MrBeast: If You Want To Be Liked, Don't Help People! I Lost Tens Of Millions On Beast Games... But I'm Worth $1 Billion!
Guests: MrBeast
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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There is a reason no one makes videos like me, because no one wants to live the life I live or be in my head. They would be miserable.
Are you happy?
I am going to be honest. So far, more unhappy than happy.
Well, has it ever crossed your mind to quit YouTube as a whole?
Oh yeah, of course.
Really?
Yeah.
Are you? Oh boy. MrBeast is the biggest YouTuber on the planet and he is building empires. I mean, is there anything this man cannot do? Your business empire is much bigger than most people realize.
I am only 26 and we have the largest YouTube channel in the world. Beast Games is going to shatter some pretty crazy records. We do nine figures in Feastables. But a lot of that stems from being a very confused child who is not fitting in, who feels like a freak. Plus, I really wanted to take care of my mom because when I was 11, we literally went bankrupt and lost everything. Luckily it worked out, and it is because I am really good at obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet.
Like, I spent tens of millions of dollars on Beast Games, but it is about making Season 1 as good as possible. I just really love solving complex problems. Like, how many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa? Just on cocoa farms, it is 1.5 million. And so with Feastables, we are trying to get over a million kids out of child labor. But the ironic part is the more I help people, the more shit I get. Like, I have read over 5,000 messages telling me to kill myself.
I mean, there are definitely times where I would cry. But if my mental health was a priority, I would not be as successful as I am. This is the price you have to pay.
But when is enough, enough?
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the backend of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you are listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you are listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode.
Jimmy, we have really just only met and you are already to me a bit of a Rubik's Cube in so many ways. I have been trying to piece the pieces together to understand the uniqueness of you, because you are so unbelievably unique. We just drove over here in the car and hearing you speak about the way that you view life and speaking to you yesterday on the phone, I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and I have never ever met someone who has the perspective on life that you have. You are truly unique. What do I need to understand about your earliest years to understand who you are?
Oh boy. Yeah, my earliest years. I am just stubborn, man. I just never give up. I mean, there was no world where I ever would have quit. I just, if we are just jumping right into it, this is great. No intro or anything, just boom. That is how you hold people. When I was 11, I just said I am going to be a YouTuber or I am going to die trying, and I meant it. And there was like, even if no one still watched my videos to this day, I would still be going. And so people hate it, but I am just the most competitive, stubborn person you will ever meet and I just never give up.
And where did that come from?
I have no idea, to be honest. It honestly feels like it was just in my DNA, in my bloodstream. My mom hated it growing up. We would always argue and she has this thing where once Jimmy sets his mind to something, he just never stops, and it would always piss her off because when it was YouTube, she wanted me to be studying or things like that. But I really don't know. It has just always been how I am. I think a lot of people have these weird tendencies and they tend to like to try to unlearn them.
I had phases in my life where I was like, "Am I too extreme?" Like people are very intimidated by me because I just am so obsessed with work and I am so all in. Is this unhealthy? Should I try to be more like a normal human? Especially when I was a teenager. It is a lot easier, it is funny, when you are making lots of money, it is like admirable, it is respectable. It is like, "Look, those are traits we want." But when you are not successful, you are a lunatic when you have all these traits.
And so back then, I would occasionally be like, "Man, like should I try to be more normal?" But I just could never do it. Anytime I tried to, I mean, I have mentioned this before, but one of the things that I have a memory of that really is burned in my brain is like, people one time, like a high schooler told me when I was in middle school, like, "All you do is talk about YouTube. Do you know how to do anything else? Like you are just like a freak."
And I tried to like watch South Park because that is what a lot of people in my school watched to fit in, and I just couldn't. I was like, "This is such a waste of time. I don't like, I could be working right now." And I tried to do all these things to fit in and I eventually just like stopped talking because I just didn't relate to anyone. People used to call me mute. Like one of my teachers literally asked if I was mute because that is how little I spoke, because no one in the school I went to was entrepreneurial or wanted to build businesses and I just didn't want to do anything else. Eventually, I started to succeed, found other lunatics, and now life is great. But I like to tell this story when I am on podcasts because if you have a younger viewer who is in that same spot, you are not the problem, it is your environment and you just got to put yourself in a better environment.
What about your parents? Mom and Dad. You talk about your mother a lot.
Yeah. No, I didn't get it from them.
What influence did they both have on you?
Well, I don't really talk about my dad much. That is a long story, don't need to get into it. But my mom, honestly, it was, it is great now. Me and my mom have a phenomenal relationship. But on the come-up, it was pretty rough because in 2008, they were overleveraged so we literally went bankrupt. And so they had properties that they used to get other properties and then when everything collapsed, they lost basically everything. And so my mom was working two jobs and barely getting by. And so we, like I didn't see her that much because when I was coming home from school, she was doing her second job.
So it was a lot because she was the single mom raising us. She is working all the time. I don't talk about a lot of this, I have Crohn's Disease, so I was very sick growing up. My brother also had issues as well and so we were not the healthiest kids in our teenage years. She is just trying to get by and take care of us, and then she comes home and she just has this brat that is being annoying and like, "I want to be a YouTuber." And she is just begging me, sometimes she would literally cry and beg me to do homework.
I didn't mean it in a mean way, but I mean, I even one time literally told her, "If you want my homework done so bad, why don't you just do it?" You know, like that is what I told my mom. What am I doing? I don't know. Like I was just like, "I don't care." I just want to be successful. I want to build businesses. And so it was like, bless her heart, luckily it worked out. So now I spoil her. She is great. She has her second home, anything she could ever want she has.
And so the first thing I did was start paying my mom, take care of her once I started making money, because she gave everything to get me where I am. And I wouldn't be where I am now, but it was like, it was like me and her spoke different languages when I was younger. She didn't want me to end up like them and get screwed and not have much money. And the path I was going down was just basically like, "Oh, I am going to be a homeless drug addict." And like, her brain couldn't compute the world I saw and my brain couldn't compute the world she saw and it was constant friction.
Who was looking after you then if she was busy working and you were at home and your dad's not around? Who takes care of you?
Just me and my brother. We were just there. I was just making videos.
You are making videos at what age?
I started at 11. I am 26 now. I can't really remember life before YouTube. My earliest memories are basically when I started making videos.
You said earlier you don't talk about your dad much. You don't have to talk tell me about it, but why don't you talk about your father much?
Don't worry about it.
I know your mom has spoken about him before and it was a bit of a tumultuous relationship.
Yeah, exactly. They didn't have the best relationship. I mean, that is a topic for another day. Honestly, kind of a sour way to start it off, but yeah, it was, my mom is great. I love my mom.
She used to cry asking you to do your homework.
A lot of things. She would cry because I wouldn't put money away when we started making money. She thought it was too risky. And I mean, the thing is nothing she would say was unreasonable. Looking back at it, she was perfectly reasonable in what she was doing. I was just a deranged lunatic and was way too obsessed with building the business and way too all in.
It was very cute one time, like when we had, I don't remember, like some month where we made like a hundred grand. And I am like, "Okay, perfect. Now I can spend a hundred grand this next month on videos." And she like took like five thousand of it and put it away for me in my own bank account without telling me, but in case I ever went, you know, was overleveraged or went bankrupt like they did. And I found out about it and she is like, "Please don't take this money. Just let me set aside anything. Stop spending everything on videos." And I was like, "No, this is perfect. Now I can spend more. This is awesome. Thank you, Mom."
To me, I don't really feel risk. If anything, risk excites me and I have a very high threshold for it. So yeah, we just literally weren't communicating the same language. But I don't remember what age it was, but eventually, after I took enough risks and figured it out, my mom just said to me, "You know what? I am going to trust you. I have faith." And everything got so much better after that point when she stopped staying up all night worrying about me and worrying whether or not I was making the right decision. When she was just like, "Jimmy, I trust you. I know you think about this all day. So I am going to just follow your lead." And our relationship has been perfect ever since then.
If I had asked 10-year-old Jimmy, "How are you doing?" what would he have said?
10, I don't know. But if you asked me at like 12 or 13, I probably would have been like, "Fuck, like no one watches my videos. I just really want to be a YouTuber. I got to make this work."
Why did you want to really be a YouTuber? Because kids say that, but the extent to which you said it and the focus that you had on that particular goal of being a YouTuber, because there is many things you could have focused on. You could have been a video game player, whatever, but YouTube is a particularly interesting thing because you are on camera, people are seeing it, there is a metric which decides how successful you are. Was there any element of the on-camera part that was helping to solve for like the feeling of isolation that you seemed to have at that time? Was there a community?
No, I think it is more to do with just, I found out that at a young age, probably around 11, that there were YouTubers that were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And I was just like, "Oh, that is it. Like that is the goal." Of course, because back then we didn't have money and I really wanted to take care of my mom and just my family in general. So it was like everything. It was like, this is what I love doing, I have never had as much joy doing something as I do this. Plus I could see a path where I could actually retire my mom, take care of her, pay her back for all the nights she worked so long so we could live comfortably and things like that.
So it was just kind of, the thing is, one thing that irks me is when people try to put someone's motivation into one little bucket. Like we are very complex creatures. Like you have a girlfriend. I would never say, "Oh, you just like her because she is pretty." But you like her because she is pretty, but you probably also like her because she is smart, you probably also like her because she is fun to be around, she likes similar shows, blah blah. If we sat here for 10 hours, you could probably give me a thousand reasons why you like your girlfriend.
So it is like it is very annoying when people try to put why you like doing a certain job or building a certain business into one bucket. "Oh, you just do it because of money." What if I do it because I like money, and I enjoy it, and it is a way to do this, and it is a way to communicate with people, and community, and these other things? And I think that is a common flaw we try to do. It is not that simple.
I think a lot of people can't understand someone being so relentlessly focused on something with the level of commitment and sustained commitment that you have shown.
And I don't know how I do it. I agree, because it is very weird how, like I have extreme obsession to the point where I just think about the same thing. For me, it is much easier to think about something 16 hours a day for seven days straight than it is to gear shift constantly. I am like really good at just obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet. If I were to say what's my superpower, it is that. I can just obsess endlessly about something and I can just have the same thoughts over and over and over and over again. It is very weird. It wasn't like it was work for me grinding YouTube for those 10 years or whatever where no one was really watching it. It is just kind of who I am.
It would have had to have been a deep obsession because you were doing it when no one was really watching or paying attention or really when the platform was...
There was literally a day when I was 19 or 20 where I got, I woke up, joined a Skype call with my friends and we were reverse engineering why certain videos do well or whatever. And I remember that call being over 18 hours long, and then I hung up, went to bed, woke back up the next day and instantly got back on the call and picked back up. That was the level of hours we were putting in. I didn't know anything besides just trying to make it happen.
Was there anything else that you showed that level of obsession to?
So at that age, no. From 11 to 15, it was a mix of YouTube and baseball. But when I turned 15, I got Crohn's and I went from like 190 pounds down to 139. I lost all muscle I had and so I was like, "Alright, I am not playing baseball in college anymore." So then I was like, "Fuck it." It is just all in on YouTube.
And then up until really Feastables, it was basically just YouTube. For whatever reason, I never thought I would find this kind of love for building, I thought it was specifically video making. But I have found over like the last two or three years just in general, I just enjoy entrepreneurship and I have been really deeply loving getting obsessed with Feastables and other things. Which was very weird, like when I first started a chocolate company, it was like kind of a side thing, but the more I started to work on it, I got a lot of the same highs I got when I was making videos, just in different ways. And so now I know way too much about the chocolate industry. It is pretty crazy. I never imagined I would have put the thousands of hours I poured into building Feastables. And so I think just in general, it is just I just really love solving consistent complex hard problems. I think that is what gets me out of bed and the harder the problems, the more exciting it is.
Consistent hard problems. I want to talk about that and also Feastables, but you mentioned Crohn's Disease there and a lot of people don't know what that is and the impact it has on someone's life.
Are you aware of it?
I am because I had a team member that had it. So in order to help support them at certain times when they had to leave and stuff like that, I got a little bit more aware of what it means and how it impacts you. But could you give me your perspective on that?
Yeah. So Crohn's Disease is when your immune system attacks itself. So yeah, when I was 15, I just started going to the bathroom 8, 9, 10 times a day, not digesting any food because my GI tract is literally just attacking itself. It is very weird. Your immune system in your gut thinks your gut is a foreign invader and so it just starts attacking itself, which if you are just using the bathroom 10 times a day not digesting food, that is why you drop weight rapidly and it hurts like crazy because it gets very inflamed and it feels like someone stabbing you in the gut with like a knife constantly when it is really, really bad, which is what I had.
So I lost 50 pounds, which is crazy because I was already relatively lanky. And we were just trying different medicine. And then eventually I am on a pretty extreme medicine called Remicade where it just basically you nuke your immune system. Which is why my voice sounds a little off right now because I just got the flu, I got COVID six times, I got shingles. Like I get sick all the time because for me to have my GI tract stop attacking itself, we basically have to shut down my immune system. So I have like a really weak immune system so I just get sick all the time, that's why I have like random rashes and things like that.
It was pretty brutal, to be honest. And then it randomly flares up sometimes and just makes you very sick, very tired. I just live life on hard mode, to be honest. Like if someone, like if you wake up and you have energy, you are already leaps and bounds ahead of me. It makes things way more difficult.
And so you still wake up with some days where you don't have energy?
Of course.
Which is really hard to believe for someone who is so productive for everybody looking on.
Yeah, it is, you just got to really love what you do and push through it. It is pretty brutal because then you compound that with always being sick. And I mean, yeah, like I just spent four days in a hospital in South Africa because I got the flu and it just takes me a lot longer to recover from certain things. So it is brutal. And that is where if I didn't work so much, I would spend more time researching Crohn's because surely there is a better way to stop it than just destroying my immune system. And ideally, I don't do that deep into my 30s and 40s. So I see it as a little bit of a Band-Aid. But I have met with the top Crohn's doctors in the world and so far they are like, "This is just the answer and you are just lucky your gut isn't attacking itself." So, but I don't know. I feel like the medicine they give people with Crohn's is kind of silly and there has got to be a better way to treat it. I mean, the ultimate solution is they just cut me open and cut out a large part of my GI tract and then there you go, but you know.
It is what I observed in the team member that I had that had Crohn's, just a bit of a mental rollercoaster as well because there is a certain unpredictability to it.
Exactly. It's even worse when you are filming because you got this huge multi-million dollar set and 200 people waiting on you and sometimes you don't know if you are going to have a flare, but you just got to go fuck it and just down some caffeine and crank it out.
I got diagnosed with ADHD.
You did?
Yeah. I got diagnosed with ADHD and it made me think a lot about myself and the way that I am. It is not, I am not the type of person to like embody the label or think it really means much. I am just who I am. Have you, are you in any way neurodivergent?
I have been told yeah, by a doctor I have ADHD. I mean I am not surprised because I just sit and obsess over things constantly. But I think I am happy with however my brain is wired. I don't really care to change it. I like I said, I think one of my greatest superpowers is my obsession and I think some people would view that as a weakness, but I just like, if you just think about solving problems three times more than everyone else, you are bound to come up with different solutions.
That is one of the things you mentioned earlier, you like solving hard problems consistently. When you think back over the last 10 years of your life and the success you have had solving some of these hard problems, if you were to like break it down into some core components that you have learned, one of them is obsession that you have said. What are the others?
I mean, it is all the typical stuff. You are obviously who you surround yourself with and luckily I just got around the right people in my later teenage years because I feed off the energy of the people probably around me. It is so obvious, like I start to talk like them, I become interested in the things they are interested in. I mean, this is all obvious stuff I am sure you have heard a bajillion times. But you know, just got to, I always have to be protective of the people I am around because whatever they say is what I start thinking on and then that is what I start obsessing over.
And one of the best things that happened with Feastables is I just reached out to all the fastest-growing chocolate companies, all the fastest-growing snack businesses and everything and just became friends with a lot of the founders. And you know, that is what would have probably taken me eight, nine years to solve. After 18 months, I was probably one of the top 10 people in the world when it comes to running a chocolate company and understanding it deeply just because it is just cheat codes.
What about detail? Sweating the small stuff. One of the things that I saw, I was reading the Beast handbook that was leaked on the internet. And one of the things I saw throughout that was this real obsession with the one percent and the small stuff. How do you feel about this by the way and all of that stuff?
I wrote that with some of my employees when I was probably 22. So there are some things that I am like, I read and I am like, "Oh wow, I was an idiot." But for the most part, most of it still stands the test of time. And I do think it is very helpful. You know what is funny? A lot of CEOs have actually told me that they make their employees read this.
Yeah, it went around all of our Slack channels. We all read it.
Which is funny because I am like, "Damn, I should make an updated version of it so everyone..." But yeah, the thing is, it is the core crux of it is like extreme ownership and don't make excuses and you know, people always... yeah, I mean, damn, I am getting a lot of déjà vu from when I was writing that. It was just a different time back then too, because I just had no idea what I was doing when I was 21, 22. And I just found that I was constantly telling, like teaching people the same thing over and over again and it was always just like, "Take extreme ownership, take accountability. Sure, I guess it was out of your control, but it could have been in your control if you just thought through it more, if you just really cared." And that is what I was just trying to convey in it.
And the other thing that comes through in this but also all of your work is just this idea, something that I have learned from you just from speaking to you on the phone yesterday, that nothing is impossible. And watching Beast Games over the last couple of weeks, but also speaking to some of your team, there's clearly this throughline with everything that you do of like extreme, well it appears to me to be extreme ambition. And it doesn't appear to be extreme ambition to you in the same way that it appears to be extreme ambition to me.
Yeah, I mean it is just, I mean, does physics allow it? Then yes, it is possible. Just do we want to put the time in? I mean, I feel like people overcomplicate a lot of things.
And is that something you have trained over time or have you always thought that?
No, I think I have just... it's a good question. I don't know why, but when people tell me I can't do something, and I don't know where this came from, it makes me just want to do it more, to be honest. If you tell me I shouldn't do something, that is fine. But if you tell me I can't, then it just everything in my body just wants to go, "Fuck you, I obviously can. I just I don't know if I should, but I can."
And then I don't know, it's like the thing is like to go viral, you have to do something that's never been done before. I've told this story before of, you know, if you're driving down the road and you see a cow, who cares? It's a fucking cow. But if you're driving down the road and you see a purple cow, you're like, you've never seen that before. And it's something you weren't expecting, you're going to go "Holy shit!" And you're going to go tell your friends about it, you're going to remember that, you'll probably even think about it randomly once every couple years. "Why the fuck was there a purple cow?"
And it's like it's the same thing, just one was a little purple. And like you can apply that same like analogy to ideas. Like when you're scrolling through social media to find a video to watch, there's things that, you know, have been done before, you've seen, it's you know, roughly similar to stuff before, you're just going to scroll past it, you'll never think about it again. Just like you'll never think about a fucking cow on the side of the road.
And then there are ideas that are like the purple cow idea, which is what I try to do, which are things that make you go "What the fuck? I've never seen that. Like I I have to click this or I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight because like why is this video? No way they did this, right?" But those typically are very hard and usually to get that purple cow effect, they've never been done before. And if something's never been done before, there's usually a reason because it's very fucking hard. So you just kind of have to train yourself to like not resent very difficult complex hard original problems and actually run towards them because those are the ones that, you know, tend to have more of the purple cow effect where people have to watch it.
Viewership's very exponential. It's way easier to get 50 million views on one video than it is to get a million views on 50 videos, right? And so because it like kind of goes exponential and it's like you know pretty winner take all on the top videos, like you just really have to lean into that purple cow effect, if that makes sense.
Makes perfect sense. If you were to distill then, say we were coming up with a new "How to Succeed in MrBeast Production" handbook now, what would be the top five, if I was applying for a job with you, what five characteristics would I need to demonstrate to be successful?
Yeah, be very coachable, because whatever I teach you today is going to change a year or two from now. Always learning, always improving. Coachable. A big thing for me is you got to see the value in working here. Like you really, I just I don't, this isn't like a job, this is a career. Like if you don't realistically see a world where you're working for me in 10 years, then it's pretty hard for me to invest into you at the level I want.
Like I'm not I don't like training someone for six months, they work here for a year, and then I lose them. What I like is I train someone for a year and then I get nine years of dividends on the back end where they crush at their job and I'm constantly paying them more because they're becoming more valuable with time. Like that is like the eighth wonder of the world is investing heavily in an employee and then they stick around for a decade. You know what I mean?
It's like there are some of my top guys that I spent three or four years in the trenches with, training and working with, you know. They're like Tyler, who writes a lot in my videos and directs them. I probably talk to him five, six hours a day every day for four yeah, around four years. And now because I can't spend a you know, he spends 100% of his time writing the videos, directing the videos, obsessed over that, whereas I could theoretically max spend 5% of my time. So he's going to naturally just shit on me on it because he can spend way more time on it.
And it's like so you know, I have full faith in him. But the dividends that I get off of him after all those years of pouring all that time and effort into him, and now he knows exactly how I think, what I value, that I don't even really have to communicate with him. Sometimes I can just show up to film and like I just trust that it's good, you know. And I have a bunch of people across all my businesses like that, that it's like great. And if, you know, in a world where Tyler's still working here 10 years from now, I mean the amount of value out of someone like that is unfathomable. It is quite literally the eighth wonder of the world for business and it's like that's what I want.
But you only get those kinds of people if they see the value for you know working for you. And so they have to like deeply believe like the more valuable I become to this company, the more I will be rewarded and they like actually want to dedicate their life to the business. So that's very important. Because if I really don't get that vibe, then it's not fair to both of us because I'm not going to invest in you like I should because I don't think you're going to be here in 10 years and then you're going to feel that and it creates... So coachable, sees the value, obviously obsessed.
I don't I just don't like working with mediocre people. I mean, I really just can't stand it. It's the fastest way to make me depressed is if I have to work with someone who's just not all in and just loves what they do. And it's just a lot of, you know, stuff like that that I'm sure if you listen to like a Steve Jobs interview or something that he talks about. It's just the typical traits. Obsessed, coachable, all in, sees the value.
And what is the single worst trait?
Mediocrity. I mean it's just like because they're not bad enough where you fire them, but not good... The problem is like, and you see it in full effect, great people just love working with great people. They do. And there's something about being around great people that pulls some kind of animal out of you that just makes you want to do more and push more and believe things aren't possible. And I don't know, when you put me around a bunch of other successful entrepreneurs, I just turn into a different human than if you put me around I don't know a bunch of people who are just running small businesses and don't really care and don't really have much ambition. I'm like two completely different humans and you see that same thing in full effect.
You put a bunch of A-players around more A-players, they just build off of each other. But you like put two or three C-players amongst a bunch of great people and they'll start pulling them down, they'll start making them not want to work as much and make work not as fun. And so everyone knows, get rid of the C-players, right? Obviously get rid of people who aren't all in blah blah. It's the ones that are like they're not an A-player, but they're not a C-player, so it's kind of hard because you still feed off the energy and if you get enough of them, it just drags your overall culture down.
So those are like the worst. I mean and not everyone can be these like world-ending monsters. You know, there are a lot of mundane things like you know the book controller and accounting, I mean probably doesn't have to be the best in the world. But you know when it comes to like the mission-critical things like making videos and things like that, like just the great people got to be surrounded... Like that's one of your number one jobs as a leader is just to make sure your great people are working with other great people because that's like that's like the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't money, you know what I mean? It's that's like number four on the list. Don't ask me to list them all, I don't remember. I just know the number one thing is do they enjoy who they're working with. And people will leave for their job because they hate working with people way before they'll ever leave because of money.
Have you ever been frustrated that the people you've hired don't match your level of obsession?
No, because I just find the people that do.
Are there people that do?
Oh yeah. I have there are so many people in my business I mean obviously you have to take care of them and pay them well. Like they're not the kind of people that'll just make the standard rate. But um yeah, like people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and you know even people on our editing team. I mean, they're putting in most weeks the same amount of same amount of hours as me and they're all in, see the vision. It's like it's hard to find those kinds of people, but um you know when you do, you got to treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.
And you have almost 500, roughly 500 people?
Probably. I think the production company were around 300, Feastables around 100, and then probably another 40-50 scattered amongst everything else.
Most founders that I speak to describe scaling headcount as the worst part of the job. More people, more problems, right?
Yep, that's that's an understatement. Yep.
Especially as someone like you who's a creative at heart and who is very focused and obsessed on I guess the show and producing, as you say often, "I want to produce the best videos we possibly can." Of course, and then all this other shit comes with it. Which is like HR, which every founder I speak to hates.
I mean yeah, the the worst part is I just have this very once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where I have so much attention and so many people watch my content and and I wish I had I just wish I had more experience building businesses. You know, I'm only 26 and this is my first real business of every every employee milestone we hit, it's my first time hitting that, right? Like when I hit 100 employees, that was my first time getting there and this was my first time going from 100 to 200, 200 to 300. And like with what I know now, I could have done it so much faster, obviously.
And it's just it's a little brutal because like like scaling Feastables from zero to 100 was way easier than doing my production company because I had been through the ringer before and I learned a bunch and I get better with time. And I it's just the honestly the most annoying part is just ignorance, right? Like because a lot of things mistakes I make I look back and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I probably should have brought in people with more experience working at a larger company earlier here, I waited a little too long here, I probably should have..." and it's just like brutal because if I had known these things I'd be way further along, but I mean that's just how you learn. You just got to make 10,000 mistakes.
Every founder says the same. They're unknown unknowns.
Exactly. And it's just like so that's where I mean my big thing recently has just been trying to find people who have successfully scaled businesses and like bring them into my organization and learn from them because I'm just so tired of like being like, "Fuck, I should have known better, but I didn't because I've never done this before." And so I'm trying to find a lot of great people who have been through it so they can like kind of mentor me along the way so I make less mistakes, which has been really good. We brought in a new C-suite recently.
It's like always a hard balance because I try not to in the past I've like, you know, decisions are kind of like pendulums and I have a a problem where like I'll identify something and I'll overcorrect the pendulum one way and then I'm like, "Ah no, I should have just stopped in the middle." And like my overcorrection in the past was like corporate people try to build too many systems and they kill innovation and so I was very anti-like people with too much corporate experience because they're going to just destroy all the creativity. But you know, that's why we're making so many organizational fuckups because we don't have anyone who's actually built a business at this size. And so you know the pendulum was on the right and I swung it all the way to the left of "no corporate" and now I think we're in the healthy medium where you know obviously the people in our C-suite and the leaders should have lots of experience managing people at this size and scale. But it's just finding the right people who can do it and build systems in a way where it doesn't crush creativity and they actually value the product over ease.
Diary of a CEO and my I'm on the a TV show called Dragons Den in the UK and um my stuff is significantly smaller, it's like a percentage of your of your viewership. But even I am slightly terrified with hiring people because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone that I work with to say that I did something bad. And in the early days of my first business, um what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there and they ask them, "What was he like?" You you have the same problem, you have the same conundrum, where anyone has an incentive that works for you, when they leave, so many different incentives to throw an arrow at you on the way out the door. How how do you contend with this?
Yeah, I mean you hit it on the head. I've you know I have 400-500 people right now but we've also worked with thousands of people in the past and so I think it's just what comes with it. But at the end of the day, you know as long as what we're doing's moral and ethical, like like you said they're going to throw arrows, but you know I I'm just a problem solver. It's like whenever I see the metaphorical arrow I just go, "You know what's the problem?" And if we did something wrong how do we fix it, or if it's not an actual problem it's just rumors, I mean it is what it is.
And so yeah, I think it just comes with part of it. Um I mean it sucks and it's unfortunate. But you also got to think like most people don't like their jobs too and so it's not like this is even specific to our industry. Like you know just go ask 100 random Americans of of all the jobs they worked in their life, how many did they deeply enjoy and did would they have nothing negative to say? So I think it's just part of it. You know it's almost like a pastime for a lot of people just to like trash talk their old jobs or whatever.
Has any of that stuff ever got to you? Any criticism and...
Of course! Yeah, I mean all criticism all the time does. But I mean the thing is, independent of that kind of stuff, it's just like I mean for we are averaging like 200 million views a video. Like you know like most of it unique viewers, like we're talking like 2+ percent, um sometimes 3% of humans alive watch every piece of content I put out, depending on how well the channel's doing. And so that means like you could I could upload a video and then within 365 days later, you could grab 33 random humans anywhere on the planet, especially because we do dubs... You know what's even crazier is you know YouTube's not in China. So that's like 2 to 3 percent of humans alive excluding China. Um or China's mixed in there but if you just take people excluding China it'd be more like 3 to 4 percent. Um but you could just grab 33 random people on the planet and one of them on average would have seen that video because the views are so fucking high.
So yeah, I mean there's a lot of criticism that's thrown at me and the thing is, you know since our stuff's so global sometimes you know transcends culture and not everyone views everything and so everyone has different opinions and stuff like that, which is why it will drive you crazy at our scale if you try to make people happy. Because even if 99% of people are deeply happy, which is an insane hit rate, like if you make a piece of content 99% of people that watch it love it, that is wild, which that kind of stuff doesn't happen. But in our case, if just 1% is unhappy, that's 2 million people, which is more than anyone else even gets on video views on videos. So which will feel like an insurmountable amount of criticism and feedback and it's very easy to like trick your mind into thinking damn everyone hates me because you just focus on the 1% instead of the 99%.
So I just came to the point where, you know, I just have to have my own internal guidelines of like: do I think what I'm doing is good? Do I think you know is moral, ethical? Do do I believe in what I'm doing? If so, fuck it. Like I'm never going to be able to make everyone happy. So I and if you just let the whims of the internet kind of decide what is okay and what's acceptable and when you're being bad or good, then you you don't have a spine, you don't have a backbone, you stand for nothing and it and it will just destroy you mentally.
And so I mean I don't know what age I was when I kind of got in that mindset, but I just was like I'm going to decide and I'm not going to let the internet decide, you know, what is okay and what's not. And then ever since I got to that point, you know if people criticize me for something and I'm like "I don't agree," then I have like it's easy for me to just go "Oh well, I don't agree, not going to make everyone happy. I believe what I'm doing is right." And um just move on.
The brain isn't isn't designed for for this though.
No, it's not.
This is what I've come to learn. So the podcast it goes well, I'm at the start it feels like everyone loves me.
Yeah.
And then I get further down the line and it feels like everyone fucking hates me.
Yep.
Because they just you get attacked from you can never do anything right, especially...
I mean I've probably read messages like comments or tweets or I've probably in my lifetime read over 5,000 messages or comments or something telling me to kill myself. I mean you know you just and like in what would possess someone to tell you to like leave a comment where it's like "fucking kill yourself"? You know what I mean? So agreed, like you're we were not meant to receive this kind of feedback from basically anyone anywhere in the world, you know what I mean? Just all consistently day in and day out for in my case now over a decade.
Has it ever really got to you?
Oh yeah, of course. I mean it it does all the time or it used to all the time.
What does that mean in reality if I'm a fly on a wall in one of those moments where you can recall it really getting to you?
I mean back in the day I wasn't as confident in my ability to to be successful and you know when you're probably 20 and you're hiring all these people you're you know I have high risk tolerance but I'm reinvesting every dollar I make. I'm you know I'm hiring my friends from school, I've hired my mom, like these people I really care about are depending on me and then you know I upload a video and it does bad and then people you know I pour all my time and effort into it but you know maybe it doesn't come across as well like the video in you know some people might have interpreted as lazy and you read a comment being like "Wow what a fucking lazy! Like I thought you made great videos" or "this video sucked" and you read that and the video's underperforming and you're like "Fuck, maybe I am being too reckless."
And you know there I mean there have definitely been times where I would cry, you know just because I would just be like "Fuck, am I like not doing this right or like they don't understand I put a lot of time into this or whatever." Why why you know sometimes you're like "Fuck, does the algorithm hate me? Am I being suppressed or whatever?" back in the day. Um...
When was the last time that happened? That feeling of...
Um probably there was like a month probably last year where I I felt a little bit of that just because um you know just some times occasionally the rumor and drama mill gets spun up but you just got to snap out of it and like I said just go "Do I believe in what I'm doing? Do I..."
It's like it's hard because you know anytime I do anything good it's you know people are always like um they try to we're like conditioned in America now where when someone does something good there's always some ulterior motive. And I've I've always been straightforward and just said a world where I help people is just better than a world where I don't. Like I don't try to come up with this crazy like story of of how you know someone helped me when I was younger and now I I just want to give back and cry. I'm just like yeah I can make viral videos and I think a world where I do viral videos that help people are better than when I don't. You know I just kind of as my answer.
Um but it always does suck when people try to just I don't know the it's funny the more good you do the more people think you're secretly evil and it's like "Why can't I just help people because it's fun?" You know? So occasionally those will get to me and I'll just be like "Guys you don't even know me" like and like you would think sometimes you'd read like when I build wells in Africa or help blind people see or things like that, you would read some of these things online you would think I'm Hitler. I mean it's crazy like how people portray it. And I just I don't know I wish people just understand like in my opinion a world where I help people is just more fun than a world where I don't and it's really not that deep.
The people around you how does it impact them?
Oh how does the drama and that kind of stuff impact them? Um to be honest in my case it I don't think it hits them that hard because most things usually fall on me and people want to go after me because I'm the guy that does good, the "philanthropist," so usually I'm like the one that gets thrown under the bus quite a bit.
It's funny because I everyone that knows you knows you.
Yeah.
Whether they're really successful people or people that you work with that I've spoken to, everybody that knows you knows who you are. And it's it's remarkable to me that um someone who has done so much good in the world I've looked at your philanthropy, I know what you're doing with Feastables and the ethical sourcing of that. When I see someone that's done so much good in the world still be misunderstood it almost makes it almost makes me realize that I should never fight it.
Yeah, I mean the ironic part is the more I help people the more shit I get to be honest. Like it's it's so funny because you know like the same day I'll uh drop a video where I'll I uh you know cure help a thousand blind people see, some other YouTuber will drop a video where they just bought a new mansion and it's like everyone's like "Yes! You know get that mansion! Good job!" And then they'll be like "Fuck you for curing blind people Jimmy! Fuck you you're using them!" and I'm like "No I just wanted to inspire people to do good. I mean I can buy a mansion if you really want me to."
Um so it is funny. I if you're trying this is a weird sentence, but if you're trying to be liked I actually don't recommend you like help people. Like I actually think helping people will make the internet like you less than if you just like buy nice cars and do like the the typical influencer path it's because they were just so conditioned in America to see it as like a shield and like no one actually does good because they just find it fun apparently. Um but I mean I don't care. I like I said it's just more fun than if I didn't so I mean people can shit on me for helping people I don't I don't doesn't bother me anymore. Um but I wouldn't recommend you get into it if you want to be liked because I think it's negatively correlated now.
Interesting.
It is so fascinating. It is I swear to God man like it's it's uh there I could just uh I don't know do these like $1 versus videos where I compare like a $1 boat to a billion dollar boat and all these other things and not help people and I would just get way less shit. And it's it's so funny because no one bats an eye when I post that but when I give hundreds of thousands of people in Africa clean drinking water it's like all hell breaks loose and I'm like "Guys I'm just trying to bring attention to a cause so I don't really..." But the thing is I'm just going to keep doing it and I mean I think in my case most people have realized I'm not going to stop so they're just kind of over you know getting mad at me and they're just like "Alright Jimmy's just being Jimmy."
I think when the wind blows as well what it does is it helps you to really understand why you're doing what you're doing and understand yourself. And so for when I've been attacked for like the people I interview or whatever it might be, it's actually made me refocus on what my principles are.
Yeah.
Because you have to be really anchored to them.
It's like I said you you have to determine where the line is and as long as you're on the right side of your line then it is what it is. People on Twitter can say whatever they want and I I think like that's the only way to really survive at this scale without going crazy is you you have to determine where the line is. Not let the internet.
Workaholism.
Yes.
Give can you give me a window into the last seven days of your life? Just give paint me a picture.
Oh yes. Um let me uh drink some water because of my flu. Um well the I don't know about the last seven days but in general we so we're filming a video where we're doing the I'm visiting the five most deadliest places on Earth. So one of the places was a safari in South Africa. So I flew to South Africa um to spend time in a a cage surrounded by lions. Sick content! It was really good. Um which that was a bitch to get to.
And then I got the flu and so spent a couple days in a hospital there. Um and then we were going to go to Snake Island to spend time there, then the world's deadliest road, and then we have a couple other places, but that got postponed. So instead got out of the hospital, went to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge. Then went to or no went to North Carolina. We have this guy where I built a gym and I told him if he loses 100 pounds before he leaves the gym it has a big red circle around it I'll give him a bunch of money. So I filmed with him. Then worked on the coming up videos um that it's just a lot.
And then flew to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge. Flew here just landed, filmed with the reunion that you were at with the contestants for Beast Games. We're doing this podcast. What time is it? Like 1:00 AM?
It's just after 1:00 AM.
Yeah 1:00 AM. The latest podcast he's ever done. Lightweight! I always do my podcasts at 1:00 AM. Um my last podcast before this was like 4:00 AM um like like a couple weeks ago. And then we're flying to San Fran to film with Steph...
Steph Curry.
Yeah Steph Curry. Then I think I'm going to Snake Island, then the deadliest road, um and then I I won't I'll basically I don't think I'll be home for another 16 days. So I'm just traveling around filming for the next 16 days and then um yeah I guess then I'll get home and then they'll make me film at home.
How does everything else in your life fit into that in terms of like the gym? I know you've been working out.
It's been brutal! It's gone to shit the last couple months. It's it's really killing me, to be honest. It's it was like so much easier when you're bro if you don't travel constantly, life is so easy! When you just wake up in your own bed and like waking up in your own bed and working 15 hours in you know your office or whatever, so easy compared to like all this fucking bullshit where I'm like I don't know the time zone I'm in, I don't know what place I'm in, I don't know where I'm going in two days. It's like like I mean some days I'm going to bed at 10:00 AM other days I'm going to bed at 5:00 PM and it's like it's a mess. It's really and I used to put up with it and in and just like in and figure out how to do the training but it's just I don't I don't know. I need to truthfully whatever's a priority you'll get done. I just need to make it a priority again because it I really do miss it.
It's just this the hard part is putting putting Beast Games in the mix because I was already basically working you know every hour my eyes were awake but then Beast Games is such a monster of a project and I have to maintain the same YouTube upload schedule and then I do a lot on Feastables now and then I have a couple other businesses so I just honestly something had to give and sadly it was working out but that's fucking stupid. So I need to like reprioritize my life where I can get I mean it just only needs to be 45 minutes 5 days a week it doesn't doesn't need to be hard.
But the bigger problem is I'm just not sleeping like I used to because we've got so much going on. And so when I hit it hard in the gym and then I don't get enough sleep, then that causes pretty extreme fatigue the next day so it's like I got to fix the sleep first before that but yeah it's uh got a lot going on to be honest. I'm dying.
How are you feeling?
Right now honestly fine. I'm jacked up on all the caffeine. But I mean just in this Feast... You know the flu's not helping. It's it's making everything like 30% harder so you know it's like life's like a rollercoaster. There are going to be moments where like right now I'm going to answer this negatively but I don't want someone to think that's indicative of like oh every every time you ask me this it's going to be it. But because of the flu and the lack of sleep I mean I'm struggling at the moment. Just a lot of grinding. Um a little happy because we just dropped the ending of Beast Games so it's like a little bit of emotional high. But after this I'm probably going to go crash, be tired as fuck in the morning tomorrow, which I hate. Um but yeah I would say I'm on like the lower end. I I could use a couple good days to bring the energy back up.
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How do you think about mental health? I've heard you speak about your mental health before and I've...
Yeah I don't... Well the thing is, here's the problem. Like it's if my mental health was a priority I wouldn't be as successful as I am. I mean and that's just like a sad fact. Um like I obviously never would have buried myself alive for seven days, seven days of solitary, seven days on a desert island, seven days blah blah. Um it's like you know being consistently uncomfortable and like being able to consistently suffer over long periods is like arguably one of the deepest moats. Like there's a reason no one makes videos like me. Like not even close because no one wants to live the life I live. I mean there are there are months where I'm you know I think there was one year where I was flying like 200 days like I was on a plane. I mean it was it was a fuckfest. But you know to get these videos done and and to do everything and it's like you know when I when I wake up tomorrow and I'm going to be pretty fucking tired and feel like shit, I'm going to go you know something that I always tell myself is "How you feel right now is why no one else does what you want to do or does what you do and if you push through this that's just even you know more of a reason why no one will ever be who you are."
And so it's like I think being able to push through unhappiness and do things you don't want to do consistently year after year over the course of a decade is like the ultimate advantage. Like I mean I I think we'll hit a billion subscribers and uh I don't think anyone will be anywhere near close because like once you make a couple million dollars why would you live the life I live? Like why? Why would you not take weekends off? Why would you not just film locally even if it means less views so you can be on the right time schedule? Why would you not you know prioritize your sanity and that kind of stuff? It makes no sense but that's why no one else does it.
You spoke to Colin and Samir, two guys that I met recently.
Yeah they're great.
They're great, great guys. Um you said to them, "I'm miserable a lot of times. I have mental breakdowns every other week."
Yeah I mean those have gotten a little better. Mental breakdown sounds extreme. It's more I'm like "Fuck! Why am I doing this? This is so fucking hard!" Um because it's just a lot, man. You're just going constantly. It's like because what's funny is I think I said that years ago but that was back when all I was really doing was YouTube. Now I run this chocolate company and we have the show and we have a couple other stuff so...
Yeah I think the hardest part really is gear shifting. Like and so I try to bucket these things correct. Like if I if I'm on set, you know, and I have a 15-hour film day, like ideally the things I'm doing in between filming are like related to main channel because I'm in the frame of mind of that. And that's one thing that's really helped me not feel like my head's going to explode. Like if I'm in Chicago at the Feastables office and we're going through Feastables marketing like and then you come in and you go, "What do you think about this bit for this coming up main channel video?" then I have to like shift my frame of mind.
And like that constant gear shifting, I it's like it'll make my fucking head hurt if I'm like bouncing around too much. I and it's also just very not core to who I am. I love obsessing over certain things and I find you know obsessing over things within a business isn't like switching back and forth between marketing and product in a same business is pretty easy. This is a long way of saying like one thing that's helped with that is like just really um organizing my schedule in a way where it allows my natural state of mind to like obsess over a certain business, finish that then move on to the next one. Whereas before it used to be like 30 gear switch-its a day and that was just miserable. It's just not even fun to be honest.
I heard Elon Musk, who I know someone you you spoke about quite often, also someone that I speak about quite often. I heard him say when he was on Joe Rogan that "You wouldn't want to be in my head." And I think Joe Rogan asked him if he was happy or something and he doesn't even like consider the question to be important.
Yeah.
So two questions there: do you think the average person would like to be in your head? And secondly, are you happy?
Uh well no the average person does not want to live the life I live or be in my head. They would be miserable because you're just working all the time and they they would probably just ask themselves "Why am I working all the time? Why don't I why don't I do literally anything else?" I mean because there are I mean obviously I'm not a robot. There are times where I'm like "Fuck I really want to play this strategy board game" or "I want to do this thing" and I look at the schedule and I'm like "Oh maybe I could do that in 4 days."
And you you know and the the hard thing is it's you really have to be delicate with the framing of your mind because it's very easy in moments like that to go "Fuck, I'm like a zoo animal. Like I don't I don't have free will. I'm like a little robot to my businesses" and like um and so you have to like be very careful and sometimes those emotions take over and especially because I'm a very defiant kind of guy and I'm like "But I really want to do this thing! But I can't because I got to go film this video and I got to do this and I got to speak at this conference and I got to do this networking thing and blah blah."
And so um yeah I think most people when that feeling comes up of like "Am I just a fucking animal? Like do I have any free will?" they would probably get very depressed and but I've been able to like work through those and and just I always try to you know your brain you just it you just got to control your thoughts. Be like "Well this is the life I chose. This is you want success, you want to change the world, you want to do this and this. This is the price you have to pay. You should actually see this as a good thing because this is why..." Which is why I'm very uh diligent about how I frame things in my mind. Like "This is why no one else will do what you you will do and this is a good thing. This is what you are feeling right now is your moat. It's you're lucky it's hard. Push through it and you'll be happy you did." You know? And so that's kind of how I try to view it. Um but no I don't think most people would be happy living my life. They would be like "Oh let's just grab a couple million dollars and be happy."
Are you happy?
Uh it depends on what day you ask me. Right now I'm having a good time. Um other you know when I was had the flu in Africa sitting in a cage with lions, fuck no!
What's your baseline? How would you describe your baseline?
Probably uh this year probably so far more unhappy than happy. And it's just they're just things you got to do that just aren't fun. You know but I I think I really deeply enjoy working on Feastables and I'm trying to spend more of my time building it. The problem is it's just uh it's just opportunity cost because I'm the only one who can be in front of the camera and film. And that's what's like brutal especially with Beast Games is I'm just filming so much. It added so much shit to my yearly filming. Like doing this giant show on top of already having the largest YouTube channel in the world and I was already filming some months 25 days a month.
So I'm just like that's just the rough part is because it's like it just all rests on my shoulders. And if I don't film, there is no content. Like the channel just literally ceases like if I stop filming. And so you know I have found more and more that I'm finding more joy in entrepreneurial things and building businesses and I I do think I'd be happier if I could spend more time doing that. But it's just like weird because I could literally hire anyone in the world to do that, whereas I can't hire anyone to replace me on camera.
I always wonder someone who um is doing so well on a platform like YouTube where the algorithm's always changing. Some YouTubers I speak to say that they get burnout eventually. They get like creative burnout and they and they just like delete their channel. You've seen a lot of it recently over the last couple of years where YouTubers hit 10 million and they just stop. Yep. Has that ever crossed your mind to stop?
Oh yeah of course! All the time.
Seriously?
Yeah but I I mean like I I feel like that's what half this podcast has been about about how I don't want to do things but I push through and do it. I think they're just reasonable humans! Like they you know a lot of them were chasing a goal of like "Oh I just want this money so I can take care of these things." You know it could be noble things like retire my mom or just not have to worry about money. And then they go "Well why would I suffer now? I'm good."
When was the closest you came to quitting?
Oh man probably countless times. I mean all when I was in solitary confinement for 7 days, I mean that was fucking miserable. I mean I did quit a video uh I've quit a lot of videos like...
No I mean as a as a creator.
Um I mean I guess I never truly would have quit. I mean my biggest thing would be I just would have quit for like a week and been like "Fuck let me sleep 9 hours a night and like..."
But like we spent the first we we did a video where we spent 7 days on a desert island, first time we filmed it. On day 2 I woke up on the beach and I had literally I didn't know sandflies were a thing. I had like 700 bug bites up and down my legs all over my body. I was sunburned. I was like a little of me was like "Damn am I going to die? Like this is crazy how much like bug bites are everywhere and my skin was so red and I like couldn't see straight." And so I ended up quitting on day 2. Um which is brutal because you spend all this time and money and you have the crew out there and you flew out there and you know it's opportunity cost. It's like that's a 7-day window we could have got a video and uploaded it and now we don't. Like it's of course you know canceling a video like that is literally the worst thing that could happen from an opportunity cost perspective and that was like you know when you have moments like those and it's like "Fuck like this isn't even fun. Fuck this shit" you know? But...
Well what about YouTube as a whole? Because I feel like YouTube is like throwing coal into a train and you just have to keep throwing it in there once you've started. You just can never stop throwing it in.
No you're running on a treadmill cranked up to the max, especially if you want to be a top-tier creator like me and it's just like who who can stay on the treadmill the longest? Because it never slows down. If anything, you're making it faster. Um but no I mean I don't think there's ever unironically a time where I actually would have quit. It just breaks probably would have been nice.
And when you think forward that treadmill, can you see yourself doing it for the next 2, 3, 4 decades or...
Oh yeah of course! I don't have any intention of ever stopping.
Love. Something that came into your life a couple of years ago. You announced I think over Christmas time that you had proposed I think it was like Boxing Day or New Year's Eve?
Yeah it was on Christmas day because because her family was in town so I proposed. Yeah.
How does that fit into this craziness?
§02Transcript — part 2
She's literally I you could probably count on your hands the amount of people on the planet that actually would make a good partner for me and she's just she's one of them. She really understands that work is what you know is what I live for, what keeps me going and she supports me and she understands how important it is and it's the big thing is hanging out with Thea, my fiancée, is so frictionless. We play the same video games, we watch the same shows, we're very interested in the same things. She loves learning like I do so um you know it's exciting to see what you know um lecture she listened to online that day or like whatever weird book she's reading and she just like everything about being around her is very frictionless which is great because like obviously I don't have much time at the house and so like the last thing that I need is to come home from work and there be friction. And so we don't we don't fight. It's I you know I sometimes I'm like "Wow this is like my best friend. This is and she's hot! This is great!" you know? Um and so it's like it it feels weird sometimes.
People I mean anyone listening now that's in a relationship I guess the question they'd be thinking is: when do you spend time together?
Uh mostly at nights. Um and the that but the beauty is she gears her schedule around mine. So like she's she'll work when um I'm working and then she'll just travel with me and so honestly a lot of it is on planes, a lot of it is in car rides or you know an hour before bed or in the morning, that kind of stuff. But it's just like because there are pockets of breaks on set and things like that. So it's just you know having some it's very hard to find someone who is intelligent, actually has their own hobbies, things going for them independent, that's also willing to mold their life around mine and not see it as a demeaning thing. Because like yeah, if she was just like "Well I have this thing going on and I have to prioritize my life," I would never see her. But because she's willing to you know mold her life around mine um and my work schedule, that you know is that's everything. Um and it's rare that someone's willing to do that while you know being as in my opinion at least from what I've seen as intelligent and independent as she is.
Parents always message me and say, "Steve, wait till you have kids."
Oh yeah. That's I mean and that's the thing. Like my lifestyle right now is would not work for kids. So I want to wait I want kids but I want to wait as long as possible because if I'm going to have kids I got to be a great dad. Like I really I really, really enjoy mentoring people. I love mentoring you know younger entrepreneurs and like help like I've told this I think I told this story on Joe Rogan: I helped one of my friends go from like 40k a month in revenue to 400k on YouTube and I do kind of stuff like that all the time. I just like one of my other friends has a um snack CPG brand and I helped him grow it up to eight figures in revenue just for fun. I would just call him a couple times a month.
And it's like there's something so satisfying about helping other people succeed and so I would love to have a couple kids and just really mentor them into like you know being badasses. But yeah not anytime soon. Like I would be so absent if we had kids so just got to like find that right time in the Venn diagram where I can actually be present in their life.
And your business empire, I think, is much bigger than most people realize.
Probably.
I imagine the majority of people probably don't really understand the context of business so they don't really get it. They might see you as a YouTuber or a creator. But from the research that I've done, you run a very, very large business.
Yeah I mean well we do nine figures in Feastables. I mean we can say that, yeah.
Nine figures in Feastables. So the business must be worth several billions of dollars.
Uh overall, I mean you could deduce something like that, yeah.
I'm not going to get you to to try and hazard a guess. I'm sure you know but I'm not going to get ask you to predict the... but... are you a billionaire?
Uh on paper yeah, but I mean in my actual bank account I have less than a million dollars so.
Do you pay yourself at all?
A little bit, but I also like I have some assistants and things like that so it's like I try to just pay myself what I spend you know personally a month just to like stay even.
How how do you think about money in all of this? Because most most people in their lives are pursuing money so that they can chill out and retire, but you seem to be pursuing it purely for the sake of reinvesting it back into this system.
Of course! Money is fuel to grow a business.
And then you make money from the business and then...
To keep growing. Yeah and then you find a business that you enjoy that you know is better for mother nature or earth or people and there you go. You have a fulfilled life! That's my theory. I just don't when I'm 70 I don't want to look back and have regrets, you know?
When is enough enough? Such a cliché question that I'm asked a lot.
Enough like building the business? Never. I mean I just want to keep like building a business is like a video game. It's just fun, you know? Like with Feastables right now, um you know we're the largest ethically sourced chocolate company in America and like it's just fun to like look at something that's been done the same way for 100 years and go: how do we just flip this on its head and fuck up this industry? And you know how can we pay our farmers a living income? You know, not use child labor, etc., etc.
And so it's like you know I think if I was just doing mundane things like everyone else probably I probably would be bored as fuck. If I was just sold chocolate like everyone else, made the same repetitive YouTube videos like everyone else, I probably would be like "Alright give me out of this I want to retire." But it's not what we're doing. Like we're changing industries, we're impacting the world. Like this this is the point of life in my opinion.
You could do so much with the gazillion people that listen and watch your videos. You could like start almost any business and it be successful. You could have almost any social impact and it be profound and save a gazillion people's lives. Do do you struggle with focus?
Uh no. I mean I do wonder you know sometimes should we be doing more? But I've really found a good groove with Feastables. I'm very I keep looking over there because there's Feastables sitting over there. Um I do feel like I've hit a good groove with that um and the ethical sourcing on it and... No I mean yeah obviously I get a bajillion opportunities but you know right now this like I think I said earlier, this is one of the few things in life that I've it's scratched the same itch as YouTube where building Feastables is equally as fun as making videos for me.
It is so delicious.
Thank you.
It is so delicious. I'd really love to just spend a moment talking about the ethical sourcing piece because I don't think that's something I didn't understand until I did some research on you. Yeah. Um why? Why does that matter so much? And what when you say ethical sourcing, what's the difference between what you do and what normal chocolate companies in big chocolate in America?
Well the big thing is when I got into chocolate I didn't I didn't know any of these things. Um we we used to source our cocoa from Peru, cacao, um which you know ethical sourcing's not really an issue there. But the problem is majority of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa and so as we got bigger everyone's like "Hey you need to switch your supply chain to West Africa." I'm like "Cool." Um and so then I started studying and reading up about it and um and I noticed that 46% of labor in West Africa on cocoa farms is child labor.
And I was like "That's not that can't be accurate." And then I started digging deeper and deeper and I was like "Holy shit! It's just almost half the labor is child labor." And so I started talking to all the big chocolate companies, or not all of them but as many as I could get a hold of. And I was like "So what what do you guys do about this whole child labor thing?" and they they're constantly just telling me like "It just is what it is. That's how chocolate's always been." And I was like "Whoa! You guys make like a billion dollars a year in profit. You don't you don't see an issue with that being on the back of little kids?" and they're like "No you..."
And then you know I I have this crazy clip on I because I have a documentary guy, I think you saw him, Jeff, who follows me around. Crazy clip where I'm meeting with like a big um I got to be as vague as possible because they're going to murder me if this gets back to them, but like a big supplier, we'll just leave it vague like that. And I asked them I was like "So do you have any way I can pay extra to not use child labor or anything like that or any options?" and they're just like "No." And I was and and I my literal documentary guy is just like filming and I'm in like this big boardroom and I look at the camera and I'm like "Holy shit! They just said that on camera!"
And and so I did all this research and it was like yeah no in especially in America. Like there are some European chocolate brands that you know try, but um in America like really no one really cared. I mean there's plenty of options and plenty of time to fix it, plenty of money to fix it. So that just kind of honestly pissed me off and like that so then I just was like how do we solve this?
And so then it sent me down the rabbit hole. The everything points back to like you know the the reason chocolate in America is so cheap is because they just don't you know not the reason, one of the reasons they just pay the farmers so little. Like farmers make less than a dollar a day. Um so like because of that they're forced to use child labor because I mean they literally just don't even have money to pay someone who's not a child. So how many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa just on cocoa farms?
Uh I might have saw it in there too. 5,000?
No it's 1.5 million.
You're joking!
Yeah it's over a million! It's crazy. So what we need to do is we need to in my head get to a billion dollars a year in revenue as fast as possible while being ethically sourced and being profitable. A big part of it is we have to be profitable while doing it because then I can point and go "Look! We achieved scale ethically and we're making money. It's not that you can't do it, you just don't want to."
And then um and maybe maybe we give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just truly don't know how to do it at scale and maybe it'll open their eyes and they'll be like "Oh I guess it is possible" and they'll start to change their ways. More than likely they won't. And I think but over time I hope we can just shine a light on it using my platform and you know um just show the model works. And then I don't know something I would love to do in the long run is like you know how there's like the Fairtrade logo? Maybe I make my own version of it and I help other chocolate companies source their cacao ethically and um or something and you know and I just educate people on like if it doesn't have this symbol it's probably using child labor and something. I there's some way where I could play my cards over the next 10 years where we get over a million kids out of child labor uh on cocoa farms and so I just got to connect the dots and figure out the correct way to do it.
This might sound like a really obvious question, but it won't to everybody. Why don't you care so much?
Bro I just like I've been on these farms and I don't want to get rich on the back of little kids. I mean it's just kind of I feel like that's kind of obvious, you know? Like I mean maybe to other people in chocolate they don't care but I the first thing when I heard about it was like "Why? Why is this a thing?"
It reminds me somewhat of again of Elon Musk and what his mission was with Tesla. He kind of knew that if he was able to prove that you can have fast, um nice electric cars then the rest of the industry could give up their excuses that it's not possible.
Exactly.
Um what if someone comes along though and they say, "Okay Mr. Jimmy, we'll give you 5 billion for Feastables"?
Hell no! I ain't selling that shit.
You're never selling it?
No, because the first thing they would do to up the margins is they'd just drop the ethical sourcing.
Have people come along and offered to buy your YouTube channel?
Uh I mean yeah I've been offered a billion dollars here or crazy amounts of money there but I mean like you know what's funny is Zuck got that famous billion-dollar offer for Facebook and he said what was it he was like "Why would I sell this social media platform if I would just take the money and start a new one? And I kind of like the one I have, so why don't I just keep it?" And I it every every time I get which I haven't in a while but you know back in the day I used to like jokingly poke around just to see what people would offer me. Um and I'd get those offers and then I would always just be like "Yeah I mean I would just do the same thing I'm doing now. So I might as well just keep doing what I'm doing now, you know. The money won't really change anything."
Well done. And I don't think you've yet got the credit you deserve for the ethical the lengths you've gone to with Feastables.
It's fine.
No, but I think it's really important. I know you're not doing it for credit at all, I know that you're doing it to get the message out there so that the industry changes, but I think someone like you with the platform that you have that's able to produce chocolate that is fucking delicious. They sent me a box of it about six months ago and I ate so much of the fucking...
I'm thinking of updating yeah I mean if you hand them to me like hand me a couple bars the there's uh a lot of stuff that uh I the problem is like if you look at this and this, you know from a distance you can't tell really the difference between the flavors. Like this is Dark Sea Salt, this is just Dark Chocolate. So um I'm about to update the wrappers where we're going to put like color tips here so you can tell the flavors from far away. Um I think that's very important.
Um another thing too that uh I there's just a lot of... you made a mistake you put these in front of me now I'm just going to think about... the other thing I want to um I've been experimenting and the newer renders are looking good with putting like right here "Every bite helps uh get kids out of child labor" putting that on the front. And then I I'm you know we're messing around with different machinery. I feel like the images of the chocolate on the front could be a little higher quality. The back is pretty ass. Um I want to you know put some more messaging on the back of it. There's a lot that needs to be... Like the the white tips here it just makes it so obvious from far away what this flavor is whereas all these blend in. And so yeah brutal. Got to fix it.
You talked about your friends calling you and asking you for business advice and you helping them drive their businesses up. But just watching you there pick apart your own business made me think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs that watch our show that are early in their own businesses and many of them will be...
You're going to fail. You're going to fail a ton. I mean when I first started chocolate, I mean it was it was hilarious how bad I fucked up. Our original bars were like very thin. There's a reason why like chocolate bars have these like break points here where they like break easily. I didn't know that. Um and so mine was just one solid sheet of chocolate. But that's almost like a piece of glass whereas if you drop it it just shatters into like a bunch of little pieces. And um and I also didn't know that there's a thing called a a package engineer.
And can you hand me a box of Feastables? Uh my original chocolate box when you pop these open and put it on a shelf this obviously the problem's fixed but if this was sitting on a shelf when you grab this one, these would all slide forward and then they would fall out of the box. And or the box would fall off the shelf because of the weight because there wasn't right balance at the bottom and the lips here this this didn't used to be a thing. So these were open and there's just a bottom lip here so they would fall out like that. Um and the bars because we didn't have the natural break points would shatter like glass.
Who noticed that?
Oh well me! And the thing is I this is the old team in Feastables. I would tell them like "We're there's too many broken bars when I go into Walmart I'm seeing too many of them that are broken" and they told me like "Ah you're worrying about this too much, it's not that big of an issue, it happens to everyone." And I got to the point where it was just fucking pissing me off because I hated like grabbing a bar off the ground or seeing on the shelf all these like shattered chocolate bars that I I put like uh I paid people to put GoPros in like uh a a bag of Lays chips pointed at because I couldn't get I tried to get Walmart to give me the security camera footage and they wouldn't. So I put hidden GoPros in a bunch of random Walmarts just to pointed at the Feastables bars just to see why they're fucking breaking so much.
There's so many shots of like you know like a mom grabbing a bar and then she'd be looking at it literally like this and then you would just see the box just go and she and it would just fall off the shelf! And then they'd just put it up and you you know some of the bars would be broken. And it would just happen over and over and over again because we didn't engineer the boxes correctly. They didn't do anything wrong.
Do you know how atypical that is what you've just said? That you put GoPros...
Yeah people told me I was crazy! The amount of people who tried to tell me that was illegal, I was like "Bro I don't fucking care! I just need to know why my bars are breaking! Like I'll delete the footage." Um and so I that and uh you know I did a bunch of just data and I actually so there's a company called Acosta where you can pay people to go into Walmarts. So then I I started paying where every every week I would send someone into every single Walmart in America to buy all the broken bars, fix up the boxes... It's pretty expensive I think um you know it was it's like $100,000 just to send someone into every single Walmart to clean them up. $28 a pop times 5,000 um Walmarts.
And uh yeah so I was sending people into Walmart to clean up the broken bars and then but I was paying so much money! It was $100,000 a week just to send people in and then I was buying all these broken bars because I just really didn't want people to go into a Walmart to buy a broken Feastables bar. Like that is literally the worst you know consumer experience you can have. Um and yeah and then I found I learned what a package engineer is and I was like "Holy shit! This is your full-time job to make it where my boxes don't fucking fall over? Where have you been?"
But on the point that I was saying, your obsession with the detail of a product is a completely atypical. As if I was to compare this to a normal YouTuber and their e-commerce brand...
Oh they wouldn't give a fuck! Yeah.
You're going to I've probably spent thousands of hours obsessing over this product. I mean I know it doesn't feel like it because it's just chocolate but yeah I mean it's a problem from the ethical sourcing to every little thing about it. Like I don't I don't do anything haphazard.
And didn't you drive to a ton of Walmarts? Don't you...
Oh all the time! That's what I do every day. Oh fuck we should go hit a Walmart! We didn't even go Ah you got a plane you got to catch. Yeah it's my favorite thing to do is like sometimes I'll spend all night in Walmart just uh scanning products and looking at the daily velocities and sales. It's it's like uh I had a layover in DC. I live in North Carolina. Then I was like "Wait a minute. I could just rent a car and hit like 30 Walmarts on the way home and just drive home." And so then I drove home from DC to North Carolina and visited every Walmart on the East Coast in like the middle of America just to go look at the chocolate aisle and see all the statistics and things like that.
I asked you earlier on if you struggled with focus.
Fuck! I wish we could go visit a Walmart. You know how fun that would be? It's like I would love to educate you on the chocolate aisle.
Are Walmarts still open now?
Uh no. But um we can do it another time. I would usually what I do is I just bang on the door and they let me in.
Of course.
Yeah.
But what you've just said there, I'm I feel like I'm getting at something here. Because 99.99999% of entrepreneurs that I know that just have one thing to do, just to run their business, don't give that many fucks about the detail. And you have a gazillion things to do, an Amazon show which is like the highest budget of whatever of all time or whatever, and you have this massive channel, you have your philanthropy, you have all of this stuff, 100 million followers on TikTok, 100 gazillion followers here, a gazillion followers... The numbers are just unfathomable and you're still driving to 31 Walmarts to check if your chocolate is breaking.
Yeah! Well and I go in the back when I'm there if it's not on the shelf and I'll go scan it in and help with the employees and...
And is that is that the difference?
Well you just got to know everything going on. It's I mean it's just first principles. Every if like I I hate when someone in my business is like tells me something that I don't agree with but I'm too ignorant to be able to challenge them because then it's like well who am I to tell you? I guess I got to just take them on their word. But most people tend to pick the easiest route or conform to the status quo and I want to if I want to lead real innovation and like change the industry then I got to know every little facet of everything. And so I mean at the end of the day you know the shelf is where people buy it so I got to intricately know everything going on at the touchpoint of the consumer and you know how it gets there, how it's being stored at the DC distribution centers and then the retailer and then on the shelf and what what does it look like, what's the experience and everything because all these little things add up.
Do you not feel like you've spent your whole life fighting people to raise their standards to your standards? Because you don't exist in a world of MrBeasts.
Well that's the thing. I used to think which I've said a couple times it was just content but I've realized it's just everything I do. Like I just want to be the best at it. And that's it's weird man because you just look at this chocolate bar and you'd be like "Who the fuck cares?" But that's the thing! It's it's what I've really enjoyed the last two years is I've gone as in-depth on this as I have YouTube. And it's been every bit as fun. I mean it's very, very fucking difficult. Hard, especially the ethical sourcing and like I recently spent a week in West Africa and I went from the bean all the way to the bar and like you work on the farm and follow the entire QC supply chain and everything and it's not it's like it's equally as hard as my YouTube channel but it's also equally as fun. And I that was just that was a big eye-opener for me because I never thought I would enjoy something as much as uh my YouTube channel and then that's what I was saying earlier I've come to realize I deeply enjoy building businesses and solving hard complex problems even though I know this is just chocolate but I get the complex thing from the ethical sourcing side just on a daily basis. Like that that's fun.
With Beast Games, with this, with all the other things going on, um your main channel which I guess you probably still see as your baby to some degree... It's the mothership, right? Because it's the source of...
It's what allows us to do everything. Like most people buying this aren't buying it because of Beast Games.
Do you ever get paranoia when the views go down?
They haven't gone down yet! They've gone up every year for 14 years.
But do you still get that do you still watch the video go live and look at the backend?
No.
You don't?
No! I mean because it's like we uh I don't know I just upload a video and then in the next day I look at the retention and the CTR and if we fucked up I just you know well what we do is we call them after-action reports. So I get all the smartest people in my company like uh we actually just did one I wish I had my had it on me. But um we'll we have I pay this guy just to do a very in-depth breakdown of like "Here's the retention chart, here's every time someone clicked away, here's where it was the flattest, here's where it was the worst. You know we'll take like so if I upload a video that's 20 minutes, we'll take our last 10 20-minute videos and we'll go you know the median retention on the last 10 20-minute videos was 10 minutes and 55 seconds is the median. So if the retention on this new video's 11 minutes or above we did a good job, if it's below that then we did below average" and blah blah and he just does like a a giant like presentation. And so usually after two weeks after we upload we'll look at that with all my top people and then we'll just be like "What did we fuck up? What did we do well? Cool, move on."
And has there ever been a moment in real recent times where you go "I think I need to spend more time on it again and get back in there" because...
All the time! You know but a lot of that stems from insecurity. I mean because the thing is of course we we had a video recently "Every minute someone is eliminated" and it didn't perform the best. Um you know and there are like our intro was a little repetitive, it was a little dark. It um we had we brought back like losers from Beast Games to compete in a main channel video but the problem is some people thought it was Beast Games and like "Oh I've already seen this." There was just a lot of rookie mistakes there and it's very easy for me to like you know get insecure and and like be like "Fuck this is why I need to be in the weeds." But at the end of the day it's not like when I was calling all the shots I was perfect either. So as long as it's like as long as when people make mistakes they learn from them. I have a saying like that I tell people all the time like like whenever our new creatives fuck up I'll I'll look at Tyler I would go "Tyler's literally cost me tens of millions of dollars in bad decisions. Like this isn't going to be the first time you fuck us out of a million dollars as long as you learn from it it's fine." Um and so as long as like that's where these after-action reports are are important because as long as we when we mess up we articulate why and it doesn't happen again then it's just part of it. But yeah I mean if the same thing was happening over and over and over again then I'd be like "Fuck I need to get back" step in but my guys are just good like they don't make the same mistake twice.
Tell me about experimentation and testing. Because people look to you as the the real king of like testing and experimentation.
Exactly.
How central is this to the success of everything that you do?
Very much! And that's the thing. Like that "Every minute" video like it flopped you know and that was you your highest chance of flopping is when you do something new like really, really new. Uh one of our bigger flops before that too is we did this video where it was like "10 minutes this room will explode" but we built this giant tower, had a guy start at the top, he had to make it it was a real-time shoot down, press a button... you know it just didn't perform that well, people didn't really like it. Um it was kind of complicated blah blah.
And it's like you have to be careful because you know um I want to I want a culture where people feel comfortable experimenting and trying and feel fine failing. And so you know when that video failed or when you know the "Every minute someone's eliminated" like you know I don't go and yell at people or call them idiots or anything like that. I just am like "What did we do wrong? Alright here's all the facts. Just make sure it doesn't happen again. Not going to be the first time you cost me a bunch of money. It's all good, you know. I see this as investing in you guys and let's just learn from it."
I was going to say because um or else if if there was a culture of that then people would just make the same videos again and a lot of YouTubers just churn out the same format.
Exactly. I'm okay with my people failing. I'm okay with the video being 10 out of 10. Like as long as we actually took an honest, good um try at it, you know, and and as long as we failed because we made the wrong shot call, not because we were lazy, not because we didn't put the effort in, etc. As long as it was if as long as it's just like we made an educated decision to test something or try something and it just didn't work, I'm cool with that. We can do that all day. And like they know that and I haven't I don't yell at people um you know or get mad at them when they um accidentally mess up like that.
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You've just concluded today the biggest competition show I think of all time. Well it is of all time, but I think you've got 50 Guinness...
Oh yeah largest sets in history, most world records in history, largest cash prize in history, most winners in history, most contestants in history, most cameras, yeah.
And what? 50 Guinness World Records?
That we know of! There's probably way more, but yeah.
You said something on stage which I found quite interesting. You said "I kind of feel a bit sad."
Yeah I know! Because every Thursday I got to look forward to like seeing the internet's reaction to Beast Games and now I'm going to wake up next Thursday and I don't I don't get to see what people think. It's over.
They they describe this in the Olympics as "gold medal depression."
Really?
Yeah they say I think it's I might butcher these numbers but 70% of people after the Olympics, even if they won a gold medal, experience a depression afterwards because they've lost their North Star that was giving them meaning and...
Yeah. No I mean I'm not I mean I guess I'm playfully sad but I don't it's fine. We'll just I got I have so much shit going on I don't even really get to think about that kind of stuff.
And you're onto the next one?
Uh yeah so we'll we'll Amazon, let's get Season 2 in the books already! Come on! Let's sign a contract! Can't really talk about it...
It is the most me and Jack were talking about it earlier on, it is the most incredible thing that I think I've seen on TV and I just think I think I said to you on the phone the other day: I watch it knowing that unless you do another one, I will never see something on this magnitude and scale ever again.
Yeah no one wants to do something like that. I mean because it's fucking hard man! At those sets and the the thing is the reason why a lot of reality TV doesn't feel like that... and we could have obviously done much better storytelling and we will when we do future iterations... but the at its crux, like what people don't see is like to have a thousand cameras recording, the amount of infrastructure... like we broke a world record for most camera cables ran, like the like the most miles of camera cables. And like and the millions of dollars we had to spend on storage and millions of dollars on the control room and the millions upon millions of dollars of hardware to edit it and like having to bring in Adobe to custom change the Adobe software where you could actually have that many multicams.
It's like it is the the actual infrastructure to actually be able to do that is incredibly, incredibly difficult. And um that's why usually what they'll do is they'll be like, "Alright, here's a one-hour..." like if you're filming a reality show, "Here's a one-hour window," you know, they'll send out story producers, they'll put a camera on you, they'll be like "Yo can you say this line? You're kind of our villain, this is what we're looking for." They'll kind of tell you what to say and then they'll write the notes down and they'll catalog it for the editors.
Whereas we're just like "Fuck it. We're going to be filming you know 24/7, all these cameras. You guys be yourselves, we'll just capture it because you don't know when someone's going to do something weird. You don't know when someone's going to whisper to someone in form of an alliance, you don't know." So you literally have to just be rolling and you need these to be acceptable angles so you need multiple an A-cam and a B-cam and all this coverage, which creates a monumental fuckload of footage.
But that's what allowed us to tell what actually happened and why it feels different, because we were recording nonstop 24/7. But it's a fucking nightmare man. Like I had over 150 people editing that. I mean we were combing through unfathomable amounts of footage and and and everything and I mean even things from like the uh computer network and our local IT constantly crashing because there was just so much footage there and like if I if I were to send all the Beast Games footage to just one editor it would probably be like $300,000 in hard drives, you know, and and if you have 150 editors it's just impossible.
So we you spend millions of dollars and you build a central uh server room and so we have our own server racks and everything and then you have them remote in there. But even then just due to the sheer volume of footage Adobe and everything was constantly crashing and it's like it was it was a nightmare on the back end. But it's great! Because that's why we were able to tell what actually happened and why it feels different, because we were recording nonstop 24/7.
I was wondering as I was watching it if Amazon are aware of the the fact that you're just going to give away the money like this. Like when you like flip the coin and it adds another five million dollars...
Well that didn't affect them. I lost a ton of money filming the show so that that came out of my pocket.
Really?
Yeah we were we spent way too much money on it. I lost tens of millions of dollars on that show.
Really?
Yeah. I'm an idiot.
Because the headlines came out and it was like "Amazon give MrBeast a hundred million to do show."
Yeah.
So I'm thinking okay I'm doing the math I'm thinking okay so he spent 20-odd million on the prizes.
Yep. Yeah we gave away...
So there must be 80 million left or something.
I mean so episode 1 we spent over $15 million on those towers building them all. Like that was the most towers ever built, the most hydraulic press or whatever used. I mean that that set was fucking crazy man! We had to build a thousand towers that were 10 feet tall, safety test them all, put like get it where they actually work, we had to literally hardwire them all and build like our own software where we could drop people, we had to put up all the screens. I mean that was that's like arguably one of the largest sets ever built in history.
That was just Episode 1. And that's just like the construction of the set. That's not including like you said we we gave away over $20 million. I think over $2 million was in Episode 1. And then Episode 2 we have the city which that was a $14 million set build and that was huge! I mean because that was a real city that they were living in, you know. Um and then I yeah go on... But just between the 20 whatever 2 million we gave away plus those two sets I mean already right there you're probably you're at over $50 million.
How much did the whole thing cost?
That I have been advised not to say because because people will hear big number and be like "Oh well I could have made a good show if I had that kind of money" but the thing is they couldn't because it's money isn't everything. Like building and managing it is is you know infinitely harder. But...
Is it more than 100 million?
Yeah of course. Yeah.
Of course. I mean...
Well I just told you how we spent 50 million and that was we're only two episodes in.
So how out of pocket are you?
Tens of millions. Yeah it was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games. I lost money. I would have more money if I didn't film it.
Any regrets?
No! No it was great. I mean for for me it was about making Season 1 as good as possible, you know? I can't let the YouTube community down because you know creators don't have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms and you know I'm getting 200 million views a video on average over the course of the first year and I'm going to talk to these streaming platforms and they're like "Eh, we've been burned by creators before." I'm like "Bro I'm not a TikToker that dances! I have a production company and I routinely make spectacles."
And even me, these streaming platforms, they weren't taking serious. So I was like "Fuck! Like if I fail, it's over. Like no one's ever no streaming platform's ever going to touch a YouTuber ever again." So my big thing was just making sure this crushed and you know now the doors are opening up. I mean I'm getting calls from creators left and right and they're like "Yo yeah streaming platforms they wouldn't talk to me before now they're coming like..." I I would try to get a meeting with them and they were like "No." Now they're like begging to like have meetings with them and I I already know of two creators that have signed deals um just on the back end success of Beast Games and probably I mean hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars is going to flow into creators' pockets just because of Beast Games in the next year.
Well the on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not a a an easy a an easy critic to please...
Oh god.
No you you it was like 90% approval from fans, which is pretty unheard of on Rotten Tomatoes.
I know.
Um but also I hear through the the grapevine that it is on track to become one of Amazon's biggest shows of all time.
Yeah. See the problem is I have to wait for them to do a press release so.
Okay. Yeah well but for a "YouTuber," quote-unquote YouTuber...
Yeah well they they did release it was their number one unscripted show of all time and then yeah I mean the it's I I don't think they'd mind me saying it's very the show's very evergreen. Like usually these shows get a lot of attention and then kind of teeter off but ours is like like over 700,000 new unique viewers are watching it every single day. Like which is pretty crazy because if we maintain that yeah it's going to shatter some pretty crazy records.
And what's the upside for you to continue promoting it, now that it's done?
Because I put all this effort in! I want people to see it. Yeah I don't get paid to like all the promotion I'm doing now I'm not getting paid for.
Really?
But I mean but I guess the upside would be the better Season 1 does you know the more money I get for Season 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
If I sit here with you in 10 years' time, Jimmy...
Yep.
Oh boy. And everything went to plan...
You're 36 at that age.
I already know what you're going to ask. Yeah I mean I hate that kind of stuff because if you asked me the problem is if you asked me this like 5 years ago, I never would have said anything about Feastables or a lot of the stuff I'm doing now. And so the honest answer is: I don't know. I mean I think in what I'm doing you know hopefully by then I have 2 billion subscribers on YouTube, you know Beast Games is bigger than we ever imagined, hopefully Feastables has gotten over a million kids out of child labor by then um and you know and I probably will have two or three other businesses that I'm very passionate about that are hopefully crushing and yeah just I don't know.
And personally?
Maybe I'll have a kid by then. I don't know. I mean only time will tell. It it won't be until I feel like I could actually have enough time to be a good dad but I I don't even know. I don't think about my personal life. I just think about winning and got to build.
Some photos that I found that I loved.
Oh, okay. Holy shit, is this me or my brother? That's me. This one as well. Where'd you get these?
Um internet.
These are on the internet?
These are like the really iconic photos that I from seen really interesting moments.
Yeah I I don't think I've ever seen this one.
Really?
Yeah. No.
Do you recognize anything in that photo other than you?
No I don't. I was just thinking like what house am I even in? I might be at a military base potentially because when we were younger my both my parents were in the military so they were traveling a lot so this might just be like some random house. Interesting. I do recognize this though because this photo in the background I'm sure you've throw it up on screen, I think that that that was yeah that's on the hallway beside our bathroom. I haven't been to my mom's house in so long. Um interesting.
You you do so much for children but if you could whisper in that child's ear something about...
Buy Bitcoin.
What was it? Like two pennies back then?
No, I know because the I wouldn't want I wouldn't say anything if you gave me a microphone to talk to him because the problem is I'd be I'd be worried that it would change you know the outcome of of how I became. And like I'm very even though I know earlier on I was probably sounded a little depressed because shit's hard, but you know like I am happy with the position I am in and I would be worried that you know like this is definitely a very confused child that's not fitting in, that feels like a fucking freak. Not this young one, I don't know what the fuck he's thinking, but this one right here probably is around the age where I was like "Fuck I'm just a fucking weirdo I don't fit in with anyone. Why does no one want to build businesses and succeed?" But I think going through that journey was was important and it's uh yeah just gives me a lot of conviction with things. So I probably if I wasn't allowed to say "buy Bitcoin" I just wouldn't say anything.
What about to her?
Yeah to my mom I would... I mean this was what's funny is these are these are two different photos of my mom. You have like this version of my mom. I don't think there's anything I could say that would I mean because she she was in the military and they just beat like systems and order into your head and she probably this is probably right around the time where we lost everything and so this you know and she's at a very low point in her life and so I don't think there's anything I could say that would ever have like convinced her that her lunatic son is heading down the right path and um you know. But you know you can see the difference here where she it's it's almost indicative where she's smiling in this photo. This is when I gave her 100 grand. This is after we made it. This is after we had the whole conversation where she finally was like "Okay I'll trust you." You know?
There's a the whatever 12-13 years between these two photos was a very hard journey um especially when I stopped going to college and I got straight zeros and I mean she thought "Oh his life's fucking over. I just wasted 18 years of my life," you know? Um so same thing I don't I don't think there's anything I could say that would have changed anything. Um if anything it would have just gave her a heart attack.
Does she do you tell her now what she means to you and how much you appreciate...
Oh yeah of course. Yeah we're in a great... Yeah and she she's very happy and like yeah we're in a really good spot now. I love my mom. I mean because obviously I wouldn't be here without her, you know what I mean? If she didn't work the multiple jobs and do all the things she did to put me where I am, I mean even little things like you know she uh would give me like some months you know 20-30 dollars and then I would take that money and use that to like buy stuff to like help make videos or or whatever. Um and even just the fact that we had internet, you know what I mean? and things like that. Which you know I mean pretty basic now it wasn't as common back then. You used to get a phone call and you're like house internet I don't know if you would go up... Yeah and so like you know um it wasn't the best position but she gave me all the tools I needed to succeed. Not you know on purpose but.
She must be so shocked.
Well she's used to it now, but yeah I mean on the come-up I mean it was yeah I mean imagine being her. You know I mean she used to when I turned 16 like she couldn't afford to buy me a car, she she couldn't afford like the minivan we had like it was fucking piece of shit, like needed a repair, she couldn't afford it, like smoke was coming out the front of it. I mean she was a an absolute mess. And then she comes home and I'm just like "I'm making YouTube videos! Fuck math homework Mom!" and you know and she's just I think she was making $40,000 a year because I um we didn't talk about finances much when we were younger but I remember I got a $40,000 brand deal and then she told me that's how much I make in a year. And I was like "Holy shit! I didn't at the time I was like I thought you made way more than 40 grand a year." Um and then I was like "Why the fuck are you working? Like I'm getting paid this per video now on brand deals." And so um yeah.
What an incredible woman.
I know she's great. From everything she went through to now she she she just needs to be happy. I try not to stress her out. She's been through enough stress. Like her her job is I've been making her not make I mean she wants to do it but like exercise routinely, do all the system like body health scans and you know get on the vitamin grind and everything because like I'm not having kids anytime soon but obviously when I do have kids I really want her to be involved and she needs to be able to play with them and things like that so I'm like "You know stress is going to kill you, you're not allowed to be stressed. You need to do all these health protocols, you need to be like because you know you might be in your 70s when I have kids. Like you need to be able to move around which means you might potentially be 80 when they're 14 or 15. Like come on! Like what you do now is indicative will represent how active you'll be in my kids' lives." So like and we did have these conversations in a playful way so she's taking her health very serious for the future.
You're um not a man that seems to have many fears, but that appears to be one of them, a fear that we both share.
Yeah, exactly. I mean hopefully she'll just never die. My mom's going to live forever. It'll be fine. Bryan Johnson!
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.
Okay. Do do I get hit with the question first or...
You get hit with the question first.
Okay.
Would you rather die with a sound body or a sound mind?
Sound body or sound mind? Ooh. I assume if I chose body, then like that would be like dementia or something on the mind. Um. That's hard. Die sound body or sound mind? I mean what are you if you don't have your mind? I would say mind, to be honest.
Amen.
Yeah. Jimmy thank you. I do I get to write my question now?
You do. I want to say something to you though. Um I have to give you a lot of credit because so many people like us, like our teams, we have stolen so much from you. We've stolen your principles, your mentality and it's made us be better creators, which has allowed us to live the lives that we get to live and do these things that we we love the most. And um there's always a cost I think to being different and to being weird. There's an upside, but there's also a really, really, really big cost. And you pay that cost most when you're younger and you have to fit into the the system and you don't get to choose who you hang around with and stuff. Um but then as an adult, as you said, we all then clap for the the unique ones, the weird ones, and we steal from them and we aspire to be them and we learn from them. And you have in the very short amount of time that I've been speaking to you for like a week or something have blown my mind open. I got to see the behind-the-scenes of Beast Games and my entire mind as I sat there on the sofa... I like remember where I was sat when I saw the behind-the-scenes... just exploded. And you made me um in that moment realize how much I'd limited myself. As someone that considers themselves to be really ambitious, I'd limited myself. And so I wanted to say thank you because you're not just doing that for me, you're doing that for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people all at the same time and you're giving them the the road map but also a blueprint and the mentality and the belief that they too don't have to live the life that school or the system has told them they have to.
Agreed.
Exactly. So thank you for the couch honestly because we need more people like you and I'm your biggest fan.
Thank you. I really, really appreciate you. Thank you. All right let's see if we can break into a Walmart!
You're so funny!
Some of the most successful, fascinating and insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table. And at the end of every conversation, I ask them to leave a question behind in the famous Diary of a CEO. And it's a question designed to spark the kind of conversations that matter most, the kind of conversations that can change your life. We then take those questions and we put them on these cards. On every single card, you can see the person who left the question, the question they asked, and on the other side if you scan that barcode, you can see who answered it next. Something I know a lot of you have wanted to know. And the only way to find out is by getting yourself some conversation cards, which you can play at home with friends and family, at work with colleagues, and also with total strangers on holiday. I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours at thediary.com.
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