Transcript of MrBeast: If You Want To Be Liked, Don't Help People! I Lost Tens Of Millions On Beast Games... But I'm Worth $1 Billion!

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'm going to be honest. So far, more unhappy than happy.

Well, has it ever crossed your mind to quit YouTube as a whole? Oh, yeah, of course. Really? Yeah. Are you?

Oh, boy. 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. Then Beast Games is going to shatter some pretty crazy records, and we do nine figures of feestibles. 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. It's because I'm really good at obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet. I'll ask millions of millions of dollars on these games. But it was about making season one as good as possible. I just really love solving complex problems. How many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa? Just on Coco Farms, it's 1. 5 million. 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. I've read over 5,000 messages telling me to kill myself. 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 this show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and to 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.

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. Yeah, my earliest years, I'm just stubborn, man. I just never give up. I mean, there's no world where I ever would have quit. I mean, we're just jumping right into it. This is great. No intro or anything, just boom. That's how you hold people. 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 a Even if no one still watches my videos to this day, I would still be going. People hate it, but I'm just the most competitive, stubborn person you'll ever meet, and I just never give up.

Where did that come from?

I have no idea, to be honest. Honestly, it feels like it was just in my DNA and my bloodstream. My mom hated it. Growing up, we'd always argue. She has this thing where once Jimmy sets his mind to something, he just never stops. It would always piss her off because when it was YouTube, she wanted me to be studying or things like that. But I really don't know. It's just always been how I am. I think a lot of people have these weird tendencies, and they tend to try to unlearnt them. I had phases in my life where I was like, Am I too extreme? People are very intimidated by me because I just am so obsessed with work, and I'm so all in. And is this 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 you're making lots of money, it's admirable, it's respectable. It's like, look, those are traits we want. But when you're not successful, you're a lunatic when you have all these traits. And so back then, I'd occasionally be like, man, should I try to be more normal?

But I just could never do it anytime I tried to... I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that I have a memory of that really is burned in my brain is people... One time, a high schooler told me when I was in middle school, All you do is talk about YouTube. Do you know how to do anything else? You're just a freak. And I tried to watch South Park because that's what a lot of people in my school watched to fit in, and I just couldn't. I was like, This is such a waste of time. I could be working right now. And I tried to do all these things to fit in, and I eventually just stopped talking because I just didn't relate to anyone. People used to call me Mute. One of my teachers literally asked if I was mute 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 eventually, I started to succeed, found other to take some out. That life's great. But I like to tell this story when I'm on podcast, 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 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 They had other properties. And then when everything collapsed, they lost basically everything. And so my mom was working two jobs and barely getting by. And so 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. I don't talk about a lot of this. I have Crohn's disease, so I was very sick growing up. My brother also had issues as well. We're not the healthiest kids in our teenage year. She's just trying to get by and take care of us. Then she comes home and she just has this brat that's being annoying and like, I want to be a YouTuber. She's just begging me.

Sometimes she would literally cry and beg me to do homework. I didn't mean it in a mean way. But even one time I literally told her, If you want my homework done, why don't you just do it? That's what I told my mom. What am I doing? I don't know. I was just like, I don't I just want to be successful. I want to build businesses. It was like, bless her heart. Luckily, it worked out. Now I spoil her. She's great. She has her second home, anything she could ever want, she has. The first thing I did was start paying my mom, take care of her once I started making money because she gave everything to get me where I am. I wouldn't be where I am now, but it was like me and her spoke different languages when I was younger. She didn't want me to end up like them and get screwed and not have much money. The path I was going down was just basically like, oh, I'm going to be a homeless drug addict. 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?

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. I'm 26 now. I can't really remember Uber life before YouTube. My earliest memories are basically when I started making videos.

You said earlier you don't talk about your dad much.

Yeah.

You don't have to tell me about it, but why don't you talk about your father much?

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, a sour way to start it off, but yeah, My mom is great. I love my mom.

She used to cry asking you to do your homework.

A lot of things. She would cry because I wouldn't put money away. When we started making money, she thought it was too risky. The thing is, nothing she would say was unreasonable. 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. It's very cute. One time, when we had, I don't remember, some month we made 100 grand, and I'm like, Okay, perfect. Now I can spend 100 grand this next month on videos. She took 5,000 of it and put it away for me in my own bank account without telling me. But in case I ever was over leveraged or went bankrupt like they did, and I found out about it. She's like, Please don't take this money. Just let me set aside anything. Stop spending everything on videos. I was like, No, this is perfect. Now I can spend more. This is awesome. Thank you, Mom. She But to me, I don't really feel risk. If anything, risk excites me, and I have very high threshold for it. We literally weren't communicating the same language.

But I don't remember what age it was. But eventually, after I took enough risk and figured it out, my mom just said to me, You know what? I'm going to trust you. I have faith. Everything got so much better after that point when she stopped staying up all night worrying about me and worrying whether or not I was making the right decision when she was just like, Jimmy, I trust you. I know you think about this all day. I'm going to just follow your lead. Our relationship has been perfect ever since then.

If I'd asked 10-year-old Jimmy, How are you doing? What would he have said?

Ten? I don't know. But if you asked me at 12 or 13, I probably would have been like, Fuck, no one watches my videos. I just really want to be a YouTuber. I got to make this work.

Why did you want to really be a YouTuber? Because kids say that, but the extent to which you 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 or whatever. But YouTube is a particularly interesting thing because you're on camera, people are seeing it, there's a metric which decides how successful you are. Was there any element of the on camera part that was helping to solve for the feeling of isolation that you seemed to have at that time?

No. Was there community? Yeah, I I think it's more to do with just... 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. Just the money. Yeah, of course, because back then, we didn't have money. And I really wanted to take care of my mom and just my family in general. So it was everything. It was like, this is what I love doing. I've never had as much joy doing something as I do this. Plus, I could see a path where I could actually retire my mom, take care of her, pay her back for all the night she works so long so we could live comfortably and things like that. So it's just the thing is, one thing that irks me is when people try to put someone's motivation into one little bucket. We're very complex creatures. You have a girlfriend. 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 she's fun to be around. She likes similar shows, blah, blah. If we sat here for 10 hours, you could probably give me a thousand reasons why you like your girlfriend. 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? I think that's a common flaw we try to do. It's not that simple.

I think a lot of people can't understand someone being so relentlessly focused on something with the level of commitment and sustained commitment that you've shown.

I don't know how I- You know what I mean? I agree because it's very weird how I have extreme obsession to the point where I just think about the same. For me, it's much easier to think about something 16 hours a day for seven days straight than it is to gear shift constantly. I'm 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. 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 who I am.

It would have had to have been a deep obsession because you were doing it when no one was really watching or paying attention or really when the platform was...

There was literally a day when I was 19 or 20, where I woke up, joined a Skype call with my friends, and we were reverse engineering why certain videos do well or whatever. I remember that call being over 18 hours long. Then I hung up, went to bed, woke back up the next day, and instantly got back on the call and picked back. That was the level of hours we were putting in. I didn't know anything besides just trying to make it happen.

Was there anything else that you showed that level of obsession, too?

At that age, no. I would say from 11 to... Well, 11 to 15, it was a mix of YouTube and baseball. But when I turned 15, I got Crohn's, and I went from like 190 pounds down to 139. I lost all the muscle I had, and so I was like, all right, I'm not playing baseball in college anymore. Then I was like, fuck it. It's just all in on YouTube. Then up until really Feastables, it was basically just YouTube versus whatever. I never thought I would find this 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 upset with feestables and other things, which was very weird. When I first started a chocolate company, it was a side thing, but the more I started to work on it, I got a lot of the same highs I got when I was making videos just in different ways. Now I'm like, I know way too much about the chocolate industry. It's pretty crazy. I never imagined I would have put the thousands of hours I poured into building feestables.

I think just in general, I just really love solving consistent, complex, hard problems. I think that's what gets me out of bed. The harder the problem, the more exciting it is.

Consistent, hard problems. I want to talk about that and also feestibles, but you mentioned Crohn's disease there. A lot of people don't know what that is and the impact it has on someone's life.

Are you aware of it?

I am because I had a team member that had it. In order to help support them at certain times when they had to leave and stuff like that. I got a little bit more aware of what it means and how it impacts you. But could you give me your perspective on that?

Crohn's disease is when your immune system attacks itself. When I was 15, I just started going to the bathroom 8, 9, 10 times a day not digesting any food because my GI tract is literally just attacking itself. It'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 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. We were just trying different medicine. Then eventually, I'm on a pretty extreme medicine called Remikid, 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. 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.

I have a really weak immune system, so I just get sick all the time. That's why I have random rashes and things like that. It's pretty brutal, to be honest. Then it randomly flares up sometimes and just makes you very sick, very tired. I just live life on hard mode, to be honest. If you wake up and you have energy, you're already leaps and bounds ahead of me. It makes things way more difficult.

And so you still wake up with some days where you don't have energy. Of course. Which is really hard to believe for someone who'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 pretty brutal because then you compound that with always being sick. 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. It's brutal. That's where 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. Ideally, I don't do that deep into my 30s and 40s, so I see it as a little bit of a played, but I've met with the top Crohn's doctors in the world, and so far they're like, this is just the answer, and you're just lucky your gut isn't attacking yourself. But I don't know. I feel like the medicine they give people Crohn's is silly, and there's got to be a better way to treat it. The ultimate solution is they just cut me open and cut out a large part of my GI tract, and then there you go.

I observed in the team member that I had that had Crohn's, just a bit of a mental roller coaster as well because there's a certain unpredictable ability to it.

Exactly.

Which makes life...

It's even worse when you're filming because you got this huge multimillion dollar set and 200 people waiting on you. Sometimes you don't know if you're going to have a flare, but you just got to go, fuck it and just down some caffeine and crank it out.

I got diagnosed with ADHD.

You did?

Yeah, I got diagnosed with ADHD, and it made me think a lot about myself and the way that I am. I'm not the type of person to embody the label or think it really means much. I am just who I am. Are you in any way neurodivergent?

I've been told by a doctor I have ADHD, I'm not surprised because I just sit and obsess over things constantly. But I think I'm happy with however my brain is wired. I don't really care to change it. Like I said, I think one of my greatest superiors is my obsession, and I think some people would view that as a weakness. But if you just think about solving problems three times more than everyone else, 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 the success you've had solving some of these hard problems, if you were to break it down into some core components that you've learned, one of them is obsession that you've said. What are the others?

It's all the typical stuff. You are obviously who you surround yourself with. Luckily, I just got around the right people in my later teenage years because I feed off the energy of the people probably around me. It's so obvious. 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 bazillion times. But 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 start obsessing over. And one of the best things that happen 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 that's But it would have probably taken me eight, nine years to solve. After 18 months, it was probably one of the top 10 people in the world when it comes to running a chocolate company and understanding it deeply just because it's just cheat codes.

What about detail? Sweating the small stuff. One of the things that I saw, I was reading that handbook that was linked on the Internet, and one of the things I saw throughout that was this real obsession with the one per cent and the small stuff. How do you feel about this, by the way, and all of that stuff?

I wrote that with some of my I had some employees when I was probably 22. There are some things that 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. I do think it's very helpful. You know what's funny? A lot of CEOs have actually told me that they make their at least read this.

It went around all of our Slack channels. We all read it.

Which is funny because I'm like, damn, I should make an updated version of it. But yeah, the thing is, the core crux of it is extreme ownership and don't make excuses. People always... Yeah, I mean, 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 had no idea what I was doing when I was 21, 22. I just found that I was constantly teaching people the same things over and over again. It was always just like, take extreme ownership, take accountability. Sure, I guess it was out of your control, but it could have been in your control if you just thought through it more, if you just really cared. That's what I was just trying to convey in it.

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 you on the phone yesterday, that nothing is impossible. Yeah, exactly. 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 what appears to me to be extreme ambition. 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, does physics allow it? Then yes, it's possible. It just is, do we want to put the time in? 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... It's a good question. 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 I don't know if I should, but I can. And then I don't know. The thing is, to go viral, you have to do something that's never been done before. I've told this story before of 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 going to go, holy shit, and you're going to go tell your friends about it. You're going to remember that. You'll probably even think about it randomly once every couple of years. Why the fuck was there a purple cow? And it's like, It's the same thing, just one was a little purple.

You can apply that same analogy to ideas. When you're scrolling through social media to find a video to watch, there's things that have been done before. You've seen. It's roughly similar to stuff before. You're just going to scroll past it. You'll never think about it again. You'll never think about a fucking cow on the side of the road. Then there are ideas that are 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. I have to click this, or I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight because why is this video? No way they did this. But those typically are very hard. Usually, to get that Purple Cal effect, they've never been done before. If something's never been done before, there's usually a reason because it's very fucking hard. You just have to train yourself to not resent very difficult, complex, hard, original problems and actually run towards them because those are the ones that tend to have more of the Purple Cal effect where people have to watch it. If your ship is 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.

Because it goes exponentially and it's pretty winner take all in the top videos, you just really have to lean into that Purple Cal effect, if that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. 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 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. This isn't a job This is a career. If you don't realistically see a world where you're working for me in 10 years, then it's pretty hard for me to invest into you at the level I want. 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 time. That is 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. They're like Tyler, who writes a lot of my videos and directs them.

I've probably talked to him five, six hours a day, every day for around four years. And now because I can't spend... He spends 100 % of his time writing the videos, directing the videos, obsessed over that, whereas I could theoretically max spend 5 % of my time. So he's going to naturally just shit on me on it because he can spend way more time on it. And it's like, so 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 I just trust that it's good. And I have a bunch of people my businesses like that. It's great. In a world where Tyler is still working here 10 years from now, the amount of value out of someone like that is unfathomable. It is quite literally the eighth winner of the world for a business. It's like, that's what I want. But you only get those kinds of people that see the value for working for you.

They have to deeply believe the more valuable I become to this company, the more I'll be rewarded, and they actually want to dedicate their life to the business. That's very important because if I really don't get that vibe, then it's not fair to both of us because I I'm not going to invest in you like I should because I don't think you're going to be here in 10 years, and then you're going to feel that, and it creates... Coachable, sees the value. Obviously, obsessed. I just don't like working with mediocre people. I really just can't stand it. It's the fastest way to make me depressed is if I have to work with someone who's just not all in and just loves what they do. There's just a lot of stuff like that that I'm sure if you listen to a Steve Jobs interview or something that he talks about, it's just the typical traits, obsessed, coachable, all in, sees the value.

What is the single worst trait?

Mediocrity. I mean, it's just like... Because they're not bad enough where you fire them, but not good. The problem is, and you see it in full effect, great people just love working with great people. They do. There's something about being around great people that pulls some animal out of you that just makes you want to do more and push more and believe things aren't possible. 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 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 put two or three C players amongst a bunch of great people, and they'll start pulling them down. They'll start making them not want to work as much and make work not as fun. Everyone knows, get rid of the C players, right? Obviously, get rid of people who aren't all in, blah, 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 hard because you still feed off the energy. And if you get enough of them, it just drags the overall culture down. Those are the worst. I mean, not everyone can be these world-ending monsters. There are a lot of mundane things I mean, the book controller and accounting probably doesn't have to be the best in the world. But when it comes to the mission critical things, making videos and things like that, just the great people got to be surrounded. That's one of your number one jobs as a leader is just to make sure you're Are great people are working with other great people because the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't money. You know what I mean? That's number four on the list. Don't ask me the list them all. I don't remember. I just know the number one thing is, do they enjoy who they're working with? People 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. There are so many people in my I mean, obviously, you have to take care of them and pay them well. They're not the people that will just make the standard rate. But yeah, people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and even people on our editing team, they're putting in most of the week, same amount of hours as me, and they're all in, see the vision. It's hard to find those kinds of people, but when you do, you got to treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.

And you have roughly 500 people?

I think the production company were around 300 Festivals around 100, and then probably another 40, 50 scatter a month to everything else.

Most founders that I speak to describe scaling headcount is the worst part of the job. More people, more problems, right?

Yeah, that's an understanding.

Especially as someone like you who's a creative at heart and who is very focused and obsessed on, I guess, the show and producing, as you say often, I want to produce the best videos we possibly can. Of course. And then all this other shit comes with it, which is like, HR, which every founder I speak to you hates.

I mean, yeah. The worst part is I just have this very once in a... Just very rare opportunity where I have so much attention and so many people watch my content. I just wish I had more experience building businesses. I'm only 26, and this is my first real business of... Every employee milestone we hit, it's my first time hitting that. When I hit 100 employees, that was my first time getting there. This was my first time going from 100 to 200, 200, 300. With what I know now, I could have done it so much faster, obviously. It's a little brutal because scaling feestibles from zero to 100 was way easier than doing my production company because I had been through the Ringer before and I learned a bunch, and I get better with time. And honestly, the most annoying part is just ignorance, right? Because a lot of mistakes I make, I look back and I'm like, oh, yeah, I probably should have brought in people with more experience working at a larger company earlier here. I waited a little too long here. I probably should have. It's just brutal because if I had known these things, I'd be way further along.

But that's just how you learn. You just got to make 10,000 mistakes.

Every founder says the same. Every founder I've spoke to says the same, their unknown unknowns.

Exactly. So that's where... I mean, my big thing recently has just been trying to find people who have successfully skilled businesses and bring them into my organization and learn from them because I'm just so tired of 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 mentor me along the way so I make less mistakes, which has been really good. We brought in a new C-suite recently. It's always a hard balance because I try not to... In the past, I have... Decisions are like pendulums, and I have a problem where I'll identify something and I'll overcorrect the pendulum one way, and then I'm like, Oh, no, I should have just stopped in the middle. My overcorrection in the past was corporate people try to build too many systems and they kill innovation. And so I was very anti people with too corporate experience because they're going to just destroy all the creativity. But 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 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, 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 CEO, I'm on a TV show called Dragonson in the UK, and my stuff is significantly smaller. It's like a percentage of your viewership. But even I am slightly terrified with hiring people because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone that I work with to say that I did something bad. And in the early days of my first business, what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there and they ask them, what was he like? You have the same problem. You have the same conundrum where anyone has an incentive that works for you when they leave, so many different incentives to throw an arrow at you on the way out the door. How do you contend with this?

Yeah, you hit it on the head. I have four or five hundred people right now, but we've also worked with thousands of people in the past. 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. But you also think most people don't like their jobs, too. It's not like this is even specific to our industry. Just go ask 100 random Americans of all the jobs that worked in their life, how many did they deeply enjoy? Would they have nothing negative to say? So I think it's just part of it. It's almost like a pastime for a lot of people just to trash talk their old jobs or whatever.

Has any of that stuff ever got to you? Any criticism?

Oh, of course. Yeah. Criticism all the time does. But the thing is independent of that stuff, it's just I mean, we are averaging 200 million views of video. Most of it unique viewers. We're talking like two plus %, sometimes three % of humans alive watch every piece content I put out, depending on how well the channel is doing. 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 dubs. You know what's even crazier is that YouTube's not in China. So that's like 2 to 3% of humans alive excluding China. Or China is mixed in there. But if you just take people excluding China, it'd be more like 3 to 4%. But you could just grab 33 random people on the planet, and one of them on average would seen that video because the views are so fucking high. So, yeah, there's a lot of criticism that's thrown at me. And the thing is, since there are stuff so global, sometimes 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. If you make a piece of content, 99% of people that watch it love it, that is wild, which that stuff doesn't But in our case, if just one % is unhappy, that's two million people, which is more than anyone else even gets views on videos, which will feel like an insurmountable amount of criticism and feedback. And it's very easy to trick your mind into thinking, damn, everyone hates me because you just focus on the one % instead of the 99. So I just came to the point where I just have to have my own internal guidelines of, do I think what I'm doing is good? Do what I think is moral, ethical? Do I believe in what I'm doing? If so, fuck it. I'm never going to be able to make everyone happy. If you just let the whims of the internet decide what is okay and what's acceptable 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 it will just destroy you mentally. I don't know what age I was when I got in that mindset, but I just was like, I'm going to decide, and I'm not going to let the internet decide what is okay and what's not.

Then ever since I got to that point, people me for something, and I'm like, I don't agree. Then it's easy for me to just go, oh, I don't agree. Not going to make everyone happy. I believe what I'm doing is right, and just move on.

The brain isn't designed for this, though. No, it's not. This is what I've come to learn. So do the podcast, it goes well. It feels like at the start, everyone loves me, and then I get further down the line, and it feels like everyone fucking hates me because you get attacked from... You can never do anything right.

I've probably read mess, comments or tweets. I've probably, in my lifetime, read over 5,000 messages or comments or something telling me to kill myself. You know what I mean? And what would possess someone to tell you to leave a comment where it's like, fucking kill yourself Well, you know what I mean? So agreed. We were not meant to receive this 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.

Like I said- What does that mean in reality? If I'm a fly on a wall in one of those moments where you can recall it really getting to you.

I mean, back in the day, I wasn't as confident in my ability to be successful. 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 hired my mom. These people I really care about depending on me. And then I upload a video and it does bad. And then people... I pour all my time and effort into it, but maybe it doesn't come across as well. Some people might have interpreted it as lazy. And you read a comment being like, wow, what a fucking lazy. I thought you made great videos or this video sucked, and you read that and the video is underperforming and you're like, fuck, maybe I am being too reckless. There's definitely times where I would cry just because I would just be like, fuck, am Am I not doing this right? Or they don't understand I put a lot of time into this or whatever. Sometimes you're like, Fuck, does the algorithm hate me? Am I being suppressed? Or whatever back in the day.

When was the last time that happened, that feeling of There was a month, probably last year, where I felt a little bit of that just because sometimes, occasionally, the rumor and drama mill gets spun up.

But you You just got to snap out of it and like I said, just go, do I believe in what I'm doing? It's hard because anytime I do anything good, people are always like... We're condition in America now. When someone does something good, there's always some ulterative motive. I've always been straightforward and just said, a world where I help people is just better than a world where I don't. I don't try to come up with this crazy story of how someone helped me when I was younger, and now I just want to give I can 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. That's my answer. But it always does suck when people try to just... 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? So occasionally, those will get to me, and I'll just be like, Guys, you don't even know me. You would think sometimes you'd read when I build walls in Africa or help blind people see or things like that.

You'd read some of these things online, you would think I'm Hitler. I mean, it's crazy how people portray it. I don't know, I wish people just understand, 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?

How does the drama and that stuff impact them? To be honest, in my case, I don't think it hits them that hard because most things usually fall on me and people want to go after me because I'm the guy that does good, the philanthropist. Usually, I'm the one that gets thrown under the bus quite a bit.

It's funny because everyone that knows you, knows you. 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 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 I will be misunderstood, 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. It's so funny because the same day I'll drop a video where I'll help a thousand blind people see. Some other YouTuber will drop a video where they just bought a new mansion, and everyone's like, Yes, get that mansion. Good job. And Then they'll be like, Fuck you for curing blind people, Jimmy. Fuck you. You're using them. I'm like, No, I just wanted to inspire people to do good. I mean, I can buy a mansion if you really want me to. It is funny. If you're trying, this It's a weird sentence, but if you're trying to be liked, I actually don't recommend you help people. I actually think helping people will make the Internet like you less than if you just buy nice cars and do the typical influencer path. It's because we're just so conditioned in America to see it as a shield, and no one actually does good because they just find it fun, apparently. But I don't care. Like I said, it's just more fun than if I didn't. 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. I swear to God, man, there are I could just, I don't know, do these $1 versus videos where I compare a $1 boat to a billion dollar boat and all these other things and not help people, and I would just get way less shit. 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. 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. I think in my case, most people have realized I'm not going to stop. They're just over getting mad. I 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. When I've been attacked for the people I interview or whatever it might be, it's actually made me refocus on what my principles are because you have to be really anchored to them.

It's like I said, you have to know where your line is, and as long as you're on the right side of your line, then it is what it is. People on Twitter can say whatever they want. I think that's the only way to really survive at this scale without going crazy is 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 paint me a picture.

Yes. Let me drink some water because of my flu. Well, I don't know about the last seven days, but in general, we were filming a video where we're doing the... I'm visiting the five most deadliest places on Earth. One of the places was a safari in South Africa. I flew to South Africa to spend in a cage surrounded by lines. Sick content. It was really good, which that was a bitch to get to. Then I got the flu, and so spent a couple of days in the hospital there. 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 of other places, but that got postponed. Instead, got out of the hospital, went to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge. Then I 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. It's a lot. Then flew to Florida, filmed with Aaron Judge, flew here, just landed, filmed with the reunion that you were at with the participants for Beast Games.

We're doing this podcast. What time is it? Like 1 AM? Just off to 1 AM. Yeah, 1 AM. The latest podcast he's ever done. Lightweight. I always do my podcast at 1 AM. My last podcast before this was like 4 AM, like a couple of weeks And then we're flying to San Fernando to film with Steph. Steph Curry. Yeah, Steph Curry. Then I think I'm going to snake Island, then the deadliest road. I don't think I'll be home for another 16 days. So I'm just traveling around filming for the next 16 days. And then, yeah, I guess then I'll get home and then they'll make me go my home.

How does everything else in your life fit into that in terms of the gym? I know you've been working out- It's been brutal.

It's gone to shit the last couple of It's really killing me, to be honest. It was 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 you're waking up in your own bed and working 15 hours in your office or whatever. So easy compared to 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. Some days I'm going to bed at 10: 00 AM, days I'm going to bed at 5: 00 PM. It's a mess. I used to put up with it and just figure out how to do the training, but it's just... 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 Beast Games in the mix because I was already basically working whatever every hour my eyes were away. But then Beast Games is such a monster of a project, and I have to maintain the same YouTube upload schedule.

And then I do a lot on feestals now, and then I have a couple of other businesses. So I just honestly, something had to give, and sadly, it was working out, but it's fucking stupid. So I need to reprioritize my life where I can get... I mean, it just only needs to be 45 minutes, five days a week. It 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. 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. It's like I got to fix the sleep first before that. But yeah, it's got a lot going on, to be honest. I'm dying.

How are you feeling?

Right now, honestly, fine. I'm jacked up on all that caffeine.

But I mean, just in this...

The flu is not helping. It's making everything 30% harder. It's like life's 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 time you ask me this, it's going to be it. But because of the flu and the lack of sleep, I'm struggling at the moment. Just a lot of grinding. A little happy because we just dropped the ending of beast game. It's 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 I would say I'm on the lower end. I could use a couple of good days to bring the energy back up.

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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, that's just a sad fact. I obviously never would have buried myself alive for seven days, seven days of solitary, seven days on a dessert island, seven days blah, blah, blah. It's like being consistently uncomfortable and being able to consistently suffer over long periods is arguably one of the deepest motes. There's a reason no one makes videos like me, not even close, because no one wants to live the life I live. There are months where I'm... I think there was one year where I was flying 200 days. I was on a plane. It was a fuck fest, but to get these videos done and I do everything. It's like when I wake up tomorrow and I'm going to be pretty fucking tired and feel like shit, I'm going to go... 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 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 the ultimate advantage. I think we'll hit a billion subscribers, and I don't think anyone will be anywhere near or close because once you make a couple of million dollars, why would you live the life I live? Why? Why would you not take weekends off? Why would you not just film locally, even if it means less views so you can be on the right time schedule? Why would you not prioritize your sanity and that stuff? It makes no sense, but that's why no one else does it.

You spoke to Colin and Samir, two guys that I met recently. Yeah, they're great. They're great, great guys. You said to them, I'm miserable a a lot of times. I have mental breakdowns every other week.

Yeah, I mean, those have gotten a little better. Mental breakdown sounds extreme. It's more I'm like, Fuck, why am I doing this? This is so fucking hard because it's just a lot, man. You're just going constantly. 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 of other stuff. I think the hardest part really is gear shifting And so I try to bucket these things correctly. If I'm on set and I have a 15-hour film day, ideally, the things I'm doing in between filming are related to main channel because I'm in the frame of mind of that. That's one thing that's really helped me not feel like my head's going to explode. If I'm in Chicago at the Feastables office and we're going through Feastables marketing, 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 shift my frame of mind. And then that constant gear shifting It'll make my fucking head hurt if I'm bouncing around too much.

It's also just very not core to who I am. I love obsessing over certain things. I find obsessing over things within a business isn't switching back and forth between marketing and product in a same business is pretty easy. It's a long way of saying, one thing that's helped with that is just really organizing my schedule in a way where it allows my natural state of mind to obsess over a certain business, finish that, then move on to the next one. Whereas before it used to be like 30 gear switched to the day, and that's just miserable. It's just not even fun, to be honest.

I heard Elon Musk, who I know someone 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 consider the question to be important. So two questions there. Do you think the average person would like to be in your head? Secondly, are you happy?

Well, no. The average person does not want to live the life I live or be in my head. They would be miserable because they're just working all the time. They would probably just ask themselves, Why am I working all the time? Why don't I do literally anything else? Obviously, I'm not a robot. There are times where I'm like, fuck, I really want to play this strategy board game. I want to do this thing. I look at the schedule and I'm like, oh, maybe I could do that in four days. The hard thing is you really have to be delicate with the framing of your mind because it's very easy in moments like I have to go, fuck, I'm like a zoo animal. I don't have free will. I'm like a little robot to my businesses. And so you have to be very careful. And sometimes those emotions take over, especially because I'm a very defiant guy. And I'm like, but I really want to do this thing, but I can't because I got to go film this video and I got to do this and I got to speak at this conference and I got to do this networking thing and blah, blah, blah.

And so, yeah, I think most people, when that feeling comes up of, am I just a fucking animal? Do I have any free will? They would probably get very depressed. But I've been able to work through those and I always try to... Your brain, you just got to control your thoughts. Be like, Well, this is the life I chose. You want success. You want to change the world. You want to do this and this. This is the price you have to pay. You should actually see this as a good thing because this is why, which is why I'm very diligent about how I frame things in my mind. 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 So you're lucky, it's hard. Push through it and you'll be happy you did. And so that's how I try to view it. But no, I don't think most people be happy living my life. They would be like, Oh, let's just grab a couple of million dollars and be happy.

Are you happy?

It depends what day you ask me. Right now, I'm having a good time. When I had the flu in Africa sitting in a cage of lines, fuck no.

What's your baseline? How would you describe your baseline?

Probably this year, probably so far, more unhappy than happy. And there are just things you got to do that just aren't fun. But I think I really deeply enjoy working on feestibles, 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. That's what's brutal, especially with Beast Games, is I'm just filming so much. It added so much shit to my yearly filming, doing this giant show on top of already having the largest YouTube channel in the world. I was already filming some months, 25 days a month. That's just the rough part. It's because it's just all the rest of my shoulders. If I don't film, there is no content. The channel just literally ceases if I stop filming, So I have found more and more that I'm finding more joy in entrepreneurial things and building businesses. I do think I'd be happy if I could spend more time doing that. But it's just 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 creative burnout and they just delete their channel. You've seen a lot of it recently over the last couple of years where YouTube has hit 10 million, they just stop. Has that ever crossed your mind to stop?

Oh, of course. All the time.

Seriously? Yeah.

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. A lot of them are chasing a goal of like, Oh, I just want this money so I can take care of this things. 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?

Probably countless times. When I was in solitary confinement for seven days, that was fucking miserable. I did quit a video. I've quit a lot of videos.

No, I mean, as a creator.

I guess I never I truly would have quit. My biggest thing would be I just would have quit for a week and been like, Fuck, let me sleep nine hours a night. But we did a video where 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 flees were a thing. I had 700 bug bites up and down my legs, all over my body. I was sunburn. A little bit of me was like, damn, am I going to die? This is crazy how much bug bites are everywhere and my skin was so red and I 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 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. Of Canceling a video like that is literally the worst thing that could happen from an opportunity cost perspective. You have moments like those and it's like, fuck, this isn't even fun.

Fuck this shit.

But what about YouTube as a whole? Because I feel like YouTube is throwing coal into a train, then you just have to keep throwing it in there once you start it. You just can never stop throwing it in.

No, you're running on a treadmill cranked up to the max, especially if you want to be a top tier creator like me. It's just like, who can stay on the treadmill the longest? Because it never slows down. If anything, you're making it faster. But no, I don't think there's ever unironically a time where I actually would have quit. It just breaks, probably would have been nice.

When you think forward at 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 Okay.

Love. Something that came into my life a couple of years ago. You announced, I think, over Christmas time that you had proposed. I think it was Boxing Day or New Year's Eve.

It was on Christmas Day. Oh, Christmas Day. Because her family was in town, so I proposed.

How does that fit into this craziness?

You could probably count on your hands the amount of people on the planet that actually would make a good partner for me. She's just one of them. She really is understands that work is what I live for, what keeps me going, and she supports me, and she understands how important it is. The big thing is hanging out with Tia, my fiancée, is so frictionless. We play the same video games, we watch the same shows, we're very interested in the same things. She loves learning like I do. It's exciting to see what lecture she listened to online that day or whatever weird book she's reading. Everything about being around The counter is very frictionless, which is great because obviously, I don't have much time at the house. The last thing that I need is to come home from work and there be friction. We don't fight. Sometimes I'm like, Wow, this is my best friend. She's hot. This is great. It feels weird sometimes.

Anyone listening now that's in a relationship, I guess the question they'd be thinking is, when do you spend time together?

Most Mostly at nights. But the beauty is she gears her schedule around mine. She'll work when I'm working, and then she'll just travel with me. Honestly, a lot of it is on planes. A lot of it's in car rides or an hour before bed or in the morning, that stuff. But it's like... Because there are pockets of breaks on set and things like that. So it's just... 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 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 mold her life around mine and my work schedule, that's everything. It's rare that someone's willing to do that while being, 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 kids.

Oh, yeah. That's the thing. My lifestyle right now would not work for kids. So I want to wait. I want kids, but I want to wait as long as possible because if I'm going to have kids, I got to be a great dad. I really, really enjoy mentoring people. I love mentoring younger entrepreneurs. I think I told this story on Joe Rogan. I helped one of my friends go from $40,000 a month in revenue to $400,000 on YouTube. And I do stuff like that all the time. One of my other friends has a snack CPG brand, and And I helped them grow to eight figures in revenue just for fun. I would just call them a couple of times a month. There's something so satisfying about helping other people succeed. And so I would love to have a couple of kids and just really mentor them into being badasses. But yeah, not anytime soon. I would be so absent if we had kids. So just got to find that right time in the VIN 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, we do nine figures in Feestibles. I mean, we could say that.

Nine figures in Feestibles. So The business must be worth several billions of dollars.

Overall, you could do something like that.

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 them.

The business would be worth a lot of money.

Are you a billionaire?

On paper, yeah. But in my actual bank account, I have less than a million dollars.

Do you pay yourself at all?

A little bit, but I also have some assistance and things like that. I try to just pay myself what I spend personally a month just to stay even.

How do you think about money in 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.

Then you make money from the business and then- To keep growing.

Yeah. Then you find a business that you enjoy that is better for Mother Nature or Earth or people. And there you go. You have a fulfilled life. That's my theory. When I'm 70, I don't want to look back and have regrets.

When is enough enough? Such a cliché question that I'm asked as- Enough building the business?

Never. Building a business is like a video game. It's just fun. With Feastables right now, we're the largest ethically sourced chocolate company in America. It's just fun to look at something that's been done the same way for 100 years and go, how do we just flip this on its head and fuck up this industry? And how can we pay our farmers a living income, not use child labor, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's like, I think if I was just doing mundane things like everyone else, 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, get me out of this. I want to retire. But it'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 be successful. You could have almost any social impact and it be profound and save a gazillion people's lives. Do you struggle with focus?

No. I do wonder sometimes, should we be doing more, but I've really found a good groove with feestibles. I keep looking over there because there's a feestible sitting over there. I do feel like I've hit a good groove with that and the ethical sourcing on it. No, I mean, yeah, obviously, I get a bajillion opportunities, But just right now, like I think I said earlier, this is one of the few things in life that it's scratch the same itch as YouTube, where building feastables is equally as fun as making videos for me.

It is so delicious.

Thank you.

They're 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. 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?

Big chocolate in America. Well, the big thing is when I got into chocolate, I didn't know any of these things. We used to source our cocoa from Peru, cacao, which ethical sourcing is not really an issue there. But the problem is, The majority of the wool's cocoa comes from West Africa. And so as we got bigger, everyone's like, Hey, you need to switch your supply chain to West Africa. I'm like, Cool. And so then I started studying and reading up about it, and I noticed that 46% of labor was West Africa on cocoa farms, it's child labor. And I was like, that can't be accurate. And then I started digging deeper and deeper, and I was like, holy shit, it's just almost half of labor is child labor. And so I started talking to all the big chocolate companies, or not all of them, as many as I could get a hold of. And I was like, so what do you guys do about this whole child labor thing? And they're constantly just telling me it just is what it is. That's how chocolate always has been. I was like, whoa, you guys make a billion dollars a year in profit.

You don't see an issue with that being on the back of little kids. They're like, No. Then I have this crazy clip on... Because I have a documentary guy. I think you saw him, Jeff, who follows me around. Crazy clip where I'm meeting with a big I got to be as vague as possible because they're going to murder me. I got to talk back to them. But a big supplier will just leave it big like that. 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? They I'm just like, No. My literal documentary guy is just filming, and I'm in this big boardroom, and I look at the camera, I'm like, holy shit, they just said that on camera. I did all this research, and it was just like, yeah, no. Especially in America, there are some European chocolate brands that try. But in America, 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 honestly pissed me off. And then I just was like, how do we solve this?

And so then it sent me down the rabbit hole. Everything points back to the reason chocolate in America is so cheap is because they just don't... Not the reason. One of the reasons is they just pay the farmers so little. Farmers make less than a dollar a day. So because of that, they're forced to use labor because 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 Coco Farms? You might have sold in that.

Five thousand?

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 Not that you can't do it. You just don't want to. And then maybe we give them the benefit of a 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. But over time, I hope we can just shine a light on it using my platform and just show the model works. And then, I don't know, something I would love to do in the long run is how there's the fair trade logo. Maybe I make my own version of it and I help other chocolate company source their cacao ethically or something.

And I just educate people on if it doesn't have the symbol, it's probably using child labor and something. 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 of arms. And so I just got to connect the dots and figure out the correct way to do it.

This might sound like a really obvious question, but it won't be to everybody. Why don't you care so much?

I've been on these farms. I don't want to get rich on the back of little kids. I mean, it's just I feel like it's obvious. Maybe to other people in Chappaqua, 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, again, of Elon Musk and what his mission was with Tesla. He 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 five 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 dropped the ethical sourcing.

Have people come along and offered to buy your YouTube channel?

I mean, yeah, I've been offered a billion dollars here, crazy amounts of money there. But I 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 like the one I have, so why don't I just keep it? And Every time I get, which I haven't in a while, but back in the day, I used to jokingly poke around just to see what people would offer me. I would get those offers, and then I would always just be like, Yeah. I would just do the same thing I'm doing now, so I might as well just keep doing what I'm doing now. The money wouldn't really change anything.

Well done. I don't think you've yet to get the credit you deserve for the lengths you've gone to with Feastables. It's fine. 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. I hate so much the fucking thing.

I'm thinking of updating. If you hand them to me, like hit me a couple of bars. There's a lot of stuff that... The problem is, if you look at this and this, from a distance, you can't tell really the difference between the flavors. This is dark sea salt, this is just dark chocolate. 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. Another thing, too, that I... You made a mistake. You put these in front of me. The other thing, I've been experimenting, and the newer renders are looking good with putting right here, every bite helps get kids out of child labor, putting that on the front. Then 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. I want to put some more messaging on the back of it. There's a lot that needs to be... The white tips here, it just makes it so obvious from far away what this flavor is, whereas all these blend in.

Yeah, brutal. Got to fix it.

You talked about your friends calling you and asking you for business advice and you helping them drive their businesses up. But just watching you there pick apart your own business made me think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs that watch our show that are early in their own businesses, and many of them will be-You're You're going to fail.

You're going to fail a ton. When I first started chocolate, it was hilarious how bad I fucked up. Our original bars were very thin. There's a reason why chocolate bars have these breakpoints here where they break easily. I didn't know that. Mine was just one solid sheet of chocolate, but that's almost like a piece of glass, whereas if you drop it, it just shatters into a bunch of little pieces. And I also didn't know that there's a thing called a package engineer. Can you hand me a box of Feastables? My original chocolate box, when you pop these open and put it on a shelf, this obviously the problem is fixed. But if this was sitting on a shelf, when you grabbed this one, these would all slide forward and then they would fall out of the box. 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 didn't used to be a thing. These were open and there's just the bottom lip here. And so they would fall out like that. Then the bars, because we didn't have the natural breakpoints, would shatter like glass.

Who noticed that?

Well, me. And the thing is, this is an old team in pieceables. I would tell them, there's too many broken bars. When I go into Walmart, I'm seeing too many that are broken. They told me, 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 grabbing a bar off the ground or seeing on the shelf all these shattered chocolate bars that I paid people to put GoPros in a bag of lace chips just pointed at because I tried to get Walmart to give me the security camera footage, and they wouldn't. So I put hidden GoPros in a bunch of random Walmart just to point it at the feastful bars just to see why are they fucking breaking so much. There's so many shots of a mom grabbing a bar, and then she'd be looking at it literally like this, and then you just see the box just go, and it just fall off the shelf, and then they just put it up, and some of the bars would be broken. 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 of what you 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. I'll delete the footage. And so I did a bunch of just data. Actually, there's a company called Acosta where you can pay people to go into Walmart. So then I started paying 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. Walmart. 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 a Walmart and to buy a broken feasible bar. That is literally the worst consumer experience you can have. Then I've learned what a package engineer is. I was like, holy shit, this is your full-time job to make it where my boxes don't fucking fall over.

Where have you been?

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.

They wouldn't give a fuck. I've probably spent thousands of hours obsessing over this product. I know it doesn't feel like it because it's just chocolate, but it's a problem. From the ethical sourcing to every little thing about it, I don't do anything half-ass.

And didn't you drive to a ton of Walmart, 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. He's got a plane he's got to catch. Yeah, it's my favorite thing to do is sometimes I'll spend all night in a Walmart just scanning products and looking at the daily velocities and sales. 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 30 Walmarts on the way home and just drive home. Then I drove home from DC to North Carolina and visited every Walmart on the East Coast in the middle of America just to go look at the chocolate and see all the statistics and things like that.

I asked you earlier on if you struggled to- Fuck, I wish we could go visit a Walmart.

You know how fun that would be? I would love to educate you on the chocolate.

Are Walmart still open 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. But what you just said there, I feel like I'm getting at something here because 99. 9999% of entrepreneurs that I know that just have one thing to do just to run their business, don't give that many Any fucks about the detail. You have a gazillion things to do. An Amazon show, which is like the highest future of whatever, of all time or whatever. You have this massive channel. You have your philanthropy. You have all of this stuff.

A hundred million followers on TikTok.

A hundred 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.

Is that the difference?

Well, Well, you just got to know everything going on. It's just first principles. I hate when someone in my business 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 mind to... I guess I got to just take them on the word, but most people tend to pick the easiest route or conform to the status quo. If I want to lead real innovation and change the industry, then I got to know every little facet of everything. At the end of the day, the shelf is where people buy it, so I got to intrinsically know everything going on at the touch point of the consumer and how it gets there, how it's being stored at the distribution centers, and then the retailer, and then on the shelf, and what does it look like, what's the experience and everything 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. Beast.

Well, that's the thing I used to think, which I've said a couple of times, it was just content, but I realized it's just everything I do. I just want to be the best at it. It's weird, man, because you just look at this chocolate bar and you'd be like, who the fuck cares? But that's the thing. What I've really enjoyed the last two years is I've gone as in 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. I recently spent a week in West Africa, and I went from the bean all the way to the bar, and you worked on the farm and all the entire QC supply chain and everything. It's equally as hard as my YouTube channel, but it's also equally as fun. 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.

That's fun.

With Beast Games, with this, with all the other things going on, But your main channel, which is, I guess, you probably still see as your baby to some degree. It's the mothership, right? Because it's the source of it.

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 haven't gone up every year for 14 It's been 10 years.

But do you still watch the video go live and look at the back end?

No. You don't? No. 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 I just... What we do is we call them after action reports, so I get all the smartest people in my company. We actually just did one. I wish I had it on me. But I pay this guy to just do a very in-depth breakdown of, Here's the retention chart, here's every time someone clicked away. Here's where it was the flattest. Here's where it was the worst. If I upload a video that's 20 minutes, we'll take our last 10, 20-minute videos and we'll go, the median retention on the last 10, 20-minute videos was 10 minutes and 55 seconds is the median. So if the retention on this new video 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 he just does a giant presentation. And so usually, after two weeks after we upload, we'll look at that with all my top people, and then we'll just be like, what did we fuck up?

What did we do well? Cool. Move on.

And has there ever been a moment in recent times where you go, I think I need to spend more time on it again and get back in there?

All the time, but a lot of that stems from insecurity. Because the thing Because, of course, we had a video recently, every minute someone is eliminated and it didn't perform the best. Our intro was a little repetitive. It was a little dark. We brought back 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 get insecure and be like, Fuck, this is why I need to be in the weeds. But at the end of the day, it's not like when I was calling all the shots, I was perfect either. So as long as it's like... As long as when people make mistakes, they learn from them. I have a saying that I tell people all the time. Whenever our new creatives fuck up, I'll look at Tyler, I'll go, Tyler has literally cost me tens of millions of dollars in bad decisions. 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.

And so as long as that's where these after-action reports are important, because as long as when we mess up, we articulate why, and it doesn't happen again, then it's just part of it. But yeah, I mean, if the same thing was happening over and over and over again, then I'd be Fuck, I need to step in. But my guys are just good. They don't make the same mistake twice.

Tell me about experimentation and testing because people look to you as the real king of testing and experimentation. How central is this to the success of everything that you do?

Very much. And that's the thing, that every minute video, it flopped. And your highest chance of flopping is when you do something new, really, really new. One of our bigger flops before that, too, is we did this video where it was like 10 minutes, this room will explode. We built this giant tower Or had a guy start at the top, he had to make it. It was a real-time shoot down, press a button. It just didn't perform that well. People didn't really like it. It was complicated, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you have to be careful because I want a culture where people feel comfortable experimenting and trying and feel fine failing. And so when that video failed or when every minute someone's eliminated, I don't go and yell at people or call them idiots or anything like that. I just am like, what did we do wrong? All right, here's all the of facts. Just make sure it doesn't happen again. Not going to be the first time you cost me a bunch of money. It's all good. I see this as investing in you guys, and let's just learn from it.

I was going to say, or else if there was a culture of that, then people would just make the same videos again, and a lot of YouTube is just trying out the same format.

I'm okay with my people failing. I'm okay with the video being 10 out of 10. As long as we actually took an honest good try at it, as long as we failed because we made the wrong shot call, not because we were lazy, not because we didn't put the effort in, et cetera. As long as it's just like we made an educated decision to test something or try something and it just didn't work, I'm cool with that. We can do that all day. They know that. I don't yell at people or get mad of them when they accidentally mess up like that.

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That's join. Whoop. Com/ceo video, let me know how you get on. You've just concluded today the biggest competition show, I think, of all time. Well, it is of all time, but I think you've got 50 Guinnessmen.

Well, you know, largest sets in history, most world records in history, largest cash fries in history, most winners in history, most participants in history, most cameras. Yeah.

And what, 50 Guinness World records? Yeah.

That we know of. There's probably way more.

You said something on stage, which I found quite interesting. You said, I feel a bit sad.

Yeah, I know, because every Thursday, I got to look forward to seeing the Internet its 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 butch you these numbers, but 80% 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 in truth.

No, I'm not. I guess I'm playfully sad, but it's fine. I have so much shit going on. I don't even really get to think about that stuff.

And you're on to the next one?

Yeah. So we'll... Amazon, let's get season 2 in the books already. Come on, let's sign a contract.

Can't really talk about it. It is the most... Me and Jack were talking about it earlier on. It is the most incredible thing that I think I've seen on TV. I think I said 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.

No one wants to do something like that because it's fucking hard, man. At those sets 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 at its crux, what people don't see is to have a thousand cameras recording, the amount of infrastructure... We broke a world record for most camera cables ran, the most miles of camera cables. The millions of dollars we had to spend on storage and millions of dollars on the control room and the millions upon millions of dollars of hardware to edit it and having to bring in Adobe to custom change the Adobe software where you could actually have that many multi-cams. The actual infrastructure to actually be able to do that is incredibly, incredibly difficult. That's why usually what they'll do is they'll They'll be like, All right, here's a one hour. If you're filming a reality show, here's a one hour window. 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 our villain. This is what we're looking for.

They'll 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 24/7, all these cameras. You guys be yourselves. We'll just capture it because you don't know when someone's going to do something weird. You don't know when someone's going to whisper to someone in form of a line. You don't know. So you You literally have to just be rolling. You need these to be acceptable angles. So you need multiple, an A cam and a B cam and all this coverage, which creates a monumental fuckload of footage. But that's what allowed us... I mean, amongst many things, that's one of the biggest competitive advantages we had when filming Beast Games is we put in the effort to set up all this infrastructure where 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. I had over 150 people editing that. We were combing through unfathomable amounts of footage and everything. Even things from the computer network and our local IT constantly crashing because there's just so much footage there.

If I were to send all the Beast Games footage to just one editor, it would probably be $300,000 in hard drives. If you have 150 editors, it's just impossible. 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 Adobe and everything was just constantly crashing. 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 nonstop 24/7.

I was wondering as I was watching it, if Amazon are aware of the fact that you're just going to give away the money like this, when you flip the coin and it adds another $5 million.

But that didn't affect them. I lost a ton of money filming the show, so that came out of my pocket. Really? Yeah, we spent way too much money on 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 MrBeast $100 million to do show. So I'm doing the math. I'm thinking a case of he spent 20 odd million on the It's like, oh, we're going to need to build a lot of houses. Yeah, we gave away-So there must be 80 million left or something.

I mean, so episode one, we spent over $15 million on those towers building them all. That was the most towers ever built, the most hydraulic press or whatever used. I mean, that set was fucking crazy, man. We had build a thousand towers that were 10 feet tall, safety test them all, get it where they actually work. We had to literally hardwire them all and build our own software where we could drop people. We had to put up all the screens. I mean, that's arguably one of the largest sets ever built in history. That was just episode one. And that's just the construction of the set. That's not including, like you said, we gave away over $20 million. I think over $2 million was in episode one. And then episode two, we have the city, which that was a $14 million set That was huge because that was a real city that they were living in. But just between the $20, whatever, $2 million we gave away plus those two sets, already right there, you're at over $50 million.

How much did the whole thing cost?

That I have been advised not to say because people would hear a big number and be like, Oh, well, I could have made a good show if I had that money. But the thing is they couldn't because money isn't everything, building and managing it is infinitely harder.

Is it more than 100 million?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. Well, I just told you how we spent 50 million, and we're only two episodes in.

How out of pocket are you?

Tens of millions. Yeah, it was not a good financial decision to make peace games. I lost money. I would have more money if I didn't film it.

Any regrets?

No, it was great. For me, it was about making season one as good as possible. I can't let the YouTube community down because creators don't have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms. I'm 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 TikTokeer 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. If I fail, it's over. No stream platform is ever going to touch a YouTuber ever again. My big thing was just making sure this crushed. Now, the doors are opening up. 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. I would try to get a meeting with them, and they were like, no. Now they're begging to have meetings with them. I already know of two creators that have signed deals just on the back in success of of beast games, and probably, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars is going to flow into creators' pockets just because of beast games in the next year.

Well, on Rotten Tomatos, which is not an easy critic to please. Oh, God. No, it was like 90% approval from fans, which is pretty unheard of on Rotten Tomat. I know. But also, I hear through the grapevine that it is on track to become one of Amazon's biggest shows of all time.

Yeah. The problem is I have to wait for them to do a press release. Okay.

Yeah, well, I'm just talking- Amazon.

I got you. I told him I'd be a good boy and not leak things.

But for a YouTuber, quote unquote YouTuber.

Yeah, they did release it. It was their number one unscripted show of all time. Yeah, I mean, I don't think they'd mind me saying the show's very evergreen. Usually, these shows get a lot of attention and then teeter off. But ours is like over 700,000 new unique viewers are watching it every single day, which is pretty crazy because if we maintain that. Yeah, it's going to shatter some pretty crazy records.

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. Is that the next year? Yeah, I don't get paid. All the promotion I'm doing now, I'm not getting paid for.

Really?

But I guess the upside I would be the better Season 1 does, the more money I get for Season 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

If I sit here with you in 10 years time, Jimmy. Yep. Oh, boy. Everything went to plan. You're 36 at that age.

I already know what you're going to ask. I hate that stuff because the problem is if you asked me this five years ago, I never would have said anything about Feastables or a lot of the stuff I'm doing now. The honest answer is I don't know. I think in what I'm doing, hopefully by then, I have 2 billion subscribers on YouTube. Beast Games is bigger than we ever imagined. Hopefully, Feastables has gotten over a million kids out of child labor by then. I probably will have two or three other businesses that I'm very passionate about that are hopefully crushing. Yeah, 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 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 the really iconic photos that I've seen from this really interesting moment.

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, what house am I even I might be at a military base, potentially, because when we were younger, both my parents were in the military, so they were traveling a lot. So this might just be some random house. Interesting. I do recognize this, this photo in the background, I'm sure you've thought of on screen. I think that was... Yeah, that's on the hallway beside her bathroom. I haven't been to my mom's house since 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. I know because I wouldn't say anything if you gave me a microphone to talk to him, because the problem is I'd be worried that it would change the outcome of how I became. Even though I know earlier on, I probably sounded a little depressed because shit's hard. But I am happy with the position I am in, and I would be worried that 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 important. It just gives me a lot of conviction with things. If I wasn't allowed to say buy Bitcoin, I just wouldn't say anything.

What about to her?

To my mom, I What's funny is these are two different photos of my mom. This version of my mom, I don't think there's anything I could say that would... Because she's in the military and they just beat systems and order into your head. This is probably right around the time where we lost everything. She's at a very low point in her life. I don't think there's anything I could say that ever would have convinced her that her lunatic son is heading down the right path. But you can see the difference here. 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. There's the whatever, 12 Thirteen years between these two photos was a very hard journey, especially when I stopped going to college and I got straight zeros. She thought, His life's fucking over. I just wasted 18 years of my life. Same thing. I don't think there's If 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. Oh, yeah, of course. You're good about it. Yeah. She's very happy. We're in a really good spot now. I love my mom. 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. Even little things like she would give me some months, $20, $30, and I would take that money and use that to buy stuff to help make videos or whatever. And even just the fact that we had Internet, you know what I mean? And things like that, which 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. It wasn't the best position, but she gave me all the tools I needed to succeed, not on purpose, but-She must be so shocked. Well, she's used to it now, but yeah, I mean, When the come up, it was... Yeah, imagine being her. When I turned 16, she couldn't afford to buy me a car. The minivan we had, it was a fucking piece of shit, needed a repair.

She couldn't afford it. Like, smoke was coming out the front of it. She was an absolute mess. Then she comes home and I'm just like, I'm making YouTube videos. Fuck math homework, mom. I I think she was making $40,000 a year. Because 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. I was like, holy shit. At the time, I was like, I thought you made way more than 40 grand a year. Then I was like, why the fuck are you working? I'm getting paid this per video now on brand deals.

What an incredible woman.

I know. She's great. From everything she went through to now, she just needs to be happy. I try not to stress her out. She's been through enough stress. Her job is... I've been making her... I mean, she wants to do it, but exercise routinely, do all the system, body health scans, and get on the vitamin grind and everything because 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. I'm like, 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 might be in your 70s when I have kids. You need to be able to move around, which means you might potentially be 80 when they're 14 or 15. Come on. What you do now is indicative, will represent how active you'll be able to be in my kids' lives. 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. She'll just never die. My mom's going to 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 I get hit with the question first?

You get hit with the question first.

Okay.

Would you rather die with a sound body or a sound mind?

Sound body or sound mind? I assume if I chose body, then that would be 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 mind, to be honest.

Amen. 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. There's always a cost, I think, to being different and to being weird. There's an upside, but there's also a really, really, really big cost. You pay that cost most when you're younger and you have to fit into the system and you don't get to choose who you're hanging 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. You have, in a very short amount of time that I've been speaking to you for a week or something, have blown my mind open. I got to see the behind the scenes of Beast Games, and my entire mind as I sat there on the sofa, I remember where I sat when I saw the behind the scenes just exploded.

You made me, in that moment, realize how much I'd limited myself. As someone that considers themselves to be really ambitious, I'd limited myself. I wanted to say thank you because you're not just doing that economy, you're doing that for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people all at the same time. You're giving them 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. Hit in the box, agreed. Exactly. Thank you for the time. Thank you so much, honestly, because we need more people like you, and I'm your biggest fan. Thank you. I really, really appreciate you. Thank you.

All right, let's see if we can break into it one more.

You're so funny. Some of the most successful, fascinating, and insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table. At the end of every conversation, I asked them to leave a question behind in the famous diary of a CEO. It's a question designed to spark the conversations that matter most, the conversations that can change your life. We then take those questions and we put them on these cards. On every single card, you can see the person who left the question, the question they asked, and on the other side, if you scan that barcode, you can see who answered it next. Something That's the thing I know a lot of you have wanted to know. The only way to find out is by getting yourself some conversation cards, which you can play at home with friends and family, at work with colleagues, and also with total strangers on holiday. I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below, and you can get yours at thediary com.