
No, okay, let’s get curious
before we just like make a decision here.
Why?
Well, let’s try to understand it.
And if it truly is no, which it rarely is, fine.
But it’s usually not.
And then the cool thing is if you do that in the company,
do it once.
People are like, oh wow, that was interesting.
Do it twice.
By the third time you do it, people are like, all right,
like that’s the way, right?
It’s contagious, right?
– 50 of time, yeah.
You know, it’s like a religion.
People start to believe when they see it, right?
– I mean, you’re in place.
For me, it tends to take a couple of dozen times
for a decision. – Well, I’ll keep pointing at it.
I’m like, guys, remember what we said and then what happened?
Let’s like, again, let’s take that and rap.
That’s a rally cry for us now.
Like we could do all these things, right?
Let’s immortalize that.
– So I’m obsessed with being transparent about money,
particularly with ultra high net worth people.
The reason being is that there’s not a lot of information
on this demographic.
And so because I own Hampton,
which is a community for founders,
I have access to thousands of young
and incredibly high net worth people.
We have people worth hundreds of millions
and sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton.
And so every year we do this thing
called the Hampton Wealth Report,
where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs
and we ask them all types of information
about their personal finances.
We ask them about how they’re investing their money,
what their portfolio looks like.
We ask them about their monthly spend habits.
We ask them how they’ve set up their estate,
how much money they’re gonna leave to charity,
how much money they keep in cash,
how much money they’re paying themselves
from their businesses.
Basically every question that you wanna ask a rich person,
we went and we do it for you
and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people.
So if you wanna check out the report,
it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
Just go to joinhampton.com, click our menu,
and you’re gonna see a section called Reports
and you’re gonna see it all right there.
It’s very easy.
So again, it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
Go to joinhampton.com, click the menu,
and then click the Report button.
And let me know what you think.
All right, we got three more to go.
All right, here we go.
Consultants?
Or is he good?
Yeah, and honestly, ’cause I wrote this,
they’re referencing my thing I wrote a couple of years ago.
I would update that just say like,
experience people or cheat codes, the right ones.
Like, ’cause it doesn’t,
’cause like my handbook, I guess,
if that’s what you would call leaked on Twitter,
and like–
Here we go, who’s your handbook?
Yeah, by Production Bible.
So many people were like,
consultants, and even consultants
are like putting this on their website.
Even Mr. V.
Endorsed on LinkedIn.
Yeah, I know.
They’re like, so many consultant tweets,
they’re like, yes, he validated our industry.
And I’m like, well,
I always specifically talking about McKinsey, you know?
It’s just more like, you know,
it was special with us,
’cause we do so many random, weird things.
I mean, what did I say in here?
Consultants are literally cheat codes,
needed to make the world’s largest slice of cake,
start off by calling the person
who has made the previous world’s largest slice of cake–
Exactly.
LOL.
He’s already done countless tasks
and can save you weeks worth of work.
I really want to drill this point home
because I’m a massive believer in consultants
because I’ve spent almost a decade of my life
hyper-obsessing over YouTube.
I can show a brand new creator
how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month.
On their own, it would take them years to do it.
Consultants are a gift from God.
Please take advantage of them.
In every single freaking task assigned to you,
always, always, always ask yourself first
if you can find a consultant to help you.
Exactly, ’cause we do so many weird, different things.
Like, oh, we’re gonna bury me alive?
Call David Blaine.
He buried himself alive.
You know what I mean?
Like, ’cause–
How’s that phone call go?
Uh, great.
They’re usually like,
“Well, we don’t have David Blaine’s phone number.”
And then I’m like, “Okay, I’ll DM him on Instagram.”
And I’m like, “Here’s his phone number.”
Call him, figure out how he didn’t die, you know?
Well, you do these things like one night,
I was just hanging out at my house,
get a call, North Carolina number, pick up.
Oh, yeah.
I go on walks and then I just like,
I will literally just close my eyes
and like flip through my contacts
and then I’ll like stop and, you know,
when it’s on S, you’ll be there.
And I’ll just be like, “Hmm, just have a random name.”
And I’ll be like, “Teach me something.”
Sometimes the calls are one minute,
other times are 20, and yeah, it’s like,
you’ve got to always be learning.
I feel like you’re saying that almost like
it’s a normal thing.
You know like nobody does this, right?
Like that’s like a-
I don’t understand why that’s-
I kind of started to steal it
’cause I was like, “Why not?”
I’m also like, I’m obsessed with learning.
Yeah.
And there’s something like maybe the mechanics of it,
I was confused.
Like so I call these people and then I just say like,
“Hey, stop, teach me something.”
What’s something that’s come out of that?
What’s funny is the more you do it,
the more people will come to expect it too.
So like, I’ll call someone,
they won’t answer and then they’ll be like,
“Let me guess, you’re on a walk, sorry, I’m busy.”
And then I’m like,
I don’t even have to respond to just get it.
Like, you know, ’cause at the start,
you’ll go on a walk and you’ll call 20 people
and you’ll have conversations with 10
’cause these high caliber people are always busy.
And then the other 10 will call you
throughout the next 24 hours
and it’s like a new sense ’cause you gotta be like,
“Oh, I just bought on a walk, I just bought on a walk.”
So, but now everyone just gets it.
It’s a protocol.
Yeah, they’re just like-
You just call us.
Yeah, so it’s like so funny that I’ve become known for that
and like people will answer
and like sometimes I don’t even say anything
they’ll be like, “Ah, all right, here’s what I’ve learned.”
It’s like, great.
‘Cause then I just like, these are people who are,
you know, some of them running companies
that are doing billions of dollars a year in revenue
and they’re learning tons of things.
They’re always experimenting
and I just get this five minute brain dump
of everything they learn, suck it out of them.
And then I’m like, here’s what I learned
’cause I always, a big part of this,
if you wanted to go well is you have to add as much value,
ideally more than what they’re given to you.
So I try to help them in any way I can
and then you hang up and you go to the next one.
Another one that is in the kind of consultants
or cheat codes is we do these talks at our event.
So at our basketball event,
it’s kind of like play ball all day
till we’re like dead tired.
And then at night, it was like, we’re hanging out.
And the first year we did it, I remember,
’cause I created the events, I was kind of the host.
I was like, I don’t wanna be like forcing
like a conference vibe.
I was like really like tiptoeing around.
I was like, I don’t want this to be awkward,
but it was actually more awkward
’cause nobody knew who anyone else was.
You do this great thing, you like grab the chair,
you put it in the middle of the room,
you’re like, hey, sit down real quick.
And you go, all right, who are you?
What’s your story?
And then they would like start
to tell like a long-winded story.
But what I liked was you would have questions.
So like, we had a real estate guy.
And instead of being like, all right,
teach me about real estate,
which the guy doesn’t know how to start.
You were like, if I had $10 million,
what would be the best way to turn it into a hundred
for real estate?
– Yeah.
– And then he talks for like five minutes,
you’re like, cool, God,
I should just give it to somebody like you.
Big sense.
(all laughing)
On to the next.
And I was like, I love the power of kind of like
the right question, the right person.
– And honestly, in group settings like that,
another thing too is just not being afraid
to cut people off.
Because some people are just so not aware
that like there’s 20 people
and even rambling for 30 minutes.
And I’m like, I feel like they got another 15 in them.
(all laughing)
Three of those people are on their phone.
Those two are checked out.
Those five are too nice to say anything.
I’ll be the one who it’s like, hey, we get it.
– All right, I got the next one.
Block out the noise.
Okay, block out.
You want to do block out the noise?
– Sure.
So here’s the quote.
When you’re small, people say you’re too obsessed.
You’re a weirdo.
Get a life, be realistic.
This is from you.
People will try to convince you
that you’re out of your mind for wanting to do this.
Then when it works, yo, you’re dry.
You’re tenacity.
That was great.
(all laughing)
– Everything you guys have been flattering me with
throughout this podcast are the exact same things
I got low key bully for in high school.
(all laughing)
It’s like, hilarious that now these grown men are like,
yo, this is fucking awesome.
You’re like, all in impossible is not possible.
No, it doesn’t mean no.
And you just like love this shit.
And like, and in high school, that’s what a fucking nerd.
Get a life, like loser.
Yeah.
That’s why you call it block out the noise, right?
Because the same things that people admire
when you’re successful are the things
that people are gonna try and tell you to stop.
– If you had listened, you wouldn’t be Mr. Beast, right?
Like we wouldn’t be here right now.
– Everyone else, and yeah, just a normal job.
But the thing is, it’s like, the big takeaway is
it just means you’re not around the right people, right?
‘Cause like, obviously I was around you guys
when you were younger.
I’m sure you guys wouldn’t have been like,
oh, what a weird, obsessed nerd.
You wouldn’t have been like, oh, this is sick.
Let’s grow together or we’re, you know,
maybe when we were 18,
we wouldn’t have that much emotional intelligence,
but we would have like flocked together.
So it’s also just finding the right people to be around.
And if you’re having to block out a lot of noise,
then you’re just like, you have a serious problem.
– It’s a signal.
– Yeah, like you really gotta change your yard
because that’s, it’s really, I mean,
if you’re the smartest person you’re hanging around,
make, you know, the one with the most ambition
and everyone else is just bringing you down.
Like you’re literally just going through
your entrepreneurial life with like a 10 pound weight
shackled to your leg.
– Yeah, last one, let’s go into reinvest everything.
– Yes, sir.
– Can I give you my version of this?
I think people know you reinvest a lot of money
to almost a comical extent.
It’s like, we made a hundred grand last month.
Great, we’re investing a hundred and one this next month.
It’s like, yeah, Jimmy, where’d you get the extra?
– I got the largest unscripted streaming deal in history
and somehow lost a ton of money on it.
– These games?
– Yeah, yeah.
– When we were here the first time,
somebody was like, you know,
what do you think is kind of like his edge?
I go, his edge is that he takes all the money he makes
and then he reinvest it.
He takes all the hours he has and he invests it
into the channel.
Then he gets the best people
and he gets them to believe that they should invest it.
And he doesn’t ever want to quit.
I don’t think this guy’s going to get rich and retire
like every other YouTuber.
I was like, that’s like a kamikaze level of commitment.
I don’t think–
– That’s right.
You used to call it a kamikaze commitment.
– ‘Cause how do you, what do you do?
What do you do with somebody who’s willing to just plow it
all back in?
That’s not the person I would want to compete against.
So that’s kind of, I guess that’s why, to me,
this is–
– I mean, you just described it perfectly.
I don’t even have to say anything.
– Yeah, I mean, ideally you find the passion that you love
and you’re all in and it’s, you know,
you shouldn’t have to like force yourself to go get up
and write it.
It should just be what you love to do, you know?
– What’s the CFO telling you as you just, at the beginning?
Now it’s kind of known, but at the beginning,
when you were describing your approach,
CFO was like your mom at the beginning, right?
– Yeah, well, I mean, at the beginning,
it was me and my mom and a couple of friends
are high school, so she was 10 jobs, I was 20 jobs.
I mean, now they just start, I mean,
people kind of normalize to your weird craziness.
So they’re more–
– But that’s now, what at the beginning,
what was that like?
– I mean, I thought I was deranged.
You know, like, oh, why do you,
like, ’cause I mean, everyone, you know,
a big bunch of YouTube videos used to be 10 grand.
I was the first one to ever spend a million dollars
on a video and two million.
– This is probably the best example, right?
– Yeah, I got a brand deal for 10,000 dollars.
I’ve broke, you keep saying CFO,
like I had a CFO back then.
You know, this was me and like paying a guy,
I went to high school with like 10 bucks an hour
to help me.
But I, I, and me going, mom, what are taxes?
– Right.
– I didn’t make money.
Do I pay taxes?
And she’s like, yes.
I’m like, fuck.
But yeah, we, I got a brand deal for 10,000 dollars.
And then I just went outside.
Like this, I used to live like two minutes.
Like the $700 a month apartment I was talking about,
or duplex, was like literally two minutes
down the road from this.
And so I just got the 10 grand.
I was like, why are we the money?
They wired it, we drew it and gave it to this homeless guy
on the side of the street.
– Were you not tempted to like have money for the first time?
– Pocket five, give it away five.
– So I pocket five, spend on a different video?
What else do, what else do you do with the money?
– It’s like, there’s a story of Zuck
when he got offered a billion dollars
for Facebook early on.
And they were like, Mark, we should talk about this.
– And he’s like, oh, if I got this money,
I would just start a new social media platform.
And I like the one I have.
– I like the one I have.
This is like legendary.
– Yeah, that’s the same thing here.
It’s like, I could pocket it,
but I just make different videos
and I just want to film this one.
I mean, it’s literally the same thing.
– It reminds me a lot, reading about Walt Disney.
This is what he was famous for.
‘Cause his brother, Roy, was like-
– I loved your podcast on it.
– Thank you, it was like the business manager.
– This is almost done, make sure you watch it out there.
– Hot take over the world, yeah.
– And Roy would like pull his hair out of like,
Walt, can we please just like save some money?
And he had like a compulsion almost to take all the money.
He like felt bad keeping any money.
He’s like, no, it has to go into making better shows.
– Yeah.
– Do you feel that like, does it-
– It has nothing to do with like wanting to keep-
It really has nothing to do with money itself.
It’s just, I want to make the best product possible.
And so it’s like, here’s the product that I want to make.
And I’m always having to settle
because we can’t spend $10 billion on a YouTube video.
You know what I mean?
‘Cause I would love to go buy everything
in every single store in this entire city
and donate it all to charity.
You know, that’d be $200 million.
So I can’t, but so it’s just like, it’s more, you know,
like this is what I want to make,
but I have to dial it back.
And it’s like, well, now we have a little bit more money.
So I just dial it back less.
There’s nothing, I don’t really care.
You know what I mean?
Like, so.
– By the way, you just came up with that number.
– Yeah, I was like, he’s done the math.
– Well, you look at this.
– Well, I know it costs $15 million
to buy everything in a Walmart, but yeah.
– 15 million?
Have you done that?
Is that one of the things you’ve done?
– We’re going to.
– Yeah, nice.
– I think that’s a fucking banger.
And we’re donating it all to charity, so it’s cool.
– What’s your like ambition, right?
So it’s like, Ben in 40 years is doing the pod on you.
– Don’t ask me 40.
Ask like 10, 40’s too far.
You’re gonna give me anxiety.
– Okay, what’s like the, what’s the dream dream?
– Right now I can’t do 40, but for the next five,
the big thing I’m focusing on,
which I was telling you guys about in the car,
is just feastables.
Why people listening.
– What can you explain about your business empire?
Can you break it down?
– Yeah, well, so specifically like chocolate,
but it seems so random.
Why is the largest YouTube in the world selling chocolate?
Well, right now, 70% of the world’s cocoa
comes from West Africa, Cote de Vare and Ghana.
And a majority of the people who work on those farms
are actually kids or child labor.
So it’s like 46% of labor.
So I guess it’s not the majority.
So I should correct this statement.
46% of labor is illegal child labor, right?
Yeah, get to your feastable work.
– I’ll eat this while you talk to her.
– Yeah, so when I got into selling chocolate,
I just learned about that.
And I talked to like exacts a big chocolate company
as I was like, so what I hear like this child labor thing,
like, is this just like, we’re just cool with this?
And they’re like, well, it’s just how it’s always been.
And there’s not really anything you can do about it.
I’m like,
– That’s the way things have always been.
– I’m like, I literally, I said to one,
I think I don’t remember the exact,
I’m gonna butcher, but I was like, Elon’s gonna put people
on Mars and you’re telling me we can’t not have little kids
farming or chocolate.
We can’t just find people over the age of 18 or whatever.
And they’re like, well, it’s not that simple.
And I’m like, what the fuck?
So that kind of like pissed me off and sent me down.
I’m like, yeah, what you mean to say is that would hurt
the billions of dollars in free cash flow.
You’re spitting off in your margins.
But anyways, so I was like, I went down that path
like two years ago.
I was like, okay, well, I don’t.
– You actually went to West Africa.
– Oh yeah.
– But before even that, it’s just like,
so then I was, we’re gonna start referencing
our piece of paper here.
So then consultants are cheat codes.
So I was like, what is the largest
ethically sourced chocolate company in the world?
Who’s the one’s doing it right?
Have you heard of Tony’s Chocolonii?
– Yeah, yeah.
– Yeah, so they’re great.
It’s a European brand, but they’re like a reporter
used to call out big chocolate and be like,
there’s a lot of childhood with you guys
aren’t ethical and like they would just ignore them.
And so then he’s like, fuck it.
– He started it, right?
– Yeah, and he started a chocolate company
and that’s Tony’s Chocolonii.
‘Cause it’s like the lonely–
– And it became like a $200 million business.
– Yeah, it’s doing pretty well.
And so I was like, let me get in contact with these people.
And I just started talking to them.
I flew them here to Greenville like the next week.
And we were just like, I was like,
teach me everything about child labor,
how we can remediate it,
what should we be doing on our farms, et cetera.
And like, I just had like phone calls with them
every single day, studied.
And then the next five companies
that are also doing ethical things,
I just absorbed everything they were all doing
into my brain.
And I was like, cool.
All right, I know what we need to do.
Step one, like the main reason why there’s child labor
is just poverty.
Like most of these farmers are making a dollar less a day.
So like, if you’re getting paid a dollar,
how can you hire someone
that’s over the age of 18 to work in your farm?
So you end up just using kids, ’cause they’re cheap or free.
So step one is you just have to pay them a living income.
So 100% of our farmers are paid a living income.
So I can go super deep.
I’m gonna keep this mile high
’cause I know not everyone is as passionate
about the child’s industry as me,
but this is what I live and breathe.
But so what is a living income, right?
Because obviously a living income in America
is completely different than in West Africa.
So there’s a living income reference price
where they look at the cost of like bread
and living and inflation.
And it’s like, you know, if a farmer sells you
like a metric tons of cocoa,
they need to make this for them to be able to live
roughly and be able to.
So we pay 100% of our farmers
a living income reference price.
So there could be an instance where you’re a farmer,
you give us a shipping container of cocoa
and you’re like, you know, we want $1,100.
I’m like, no, you want $1,300.
It’s $1,300.
Now make sure there’s no kids on your farms.
You know what I mean?
Like, or kids in illegal child labor.
And so that’s, I mean, I’m oversimplifying everything.
None of the, this is a very complex thing.
And there’s, we’re talking about tens of thousands
of farms, there’s millions of farms there.
And this is not, none of this is as simple
as I’m portraying it,
but I’m just doing my best to generalize it all.
So you pay your farmers a living income,
all our beans are fair trade certified.
And then we work with CLR and MERS,
which is the child labor remediation system.
And then they routinely audit the farms,
interview the parents, interview the kids,
see if the kids are going to school,
working on the farm, et cetera.
And then if, you know,
they identify cases of child labor following up
and getting the kid out of the child labor
and stuff like that, which all the,
and then we also, just little things,
because it’s, since it’s all a route of poverty,
the more money you help them make,
the easier it is for them to, you know,
stop using a little child labor on the farm.
So we have coaches that will like represent 200 farms
and they’ll help them get more yield
and like educate them on things they could be doing
to grow more for trees or have more trees or, well,
you know, occasionally give them wheelbarrows
or things like that.
So they can just, I mean, a little,
something as simple as a wheelbarrow,
I mean, it’s a big difference between
carrying 10 kakao plots theoretically,
again, generalizing everything,
or being able to carry 40 in a wheelbarrow.
Like that statically makes you four times more efficient.
It’s not, again, maybe you have numbers.
Yeah, so like goal is just to make feastables,
the largest ethically-sourced chocolate company in the world.
And, you know, if we can do a billion dollars a year
in chocolate sales ethically while being profitable,
then I can use that as a model to, you know,
on my videos, talk about being chocolate
and all the unethical things they’re doing
and just be like, look, it’s possible to be profitable,
to not do it at scale.
There’s no excuse, besides they just don’t care.
And then, you know, we’ll see what happens
when I get to that point.
– Last year when I was here,
I asked, I think you’re right-hand guy at that time,
I was like, what’s y’all’s focus for the year?
And most people don’t have an answer
at the tip of your tongue.
His was like, instantaneous he goes,
I think, you had a number of the number of YouTube videos,
22 or something like that. – 26 videos.
– Maybe 26 bangers sell a lot of chocolate, get jacked.
And he said it like that fast.
– Every day, all three.
– And you got in great shape from the last time, can you?
– Yeah, was I still fat last year,
or was that the first year?
– No, it was first.
– First year was, I mean, I wanted to try fat,
but like, you know-
– Bro, I was a fucking walrus, that was 240 pounds.
Yeah, I’m, right now I’m 190.
So I probably-
– But you had started lifting at the last one we did.
And in this year, you’re like-
– Yeah, so year one, I was 240 pounds, year two,
I was probably 215, 220 pounds, and now I’m 190.
So yeah, I’m like probably 25 pounds lighter.
I can’t wait to ball.
– How did you, what’d you do?
Like, what was your approach to getting jacked?
Or like, how’d you approach it?
– I’m very heavily influenced by the people around me.
Like, if I spent too much time with you,
I’ll start speaking like you,
acting like you, thinking like you.
So I’m very cautious of that.
So I just put a lot of jacked people around me.
And then, like, my metric of success was like,
how frequently are random people just handing me chicken breasts?
Or like, you know, something high in protein?
Like, you know, ’cause like, they’re, you know,
all the, like my old friend group, you know,
all the time they’d be like,
oh, we just ordered pizza or this or that.
And it’s like, it just makes accomplishing my goals
so much harder.
Like the ratio of people ordering pizza
to the ratio of people ordering protein was just way off.
I mean, this is just how I analyze my life
because I, like, I’m so all in on business.
Like, I don’t think about this kind of stuff.
So I need an environment that just makes being jacked
very natural.
Like the weightlifting is pretty easy.
You just go to the gym 45 minutes, five days a week.
But it’s the, yes, the food that, that is a,
that’s not a thing you turn on and off.
That’s the thing that you have to be consistent on
for a very long period if you want to achieve results.
And like, I just, I can’t think about, like,
that every single day.
And I just, and it’s like, there are just times
where I’m at low points
and it’s just a lot harder to be disciplined.
And I just know if like, you know,
I always have people who are just eating healthy.
It’s just, it takes something that feels hard
and kind of makes it fun.
Like when you’re doing it together and like, you know,
and it’s just so, just surround myself with other people
trying to accomplish the same thing,
just like anything in life.
– This is what, I was living in Australia
and I literally bought a plane ticket
with no plan one way to San Francisco
because I was at this Tony Robbins event
and he said proximity is power.
– Dang, love it.
– Did you like hire anyone too
to help you, do you have like a trainer around or a coach?
– Yeah, he follows me around all day every day.
He’s a jack dude sitting downstairs.
You’ll notice he’s the one who looks like
he could be on a bodybuilding stage.
– Yeah.
– He’s usually in a tank top, you know.
– Somebody just sent me this.
You posted TikTok an hour ago.
– Yeah.
– I just got out of a meeting
with a bunch of billionaires.
TikTok, we mean business.
This is my lawyer right here.
We have an offer ready for you.
We want to buy the platform.
America deserves TikTok.
Give me a seat at the table.
Let me save this platform TikTok.
– Yeah.
– Are you gonna buy TikTok?
– I tweeted out yesterday
that I was thinking about buying TikTok.
And honestly, kind of as a joke.
And then I had even a lot of people coming to this event.
So many billionaires text me.
I mean, I’m probably up to like 35
who have like unironically reached out
and like, I want to put money in, I want to do it.
And then like two separate groups
that have like very serious bids together for it.
Also like, go get involved in this.
And then I’m like, my phone just blew up
ever since that tweet.
So then I made that TikTok ’cause it’s like,
yeah, I was joking, but now it’s like, oh, okay.
– I’ll predict it right now.
This, I think this is going to happen
because I think it should happen.
It’d be smart, right?
Any ownership group that’s doing this
would be smart to have you involved.
– As long as TikTok’s willing to sell.
Yeah, everyone interested in buying it
wants to get us involved.
– Yeah, I don’t know the political side
like how that’s all going to impact it
to be forced to divest, but if they are.
– Yeah, it’s gonna be banned if they don’t.
It’s just a question of like,
is TikTok gonna sell or not?
– Yeah, what would you do?
– Oh God, bro, we just, we’re winding the podcast down.
Are you really about to start another five hour talk?
Truthfully, I would have to surround myself
with like the 10 greatest algorithms
to make people in the world
and I’d have to spend like a week with them
and just like absorb.
Like I have no idea what I would do right now.
– Jimmy, this has been a pleasure.
– It’s been fun.
– Thanks for doing it, man.
I’m excited to hoop.
I hope it pays tonight.
– So on basketball camp five,
we’ll do another one every two years.
So what are we doing?
– We’re like the Olympic Cycles
like every two years in our face.
– Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberger
in the other room, we gotta crank out this podcast
and I’m gonna ball with them.
– All right boys, we did it.
All right, great out of here.
– Thanks Jimmy.
– Hey boys.
♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
♪ On the road, let’s travel never looking back ♪
– Hey, Sean here.
A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
So he started Twitter
and before that he sold a company
to Google for a hundred million dollars
and somebody asked him.
They said, Ev, what’s the secret man?
How do you create these huge businesses,
billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is
that you take a human desire,
preferably one that’s been around for thousands of years
and then you just use modern technology to take out steps.
Just remove the friction that exists
between people getting what they want.
And that is what my partner Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has
managing your money
and being able to do your financial operations.
So they’ve removed all the friction
that has existed for decades.
No more clunky interfaces.
No more 10 tabs to get something done.
No more having to drive to a bank,
get out of your car just to send a wire transfer.
They made it fast, they made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business.
You don’t have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two,
but six of my companies right now.
And it’s used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you want to be like me,
head to mercury.com, open them an account in minutes.
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company,
not a bank, banking services provided
by Choice Financial Group
and evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
Access Shaan’s interview prep and research notes: https://clickhubspot.com/mrbeastfiles
Episode 676: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with MrBeast ( https://x.com/MrBeast ) to talk about the mindset that made him the youngest billionaire and biggest entertainer on earth.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Origin story
(5:11) Burn the boats
(11:15) The Rule of 100
(16:49) You can make anything go viral
(23:27) Cloning
(28:39) Impossible is possible
(36:53) Consultants are a cheat code
(41:25) Block out the noise
(43:00) Reinvest everything
(47:30) Feastables
(53:02) Getting jacked
(54:56) Buying TikTok
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Links:
• MrBeast on YouTube – https://tinyurl.com/2wfkm4by
• Beast Games – https://tinyurl.com/fh3atsxp
• Feastables – https://feastables.com/
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Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
