MrBeast Shares His Best Business Advice

MrBeast's Rules for Impossible Success - February 13, 2025 (about 2 months ago) • 57:00

This My First Million podcast episode features Shaan Puri interviewing MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson. They discuss Donaldson's journey, business philosophies, and unique approach to content creation and entrepreneurship. The conversation offers insights into Donaldson's mindset and strategies, applicable to various fields.

Burning the Boats: Donaldson describes dropping out of college against his mother's wishes to pursue YouTube full-time, giving himself a six-month deadline to succeed.
Rule of 100: Donaldson emphasizes consistent practice and improvement. He advises creators to make 100 videos, improving one aspect with each iteration, before seeking advice.
Making Anything Viral: Donaldson explains how a strong idea can make even mundane activities engaging. He demonstrates this by generating viral video ideas based on random words.
Obsessive Focus: Donaldson highlights his obsessive personality, driving him to constantly analyze and improve his content and businesses. He illustrates this with his meticulous attention to Feastables chocolate displays in Walmart.
Cloning: Donaldson discusses his strategy of "cloning" himself by having others shadow him to learn his decision-making process and business acumen. This allows for faster scaling and efficient problem-solving.
Impossible is Possible: Donaldson encourages pushing boundaries and challenging perceived limitations. He believes almost anything is possible with enough research and effort, citing examples like securing the Egyptian pyramids for a video.
Consultants are Cheat Codes: Donaldson advocates for leveraging the expertise of consultants or experienced individuals to accelerate progress and avoid common pitfalls. He uses examples like contacting David Blaine for advice on being buried alive.
No Doesn't Mean No Way: Donaldson emphasizes the importance of curiosity and persistence when faced with obstacles. He promotes investigating the reasons behind a "no" before accepting it as a final answer.
Reinvest Everything: Donaldson explains his strategy of reinvesting all profits back into his businesses to fuel growth and improve content quality. He draws parallels to Walt Disney's similar approach.
Feastables and Ethical Sourcing: Donaldson discusses his chocolate company, Feastables, highlighting his commitment to ethical sourcing and combating child labor in the cocoa industry.
Surrounding Yourself with the Right People: Donaldson emphasizes the importance of surrounding oneself with driven and supportive individuals who share similar goals and values. He applies this principle to both his business and personal life, like achieving his fitness goals.
Buying TikTok: Donaldson reveals that his joke tweet about buying TikTok attracted serious interest from billionaires and investment groups, leading to actual discussions about acquiring the platform.

Transcript:

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	James Stephen Donaldson	Let's go.
00:00	Shaan Puri	So here we go. I have it here. This is the Mr. Beast secret. I don't...
00:04	James Stephen Donaldson	know if
00:04	Shaan Puri	I should be concerned, I guess. You faked going to college.
00:07	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh, that's a juicy one.
00:09	Shaan Puri	Under the hood of the video, you wrote your stats.
00:11	James Stephen Donaldson	I did do that. I remember that.
00:13	Shaan Puri	It's not like at a hundred you were.
00:16	James Stephen Donaldson	Rich and famous people say it takes ten thousand hours to master something. I'm like, that's when you start.
00:18	Shaan Puri	But, you know, like nobody does this right.
00:20	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't understand why. So, we want to do an exercise.
00:23	Shaan Puri	To see.
00:23	James Stephen Donaldson	If I can come up with a viral idea.
00:25	Shaan Puri	But with a budget of $1,000.
00:26	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, exactly. So, we're...
00:27	Ben Wilson	I'm going to do a random word generator.
00:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, they're going to think this is great. Alright, so it gave us the word "grandmother." So, what's a viral idea with a grandmother? I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega banger...
00:46	Shaan Puri	What's it doing? What's up?
00:47	James Stephen Donaldson	How's it going, boys?
00:48	Ben Wilson	Hey, how are you doing?
00:49	James Stephen Donaldson	Let's go! It's been two years, and there's lots to update people on.
00:53	Shaan Puri	I think your business has grown like 10x since then.
00:56	James Stephen Donaldson	Probably something like that, yeah.
00:57	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it's wild to see. In fact, actually, this is kind of where I want to start because you walk in, we're in your office. This is like Jimmy's actual office, and it's easy to see the size and scale. Now it looks like, of course, you know, this is all happening.
01:12	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
01:12	Shaan Puri	But I like to see that journey, and I actually want to play a clip for you.
01:17	James Stephen Donaldson	It's going to be... so we're starting off with the origin story, it sounds like.
01:20	Shaan Puri	You're gonna hate this.
01:21	James Stephen Donaldson	There's a letter room. You're gonna hate this. What would you bring?
01:23	Shaan Puri	Let's... this is from a video on your YouTube channel called "Quitting."
01:27	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh God, I don't...
01:27	Shaan Puri	Know if you remember this.
01:28	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh God, do you...
01:29	Shaan Puri	Know what you're about to hear.
01:30	James Stephen Donaldson	I remember uploading this video, but I do not remember a single thing I said in it.
01:35	James Stephen Donaldson	You guys make it really hard to quit. It's been a month since I uploaded to YouTube. Whoa! To be honest, I was pretty sure I was done with YouTube. I kind of want to start uploading again. I feel like my YouTube channel has so much potential. I made over $500 off of this channel.
01:51	Shaan Puri	I feel like this.
01:52	James Stephen Donaldson	Channel could grow, like money aside. I could become famous, which would be awesome in and of itself. So, I don't know, I might start up with that.
02:00	James Stephen Donaldson	Stay high.
02:01	Shaan Puri	This is you, dude.
02:03	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't remember saying any of that. Woah, woah.
02:06	Shaan Puri	Wild! Is that dude?
02:07	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh my gosh, I was making $500 a month. Why would I quit?
02:12	Shaan Puri	And in the thing you're talking about, you're like, "You know, I've been busy with sports, and I just haven't been as consistent."
02:17	James Stephen Donaldson	Now it's and.
02:17	Shaan Puri	Then what you said was, "The comments have kept me going."
02:20	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
02:20	Shaan Puri	You're like, "I logged in today. I wasn't planning to upload, but I saw 20 comments, and you know what? I think I might keep uploading."
02:28	Ben Wilson	Man, that's crazy.
02:30	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, that was also around the time I got Crohn's disease. I was really into baseball and wanted to play baseball in college, so I was all in on baseball. There was a constant tug and pull where one day I'd wake up and think, "I want to try to play in the MLB," which I had zero shot of. I never would have, but you know you're delusional when you're a little kid. Then the next day, I'd be like, "No, I want to be a YouTuber," and this seemed more realistic. I thought I could make money that way. Then I got Crohn's, and I went from 200 pounds, weightlifting every day, down to 139, on the verge of dying. I lost every ounce of muscle I had. I was like, "Well, I just made this easier," with YouTube. I was probably around 14 or 15 at the time. So, that was when life was working for me. Yeah, that was probably around that time too. I was going through Crohn's and trying to figure out, "Am I doing YouTube or am I doing baseball?" because I'm a very all-in kind of guy.
03:17	Shaan Puri	And so, do I mean just to hear you?
03:18	James Stephen Donaldson	$500 a month.
03:20	Shaan Puri	That's crazy... half a thousand.
03:22	James Stephen Donaldson	Half a thousand, yeah, I've...
03:24	Shaan Puri	That's amazing! I've never even heard that before.
03:26	James Stephen Donaldson	I was richer than I thought back then. So, I mean, no, that was definitely cap. I was not making $500 a month. Or maybe I had one month where I made $500, and I was like, "Okay, maybe someone from school might see this," and I wanted to flex. When I graduated from high school, I was making nothing. I was not making $6,000 a year back then.
03:44	Shaan Puri	Dude, you had this great quote: "I started making videos when I was 11. No one watched when I was 11. No one watched when I was 12. No one watched when I was 13. At 14, I thought, 'Is anyone ever gonna watch these things?' At 16, nobody's watching. At 17, oh, I'm about to graduate high school, and still no one is watching my videos."
03:59	James Stephen Donaldson	Yep, and 18... no one watched that. I think it was around 19 when I started to really figure it out.
04:04	Shaan Puri	And I think, so why are we doing this episode? Right? Our audience is not trying to be YouTubers; it's mostly business founders.
04:10	James Stephen Donaldson	I mean...
04:11	James Stephen Donaldson	It works.
04:11	James Stephen Donaldson	For you... yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm kidding. I'm kind.
04:13	Shaan Puri	What I like about you is your approach to whether it's YouTube, selling chocolate, losing weight, or whatever it is.
04:21	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
04:22	Shaan Puri	You have a certain mentality. I think you are wired differently. In twenty years, I'm going to be able to look back and show my kids, saying, "Yeah, before Jimmy was president, you came on my podcast. We sat at this little table." So, it's an honor. I honestly think you're wired differently, and I want to share that with the audience. Anyone can use this mentality, whether you want to be a swimmer, a YouTuber, or a business person. I also called your assistant and your thumbnail guy.
04:47	James Stephen Donaldson	Are they doing it? They didn't even tell me that. What?
04:49	Shaan Puri	And so, here we go. I have it here. This is the Mister B secrets.
04:53	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't know if I should be concerned.
04:55	Shaan Puri	We're going to go through these. These are nine of what I consider to be your rules. Now, you could tell me if these are bullshit.
05:01	James Stephen Donaldson	Are you making this a game?
05:02	Shaan Puri	You're just playing them out in front of me. Here you go. So we're going to play this game, and each one of these is, to me, a rule of Mr. Beast. It's something we've seen about the way you operate, and I want you to kind of talk about these. So this is number one, okay?
05:14	James Stephen Donaldson	Burn the boats.
05:14	Ben Wilson	Burn the boats.
05:15	Shaan Puri	So, burn the boats. Your mom wanted you to go to college, and I guess you faked going to college. You pretended to go. What is the story?
05:22	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh, that's a juicy one. So, well, first off, we didn't have the kind of money to go to a real college. It was just a free community college. But yeah, my mom, because she grew up pretty traditionally, you know, in the military, worked her whole life. Then in February 2008, she lost everything when the real estate market collapsed. She lost all her savings and stuff. We went bankrupt and had to file for bankruptcy. So she's very paranoid. She just wants her kid to go get a job and not mess up, because she's very risk-averse. That was a constant tug and pull because I'm like, "I'm going to be a YouTuber or homeless." And she'd be like, "But then you could be homeless." I'm like, "Okay, I mean, it is what it is. I don't care."
05:59	Shaan Puri	I'm going to.
05:59	James Stephen Donaldson	Be a YouTuber. It just never clicked in her head. To her, it's like if he doesn't get a college degree, he's a failure. She feels like she wasted eighteen years; he's not going to be able to provide. For her, it was like either college or my life is ruined because that's just how her brain is wired. She went through so much. So when I said, "I don't want to go," she was just like, "Then leave! Get out of the house! I can't bear the sight of my son just sitting around and throwing his life away." I didn't have enough money to move out, so I was like, "Freak!" Luckily, community college is so cheap; it's not like she's wasting money on it. I thought, "Okay, I'll go to college." Then, I mean, I just flat out lied to her. I said, "I'll do it," but I had no intention of actually doing it. I went just to see what it was like. I thought, "Maybe I'm being a little dramatic." I went to class for like a week. It was horrible. It was so boring. I swear, the teacher was just reading out of the book, and I was like, "Why do I have to? I can just read the book. What are we doing?" I said that to some of the people around me, and they were like, "Yeah, that's what education is. Stop complaining." My head hurt. So then I thought, "It is what it is." I have like a six-month time clock where I have to make enough money to move out because once my mom knows, I'm screwed. She's going to kick me out of the house. Honestly, I would want to leave the house because I know it's going to make her depressed and very sad.
07:18	Shaan Puri	So, you just didn't go after that?
07:19	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, so I would go every day. I would just sit in this really old Dodge Durango that was super used with a lot of miles. I would just sit in the Dodge Durango and edit videos. I'd film at night and then I'd go home.
07:31	Shaan Puri	Back and be like, "School was..."
07:32	James Stephen Donaldson	Great! Miles, just like, "Yeah, you know." She'd be like, "How's college?" and I'd be like, "You know," and then move on. I just wouldn't tell her that I'd stopped going.
07:39	Shaan Puri	But you burned the boats. You're like, "Alright, I got six months."
07:42	James Stephen Donaldson	Exactly.
07:43	Shaan Puri	I gotta either make it or...
07:44	James Stephen Donaldson	I figured it out. I don't even remember, but I had a month where we made $20 right before it was time. The window was almost up, and then I just told my mom, "I haven't been going. I'm failing." I found a place down the road; it's $700 a month. Sorry. She's like, "Alright."
08:04	Shaan Puri	Hey, real quick! I'm trying something special for this episode. Let me know if you like it. We were talking to Jimmy, and before these episodes, I do thirty to forty hours of research and prep. I make detailed notes that, for me, make it super easy to remember all the key takeaways. Well, for the first time, I'm actually going to give those notes to you! You can get them for free in the description below. It's my notes—the key takeaways from this episode. Go ahead and grab it; it's down in the description below. Is this kind of a strategy for you where you're like...?
08:31	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't think it's a strategy; it's more of my personality. I'm a very obsessive person. If you told me to do a hundred things, I would struggle with it. But if you told me to think about this one thing every second of the day for the next ten years, I can do that pretty easily. So, I like to just obsess over something. I like to dream about it, wake up, think about it, think about it, think about it, think about it, think about it, think about it more. Work on it, work on it, work on it, think about it, think about it, dream about it, and just do that every single day. For me, that comes very naturally.
08:55	Shaan Puri	What was your observation? We just went to Walmart with Jimmy. We did. Give me your... we haven't talked about this.
08:59	Ben Wilson	Most of
09:00	James Stephen Donaldson	Your audience probably doesn't even know I sell chocolate. We have a company called Feastables; it's a chocolate company. I'm sure we'll go into that at some point. Yeah, festivals.
09:07	Shaan Puri	This episode is brought to you by Feastables.
09:08	James Stephen Donaldson	So, I took them to a Walmart just because it's my favorite thing to do in my free time. I go walk up and down the chocolate aisles in different retailers, and so I brought him along.
09:16	Ben Wilson	He was telling us everything about merchandising. Everything, not just about Feastables, but about competitive chocolate companies. He was showing us, like, talking numbers of sales.
09:24	Shaan Puri	Dude, I thought influencers were just like, you give them a product and they're like, "Oh, this is great! Hey guys, buy this!" You know? The chocolate guy knew the game inside and out. He was in the aisles, reconfiguring the SKUs and making everything straight.
09:37	James Stephen Donaldson	I landed in DC for a layover to then fly to North Carolina. When I got off the plane to go to my connecting flight, I thought, "Wait a minute." I opened up Google Maps and searched for Walmart. I realized I could just drive there and hit 25 Walmarts on the way home. So, it was around 10 AM, and I decided to skip my connecting flight. I rented a car and drove from DC, visiting every Walmart on the way to North Carolina. I didn't get home until about 9 PM, and it was quite an adventure!
10:02	Shaan Puri	If that's still ever Hershey's, has done it? Probably not. I wonder if he's doing it, and then the guy... it's.
10:08	James Stephen Donaldson	A problem.
10:08	Shaan Puri	Your friend was like, "Have you gone to Walmart with him?" They're like, "Yeah, I don't know. Jimmy has like a badge. If something's out of stock, he just goes in the back and restocks it himself." Yeah, do they give you like some... do you have some way of like...
10:18	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, it's a vendor's license. A lot of people have vendor's licenses, like beverage companies such as Coca-Cola. They have a direct sales network where you can fit, theoretically, 10,000 chocolate bars on a pallet, but you can only fit 500 Coke cans. So, it's a lot harder to store 10,000 cans of Coke than it is to store 10,000 chocolate bars. For that reason, they have Coke trucks at some Walmarts that go there every single day. They take the product and put it in the back for the Walmart locations, and then they stock the shelves and everything. Walmart is pretty transparent about that. When I first got into the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) game, I was like, "No shot! They're just going to let us do it?" But yeah, if your product is out of stock on the shelf and you have a vendor's license, you can go to the back, scan it in, and put it on the shelf. Smart, right? I mean, you could argue it's not a good use of your time, and I don't know why I do it. It's kind of therapeutic. I just love going to Walmarts, fixing the product, and observing what it looks like on the shelf. I like seeing what the competition is doing and just watching who's grabbing it and buying it.
11:07	Shaan Puri	It's like those memes: "Men won't go to therapy, but they'll do this." This is your thing.
11:12	James Stephen Donaldson	I can organize a chocolate aisle in Target or Walmart.
11:15	Shaan Puri	So, let's do rule number two. This one... go ahead, you can reveal this. I think you know what this one is.
11:22	James Stephen Donaldson	The rule of a hundred... I know, I gave it.
11:24	Shaan Puri	I'm sorry, but it seems there was an error in my previous response. Here is the cleaned transcription: A name. So this is... I'm going to quote you on this. This was some... you know, I'm sure you get asked this a million times.
11:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Okay, how do...
11:30	Shaan Puri	I, you know, what advice do you have for me as a YouTuber? How do I be successful on YouTube? You said this thing that to me was like, "Every creator should print this and put it on their wall." Oh God, it's advice: "Your first video’s not gonna get views."
11:44	James Stephen Donaldson	You're done with the hundred videos. Improve something every time on the hundredth one, then ask questions.
11:48	Shaan Puri	To me, that's the rule of a hundred. Before you come ask for advice, it's like, "Have you made a hundred videos?" Every time, try to make one thing better. That's also very achievable; it's not like some insurmountable thing to do. It's like, "Alright, I'm going to make my intro better. I'm going to make my editing better," or whatever it is. The beauty of what you said was, I think, the way you said it. You were like, "If you do that a hundred times, come talk to me after you've done the hundred." Ninety-nine percent of people just don't do it. Then the one percent of people who do, they don't need me after that. They figure it out, which is...
12:18	James Stephen Donaldson	Which is, it's more of a metaphorical mindset. Because that's the thing; most people who need advice just need to go do it and learn from failure. I'm a big fan of just trial by fire. Go do it, mess up a bunch of times, and get 1% better. Then do that for a couple of years.
12:34	Shaan Puri	I have a couple of other pictures to show you. So, this is one. This is one of your thumbnails.
12:37	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh God.
12:38	Shaan Puri	During your ride.
12:39	James Stephen Donaldson	That's still on my channel.
12:40	Shaan Puri	So, I went and I looked at your first hundred.
12:43	James Stephen Donaldson	I was like, "Alright."
12:44	Shaan Puri	Let me see. He said the rule of a hundred. Let me go look at his first hundred. I saw this and like today you're probably known as one of the best, smartest thumbnail people in the world, right?
12:52	James Stephen Donaldson	Black Ops: Do shotgun gameplay with commentary. PS4 or Xbox?
12:57	Shaan Puri	I just suck at making thumbnails, which is honestly dope because most people, if they feel like they're bad at something, they just don't do it. Yeah, like they shy away.
13:04	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
13:05	Shaan Puri	And then you have this other one, which is like your hundredth video. On your hundredth video, you wrote your stats. You go...
13:10	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh my God, subscribers, I did do that.
13:12	Shaan Puri	I remember that I had 730 subscribers. So, on your rule of a hundred, it's not like at a hundred you were rich.
13:17	James Stephen Donaldson	And famous? Yeah, right. Honestly, probably about 50 of them are me asking people on Xbox Live to subscribe. Like when I'd be playing Call of Duty in game chat, I'd be like, "Yo, subscribe to my channel."
13:29	Ben Wilson	What do you see people get wrong about the Rule of 100?
13:32	James Stephen Donaldson	Most people just aren't as obsessed with improving things. They get pigeonholed in a box and think, "Oh, I just need to improve." I mean, this applies to everything, but I guess specifically to content. They'll be like, "Oh, I just need to write better jokes," or "I need to have a better camera." It's not just that; it's a mindset. Every single thing can be improved. There's no such thing as a perfect video. You can go as low as you want, from the coloring to what you're wearing, to how you speak, to how long the video is. I mean, there's nothing that you can't improve. So, just having that mindset where you're always trying to get better and applying that to everything across the board—not just narrowing in on this one little thing—is crucial. Honestly, a lot of people are mentors; they just don't listen. They ask me for advice, and the ones who will listen can take their revenue from $30K to $400K a month, or achieve their goals, subs, or whatever it is. I can show them how to hit it, but a lot of times, people ask for advice, I say it, and it goes in one ear and out the other. Those are the worst.
14:25	Shaan Puri	I use this because I was studying Seinfeld recently.
14:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Uh-huh, and I...
14:30	Shaan Puri	Don't know if you know, but Seinfeld has this daily routine. Seinfeld is now like 70 years old, and he's still in stand-up comedy. I mean, he's the only stand-up billionaire ever. It's pretty crazy! So I was like, "Alright, what can I learn from Seinfeld?" One of the things he did was say, "Every day for the last forty-five years, I wake up, and my first two hours of the day, I write." He said, "Guess what? If you want to get good at jokes, you write jokes every day." He also mentioned that every day, he just tries to make it one better than the other. They talk about writer's block, and he said, "That's nonsense." His rule is, "I sit down, I don't have to write, I just can't do anything else." And he said that makes him write. I've been doing that, and he has this yellow legal pad with all the pages he ever did. He literally laid them out on a road, and he paved the whole road. It became like a yellow brick road, basically. It's an incredible story!
15:15	James Stephen Donaldson	You know how many hours that is? Two hours a day for forty-five years—thirty thousand hours, right? Yeah, that's the thing. People say it takes ten thousand hours to master something. I'm like, "Ten thousand hours? That's when you start!" That's the mindset you need with the role of a hundred. It's not because ten thousand hours... what is that? It's only like eight hours a day for four years.
15:36	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly.
15:37	James Stephen Donaldson	It's not that they got crazy, but to a lot of people, you know, that's the saying: "Ten thousand hours to master." I think it should be a hundred thousand hours, to be honest. I think ten's too easy.
15:46	Ben Wilson	So, if Seinfeld is like locking himself in a room and saying, "I can't do anything but write jokes," do you ever have...?
15:51	James Stephen Donaldson	To do that, or is it just... no, this is just what I live for. Yeah, so I mean, I just wake up, walk into the studio, and normally this whiteboard over here—we erased it, I guess it wouldn't be leaked—but it would have all the businesses, all the piles, all the bottlenecks, anything I could do to push things forward. It's all listed out, and there'd be probably three or four hundred things. Then we'd go through at the start of each week and just pick what needs to be done, what should we prioritize, etcetera, etcetera. So it'd be like Feastables. It's like, you know, ethical sourcing. Here are three things that need to be done. Here are all the major bottlenecks that if you stepped in, you could push it forward: content, toys, lunch, whatever. So that's more how I structure my days. We just have a lot going on, and it's just about making sure what I'm working on is the most efficient thing. Because if there are like ten people sitting around waiting on me to make a decision to go work, that shouldn't be a Friday thing. That should be a fucking Monday at 9:01 AM thing, you know what I mean? So it's very... even just figuring out what I need to accomplish in a week, and then even the order of what we do is very important.
16:46	Shaan Puri	You want to do the third one? Yeah.
16:47	James Stephen Donaldson	You wanna go ahead, Jimmy? Let's see this bad boy. You can make anything viral.
16:51	Ben Wilson	So, can we talk about your leaked [information]?
16:54	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, of course. The document on how to succeed in this podcast is on it.
16:57	Ben Wilson	So, we want to do an exercise.
16:58	Shaan Puri	An exercise... is it a challenge? A challenge... a challenge to see.
17:02	James Stephen Donaldson	If I can come up with a viral idea... yeah, exactly. The problem here is, I'm down for this. The only ironic thing is, the only one here who will actually know if it's viral or not is me.
17:12	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you're grading yourself here.
17:13	James Stephen Donaldson	I know.
17:14	Shaan Puri	It's that meme where Obama is putting the medal on.
17:16	James Stephen Donaldson	Himself, exactly. Because you guys could be like, "I don't think they'll get a hundred million views," and I'll just go, "No."
17:20	Shaan Puri	But, here's the stipulation: take a normal thing.
17:23	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, make.
17:24	Shaan Puri	It’s an interesting viral idea, but with a budget of a thousand dollars, because it’s easy.
17:27	James Stephen Donaldson	$1,000
17:28	Shaan Puri	Oh, Mr. Beast would just put a million dollars.
17:30	James Stephen Donaldson	On the line.
17:30	Shaan Puri	$10
17:30	James Stephen Donaldson	$10,000.
17:32	Shaan Puri	And you said you used to use random word generators? I did.
17:34	James Stephen Donaldson	All the time.
17:34	Shaan Puri	So, we gave you a random word generator. If you hit...
17:37	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't know what random words.
17:38	Shaan Puri	You can pay. You can flip through a few until you find.
17:40	Ben Wilson	A word... try the actual thing.
17:41	James Stephen Donaldson	Like in that way, context to your viewers. The thing is, you could spend seven days... This is something I've said on other podcasts; I think this drives it home. I spent seven days buried alive, right? That got hundreds of millions of views—me laying in a coffin. It's like, "Holy shit! Put a coffin 10 feet underground, cover it with 20,000 pounds of dirt." I'm literally in a coffin for a week. That's cool. That's viral. That was seven days of me laying down. I theoretically could have, instead of doing that, laid in just a bathtub for seven days. No one would have cared. That video would have flopped. But in theory, it's the same amount of time, at least from a filming perspective. Logistically, maybe not, but in theory, both are just me laying down for seven days. But one is super fucking viral, and the other, no one cares about. So that's like the power of ideas. With the right idea, you can do the exact same amount of work as a different idea but get 50 times the return. So that's why I'm so adamant about generating good ideas. Alright, so I just hit random... create random words: chocolate.
18:34	Shaan Puri	Oh, that was your chocolate tea.
18:35	James Stephen Donaldson	They're gonna think this is... no, you're gonna think this is... you said chocolate. This is a random word generator. They'll probably... they're not gonna... they're gonna think this whole thing is ruined. Non-chocolate: grandmother. Alright, so they gave us the word "grandmother." So, what's a viral idea with a grandmother that could be done for $10,000? I mean, bro, if you actually want like a mega banger, I would do completing a hundred-year-old's bucket list.
19:01	Shaan Puri	Oh, so you met a grandma?
19:03	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, I'd find a grandma. I mean, if you really wanted to... I wouldn't say I would do this, but if you wanted a viral lead, I'd find a grandmother who's terminally ill. I'd take her and her grandkids and help them fulfill everything on their bucket list. Like, bro, that's a cool idea! Don't do this title, but she will die in thirty days, so I fulfilled all her wishes. That would definitely get clicks!
19:23	Shaan Puri	That's so good! Hold on, we gotta do another one. That's okay, you passed... you passed the test. I just...
19:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Alright, bro. This is a lifestyle. I can make things.
19:31	Shaan Puri	I like the magic trick.
19:33	James Stephen Donaldson	So, you want to do that one?
19:34	Shaan Puri	Yeah, drawing.
19:34	James Stephen Donaldson	Okay, the next one here is drawing. I mean, whoa! So, you want it for $10? The first thing I thought of for drawing is creating the world's largest picture, but that would be more than $10. Actually, weirdly enough, a lot of videos go viral on YouTube where people are just customizing phones or things like that. It depends. If I'm a really good artist, I would do TikToks that go super viral. For example, they find a couple on the street and sketch them. But they sketch them in a really ugly way. They stop really beautiful people, and then they turn their artwork around, and the reaction is, "What the heck?" Those types of videos do really well on TikTok. I've seen someone get a hundred million views! So, that would be one way you could approach drawing. I mean, even if you're just a good enough artist—if you're not, just get good and study to improve. You could design something like a hospital floor for Make-A-Wish kids and create cool artwork. If there's some film you could put over your drawing, you could design something that they just peel off a couple of days later. That wouldn't be that expensive, and it would be cool to surprise Make-A-Wish kids with their favorite characters or something. Yeah, I mean, the... how many...
20:49	Shaan Puri	Do you want to brainstorm? Are you usually just kind of by yourself? What's your process? If I said you need to come up with something, what would you do to set yourself up to generate great ideas?
20:58	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, because in transparency, I have teams now. I'm not as hands-on as I used to be; I used to do it all myself. Now, I pay a lot of people to do it, and I just work with them on the back 10%. But I mean, if you really want to come up with great ideas, you need to surround yourself with other very creative people. I’m not going to say their names, but I have at least five people that if I really needed to solve something, I would call. I’d fly them down, and it would be boom, boom, boom, with me in the middle. We can solve anything creatively in terms of virality or anything like that. They're just really, really good. One's good with thumbnails, another is the smartest guy I’ve ever met when it comes to titles. Another is just a freak; he says the craziest stuff, but it’s very inspirational. You need that kind of shotgun approach that's constantly shooting out ideas. Then there's another guy we would describe more as a sniper. He’s not going to say much, but when he does, you’re like, “Dang, that’s good.” So yeah, I just have my go-to people who are very creative, and they pull the best out of me. It’s very important to have that. I think Steve Jobs called it a think tank in "Creative Inc."
22:00	Shaan Puri	He and they had a thing where they were like, at Pixar, they have a book called Creativity, Inc. at the... oh.
22:05	James Stephen Donaldson	Creativity, Inc.
22:06	Shaan Puri	And he said, "It's not that people think, 'Oh, we just come up with the best ideas right away.' No, the creative process is taking something that sucks and removing the suck." So he's like, "Yeah, we sit there, we watch the first version, and it sucks. We trust each other enough to be like, 'Yeah, that kinda sucks, but here's what sucks about it. Go back, try again, try again, try again.'" He said by the end, by the tenth thing, we just removed all the suck, and all that's left is the good bits.
22:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, I was just... do you?
22:29	Shaan Puri	Buy, that is that.
22:30	James Stephen Donaldson	I was just at Pixar. It's at the Steve Jobs building, and I was with some of the employees while they were working. I got to see how they go about it. They're doing daily reviews over there, which means every day they show what they worked on to the director and get real-time feedback. They're very egoless, and it was really cool to see their culture and how they operate. I mean, in terms of animated films, they're second to none, right? I remember a couple of years ago when...
22:55	Ben Wilson	We talked to you, and you said that coming up with ideas was still the thing that you felt like you had the most trouble handing off to anyone else. It was like the thing that you still just excelled most at and couldn't get.
23:07	James Stephen Donaldson	Any outreach? So many great people at that now.
23:10	Ben Wilson	Okay.
23:10	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, I mean, I have enough ideas for the next five years, so that's not a bottleneck at all. I have too many. I would just start listing them off, but then the problem is everyone would steal them.
23:20	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, okay, great. Let's go to the next one. Alright, so we have... that's three of the rules. Number four, I'll flip this one: cloning.
23:28	James Stephen Donaldson	Yes.
23:29	Shaan Puri	Alright, so the backstory of this one is last year when we were doing our camper event. It's basically a room full of business people, billionaires, all whatever. You started describing how you run your company and, well, you were 25 years old at the time. You're not now; you're 26.
23:43	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, these people are double my age and have 20 times the experience that I do.
23:46	Shaan Puri	Correct. So, there we were listening, and we're like, "Who is this guy? Why has this guy been following you around all day? Who is this, and how do you run this? How do you train people?" You described this process of cloning, and I swear I saw like five billionaires make a note to themselves. So, can you describe what your cloning principle is? What does that mean?
24:02	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, the thing is, as a founder, I assume a lot of your viewers run this.
24:06	Shaan Puri	Founders and...
24:06	James Stephen Donaldson	Investors, yeah, like you're constantly having to put out fires. You're always having to do things, and that's a flaw. You're always going to be putting in the work on stuff. But you should view anytime you have to work on things as a flaw. It's like, how do you find the fastest way to stop working on something? Every time you work on it, have someone by your side and teach them how to do it. Essentially, you want to clone yourself to handle that task. So, anytime I've worked on something, I don't ever work alone anymore. Because if I'm doing something that's a problem, I think, "Someone should be doing this in six months." So that's just like the cheat code to getting it done.
24:36	Shaan Puri	And it's cloning, not training. Why?
24:38	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, we would call... now that I have hundreds of employees, I think we're probably closing in on 500. So, it's a lot more training. But clones, like clones are more like the all-in people who are going to run your company one day. They have the upside to live with you and, you know, because someone who's making $40,000 a year, they're not going to live with you and follow you around fifteen hours a day. Right? You know?
24:57	Shaan Puri	But early on, you had that... you had people, literally. Yeah.
24:59	James Stephen Donaldson	We still have people like that, but it's just a small subset of it. So, yeah, of the core team, 100%. The thing is, the more you know about everything going on, the better. A lot of what you do in one part of a vertical business, whether in finance or in this or that, affects other parts. The more you understand the whole business, the more you understand the ripples you create across things. This allows you to work more efficiently and effectively. Just having a clone who knows everything about the whole business, as opposed to just one section, makes it so they can make decisions much faster. They can cut through red tape, and it just makes it so much easier for you. When you're in hyper-growth scale, you don't know what the next fire is going to be or what the next thing is to fix. So, having a couple of versions of yourself is so nice. For example, if something over here in editing is falling apart, I can say, "Alright, clone, you followed me around for the last three years. You know what I would do, just go fix it." You know what I mean? So, I don't have to go.
25:48	Shaan Puri	Fixing it, every part of a company is not like... it's not like you look at a thing and say, "Editing is its own thing." No, editing is about people. Editing is people. What I liked about the way you were doing it was that I think, on the outside, people hear this and think, "Follow you around all the time? Live with you? That's crazy!" I would say, "That's harsh." But I met the people doing it, and they were like, "This is the greatest opportunity!" Exactly! I came here for this. I wanted to be great. He's given me the opportunity to be great. Not everybody wants this.
26:13	James Stephen Donaldson	You don't need that.
26:14	Shaan Puri	Want this.
26:14	James Stephen Donaldson	You can either go to college for three years, or you can follow Sean around for three years, like, all day, every day. The version of you that follows Sean around for three years will make way more money. You'll be way more experienced and way more valuable to him. Or you could just go to any one of his competitors, and you'll make ten times more than if you got a degree. Have you ever heard of that?
26:32	Shaan Puri	Of the Warren Buffett cloning story... No, so Warren Buffett, when he was young, wanted to learn investing. He goes to the guy who wrote the book on investing, Benjamin Graham, and he's like, "Mr. Graham, I’m Warren Buffett. I’m a big fan of your work. I want to work for you. I will work harder than anyone you know, and you know what? I’m willing to work for you for free because this matters so much. I want to learn from you." And Ben Graham goes, "Son, your price is too high." He was surprised, and then later he thought, "He was so right." I got so much more out of working every day at Ben Graham's hip than him getting my free labor. Yeah, actually, the value exchange was completely... he was correct.
27:09	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
27:10	Shaan Puri	And that always stuck with me because it's so true. Like, dude, how do you... if you want to learn, that's the best way you could possibly learn. As a founder, you know, ultimately you want judgment to scale. So it's like, if people in your company can think, "What would Jimmy do?" and get the right answer, then now you've got two Jimmys, right? You know, like for the most part, they can make a decision.
27:28	James Stephen Donaldson	And then other times it should be like, "What would Jimmy do?" Okay, Jimmy's not always right. In this instance, he's an idiot. Let's go call him out on it.
27:36	Shaan Puri	What will he say when I tell him what I'm actually going to do?
27:39	James Stephen Donaldson	And then they think even one step further, which is like my long-term clones are great. They'll be like, "Okay, well, Jimmy's gonna want data-backed [information]. He's not gonna care about an opinion, so I'm gonna just go do all the research and grab the data." Then they'll ask me something and say, "Blah blah," and they'll be like, "I knew you were gonna say that." They'll hand me things, and I'll be like, "Well, what about this?" And they're like, "I knew you were gonna say that."
27:56	Shaan Puri	And I'll be like, "Oh great." And by the way, it's not just you. There was also a guy who was cloning people. He's like, "Yeah, I'm the main guy for this part of the business, so I need to be training people." So this is how I'm...
28:06	James Stephen Donaldson	Doing it, zero to one, is so difficult. But then, one to three is so much easier. The hard part is training for things like downloading a picker or writing the videos. I used to write all the videos myself. Taking all that and getting to a point where someone else could do it without losing the essence of what makes it viral and good, while not feeling too corporate and scripted—because we're not scripted, etc.—that was a challenge. Going from zero to one took about five years. But then, training the next two people is great because I don't have to do it. He trains those two, and then those two train the next. So, it's just like that first clone is so imperative, and then they can do the rest.
28:38	Shaan Puri	That's great! You want to do...
28:39	James Stephen Donaldson	The next one... Alright, sure. Possible is possible. Fuck yeah!
28:45	Shaan Puri	Impossible is possible. Alright, so this is... I asked your friend, "Is Brohend the guy who runs your TikTok?"
28:51	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
28:51	Shaan Puri	I go, "Tell me the thing where you realize this guy's built different. This guy thinks differently than a normal person would." And I was like, "That's the story I want." He goes, "I don't know how to explain it. This is the quote: Jimmy will give you an impossible mission, but he'll say it in a way that makes it seem totally possible." Then he leaves the room, and you're like, "Goddamn, this is impossible." He goes, "For example, Jimmy came to me and said, 'I need 10,000,000 TikTok followers a month, Ron.' And every month, I told Jimmy it's impossible, like a hundred times. He told me to do it 500 times."
29:24	James Stephen Donaldson	I think we had two months where we got $10,000,000.
29:26	Shaan Puri	That's what he told me. He goes, "I didn't do it most months, but I did do it like, you know, two months, and we got way further than we ever would have gotten had he not laid down this kind of impossible gauntlet." So yeah, that's one story. I'm sure there's like a thousand of these. But do you live by this? I guess, how would you talk about that?
29:42	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, I don't try to just give people KPIs that I think are impossible just to torture them. I think most people, when you ask them to do something incredibly difficult, like when I first said I want to bury myself alive for a week, their first inclination is just, "That's not possible." Technically, almost anything is possible. So my first thing is just to ask, "Why do you say that?" Let's go through the gambit. Then they'll always be like, "Well, it's just not possible." You just have to be like, "Go do the research." Then they'll come back and say, "Is it too expensive?" Because we can figure out ways. "Is it too unsafe?" We can navigate safety or whatever it is. I hate when people tell me something can't be done. Just tell me the cost and what the problem is—the bottleneck. Then let's look at those objectively. If it's too expensive or something that's not worth investing the time into, then that's fine. I'll kill it. But just tell me something. Because half the stuff I did, if I just listened to people when they told me it wasn't possible... I wanted the Eiffel Tower for a video. "Not possible." Why? Why is that not possible? Go get the Eiffel Tower! Until the head of the President of France tells you no, it's possible. I don't understand what you mean.
30:48	Shaan Puri	When he says no, ask his kids to see if they have some sway in France.
30:51	James Stephen Donaldson	To give him while you're on the phone, we just filmed a video where we had the three pyramids of Egypt. We were there for a hundred hours; it's a crazy video. We explored the pyramids, and it's like my favorite video ever. The same thing applies: you can't just have the three pyramids. I'm like, "Did Egypt tell you that? What do you mean, go make some phone calls?" You know what I mean? Even today, when I'm not with my core group that I've trained very well, it's always like, "You can't do that," or "No," or they'll say, "Go make a phone call." Or, "Okay fine, Jimmy, we'll go try to get the pyramids." They'll go away, come back a day later, and say, "You can't have the pyramids." I'm like, "Who'd you call? This tourist guy who works at the pyramids?" I'm like, "Okay, call the head of tourism. How do you get their number?" "Okay, well that's different. You didn't ask me how to get the head of tourism's number; you just told me it was not possible." So now, please don't do that again. We gotta figure out what the problems are, let's figure it out, and then we make calls and you figure it out. Next thing you know, it's... That's a big thing that you have to have. If you really, in my opinion, want to innovate and do things that have never been done before and push boundaries, you have to have a mindset among your people that nothing is impossible. It's just about how much it costs, how to do it, and then you just make an objective decision.
32:00	Ben Wilson	It seems to me that when you solve these impossible problems, you have to think on a lower level rather than a higher level. Have you heard the story of Elon getting his rockets from Texas to Florida, where they launch them? No? So, the normal way everyone gets their rockets to Florida is on a barge. Right? But it takes like three months and costs a bunch of money.
32:18	James Stephen Donaldson	Fly it there.
32:19	Ben Wilson	He drove it there.
32:20	James Stephen Donaldson	He was.
32:20	Shaan Puri	No.
32:20	Ben Wilson	We're going to drive it instead, and they're like, "Well, it's way too big."
32:23	Shaan Puri	Well, the first answer was, "It's impossible. Can't do it."
32:25	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:25	Shaan Puri	And he said, "Let's go." He has a great line, which is, "Physics are the only laws; everything else is a suggestion." Yeah, and he's like, "Is it physically impossible to get it to Florida?" "No?" Okay, we agree on that. Great! Now let's continue to figure out where the bottleneck is. It's like, "Oh, the boat is too long, too expensive," whatever. And so the...
32:42	Ben Wilson	Know, oh well, it's impossible to get it through overpasses. So, he's like, "What would be the shortest way to get there without encountering a single overpass?" So they go, yeah, they take this extremely circuitous route all on back roads. And they're like, "But even if we do that, there's still a problem with power lines and telephone wires." So they have some of the smartest people on Earth driving in a van in front of these rockets with big poles, and they just push up the telephone wires.
33:08	James Stephen Donaldson	So they...
33:08	Ben Wilson	Can go under and...
33:09	Shaan Puri	Then they go to the next telephone wire.
33:10	Ben Wilson	And it's just like you have to approach it like a caveman, almost, to beat the impossible.
33:15	James Stephen Donaldson	Do you?
33:16	Ben Wilson	Find that's the case a lot.
33:17	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, quite a bit. A lot of it is just a willingness. It's just people who love what they do, and people who really love problem-solving will figure these things out. So, it's just having the right person in the right seat at the right time who actually wants to go deep. There are certain people where you give them something that seems impossible, and they will be giddy. They'll be like, "Fuck yeah! I can't wait!" I have people like that where I could call and be like, "Put something..."
33:40	Shaan Puri	They don't wake up until it's hard.
33:42	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, it's like, I guess if I wanted a different world... I wonder if I was like, "I want the Taj Mahal for a week," right? And they're like, people are coming to my call and said that. I promise you, they would smile and be like, "Okay." They didn't see that as a challenge; they'd go to war to figure it out. Then, not in my company, but just there are other people that you would say that to, and then, oh my God, you know? So you just gotta get the right people who deeply enjoy solving problems and see it as a challenge. There are people built that way, and those are the people that really succeed in that environment.
34:10	Shaan Puri	And even a different example that's not getting the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower. One of my favorite videos of yours, where I first thought, "Alright, respect," was before I met you. Okay, I was like, "Okay, respect." Ben was telling me about you, and he goes, "He made a video saying I'm gonna cut through this table with a plastic knife."
34:27	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh my gosh, I remember this weirdly very well. I was sitting in high school, and I just... I had a, I don't know, after lunch, I just had a plastic knife in my pocket for some reason. I don't remember why. Then I just put my hand in my pocket and was like, "Oh, a plastic knife!" I started scraping against the desk and thought, "Oh wow, I can kind of cut this desk in half," like just my stupid little high school desk. I did this for like five minutes until the teacher was like, "What the heck are you doing? Stop!" I was just looking at the little indention I was making and doing the calculation in my head. I thought, "It'd take me like ten hours to cut through this according to my math." I was like, "Forget it! I think that would be a video people would be interested in." So, I went to the store on the way home and bought like a thousand of the cheapest plastic knives I could find. Then I got this $20 fold-out table, went into my room, hit record on the camera, and just went at it. The plastic knives would get dull after like a minute, and I was just cutting through it. I think that took twelve hours to cut through the table with plastic knives or something.
35:25	Shaan Puri	But that's what I'm saying. It was no money. It wasn't the Taj Mahal; it was like creativity. Well, first, boredom. Boredom is the key. It was like how Einstein...
35:34	James Stephen Donaldson	Discovered relativity, well, it's like so dumb. It's just like, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? How many plastic knives does it take to cut a table in half? It was just like people were like, "What a fucking game!"
35:43	Shaan Puri	Do it with one, by the way, or would you just...?
35:44	James Stephen Donaldson	Go through like, probably thousands. Okay?
35:46	Shaan Puri	Gotcha, that's insane! By the way, that's a spoiler. I think that one we kind of copied. Number eight, which is "no" doesn't mean "no." There's a big difference between...
35:56	James Stephen Donaldson	No, and no way is possible. "No" doesn't mean "no." Exact same thing. Yeah, and I...
36:00	Shaan Puri	Like the clarification you had, which was, "You're not just like the asshole boss that's like, 'I need this impossible thing done,' you know?" It's more like, "Hey, I want to do this impossible thing or I want to do this great thing." No, okay, let's get curious before we just make a decision here.
36:16	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
36:16	Shaan Puri	Why? What? Let's try to understand it. If it truly is "no," which it rarely is, fine. But it's usually not. The cool thing is, if you do that in the company, do it once, and people are like, "Oh wow, that was interesting." Do it twice, and by the third time you do it, people are like, "Alright, like that's the way." It's contagious.
36:32	James Stephen Donaldson	Right of time, yeah, just...
36:34	Shaan Puri	Like a religion, people start to believe when they see it, right?
36:37	James Stephen Donaldson	That's like you're in place for me. It tends to take a couple dozen times for a decision.
36:42	Shaan Puri	Keep pointing at it. I'm like, "Guys, remember what we said?" And then what happened? Let's like...
36:46	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
36:46	Shaan Puri	Listen, again, let's take that and wrap it up. That's a rally cry for us now. We could do all these things, right? Let's immortalize that.
36:52	James Stephen Donaldson	Alright, we got three more to go. Here we go: consultants, RSU code. Yeah, and honestly, because I wrote this, they're referencing my thing I wrote a couple of years ago. I would update that to just say like experienced people or cheat codes, the right ones. It doesn't... because like my handbook, I guess that's what you would call it, leaked on Twitter and like there you...
37:13	Shaan Puri	Go, there's your handbook.
37:14	James Stephen Donaldson	My production bible. So many people were like consultants, and even consultants were putting this on their website. Like, even...
37:20	Shaan Puri	Mister B endorsed me on LinkedIn.
37:22	James Stephen Donaldson	I know there were so many consultant tweets that were like, "Yes, you validated our industry." I'm like, "Well, I wasn't specifically talking about McKinsey, you know what I mean?" It's just more like, especially with us, because we do so many random, weird things. I mean, dude, what did I say in here?
37:37	Ben Wilson	Consultants are literally cheat codes needed to make the world's largest slice of cake. Start off by calling the person who has made the previous world's largest slice.
37:44	James Stephen Donaldson	Of cake, lol.
37:45	Ben Wilson	He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks' worth of work. I really want to drill this home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper-obsessing over YouTube. I can show a brand new creator how to go from...
37:56	James Stephen Donaldson	A hundred subscribers to 10,000.
37:57	Ben Wilson	In a month, on their own, it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from God. Please take advantage of them in every single freaking task assigned to you. Always, always, always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you.
38:09	James Stephen Donaldson	Exactly! Because we do so many weird, different things. Like, "Oh, we're gonna bury me alive." Call David Blaine; he buried himself alive, you know what I mean? Like, how's that phone call go? Great! They're usually like, "Well, we don't have David Blaine's phone number." And then I'm like, "Okay, I'll DM him on Instagram." I'm like, "Here's his phone number. Call him! Figure out how he didn't die." You know? But you do.
38:26	Shaan Puri	These things... like one night, I was just hanging out at my house. I get a call from a North Carolina number. I pick up.
38:32	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh yeah, it's huge. I go on walks and then I just, like, literally close my eyes and flip through my contacts. I'll stop, and you know when it's on "S," you'll be there. I'll just have a random name and I'll be like, "Teach me something." Sometimes the calls are one minute; other times, they're 20. Yes, you gotta always be learning.
38:48	Shaan Puri	I feel like you're saying that almost like it's a normal thing. You know, like nobody does this, right? Like that's like a...
38:52	James Stephen Donaldson	I don't understand why that's.
38:54	Shaan Puri	I kinda started to steal it because I was like, "Why not?" I'm also obsessed with learning. Yeah, and oh, there's something like maybe the mechanics of it. I was confused. I was like, "So I call these people, then I just say like, 'Hey...'"
39:04	James Stephen Donaldson	Teach me something.
39:05	Shaan Puri	Stop. Well, yeah, yeah. Teach me something. What's something?
39:08	James Stephen Donaldson	That's coming out funny. The more you do it, the more people will come to expect it too. So, like, I'll call someone, they won't answer, and then they'll be like, "Let me guess, you're on a walk. Sorry, I'm busy." I don't even have to respond; they just get it. You know, at the start, you'll go on a walk and call 20 people. You'll have conversations with 10 because, you know, these high-caliber people are always busy. Then the other 10 will call you throughout the next twenty-four hours, and it's like a nuisance because you have to say, "Oh, I was just on a walk." But now everyone just gets it. It's a protocol. Yeah, yeah, it's so funny that I've become known for that. People will answer, and sometimes I won't even say anything. They'll be like, "Alright, here's what I've learned." It's great because then I just get this five-minute brain dump of everything they've learned. These are people who are, you know, some of them are running companies that are doing billions of dollars a year in revenue, and they're always experimenting. Then I just suck it out of them, and I'm like, "Here's what I learned." A big part of this, if you want it to go well, is you have to add as much value, ideally more than what they're giving to you. So I try to help them in any way I can, and then you hang up and go to the next one.
40:08	Shaan Puri	Another one that is in the kind of consultants' cheat codes is we do these talks at our event. So, at our basketball event, it's kind of like we play ball all day until we're dead tired. Then, at night, it's like we're hanging out. I remember the first year we did it because I created the events. I was kind of the host, and I was like, "I don't want to be forcing a conference vibe."
40:27	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
40:27	Shaan Puri	Really, like tiptoeing around. I was like, "I don't want this to be awkward," but it was actually more awkward because nobody knew who anyone else was.
40:33	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, and you.
40:33	Shaan Puri	Did this great thing. You like grab the chair, put it in the middle of the room, and you're like, "Hey, sit down real quick."
40:37	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
40:38	Shaan Puri	And you go, "Alright, who are you? What's your story?" Then they would start to tell a long-winded story. But what I liked was you would have questions. So, like, we had a real estate guy, and instead of being like, "Alright, teach me about real estate," which the guy doesn't know how to start, you were like, "If I had $10,000,000, what would be the best way to turn it into a hundred through real estate?"
40:54	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah.
40:54	Shaan Puri	And then he talked for like five minutes. You're like, "Cool, God, I should just give it to somebody like you. It makes sense." Oh, onto the next. I was like, I love the power of kind of like the right question and the right person.
41:05	Ben Wilson	If you're...
41:05	James Stephen Donaldson	And honestly, in group settings like that, another thing too is just not being afraid to cut people off. Some people are just so unaware that there are 20 people in the room, and they end up rambling for thirty minutes. I'm like, I feel like they have another 15 minutes in them. Three of those people are on their phones, two are checked out, and five are too nice to say anything. I'll be the one who's like, "Hey, we get it."
41:25	Shaan Puri	Alright, I got the next one: block out the noise. Okay, block out... you want to do block out the noise? Sure.
41:30	Ben Wilson	So here’s the quote: “When you’re small, people say you’re too obsessed, you’re a weirdo, get a life, be realistic.” This is from you. People will try to convince you that you’re out of your mind for wanting to do this. Then when it works, your drive, your tenacity—that was great.
41:44	Shaan Puri	Yep, yeah.
41:45	James Stephen Donaldson	Everything you guys have been flattering me with throughout this podcast are the exact same things I got low-key bullied for in high school. So it's like hilarious that these grown men are like, "Yo, this is fucking awesome!" You're like, "All in, impossible is not possible. No doesn't mean no." And you just love this shit. In high school, that's what a fucking nerd would get. A life like, "Loser."
42:06	Ben Wilson	Yeah, that's why you call it "block out the noise," right? Because the same things that people admire when you're successful are the things that people are going to try and tell you to stop.
42:14	Shaan Puri	If you had listened, you wouldn't be Mister Beast, right? Like, you wouldn't be here right now.
42:18	James Stephen Donaldson	Everyone else has a normal job, but the big takeaway is that it just means you're not around the right people. If I had been around you guys when you were younger, I'm sure you wouldn't have thought, "Oh, what a weird, obsessed nerd." Instead, you would have thought, "Oh, this is Dick. Let's grow together." Maybe when we were 18, we wouldn't have had that much emotional intelligence, but we would have flocked together. So, it's also about finding the right people to be around. If you're having to block out a lot of noise, then you have a serious problem.
42:44	Shaan Puri	It's a signal.
42:45	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, like you really gotta change who you are because it's really... I mean, if you're the smartest person you're hanging around, make you know, the one with the most ambition, and everyone else is just bringing you down. Like, you're literally just going through your entrepreneurial life with like a 10-pound weight shackled to your leg.
42:58	Ben Wilson	Yeah, last one. Let's go into reinvest everything.
43:02	James Stephen Donaldson	Yes, sir.
43:03	Shaan Puri	Can I give you my version of this? I think people know you reinvest a lot of money to almost a comical extent. Like, we made a hundred grand last month. Great! We're investing a hundred and one this next month. It's like, "Yo, Jimmy, where'd you get the extra?" "The house I got."
43:14	James Stephen Donaldson	The largest unscripted streaming deal in history somehow lost a ton of money on it.
43:18	Shaan Puri	These games you're talking about.
43:19	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, yeah.
43:20	Shaan Puri	Yeah, when we were here the first time, somebody was like, "What do you think is his kind of like his edge?" I go, "His edge is that he takes all the money he makes and then he reinvests it. He takes all the hours he has and he invests it into the channel. Then he gets the best people and he gets them to believe that they should invest too. He doesn't ever want to quit. I don't think this guy's going to get rich and retire like every other YouTuber. I was like, that's like a kamikaze level of commitment. Like, I don't think..."
43:45	James Stephen Donaldson	That's right, you used to call it a kamikaze commitment.
43:47	Shaan Puri	I was like, "What do you do with somebody who's willing to just plow it all back in?" Like, yeah, that's not the person I would want to compete against. So, that's kind of, I guess, why to me this is... I mean.
43:59	James Stephen Donaldson	You just described it perfectly. I don't even have to say anything. Like, yeah, I mean ideally you find the passion that you love and you're all in. It shouldn't have to be a struggle to get up and write; it should just be what you love to do.
44:13	Shaan Puri	You know, what's the CFO telling you? At the beginning, now it's kind of known, but at the beginning when you were describing your approach, the CFO was like your mom, right?
44:20	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, well, I mean at the beginning it was me, my mom, and a couple of friends in high school. So, she had 10 jobs and I had 20 jobs. I mean, now they just are... I mean, people kind of normalize to your weird craziness, so they're more...
44:32	Shaan Puri	But that's not what... At the beginning, what was that like?
44:34	James Stephen Donaldson	I mean, I never thought it was deranged, you know? Like, "Oh, why do you like..." Because, I mean, I would... you know, a big budget YouTube video used to be $10. I was the first one to ever spend a million dollars on a video and $2 million.
44:44	Shaan Puri	This is probably the best example, right?
44:47	James Stephen Donaldson	Like, yeah, I got a brand deal for $10,000. I've broke... You keep saying CFO, like I had a CFO back then. You're like, you know what? This was me, and like paying a guy I went to high school with, like $10 an hour to help me. But I... I went to my mom and asked, "What are taxes?" Right? I didn't make money, do I pay taxes? And she's like, "Yes." And I'm like, "Fuck." But yeah, I got a brand deal for $10,000, and then I just went outside. I used to live like two minutes from the $700 a month apartment I was telling you about, or duplex. It was literally two minutes down the road from this. So I just got the $10,000, I was like, "Wire me the money." They wired it, I withdrew it, and gave it to this homeless guy on the side of the street.
45:26	Shaan Puri	Were you not tempted to, like, have money for the first time? Pocket five, give away five?
45:31	James Stephen Donaldson	So, I pocket five. Spend on a different video. What else do you do with the money?
45:37	Shaan Puri	It's like there's a story about Zuck when he got offered a billion dollars for Facebook early on. They were like, "Mark, we should talk about this."
45:45	James Stephen Donaldson	And he's like, "Oh, if I got this money, I would just start a new social media platform." I like the one I have. I like it.
45:50	Shaan Puri	The one I have, this is like legendary. Yeah, and...
45:53	James Stephen Donaldson	It's the same thing here. It's like I could pocket it, but I just make different videos. I just want to film this one. I mean, it's literally the same thing.
45:59	Ben Wilson	It reminds me a lot of reading about Walt Disney. This is what he was famous for because his brother Roy was like...
46:03	James Stephen Donaldson	I love his podcast on it.
46:04	Ben Wilson	Thank you. It was like the business.
46:05	James Stephen Donaldson	The owner makes you want to take care of it.
46:06	Ben Wilson	The wall... Yeah, Roy would like pull his hair out, like, "Walt, can we please just save some money?" He had like a compulsion almost to take all the money. He felt bad keeping any money. He's like, "No, it has to go into making better shows." Yeah, do you feel that? Like, does it... no?
46:21	James Stephen Donaldson	It has nothing to do with wanting to keep it. It really has nothing to do with money itself. It's just that I want to make the best product possible. So, here's the product that I want to make, and I'm always having to settle because we can't spend $10,000,000 on a YouTube video, you know what I mean? I would love to go buy everything in every single store in this entire city and donate it all to charity. You know, that'd be $200,000,000, so I can't. It's just like, this is what I want to make, but I have to dial it back. Now we have a little bit more money, so I just dial it back less. There's not... I don't really care, you know what I mean?
46:51	Shaan Puri	Like, so by the way, you just came.
46:53	Ben Wilson	Up with that number.
46:54	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I was like, "He's done the math."
46:56	Ben Wilson	Of this, you look at this.
46:57	James Stephen Donaldson	It costs $15,000,000 to buy everything in a Walmart. But yeah, it's...
47:00	Shaan Puri	15,000,000. Mm-hmm. Have you done that? Is that one of the things you're going to do? Yeah, nice. I think...
47:04	James Stephen Donaldson	That's a fucking banger, and we're going to donate it all to charity, so it's cool.
47:08	Shaan Puri	What’s your ambition? Right, so it’s like Ben in forty years is doing the pod on... don’t.
47:14	James Stephen Donaldson	Ask me 40? Ask like 10. Forty's too far; you're gonna get anxiety. What? What's like the... but it's...
47:19	Shaan Puri	What's the dream?
47:21	James Stephen Donaldson	Right now, I can't do 40 because... like, when... but for the next five, the big thing I'm focused on, which I was telling you guys about in the car, is just Feastables. Like, people will listen.
47:29	Shaan Puri	What can you explain about your business empire? Can you? Yeah.
47:31	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, well, specifically, like chocolate, it might seem so random. Why is the largest YouTuber in the world selling chocolate? Well, right now, 70% of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, specifically Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. The majority of the people who work on those farms are actually kids or involved in child labor. It's about 46% of labor, so I guess it's not the majority, so I should correct this statement: 46% of labor is illegal child labor. Yeah, you two are a few people.
47:52	Shaan Puri	While you talk to them.
47:53	James Stephen Donaldson	So, when I got into selling chocolate, I just learned about that. I talked to executives at big chocolate companies. I was like, "So, what I hear is that this chocolate thing... is this just like, we're just cool with this?" And they're like, "Well, it just has always been, and there's not really anything you can do about it." I'm like...
48:08	Shaan Puri	That's the way things have always been.
48:10	James Stephen Donaldson	I'm like, I literally said to one, I think... I don't remember the exact words; I'm gonna butcher it. But I was like, "Elon’s gonna put people on Mars, and you're telling me we can't have little kids farming our chocolate? We can't just find people over the age of 18 or whatever?" And they're like, "Well, it's not that simple." And I'm like, "What the fuck?" So that kind of pissed me off and then sent me...
48:28	Shaan Puri	Fool number eight.
48:29	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, sent me down. I'm like, "Yeah, what you mean to say is that would hurt the billions of dollars in free cash flow you're spitting off in your margins." But anyways, I went down that path like two years ago. I was like, "Okay, well, I don't..."
48:39	Shaan Puri	You actually went to West Africa.
48:41	James Stephen Donaldson	Oh yeah, I worked on the farm. But before even that, it's just like... so then I was, we're going to start referencing our piece of paper here. So then, consultants are cheat codes. I was like, "What is the largest ethically sourced chocolate company in the world? Who's the one doing it right?" So, have you heard of Tony's Chocolonely? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're great. It's a European brand, but they're like... a reporter used to call out big chocolate and be like, "There's a lot of child labor. You guys aren't ethical." And they would just ignore them. So then he's like, "Forget it."
49:06	Shaan Puri	He started it, right?
49:07	James Stephen Donaldson	Yeah, and he started a chocolate company, and that's Tony's Chocolonely because it's like the lonely.
49:11	Shaan Puri	It became like $200,000,000.
49:13	James Stephen Donaldson	It's doing pretty well, so I was like, "Let me get in contact with these people." I just started talking to them. I flew them here to Greenville like the next week, and we were just like, "Teach me everything about child labor, how we can remediate it, what should we be doing on our farms, etc." I had phone calls with them every single day, studied, and then the next five companies that are also doing ethical things, I just absorbed everything they're doing into my brain. I was like, "Cool, alright, I know what we need to do." Step one: the main reason why there's child labor is just poverty. Most of these farmers are making a dollar or less a day. So, if you're getting paid a dollar, how can you hire someone over the age of 18 to work on your farm? You end up just using kids because they're cheap or free. So, step one is you just have to pay them a living income. A percentage of our farmers are paid a living income. I can go super deep, but I'm going to keep this mile high because I know not everyone is as passionate about the chocolate industry as I am. But, what is a living income? Right? Because obviously, a living income in America is completely different than in West Africa. There's a living income reference price where they look at the cost of bread, living, and inflation. If a farmer sells you a metric ton of cocoa, they need to make this amount to be able to live. So, we pay a percentage of our farmers the living income reference price. There could be an instance where you're a farmer, you give us a shipping container of cocoa, and you're like, "We want $1,100." I'm like, "No, you want $1,300. It's $1,300 now. Make sure there are no kids on your farms," you know what I mean? Or kids in illegal child labor. I'm oversimplifying everything. None of this is simple; it's a very complex issue. We're talking about tens of thousands of farms; there are millions of farms, and none of this is as simple as I'm portraying it. But I'm just doing my best to generalize it all. You pay your farmers a living income. All our beans are Fair Trade certified, and then we work with CLR (Child Labor Remediation) which is the Child Labor and Remediation System. They routinely audit the farms, interview the parents, interview the kids, see if the kids are going to school, working on the farm, etc. If they identify cases of child labor, they follow up and get the kids out of child labor and stuff like that. Since it's all a root of poverty, the more money you help them make, the easier it is for them to stop using child labor on the farm. We have coaches that represent 200 farms, and they'll help them give more yield and educate them on things they could be doing to grow more trees or have more trees. Occasionally, we give them wheelbarrows or things like that so they can just... I mean, something as simple as a wheelbarrow makes a big difference. Carrying 10 cacao pods theoretically, again generalizing everything, or you know, carrying 40 in a wheelbarrow, that statistically makes you four times more efficient. So, the goal is just to make Feastables the largest ethically sourced chocolate company in the world. If we can do a billion dollars a year in chocolate sales ethically while being profitable, then I can use that as a model to talk about being chocolate and all the unethical things they're doing. Just be like, "Look, it's possible to be profitable and not do it at scale. There's no excuse besides they just don't care." Then, you know, we'll see what happens when I get to that.
52:11	Shaan Puri	Last year when I was here, I asked, I think, your right-hand guy at that time, "What's your focus for the year?" Most people don't have an answer at the tip of their tongue. His was like, instantaneously, "I think you had a number," the number of YouTube videos: 22.
52:26	James Stephen Donaldson	26 videos.
52:27	Shaan Puri	Make 26 bangers, sell a lot of chocolate, and get jacked. Yep. And he said it like that, fast.
52:33	James Stephen Donaldson	Every day, all three.
52:34	Shaan Puri	You got in great shape from the last time.
52:36	James Stephen Donaldson	You know, I... yeah, I was... was I still fat last year, or was that the first year?
52:41	Shaan Puri	No, it's... first year was, I mean, I wasn't quite fat, but like, you know, you're gonna...
52:45	James Stephen Donaldson	Be the... fuck wall wart. I was 240 pounds. Yeah, I'm right now 190, so I probably...
52:50	Shaan Puri	Was had started lifting at the last one we did, and in this year, you're like...
52:54	James Stephen Donaldson	Year one, I was 240 pounds. Year two, I was probably 215 to 220 pounds. Now, I'm 190. So yeah, I'm like probably 25 pounds lighter. I can't wait to ball!
53:02	Shaan Puri	How did you... what did you do? Like, what was your approach to getting jacked? Or, like, how did you...?
53:05	James Stephen Donaldson	I'm very heavily influenced by the people around me. If I spend too much time with you, I'll start speaking like you, acting like you, and thinking like you. So, I'm very cautious of that. I just put a lot of jacked people around me. My metric of success is how frequently random people are just handing me chicken breast or something high in protein. You know, because all my old friend group would be like, "Oh, we just ordered pizza," or this or that. It just makes accomplishing my goals so much harder. The ratio of people ordering pizza to the ratio of people ordering protein was just way off. I mean, this is just how I analyze my life because I'm so all in on business. I don't think about this kind of stuff, so I need an environment that makes being jacked very natural. Weightlifting is pretty easy.
53:48	Shaan Puri	Right.
53:48	James Stephen Donaldson	You just go to the gym for forty-five minutes, five days a week. But it's the food that is... that's not a thing you turn on and off. That's something you have to be consistent with for a very long time if you want to achieve results. I just can't think about it every single day. There are times when I'm at low points, and it's a lot harder to be disciplined. I know I always have people around me who are just eating healthy. It takes something that feels hard and kind of makes it fun when you're doing it together. So, I just surround myself with other people trying to accomplish the same thing. Just like anything in life, this is important.
54:20	Shaan Puri	What I was living in Australia, I literally bought a one-way plane ticket to San Francisco with no plan. I was at this Tony Robbins event, and he said, "Proximity is power." Dang, I love it!
54:32	Ben Wilson	Did you hire anyone to help you? Do you have a trainer or a coach or something?
54:36	James Stephen Donaldson	He follows me around all day, every day. He's a jack dude sitting downstairs. You'll notice he looks like he could be on a bodybuilding stage.
54:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah, or...
54:44	James Stephen Donaldson	Usually in a tank top, you know.
54:46	Shaan Puri	Somebody just sent me this. You posted a TikTok an hour ago? Yeah.
54:49	James Stephen Donaldson	I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of billionaires. TikTok, we mean business! This is my lawyer right here. We have an offer ready for you. We want to buy the platform. America deserves TikTok. Give me a seat at the table. Let me save this platform, TikTok.
55:02	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so are you going to buy TikTok?
55:04	James Stephen Donaldson	I tweeted out yesterday that I was thinking about buying TikTok, and honestly, it was kind of a joke. Then I had a lot of people coming to this event. So many billionaires texted me. I mean, I'm probably up to like 35 who have unironically reached out and said, "I want to put money in. I want to do it." Then, there are two separate groups that have very serious bids together for it. They are like, "Yo, get involved in this." My phone just blew up ever since that tweet. So then I made that TikTok because it's like, "Yeah, I was joking," but now it's like, "Oh, okay." And it's like, I'll...
55:36	Shaan Puri	Predict it right now: I think this is going to happen because I think it should happen. It'd be smart, right? Any ownership group that's doing this would be smart to have you in.
55:43	James Stephen Donaldson	Touch as TikTok's willing to sell. Yeah, everyone is interested in buying it once they get us involved.
55:47	Shaan Puri	I don't know the political side, like how that's all...
55:50	James Stephen Donaldson	Gonna apply to...
55:51	Shaan Puri	Is it to be forced to divest? But if they are, yeah, that's going to be...
55:54	James Stephen Donaldson	Well, they're... it's going to be banned if they don't. It's just a question of, like, is TikTok going to sell or not?
55:58	Shaan Puri	Yeah, what would you do? Oh God, bro.
56:00	James Stephen Donaldson	We just... we're winding the podcast down. Are we really about to start another five-hour talk? Truthfully, I would have to surround myself with like the 10 greatest algorithmic people in the world. I'd have to spend like a week with them and just absorb. I have no idea what I would do right now.
56:13	Shaan Puri	Jimmy, this has been a pleasure.
56:15	James Stephen Donaldson	It's been fun.
56:15	Shaan Puri	Thanks for doing it, man. I'm excited to hoop! I hope we can do this tonight.
56:18	James Stephen Donaldson	Fall Camp Five. We'll do another one every two years, and then we do it.
56:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah, we like the Olympic cycles, like every two years.
56:25	James Stephen Donaldson	Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are in the other room. We gotta crack out this podcast. Let me go and ball with them.
56:31	Shaan Puri	Alright, boys, we did it!
56:33	James Stephen Donaldson	We did it! Get out!
56:33	Shaan Puri	Of here.
56:33	James Stephen Donaldson	That's fine. See me. Hey, boys!

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MrBeast Shares His Best Business Advice

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