There's 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...
I'm gonna 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. Mr. Beast! Mr.
Beast! Mr. Beast! He is the biggest YouTuber on the planet.
And he's building empires.
I mean, is there anything this man can't do?
Your business empire is much bigger than most people realize.
Yeah, I mean, I'm only 26 and we have the largest YouTube channel in the world.
And Beast Games is gonna shatter some pretty crazy records.
And we do nine figures of Feastables.
But a lot of that stems from being a very confused child that's not fitting in, that feels like a freak.
Plus, I really wanted to take care of my mom because when I was 11, we literally went bankrupt and lost everything.
Luckily, it worked out.
And it's because I'm really good at obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet.
Like, I lost tens of millions of dollars on these games.
But it's about making season one as good as possible.
And I just really love solving complex problems.
Like, how many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa, just on cocoa farms?
It's 1 .5 million. And so with Feastables, we were trying to get over a million kids out of child labor.
But the ironic part is, the more I help people, the more I get.
Like, I've read over 5 ,000 messages telling me to kill myself.
I mean, there's definitely times where I would cry.
But if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn't be as successful as I am.
This is the price you have to pay.
But when is enough enough?
Honestly. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end 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're 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 the 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 to do in this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're 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've really just only met and you are already to me a bit of a Rubik's cube in so many ways.
And I've been trying to piece the pieces together to understand the uniqueness of you because you're so unbelievably unique.
We just drove over here in the car and hearing you speak about the way that you view life and speaking to you yesterday on the phone, I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and I've 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 um yeah my earliest years i i'm just stubborn man i just never give up i mean there was there's no world where i ever would have quit i just i i mean we're just jumping right into it it's a great no intro or anything
just boom that's how you hold people um when i was 11 i just said i'm going to be a YouTuber I'm going to die trying and I meant it and there was like even if no one still watches my videos to this day I would still be going um and so people hate it but I'm just the most competitive stubborn person you'll
ever meet and I just never give up and where did that come from I have no idea to be honest I honestly it feels like it was just in my DNA and my blood stream my mom hated it growing up we'd always argue and like you know she has this thing where like once Jimmy sets his mind to something he just never
stops and it would always piss her off because when it was YouTube and she wanted me to be studying or things like that, but I really don't know.
It's just always been how I am.
And I think a lot of people have these weird tendencies and they tend to like try to like unlearn them.
And like I had phases in my life where I was like, am I too extreme?
Like people are very intimidated by me because I just am so obsessed with work and I'm so all in.
And like, is this like unhealthy?
Should I try to be more like a normal human?
Especially when I was a teenager, it's a lot easier.
It's funny when when you're making lots of money it's like admirable it's respectable it's like look those are traits we want but when you're not successful you know you're a lunatic when you have all these traits and so back then i'd occasionally be like man like should i try to be more normal but i
just could never do it anytime i tried to i mean i've mentioned this before but one of the like things that like i have a memory of that like really is burning my brain is like people one time like a high schooler told me when i was in middle school like all you do is talk about youtube like do like
know how to do anything else.
Like you're just like a freak.
And I tried to like watch South Park, you know, because that's what a lot of people in my school watch to fit in.
And I just couldn't.
I was like, this is such a waste of time.
I don't like I could be working right now.
And I tried to do all these things to like fit in.
And I eventually just like stopped talking because I just didn't relate to anyone.
And people used to call me mute.
Like one of my teachers literally asked like, if I was mute, like, because that's how little I spoke, because no one in the school I went to was entrepreneurial or wanted to build businesses.
And I just didn't want to do anything else.
And yeah, eventually, I started to succeed, found other lunatics.
And now life's great.
But you know, I like to tell this story when I'm on podcasts, because if you have a younger viewer who's in that same spot, you're not the problem.
It's 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 don't. 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's a long story.
Don't need to get into it.
But my mom, honestly, it's great now.
Me and my mom have a phenomenal relationship.
But on the come up, it was pretty rough because in 2008, they were over leveraged.
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, you know, 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 a single mom raising us.
She's working all the time.
You know, my I don't talk about a lot of this.
You know, I have Crohn's disease, so I was very sick growing up.
My brother also had issues as well.
And so, you know, we're not the healthiest kids in our teenage year.
She's just trying to get by and take care of us.
and then you know she comes home and she just has this brat that's being annoying and like i want to be a youtuber and she's just begging me sometimes she would literally cry and beg me to do homework and i mean i was i was i was like i didn't i didn't mean it in a mean way but i mean i even one time
i literally told her if you want my my homework done so bad why don't you just do it you know like that's that's what i told my mom what am i doing i don't know like i was just like I don't I don't care.
Like, I just want to be successful.
I want to build businesses.
And so it was like, bless her heart.
Luckily, it worked out.
So now I spoiled her.
She's great. She has her second home, anything she could ever want she has.
And so the first thing I did was take, you know, start paying my mom, take care of her once I started making money, because she gave everything to like, give me where I am.
And I wouldn't be where I am now.
But it was like, it was like me and her spoke different languages when I was younger.
You know, she didn't want me to end up like them, you know, and get screwed and not have much money.
And, like, the path I was going down was just basically like, oh, I'm 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?
I just, me and my brother, we were just there.
I was just making videos.
You're making videos?
Yeah. what age did that start the videos I started at 11 11 yeah so I I'm 26 now I can't really remember life before YouTube like my earliest memories are basically when I started making videos you said earlier um you don't talk about your dad much yeah you don't have to tell me about it but why don't
you talk about your father much I don't worry about it I know your mom has spoken about him before yeah and it was a bit of a tumultuous relationship yeah exactly they didn't have the best relationship.
I mean, that's a topic for another day.
Honestly, kind of a sour way to start it off.
But yeah, it's my mom is great.
I love my mom. She used to cry asking you to do your homework.
A lot of things. She she would cry because I wouldn't put money away.
When we started making money, she would she thought it was too risky.
And I mean, the thing is, nothing she would say was unreasonable, right?
Looking back at it, she was perfectly reasonable in what she was doing.
I'm just a deranged lunatic and was way too obsessed with building the business and way too all in.
Like, it's very cute.
One time she like when we had I don't remember, like some month or made like 100 grand.
And I'm like, Okay, perfect.
Now I can spend 100 grand this next month on videos.
And she like, took like 5000 of it and put it away for me in my own bank account without telling me but in case, you know, I ever went, you know, was over leveraged or went bankrupt, like they did and um i found out about it and uh she's like please don't take this money just let me set aside anything
stop spending everything on videos and i was like no this is perfect now i can spend more like this is awesome thank you mom and like but to me i don't i don't really feel risk like if anything it like risk excites me and like i i have very high threshold for it um 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'm 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's just like, Jimmy, I trust you.
I know this. You think about this all day.
I'm going to just follow your lead.
And our relationship has been perfect ever since that.
If I'd asked 10 -year -old Jimmy, how are you doing?
What would he have said?
uh 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 um i gotta i gotta 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's many things you could have focused on you could have been a video game player whatever but YouTube is a particularly interesting thing because you're on camera yeah people are seeing it there's a metric which decides how successful
you are um was there any element of the on -camera part that was helping to solve for like the feeling of isolation that you you seem to have at that time no was the community yeah I think it's more to do with just I I found out that when I was at a young age probably around 11 that there were YouTubers
that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and i was just like oh that's it like just the money yeah of course because back back then we didn't have money and i really wanted to take care of my mom and and just my family in general so it was like everything it was like this is what i love
doing i i've never had as much joy doing something as i do this plus i could see a path where i could actually retire my mom take care of her pay her back for you know all the nights she worked so long so we could um live comfortably and things like that so it's just kind of the thing is i've one thing
that irks me is when people try to like put someone's motivation into like one little bucket like we're very complex creatures and like you know you have a girlfriend i i i would never say oh you just like her because she's pretty but you like her because she's pretty but you probably also like her
because she's smart you probably also like her because you know she's fun to be around she likes similar shows blah blah you probably if we sat here for 10 hours you could probably give me a thousand reasons why you like your girlfriend so it's like it's very annoying when people try to put why you
like doing a certain job or building a certain business into one bucket oh you just do it because of money what if i do it because i like money and i enjoy it and it's a way to do this and it's a way to communicate with people and community and these other things you know what i mean and i think that's
a common flaw we try to do it's like it's not that simple i think it's a lot of people can't understand someone being so relentlessly focused on something with the level of like commitment and sustained commitment that you've shown yeah and so and i don't know how i i agree because it's very weird like
how like i have extreme obsession to the point where like i just think about stuff the same like for me it's much easier to think about something 16 hours a day for seven days straight than it is like to like gear shift constantly i'm like really good at just obsessing over one thing more than anyone
else on the planet if i were to say what's my superpower it's 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's very weird like it's it was it was it wasn't like it was work for me grinding youtube for those 10 years or whatever
where no one was really watching it it's just like kind of who i am 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 uh 19 or 20 hours where I got I woke
up joined a Skype call with my friends and where we like were reverse engineering you know why certain videos do well or whatever and I remember that call being over 18 hours long and then I hung up went to bed woke back up the next day and instantly got back on the call and picked back like that was the level
of like hours we were putting in I mean I didn't know anything besides just trying to make it happen.
Was there anything else that you showed that level of obsession too so at that age no from i would say from 11 to well 11 to 15 it was a mix of youtube and baseball but when i turned 15 i got crones and i went from like 190 pounds down to 139 i lost all muscle i had and so i was like all right i'm not playing
baseball in college anymore so then i was like fuck it it's just all in on uh youtube and um and then up until really feastables it was basically just youtube versus whatever i never thought i would find like this kind of love for building i thought it was specifically video making but i have found
over the last two or three years just in general i just enjoy entrepreneurship and i've been really deeply loving getting like obsessed with feastables and other things and so which was very weird like when i first started a chocolate company it was like kind of a side thing but the more i started work
on it i got a lot of the same highs i got when i was making videos just in different ways and so now i'm like i know way too much about the chocolate industry i'm like it's pretty crazy i never imagined i would have put the thousands of hours i've poured into building festivals and so i think just in general
it's just i just really love solving consistent complex hard problems i think that's like what gets me out of bed and like the harder the problems the more exciting it is consistent hard problems i want to talk about that and also festivals but you mentioned crohn's disease there yeah 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 um 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 what 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 uh yeah when i was 15 i just started going to the bathroom eight nine ten times a day not digesting any food because my GI tract is literally just attacking itself.
It's very weird. Your immune system in your gut thinks your gut is a foreign invader, and so it just starts attacking itself, which if you're just using the bathroom 10 times a day and not digesting food, that's why you drop weight rapidly.
And it hurts like crazy because it gets very inflamed, and it feels like someone's stabbing you in the gut with a knife constantly when it's really, really bad, which is what I had.
So I lost 50 pounds, which is crazy because I was already relatively lanky.
And we were just trying different medicine.
And then eventually, I'm on a pretty extreme medicine called Remicade, where 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.
Like, so I have like random rashes and things like that.
So it's like, it's pretty, pretty brutal, to be honest.
And then it randomly flares up sometimes and just makes you very sick, very tired.
Like I just live life on hard mode, to be honest.
Like if someone like if you wake up and you have energy, like you're already leaps and bounds ahead of me.
Like, you know, it's 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's so productive for everybody looking on.
Yeah, it's you just got to really love what you do.
I mean, and push through it.
It's it's 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's brutal. And that's where it's like if I didn't work so much, I would spend more time researching Crohn's because surely there's a better way to stop it than just destroying my immune system.
And ideally, I don't do that deep into my 30s and 40s.
so i see it as a little bit of a band -aid but um you know i've met with the top crones doctors in the world and so far they're like this is just the answer and you're just lucky your you know gut isn't attacking yourself um so but i don't know i i feel like the medicine they give people crones is kind
of silly and there's got to be a better way to treat it i mean the ultimate solution is they just cut me open and cut out a large part of my gi track and then there you go but you know it's i observed in the team member that i had that had crones just a bit of a mental roller coaster as well because there's
a certain unpredictability to it exactly which makes life oh it's even worse when you're filming because you got this huge multi -million dollar set and 200 people waiting on you and you know sometimes you don't know if you're gonna have a flare but you just gotta 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's not i'm not the type of person to like embody the label or think it really means much i am just who i am have you um are you in any way neurodivergent
uh i've been told yeah by doctor i have adhd i mean i'm not surprised because i just sit and obsess over things constantly but i think um i'm happy with however my brain is wired i don't really care to change it um i 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 like you're bound to come up with different solutions that's one of the things you mentioned earlier you like solving hard problems consistently when you think back over
the last 10 years of your life and that the success you've had solving some of these hard problems if you were to like break it down into some core components of um that you've learned one of them is obsession that you've said yeah what are the others i mean it's all the typical stuff like you are obviously
who you surround yourself with and um luckily i just got around the right people in my later teenage years because i i feed off the energy of the people probably around me it's so obvious like i start to talk like them i become interested in the things they're interested in i mean this is all obvious
stuff i'm sure you've heard a bajillion times so but you know just gotta i always have to be protective of the people i'm around because whatever they say is what i start thinking on.
And that's what I started obsessing over.
And, you know, one of the best things that happened with Feastables is I just reached out to all the fastest growing chocolate companies, all the fastest growing snack businesses and everything and just became friends with a lot of the founders.
And, you know, that's what would have probably taken me eight, nine years to like solve, you know, after 18 months, you know, it's 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's just cheat codes um what about detail
sweating the small stuff one of the things that i saw i was reading the this that handbook that was linked on the internet and one of the things i saw throughout that was this real obsession with the one percents yeah and the small stuff how do you feel about this by the way and all of that i wrote
that uh with with some of my employees when i was probably 22 so there are some things that i'm like i read i'm like oh wow i was an idiot but for the most part most of it still stands the test of time um and i i do think it's very helpful you know it's funny a lot of ceos have actually told me that they
make their employees read this it went around all of our slack channels we all read it yeah which is funny because i'm like damn i should make an updated version of it so everyone uh but yeah the thing is it's the the core crux of it is like extreme ownership and don't make excuses and you know um people
always yeah i mean to damn I'm getting a lot of deja vu from when I was writing that it was just a different time back then too because I just I had no idea what I was doing when I was 21 22 and I just found that I was constantly telling like teaching the same or teaching people the same things over
and over again and it was always just like take extreme ownership take accountability like sure I guess it was out of your control but it could have been in your control if you just thought through it more if you just really cared and that's what I was just trying to convey in it and the other thing
that comes through in this but also all of your work is just this idea something that i've learned from you just from speaking to on the phone yesterday that nothing is impossible yeah and watching beast games over the last couple of weeks but also speaking to some of your team there's clearly this through
line with everything that you do of like extreme what appears to me to be extreme ambition and 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's just i mean is does physics allow it then yes, it's possible.
Do we want to put the time in?
I mean, I feel like people overcomplicate a lot of things.
Is that something you've trained over time or have you always thought that?
I think I've just, oh, it's a good question.
I've never, I don't know why, but when people tell me I can't do something, I don't know where this came from.
It makes me just want to do it more, to be honest.
If you tell me I shouldn't do something, that's fine.
But if you tell me I can't, then everything in my body just wants to go, fuck you.
I obviously can. I just, I don't know if I should but I can and then I don't know it's like the thing is like to go viral you have to do something that's never been done before I've told this story before of like you know if you're driving down the road and you see a cow who cares it's a fucking cow
but if you're driving down the road and you see a purple cow you've never seen that before and it's something you weren't expecting you're gonna go holy shit and you're gonna go tell your friends about it you're gonna 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 uh 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 gonna 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 the more of the purple cow effect where people have to watch
it and 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 um and because it like kind of goes exponentially and it's like you know pretty winner take all in the top videos like you just really have to lean into
that purple cow effect if that makes sense makes perfect sense if you if you were to distill then say we were coming up with a new how to succeed in Mr.
B's production handbook now, what would be the top five, if I was applying for a job with you, what five characteristics would I need to demonstrate to be successful?
You got to be very coachable.
Because whatever I teach you today is going to change, you know, a year or two from now.
Always learning, always improving.
Coachable. A big thing for me is you got to see the value in working here.
Like you really, I just, I don't, this isn't like a job, This is a career.
Like if you don't, you know, realistically see a world where you're working for me in 10 years, then it's pretty hard for me to invest into you at the level I want.
Like I'm not, I don't like training someone for six months.
They work here for a year and then I lose them.
What I like is I train someone for a year and then I get nine years of dividends on the back end where they crush at their job and I'm constantly paying them more because they're becoming more valuable at the 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 of my videos and directs them i you know probably talked to him five six hours a day every day for four yeah around
four years and now because i can't spend you he spends a hundred percent of his time writing the videos directing the videos obsessed over that whereas i could theoretically max spend five percent of my time so he's gonna naturally just shit on me on it because he can spend way more time on it and it's
like so you know I 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 a business.
And it's like, that's what I want.
But you only get those kinds of people, 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 gonna be here in 10 years.
And then you're going to feel that and it creates.
So, uh, coachable, uh, sees the value.
Um, obviously obsessed.
I, I don't, I just don't like working with mediocre people.
I, I mean, I really just can't stand it.
It's the fastest way to make me depressed.
Um, is if I have to work with someone who's just not all in and just loves what they do.
Um, 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, the typical traits, It's 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 when you fire them, but not good.
The problem is like, I mean, 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 make work
not as fun and so everyone knows get rid of the c players right obviously get rid of people who aren't all in blah blah it's the ones that are like they're not an a player but they're not a c player so it's kind of hard because you still feed off the energy and if you get enough of them it just drags
the overall culture down so those are like the worst um i mean not everyone can be these like world ending monsters that you know there are a lot of mundane things like i mean the book controller and accounting i mean probably doesn't have to be the best in the world but you know when it comes to like
the mission critical things like making videos and things like that you like just the great people got to be surrounded like that's one of your number one jobs as leaders just to make sure you're 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 i mean it's that's like number four on the list don't ask me the list tomorrow i don't remember i just know the number one thing is do they enjoy who they're working with and people will leave 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've they're There's so many people in my business.
I mean, obviously, you have to take care of them, pay them well.
They're not the kind of people that would just make the standard rate.
But yeah, like people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and, you know, even people on our editing team.
I mean, they're putting in most weeks, same amount of hours as me, and they're all in, see the vision.
It's like, it's hard to find those kinds of people.
But, you know, when you do, you got to treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.
And you have almost 500, roughly 500 people.
uh probably uh i think the production company were around 300 feastables around 100 and then probably another 40 50 scatter amongst everything else most founders that i speak to describe scaling head counts is the kind of worst past part of the job more people more problems right yeah that's uh that's
an understanding yeah 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'm 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 I the the worst part is I just have this very once in a um I just very rare 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 200 200 300 and like with what I know now I could have done it so much faster obviously and it's
just you know it's a little brutal because like like scaling festivals from you know 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 time here i probably should 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 gotta make 10 000 mistakes every founder says the same every founder i've spoke to says the same that 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
skilled 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 um we brought in a new c -suite recently um i it's like always a hard balance because i try not to in the past i i've like you know decisions are kind of like pendulums and i have a uh a problem where i like i'll identify something
and i'll over correct the pendulum one way.
And I'm like, oh, 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 fuck ups because we don't have anyone who's actually built the business at this size.
And so, you know, the pendulum was on the right and I swung it all the way to the left of no corporate.
And now I think we're in the healthy medium where, you know, obviously the people in our c -suite and the leaders should have lots of experience managing people at this size and scale but it's just finding the right people who can do it and build systems in a way where it doesn't crush creativity and they
actually value the product over ease the diary of a seo and my i'm on a tv show called dragon's in the uk and um my stuff is significantly smaller it's like a of your viewership but even i am slightly terrified with hiring people because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone
that I work with to say that I did something bad.
And in the early days of my first business, what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there and they ask them, what was he like?
You have the same problem.
You have the same conundrum.
Where anyone has an incentive that works for you, when they leave, so many different incentives to throw an arrow at you on the way out the door.
How do you contend with this?
Yeah. I mean, you hit it on the head of, you know, I have four or 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, as long as what we're doing is moral and ethical, like you said, they're going to throw arrows.
But I'm just a problem solver.
It's like whenever I see the metaphorical arrow, I just go, what's the problem?
And if we did something wrong, how do we fix it?
Or if it's not an actual problem, it's just rumors.
I mean, it is what it is.
And so, yeah, I think it just comes with part of it.
I mean, it sucks and it's unfortunate.
it. But you also 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 all the jobs that worked in their life.
How many did they deeply enjoy?
And would they have nothing negative to say?
So I think it's just part of it.
You know, it's almost like a pastime for a lot of people just to like trash talk their old jobs or whatever.
Has any of that stuff ever got to you?
Any criticism? 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 of video like you know like most of it unique viewers like we're talking like 2 plus percent sometimes 3 percent of humans alive watch every piece of content I put out you know
depending on how well the channel is doing and so like I mean it's like you could I could upload a video and then with 365 days later you could grab 33 random humans anywhere on the planet especially because we do doves.
You know, what's even crazier is there, you know, YouTube's not in China.
So that's like two to 3 % of humans alive, excluding China.
Or China's mixed in there.
But if you just take people excluding China, it'd be more like three to 4%.
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 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 you
know focus on the one percent instead of 99 so i just came to the point where you know i just have to have my own internal guidelines of like do i think what i'm doing is good do what i think you know is moral ethical do do i believe in what i'm doing if so fuck it like i'm never going to be able to
make everyone happy.
So I and if you just you let the whims of the Internet kind of decide what is OK and what's acceptable and and when you're being bad or good, then you don't have a spine, you don't have a backbone, you stand for nothing and 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 OK 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 this is what i've come to learn so do the podcast it goes well it feels like at the start
everyone loves me yeah and then i get further down the line and it feels like everyone fucking hates me yep because they you get attacked from you can never do anything right especially i've probably read mess 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 what i mean you know just like and what would possess someone to tell you to like leave a comment where it's like fucking kill yourself you know 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 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 be successful.
And, you know, when you're probably 20 and you're hiring all these people, I have high risk tolerance but I'm reinvesting every dollar I make I'm hiring my friends from school I've hired my mom these people I really care about are depending on me I upload a video and it does bad I pour all my time and effort
into it but maybe it doesn't come across as well some people might have interpreted as lazy and you read a comment being like wow what a fucking lazy I thought you made great videos this video sucked and you read that and the video is underperforming and you're like fuck maybe i am being too reckless
and you know i mean there's definitely times where i would cry you know just because i would just be like fuck am i like not doing this right or like they don't understand i put a lot of time into this or or whatever why why 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 yeah probably there was like a a month probably last year where I felt a little bit of that just because um you know just sometimes occasionally the rumor and drama mail gets spun up but you just gotta snap out of it
and like I said just go do I believe in what I'm doing do I it's like it's hard because you know anytime I do anything good it's you know people are always like uh they try to we're like conditioned in America now when someone does something good there's always some alternative 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 when I don't you know I just kind of that's my answer um but it always does suck when people try to just like I don't know it's funny the more good you do the more people think you're secretly evil and it's like why can't
I just help people because it's fun you know so occasionally those will get to me and I'll just be like guys you don't even know me like and like you would think sometimes you'd read like when I build wells in Africa or help blind people see or things like that you you'd 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 quote -unquote 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 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 so funny, because, you know like the same day I'll uh drop a video where I'll uh uh you know uh help a thousand blind people see some other youtuber will drop a video where they just bought a new mansion and it's
like everyone's like yes you know get that mansion good job and then they'll be like fuck you for curing blind people Jimmy fuck you you're using them and I'm like no I just want to inspire people to do good I mean I can buy a mansion if you really want me to 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 we're just so conditioned in america to
see it as like a shield then like no one actually does good because they just find it fun apparently but I mean I don't care like I said it's just more fun than if I didn't so I mean people can shit on me for helping people it doesn't bother me anymore but I wouldn't recommend you get into it if you
want to be liked because I think it's negatively correlated now interesting it is so fascinating it is I swear to God man like it's it's there I could just I don't know do these like uh one dollar versus videos where i compare like a one dollar boat to a billion dollar boat and all these other things
and not help people and i would just give way less shit 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 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 all right 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 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 know where your line is and as long as you're on the right side of your line then it is what it is people on twitter can say whatever they want and i 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 can you give me a window into the last seven days of your life just give me paint me a picture oh yes uh let me uh drink some water because my flu well the i don't know about the last seven days but in general we uh 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 cage surrounded by lions sick content it was really good uh which that was a bitch to get to and then i got the flu and so spent a couple days in the 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 i 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 a lot and then flew to florida filmed with aaron judge flew here just landed filmed with the reunion that you're
at with the contestants for beast games we're doing this podcast what time is it like 1 a .m just off to 1 a .m yeah 1 a .m the latest podcast he's ever done lightweight I always do my podcasts at 1am my last podcast before this was like 4am like a couple weeks ago and then we're flying to San Fran to
film with Steph Steph Curry then I think I'm going to Snake Island then the deadliest road and then I won't I'll basically I don't think I'll be home for another 16 days so I'm just traveling around filming for the next 16 days and then yeah I guess then I'll get home and then they'll make me 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 just 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 and you know your office or whatever so easy compared to like 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 a .m.
Other days I'm going to bed at 5 p .m.
And it's like, it's a mess.
It's really, and I used to put up with it and it just like, 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.
I really do miss it.
It's just this. the hard part is putting putting beast games in the mix because i was already like basically working you know whatever every hour my eyes were away but then beast games is such a monster of a project i have to maintain the same youtube upload schedule and then i do a lot on festivals
now and then i have a couple other businesses so i i just honestly something had to give and sadly it was working out but it's fucking stupid so i need to like reprioritize my life where i can get i mean it just only needs to be 45 minutes five days a week it does doesn't need to be hard but the bigger
problem is i'm just not sleeping like i used to because we got so much going on and so when i hit it hard in the gym and then i don't get enough sleep then that causes pretty extreme fatigue the next day so it's like i gotta fix sleep first before that but yeah it's uh got a lot going on to be honest
i'm dying how are you feeling uh right now honestly fine i'm jacked up on all that 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 roller coaster 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 and every time you ask me this it's going to be up but because of the flu and the lack of sleep i mean i'm struggling at the moment just a lot of grinding um a little happy because we just dropped the ending
at beast game so it's like a little bit of emotional high but after this i'm probably going to go crash be tired as fuck in the morning tomorrow, which I hate.
But yeah, I would say I'm on like the lower end.
I could use a couple of 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.
Yeah, I don't. Well, the thing is, here's the problem.
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.
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, blah.
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 modes.
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 months where I'm, you know, I think there was one year I was flying like 200 days, like I was on a plane.
I mean, it was, it was a fuck fest, but you know, to get these videos done and I do everything and it's like you know when I when I wake up tomorrow and I'm gonna be pretty fucking tired and feel like shit I'm gonna go you know I something I always tell myself is how you feel right now is why no one
else does what you want to do or does what you do and if you push through this that's just even you know more 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 to me to you guys i met recently um yeah they're great great great guys
um you said to them i'm miserable a lot of times i have mental breakdowns every other week yeah i think i've gotten a little better mental breakdown sounds extreme it's more i'm like fuck why am i doing this this is so fucking hard 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 was doing youtube now i run this chocolate company and we have the show and we have a couple other stuff so i think the the hardest part really is gear shifting like and so i try to bucket these things correctly
like if 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 then like that constant gear shifting yeah 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 there's 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 switches a day and that that's just miserable
it's just not even fun to be honest i heard um 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 they're I mean obviously I'm not a robot there are times where I'm like fuck I really want to play the strategy board game I want to do
this thing and I'm I look at the schedule and I'm like oh maybe I could do that in four days and you you know and the hard thing is it's you really have to like 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 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, blah.
And so, yeah, I think most people when that feeling comes up of like, am I just a fucking animal?
Like, do I have any free will?
They would probably get very depressed.
But I've been able to, like, work through those.
And just I always try to, you know, your brain, you just it's 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.
do 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 diligent about how I frame things in my mind like this is why no one else will do what you will do and this is a good thing this is what you are feeling
right now is your moat you're lucky it's hard push through it and you'll be happy you did you know and so that's kind of how I try to view it 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?
It depends what day you ask me.
Right now I'm having a good time.
Other, you know, when I was had the flu in Africa, sitting in a cage of lions, fuck no.
So what's your baseline?
How would you describe your baseline?
Probably this year, probably so far more unhappy than happy.
And it's just, there are just things you got to do that just aren't fun, you know, but I think I really deeply enjoy working on festivals and I'm trying to spend more of my time building it.
The problem is 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 do think I'd be happy 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 is doing so well on a platform like YouTube where the algorithm is always changing.
So many YouTubers I speak to say that they get burnout eventually.
They get like creative burnout.
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, of course. Really?
All the time. Seriously?
Yeah. But, I mean, I feel like that's what half this podcast has been about.
About how I don't want to do things, but I push through and do it.
I think they're just reasonable humans.
Like, they, you know, a lot of them are chasing 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, I mean, probably countless times.
I mean, when I was in solitary confinement for seven days, I mean, that was fucking miserable.
I mean, I did quit a video.
I've quit a lot of videos.
No, I mean, as a creator.
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 nine hours a night and like um but like i spent the first we we did a video we spent seven days on a dessert island first time we filmed it on day two i woke up on the beach and i had literally
i didn't know sand fleas were a thing i had like 700 bug bites up and down my legs all over my body i was sunburned i was like a little bit of me was like damn are i gonna die like this is crazy how much like bug bites are everywhere and my skin was so red and i was like couldn't see straight and so I
ended up quitting on day two 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 seven -day window we could have got a video and uploaded it and now we don't like it's 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 and you have moments like those and it's like fuck like this isn't even fun fuck this shit you know but but what about youtube as a whole because I feel like youtube is like
throwing coal into a train then you just have to keep throwing it in there once you've started you just can never stop throwing it 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 on ironically 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 two three
four decades oh yeah of course i don't have any intention of ever stopping okay um love something that came into my life a couple years ago yeah you announced i think over christmas time you had proposed i think it was like boxing day or new year's eve yeah it was on christmas day oh christmas day because her
family was in town so i proposed okay how does that fit into this craziness she's literally i you could probably count on your hands the amount of uh people on the planet that actually would make a good partner for me and she's just she's just one of them she really understands that work is what you
know is what i live for what keeps me going and she supports me and she understands how important it is and it's the big thing is hanging out with tia my fiance is 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 in a listening now that's
in a relationship i guess the question they'd be thinking is like when do you spend time together mostly at nights um and uh 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's in car rides or you know an hour before bed or in the morning that kind of stuff but it's like because there are pockets of breaks on set and things like that so it's just you know having it's it's really hard to find someone who is intelligent actually has their own hobbies things going
for them independent that's also willing to mold their life around mine and not see it as a demeaning thing because like yeah 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 and my
work schedule that 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 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 40 K a month in revenue to 400 K 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 them grow to eight figures in revenue just for fun.
I would just call them a couple of 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 of kids and just like 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 could actually be present in their life.
And your business empire, I think is much bigger than most people realize.
I imagine the majority of people probably don't really understand the context of business.
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 of feastables.
I mean, we can say that, yeah.
Nine figures of feastables.
So the business must be worth several billions of dollars.
Overall, I mean, you could do something like that, yeah.
I'm not going to get you to try and hazard a guess.
I'm sure you know, but I'm not going to ask you to predict that, but...
The business would be worth a lot of money.
Are you a billionaire?
Yeah. On paper, yeah.
But I mean, in my actual bank account, I have less than a million dollars.
Do you pay yourself at all?
A little bit. But I also like I have some assistance and things like that.
So it's like I try to just pay myself what I spend, you know, personally a month just to like stay even.
How do you think about money and all of this?
Because 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 the system 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 it's 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 cliche question that I'm asked enough like building the business never I mean I just want to keep like building a business is like a video game.
It's, 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 a hundred 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, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's like, you know, I think if I was just doing mundane things like everyone else, probably I probably would be bored as fuck If I would just sold chocolate like everyone else, made the same repetitive YouTube videos like everyone else, I probably would be like, all right, give me out of this.
I want to retire. But that's not what we're doing.
We're changing industries.
We're impacting the world.
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 start almost any business and it'd be successful.
You could have almost any social impact and it'd be profound and save a gazillion people's lives do you do you struggle with focus uh no i mean i do wonder you know sometimes should we be doing more but i 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 uh i've hit a good groove with that um and uh the ethical sourcing on it and uh no i mean yeah obviously i get a bajillion opportunities but just you know right Right now, like I think I said earlier, this is one of the few things in life that 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. Why? Why does that matter so much?
When you say ethical sourcing, what's the difference between what you do and what normal chocolate companies do?
chocolate in america uh 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 is not really an issue there but the problem is majority of the world's cocoa comes from west africa and so as
we got bigger you know 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 i and I'd noticed that 46 % of labor in West Africa on cocoa farms, it's 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 a labor is child labor.
And so I started talking to all the big chocolate companies or not all of them, but as many as I could get ahold of.
And I was like, so what do you guys do about this whole child labor thing?
And they were constantly just telling me like it just is what it is.
That's how chocolate always has 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 i you know i i have this crazy clip on i have a documentary guy i think you saw him jeff he follows me around crazy
clip where i'm meeting with like a big um i gotta be as vague as possible because they're gonna murder me because i tie back to them but like a big supplier we'll just leave it big like that and i asked them i was like so do you have any way i can pay extra to not use child labor or anything like that or any
options and they were just like no and i was and i my literal documentary guys is like filming and i'm in like this big boardroom and i look at the camera i'm like holy shit they just said that on camera and uh and so i did all this research and it was just like yeah no and especially in america like
there there's some european chocolate brands that you know try but uh 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 that everything points back to like you know to 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 farmer 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 how many kids do you think are in child labor in west Africa just on cocoa farms uh you might have saw it in that 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 achieve scale ethically and we're
making money it's not that you can't do it you just don't want to and then 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 the ways
more than likely they won't and i but over time i hope we can just shine a light on it using my platform and you know 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 fair trade logo maybe i make my own version of it
and I help other chocolate companies source their cacao ethically and or something and you know and I just educate people on like if it doesn't have the 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 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's it won't be to everybody why don't you care so much bro I just like I've been on these farms I don't want to get rich on the back of little
kids I mean it's just kind of I feel like it's kind of obvious.
Maybe to other people in chocolate they don't care, but the first thing when I heard about it, I 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, nice electric cars, then the rest of the industry could give up their excuses that it's not possible.
Exactly. What if someone comes along, though, and they say, okay, Jimmy, we'll give you $5 billion for Feastable.
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 just drop the ethical sourcing.
Have people come along and offered to buy your YouTube channel?
I mean, yeah, I've been offered a billion dollars a year or crazy amounts of money there.
But I mean, you know, what's funny is Zuck got that famous billion dollar offer for Facebook and he said, what was it?
He was like, why would I sell this social media platform?
I would just take the money and start a new one and I kind of like the one I have so why don't I just keep it and I every time I get which I haven't in a while but you know back in the day I used to like jokingly poke around just to see what people would offer me and I would get those offers and 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 wouldn't really change anything well done and I don't think you've yet to get the credit you deserve for the lengths you've gone to with Feastables
but I think it's really important I know you're not doing it for credit 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 a platform that you have that's able to produce chocolate that is fucking delicious they sent me a box
of it about six months ago and i thank you i hate so much like i'm thinking of updating yeah i mean if you hand them to me like hand me a couple bars the there's a lot of stuff that uh 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 uh i'm about to update the wrappers where we're going to put like colored tips here so you can tell the flavors from far away i think that's very important um another thing too that uh i there's just a uh you made a mistake you put these in front
of me now the other thing i want to um i want to 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 gotta 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 gonna fail you're gonna 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 just shatters into like a bunch of little pieces and um and i also didn't know that there's a thing called 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 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 the bottom lip here yeah and so they would fall out like that um and then 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 i this is an old team in peacefuls i would tell them like there's too many broken bars when i go into walmart i'm seeing too many that are broken they told me like 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 a like a bag of lace chips pointed at because i couldn't get i tried to get walmart's
to give me the security camera footage and they wouldn't so i put hidden gopros in a bunch of random walmart's just to point it at the feastable bars just to see why are they 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 just see the boxes go and she and it just fall off the shelf and then they just put it up and you know some of the bars would be broken and it 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 don't delete the footage oh and so i that and uh But I did a bunch
of just data. Actually, so there's a company called Acosta where you can pay people to go into Walmart.
So then I started paying where 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 it's like $100 ,000 just to send someone into every single Walmart to clean them up.
$28 a pop times 5 ,000 Walmarts.
And yeah, so I was sending people into Walmart to clean up the broken bars, 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 Walmart and to buy a broken feastable bar.
That is literally the worst consumer experience you can have.
And yeah, and then I've 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 completely atypical.
If I was to compare this to a normal YouTuber and their e -commerce brand.
Oh, they wouldn't give a fuck.
Yeah, I 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 do anything half -assed.
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, he's got a plane he's got to catch.
Yeah, it's my favorite thing to do is like sometimes I'll spend all night in Walmart just scanning products and looking at the daily velocities and sales.
It's like, I had a layover in DC.
I live in North Carolina.
Then I was like, wait a minute, I could just rent a car and hit like 30 Walmarts on the way home and just drive home.
And so then I drove home from DC to North Carolina and visited every Walmart on the East Coast in like the middle of America just to like go look at the chocolate aisle and see all the statistics and things like that.
I asked you earlier on if you struggled.
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, though.
I want musterloper now.
No. They're not? Okay.
We can do it another time.
Usually what I do is I just bang on the door and they let me in.
Of course. Yeah. But what you just said there, 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 future 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 the employees.
And 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 you know I guess I got to just take him on the 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 day you know the shelf is where people buy it so i got to intricately know everything going
on at the touch point of the consumer and you know how it gets there how it's being stored at the distribution centers and then the retailer and then on the shelf and what what does it look like what's the experience and everything because all these little things add up do you not feel like you spend
your whole life fighting people to raise their standards to your standards because you don't exist in a world of Mr.
Beasts. Well, that's the thing.
I used to think, which I've said a couple of 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 wouldn't, you'd be like, who the fuck cares?
But that's the thing.
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 and 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 worked on the farm and followed 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 that was just that was a big eye opener for me because I never thought I would enjoy something as much as my YouTube channel.
And that's what I was saying earlier.
I've come to realize I deeply enjoy building businesses and solving hard complex problems even though I know this is just chocolate but I get the complex thing from the ethical sourcing side just on a daily basis like that's fun with Beast Games, with this, with all the other things going on your main channel
which is I guess you probably still see as your baby to some degree it's like the mothership right because it's the source it's what allows us to do everything 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 back end?
No, I don't. No, I mean, because it's like we, I don't know.
I just upload a video and then the next day I look at the retention and the CTR.
And if we fucked up, I just, you know, what we do is we call them After Action Reports.
I get all the smartest people in my company.
Like, we actually just did one.
I wish I had it on me.
but like we'll we i have i pay this guy to just do a very in -depth breakdown of like here's the retention chart here's every time someone clicked away here's where it was the flattest here's where it's 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 uh the median retention on the last 10 20 minute videos was 10 minutes and 6 or 55 seconds is the median so if the retention on this new video is 11 minutes or above we did a good job if it's below that then we did below average and blah blah blah and and he just
does like a a giant like presentation and so usually i have two weeks after we upload we'll we'll look at that with all my top people and then we'll just be like what'd we fuck up what'd we do well cool move on and has there ever been a moment in recent times where you go i think i need to spend more
time on it again and get back in there and 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 they're like our intro was a little repetitive
it was a little dark it um it 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 they're like oh i've already seen this but it's 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 like it's not like when i was calling all the shots i was perfect either so as long as it's like as long as when people make mistakes they learn from them i have a saying like that i tell people
all the time like like whenever our new creatives fuck up i'll look at tyler i 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 they'd be like fuck i need to get 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 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 your 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 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 yeah it was 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 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 this someone's eliminated like you know i don't go and yell at people or call them idiots or anything like that i just i'm like what did we do wrong all right here's all the facts just make sure it doesn't
happen again not gonna be the first time you cost me a bunch of money it's all good you know i see this as investing in you guys and let's just learn from it i was gonna 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 turn out the same format 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 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 don't yell at people um you know or get mad at them when they um accidentally mess up like that I've
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Let me know how you get on.
You've just concluded today, the biggest competition show, I think of all time.
Well, latest of all time, but I think you've got 50 Guinness.
Well, you know, 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?
Yeah. 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 get to see what people think.
It's over. 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 depression afterwards because they've lost their North Star that was giving them meaning.
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm not.
I mean, I guess I'm playfully sad, but I don't, it's fine.
I have so much shit going on.
I don't even really get to think about that kind of stuff.
And you're on to the next one?
Yeah. So we'll, well, Amazon, let's get season two in the books already.
Come on, let's sign a contract.
I 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.
Those sets and the thing is, the reason why a lot of reality TV doesn't feel that way and we could have obviously done much better storytelling and we will when we do future iterations but the the at its crux like what people don't see is like to have a thousand cameras recording the amount of infrastructure
like we broke a world record for most camera cables ran like 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 in the control room and the millions upon millions of dollars of hardware to edit it and like having to bring
in adobe to custom change the adobe software where you could actually have that many multicamps 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 all right 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 and form
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 fuck load of footage but that's what allowed us that was i mean of amongst many things that's one
of the biggest uh competitive advantages we had when filming beast games is we put in the effort to to set up all this infrastructure we could actually capture it and just tell the story how it is instead of having to use story producers to put words in people's mouths but it's a fucking nightmare man like
i had over 150 people editing that i mean we were coming through unfathomable amounts of footage and and everything and i mean even things from like the uh computer network and our local it constantly crashing because there's just so much footage there and like if i were to send all the beast games
footage to just one editor it would probably be like 300 000 in hard drives and you know and if you have 150 editors it's just impossible so you spend millions of dollars and you build a central 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 which is 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 why it feels different because we were recording non -stop 24 seven i was wondering
as i was watching it if amazon are aware of the fact that you're just going to give away some money like this like when you like flip the coin and it adds another five million that didn't affect them i lost a ton of money filming the show so that that came out of my pocket because 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 as like amazon give mr beast 100 million to do yeah show so i'm thinking okay i'm doing the math i'm thinking okay so that he spent 20 odd million on the prizes yeah
we gave away so there must be 80 million left or something i mean so episode one we spent over 15 million dollars 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 detest 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 that was that's like arguably one of the largest sets ever built
in history that was just episode one and that's just like the construction of the set that's not including like you said we we gave away over 20 million dollars i think over two million was in episode one and then episode two we have the city which that was a 14 million dollar set build and that was um
huge i mean because that was a real city that they were living in you know um and then i yeah i go 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 dollars how much did the whole thing cost that i have been
advised not to say because people would 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 uh that 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's
great i mean but for for me i was it was about making season one as good as possible you know i can't let the youtube community down because that you creators don't have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms.
And I'm getting 200 million views of video on average over the course of the first year.
And I'm going to talk to these streaming platforms.
And they're like, we've been burned by creators before.
I'm like, bro, I'm not a tick tocker 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 is 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, oh, yeah, streaming platforms, they wouldn't talk to me before now they're coming.
Like I would try to get a meeting with them.
And they were like, no, now they're like begging to like have meetings with them.
And I already know of two creators that have signed deals just on the back end 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 an easy an easy
critique no you got 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 I
got you I told him I'd be a good boy and not leak things but for a YouTuber they did release it it was their number one unscripted show of all time I don't think they'd mind me saying it's very the show's very evergreen usually these shows get a lot of attention and kind of teeter off but ours is like
over 700 ,000 new unique viewers are watching it every single day like, which is pretty crazy because if we maintain that like, 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 one does, you know, the more money I get for season two, three, four, five, et cetera.
If I sit here with you in 10 years time, Jimmy.
Yep. And everything went to plan.
um you're 36 at that age i already know what you're gonna ask yeah i mean i hate that kind of stuff because if you ask me the problem is if you asked me this like five years ago i never would have said anything about feastables or a lot of the stuff i'm doing now and so the honest answer is i don't
know i mean i think in what i'm doing you know hopefully by then i have two billion subscribers on youtube you know beast games is bigger than we ever imagined And hopefully, festivals has gotten over a million kids out of child labor by then.
And I probably will have two or three other businesses that I'm very passionate about that are hopefully crushing.
Yeah, I 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 won't be until I feel like I could actually have enough time to be a good dad.
But I don't even know, man.
I don't think about my personal life.
I just think about winning and got to build.
Some photos that I found that I loved.
Oh, okay. Holy shit, is this me or my brother?
This one as well. Where did you get these?
Internet. These are on the internet?
These are like the really iconic photos that I...
I don't think I've ever seen this one.
Really? Yeah, I don't.
Do you recognize anything in that photo?
No, I don't. I was just thinking like, what house am I even in?
I might be at a military base potentially.
when we were younger both my parents were in the military so they were traveling a lot so this might just be some random house interesting I do recognize this this photo in the background I'm sure you've thought up on screen I think that that was yeah that's on the hallway beside our bathroom I haven't
been to my mom's house in so long interesting you do so much for children but if you could whisper in that child's ear something about buy bitcoin you what was it like two pennies back then no um i know because i wouldn't want i wouldn't say anything if you gave me a microphone to talk to him because the problem
is i'd be i'd be worried that it would change you know the outcome of 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 i'm 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's she's in the military and they just beat like systems and order into your head and she this is probably right around the time where we lost everything and 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 ever would 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 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.
So, same thing. I don't think there's anything I could say that would have changed anything.
If anything, it would have just gave her a heart attack.
Do you tell her now what she means to you?
Oh, yeah, of course.
You're good about it.
Yeah, and 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 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 like 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 out.
Yeah, and so like, you know, it wasn't the best position, but she gave me all the tools I needed to succeed, not, you know, on purpose.
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 what I mean?
She used to, when I turned 16, like she couldn't afford to buy me a car.
She couldn't afford, like the minivan we had, like it was a fucking piece of shit.
needed a repair she couldn't afford it like smoke was coming out the front of it but 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 like she i think she was making forty thousand dollars a year because i
uh we didn't talk about finance as 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 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 like system like body health scans and you know get on the vitamin grind and everything because like i'm not having kids anytime soon but obviously when i do have kids i really want her to be involved and she needs to be able 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 like 14 or 15 like come on like what you do now is indicative will represent how active you'll be able to be in my kids lives so like and we do have these conversations in a playful way so she's taking her health very serious for the future you're 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 hope she'll just never die my mom's gonna live forever we'll be fine brian 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 a question first.
Okay. Would you rather die with a sound body or a sound mind?
Sound body or sound mind?
Oh, I assume if I chose body, then like that would be like dementia or something on the mind.
That's hard. Die sound body or sound mind.
I mean, what are you if you don't have your mind?
I would say mine, to be honest.
Amen. Yeah. Jimmy, thank you.
Do I get to write my question?
now. You do. I want to say something to you though.
I have to give you a lot of credit because so many people like us, like our teams, we have stolen so much from you.
We've stolen your principles, your mentality.
And it's made us be better creators, which has allowed us to live the lives that we get to live and do these things that we love the most.
And there's always a cost, I think, to being different and to being weird.
There's an upside, but there's also a really, really, really big cost.
And you pay that cost most when you're younger and you have to fit into the system and you don't get to choose who you hang around with and stuff.
But then as an adult, as you said, we all then clap for the unique ones, the weird ones, and we steal from them and we aspire to be them and we learn from them.
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 on the sofa, I like remember where I was sat when I saw the behind the scenes just exploded.
And you made me in that moment realized how much I'd limited myself as someone that I consider 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 roadmap 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 the box.
Exactly. So thank you so much, honestly, because we need more people like you and I'm, 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.
Some of the most successful, fascinating and insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table.
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