I'm usually very reluctant to make an episode about a young founder that hopefully has decades left in their career but I made an exception for this leaked memo which is called How to Succeed in Mr BEAST's production and I really there's two primary reasons I wanted to make this episode one I know Jimmy he listens to this podcast we spent a bunch of time talking about the
ideas found on the podcast found from the life and work of history SK entrepreneurs and all these biographies I also flew and visited his headquarters Beast headquarters with my friend Rick Gerson so Rick has invested in Jimmy's company and Rick and I spent seven straight hours with Jimmy we got to see his entire operation we sat in on meetings with his top team we talked to
his CFO and I would say we got a very intense download of how Jimmy thinks about YouTube and how he thinks about the business Empire that he is building and the business Empire that he wants to build the second reason I wanted to make this episode is because I devoured the memo and from the very first page it's obvious how a lot of the ideas contained
in this memo will relate to the biographies that you and I study every week and so I printed out the memo and I went through it just like I do all the biographies really the way I read anything so it starts off he says hi I'm Jimmy and as the team is growing larger I no longer get to spend as much time with everyone as I used to the first dozen employees had unfiltered and
unlimited access to me to learn as much as they could about my vision and what I wanted sadly you don't have that luxury so I thought it would be useful to try to brain dump as much as I can into this silly little book to give new people and to help bring them up to speed on everything we've learned over the past decade with this channel we've been
through a lot and chances are most of the problems you face we've dealt with so I genuinely believe that if you tently read and understand the knowledge here you'll be much better set up for Success so right from the very beginning when he's like hey this stuff may be new to you but we have a ton of experience and likely the problems that you're encountering are not novel we can
explain what you're likely to run into and how to solve them so this was my exact experience when I talked to Sam zel when I had lunch with him when I had dinner with Charlie Monger they had entire historical databases of companies and industries and all these examples from 60 to 70 years of experience of building companies of studying companies by the time I met them there's probably
not a single novel problem that they have not seen in the past there was a great line from last week's episode on Nick sleep's partnership letters that talks about this you know him doing all this thinking spending all this time trying to think through problems he arrives at a conclusion and realize wait I'm buff have figured this out 50 years ago he says as a young man there's
something slightly depressing about thinking things through for a while arriving at a somewhat recent conclusion only to find that others have been there before you in years earlier in some respects we are 50 years behind buffet and I think these two lines that Jimmy wrote uh we've been through a lot and chances are most of the problems you face we've dealt with so genu believe if
you actually read and understand and knowledge here you'll be much better set up for success I think that's that's why you find that people that reach the top of the profession they have this historical database they can draw in draw from in their head it's exactly why Sam zel and Charlie Munger spent so much time reading and studying history and so
back to Jimmy he says this is not a rule book I need to kick this thing off by saying the purpose of this is not to give you a bunch of rules to follow what we do is complex and changes based on the situation I need you to repeat this in your head three times I will apply everything I read with a grain of salt this is not an inclusive list of everything I hope this inspired you with
questions and to come to us to learn more I could make a separate book for Creative a separate book for production a separate book for editors Etc but I think that's dumb everything we do here is interconnected and the more you understand about what others are doing and trying to accomplish the better setup for Success you will be I advise everyone to read this in its entirety a
good example of this is James Warren he understands every single part of this company at a deep level and as a result can make decisions faster than anyone else the stuff you will be reading about he knows like the back of his hand I've seen a team of five people work on a project for a week just to give up and James solve it in 30 minutes that shows
the power that comes when you understand everything in this book deeply so I'll pause and interrupt myself there so that there's something that happens over and over again my favorite line on this comes from Sam zuray from the book the fish that ate the whale he says if you know your business from A to Z there's no problem you can't solve and in addition to that line from Sams Murray I
had a bunch of notes around just this one section on James Warren this idea you know he understands every single part of the company at a deep level and as a result can make decisions faster than anyone else you can have a team of five that can fail to solve a problem over a week and he solves it in 30 minutes in Sam zel's autobiography he talks about one of the most important
relationships that he ever made uh was with this extremely famous and Wealthy family that's uh in Chicago it's the pritzker family and Jay pritzker I think is close to 19 or 20 years older than simel serves as almost like a friend and a mentor to him for a very long time and teaches them a lot in fact in the autobiography Sam zel writes that Jay
pritzker was the smartest Financial guy he ever met and so one of the things that Sam zel said that he learned from Jay pritzker that I've never forgotten even though I read the book you know over two years ago I think is he says that Jay taught me to use Simplicity as a strategy he had an uncanny ability to grasp an extremely complex situation and immediately locate the weakness he
always said that if there were 12 steps in a deal the whole thing depended on just one of them the others would either work them eles out or were less important and Sam said that Jay was able to identify the most important part extremely fast it reminds me what Buffett said about Munger that he says Charlie's Got the best 30 second mind in the world if I call him and describe a
problem to him any kind of a situation he gets to the essence of it immediately I think that's exactly what Jimmy is describing the talent that James has and the importance of knowing as as much as you can and as deep as you can about every single aspect of your business I think this goes back to what Nick sleep wrote in his investment letters one of
his favorite quotes was that the art of Being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook you bring a deal to J pritzer you say here's 10 important things he's like there's the one important thing solve that and everything else Falls in line and so back to this Jimmy ends this section with very important advice the more you know about why we do things and what we were trying to
accomplish the better off you will be the next section is what is your goal here your goal here is to make the best YouTube videos possible that's the number one goal of this production company it's not to make the best produced videos not to make the funniest videos not to make the best looking videos not the highest quality videos it's to make the best YouTube videos
possible everything we want will come if we strive for that this sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here so I think the best thing to do here is look at this paragraph through the lens of what you and I talked about all the way back on episode 3 60 Robert kierin Bob kierin is the founder of fenol he wrote
this little 98 page book that's excessively hard to find and Bob's entire thesis he's got one idea in that book and his idea is that the leader of a company leader of an organization they have to maintain commitment to the organization's common goal every single person in your organization should know the organization's common goal it should
be repeated over and over again it is very natural he talks about in the book that you you'll Drift from it you'll over complicate things and then the leader's job is said no no no we we got to get back on track we got to go back to our commitment to this shared common goal and so in Bob kieran's Case his common goal was grow through customer service in Jimmy's case it's we will
make the best YouTube videos possible and if we do that everything we will want will come to us if we strive for that and in many cases your employees will respond to that there's a book that I've read three times that I absolutely love it's called creative selection it's episode 281 which I think I titled working with Steve Jobs because that book was written by a programmer that
demoed multiple times and worked for Steve for years and he has a line in that book that I think is very important to why it's so beneficial to make your thinking as clearly as possible so it's makes you easy to interface with and for Steve he did it in three words insanely great products do you want to build insanely great products come with me if
you don't this isn't the place for you and so in that book creative selection the author Ken coanda describes what it's like to be on the receiving end of this Steve Jobs provided his single-minded focus on making great products and his vision motivated me okay so the next section is I don't care how traditional media does things this is not Hollywood and I do not want it to
be Hollywood and if that sentence turn is a turnoff to you then you're probably at the wrong job I genuinely mean that YouTube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it's going to keep growing so I want to pause it right there when I got to this section I was thinking about one of my favorite things that I've studied and learned or watched
and read in the last month is that video where leelu he goes to Columbia business school it's like 17 minutes long he just lights them up he is essentially disgusted at their lack of dedication and their lack of commitment and work ethic towards the end of that video leelu says all of my employees never went to business school never worked for
an established management firm some of them never even had accounting I found it easier to train them than somebody who did this is something that reoccurs a lot in these biographies that the founders find that it's better to have no experience than bad experience better to have no habits and bad habits and so Jimmy is saying this is not Hollywood I don't want it to be Hollywood he
believes that YouTube is the future and he says I believe with every fiber of my body that's going to keep growing 99% of movies or TV shows would flop on YouTube on top of that they would be wildly unprofitable have no flexibility in Long lead times that can't adapt to Trends you need to be nimble and produce content our way not the way you were taught before if you want the highest
probability of success I beg you to learn why we do what we do at a deep level before you try to fix anything and he puts fix in quotation marks we've done countless videos and invested hundreds of thousands of hours collectively building how we do things it's not perfect but we have a reason for how we do most stuff and it's probably a decent one and then he moves
on to this next section he says the amount of hours you work is irrelevant recall the story about James solving a problem in 30 minutes that a team of five couldn't in a week in that example does it really matter how many hours they worked obviously we want Grinders that put in the the hours and love you guys to death at do but at the end of the day you will be judged on results
not hours we are results based company get done and move the goalpost and then Jimmy makes it very clear the kind of people that he wants working with them I only want a players you're either an a player B player or a c player there's only room in this company for a players a players are obsessive they learn from mistakes they're coachable intelligent they don't
make excuses they believe in YouTube they see the value of this company and in the best in the goddamn world at their job B players are new people they need to be trained into a players and C players are just average employees they aren't exceptional they aren't obsessive about learning C players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company immediately I think
one of the companies that had the largest collections of a players in the early days was PayPal if you read that book that my friend Jimmy Sony wrote about the history of PayPal it's called the founders there's a quote in there from Max letion and he was talking about the fact that PayPal prioritized speed over everything else except in one area
which is recruiting and hiring and so max would repeat this Mantra over and over again because it says Levin kept the bar for talent exceedingly High even if that came at the expense of Speedy Staffing Max kept repeating A's higher A's B's higher C's so the first be hire takes the whole company down and one thing they did in the early days is that they mandated that every single
Potential Prospect would have to meet every single member of the team and so back to this I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube some days me and some other nerds would spend 20 hours straight studying the most minor thing and the result of those probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I'd say I have a good grasp on what makes YouTube
videos do well and so because this memo was originally meant just to be read by people that are working in Mr Beast production it's going to talk about things that I'm going to ommit if you're interested in making videos he's going to talk about you know click the rate average view duration average view percentage I'm obviously going to skip over that because I want to get to one
of the most interesting things that he says and he says this a few times I think this is a really great idea and so he's talking about something that's happening inside a video we're going to skip over that but this is the main idea he says another way to look at this is It's a segment that only Mr Beast can do this the emphasis that Jimmy is placing
on doing things that only he can do things that only his team can do that is straight from Steve Jobs that is straight from Edwin L Edwin L has this motto he says my motto don't do anything that someone else can do that is one of the most important ideas that I've ever learned from all the reading for the podcast don't do anything that someone
else can do and a few pages later Jimmy is going to give an example of that we offered someone $500,000 that they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in we bring the house in on a crane 30 seconds into the video why because who the else on YouTube can do that the impression that leaves on the viewer is
invaluable to us anytime we do something that no other Creator can do that separates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them you cannot track the wow factor but I can describe it anything that no other YouTuber can do and so when I got to this part I immediately thought of a story that I read in a biography of Larry Ellison the biography is called the billionaire the
mechanic and so Larry Ellison is obviously an extreme winner he's ruthlessly competitive and so the book is about him trying to win uh the America's Cup race and in the book Larry is talking to his sailing team about other sailing teams and he has this idea to build this giant what he calls a hard wing all the other competitors are using these soft main sales and so Larry is
looking for essentially what edwiin Lance said with Jimmy saying right here is like what can we do that no one else can do and so he says Larry went on I know that most people think trying to build hard wing of this size is crazy but that's the beauty of the idea the other side isn't trying to build one so we'll have a wing and they won't and the note I left on that section when I first
read it is a great summary of this if we can do something really hard we won't have any competition okay so the next chapter he gets into the actual creating of the content I would summarize this entire section and this is where I have tons of notes I might have more notes than it's actually words on the page the good ones no more that was a line from David ogy
when he says the good one is no more he's talking about advertising agencies but you see it with literally every single profession on the planet and so let me read what Jimmy says first he says I want to pass on things I see new people typically fail out and in general what I want our videos are hard and they're only going to get harder this is
why I want the best people in the world and people who are obsessed with YouTube I want you to be obsessed with YouTube get rid of Netflix and Hulu and watch tons of YouTube it will without a doubt in my mind make you more successful here the more invested you are in the world of YouTube the more you'll understand how we can stand out and be more original what we could be doing better
Etc you should also really try to watch every Mr Beast video on all the channels this sounds obvious but I've asked multiple people this week what they thought about last week's gaming video and not a single person had seen it what he wants and the people that he's working with what he wants there is really what is ogave is describing when he says the one it's no more this comes
up over and over again think about the film all the filmmakers I did Tarantino Spielberg they have entire databases of the history of film in their head they will literally watch uh some of their favorite movies 50 100 different times there's ideas that they learned in like 1975 that they didn't use in their own movie till 20 years later there's countless examples of this in the
biographies that I read and in the episodes I make think about the early days of Microsoft the one of my favorite alltime biographies is of a young Bill Gates it's called hard drive the book ends when he's like 35 years old this is a description of Bill Gates when he's in his 20s if you talk to Bill about any software company or any hardware company
there's a very high probability that he would be able to tell you who the CEO is What their revenues were last year what they're currently working on and what the problems are with their products he's very very knowledgeable and he Prides himself on knowing what's going on in his industry here's another example for one of Edwin L biographies the fact that he knew he was going to
dedicate his life to the science of light he was like 12 when he was doing this he be it says Lan began to read about Optical science and discovered the textbook physical Optics by Robert Wood who is a professor of physics at John Hopkins University wood was a great experimentor of great Ingenuity in the areas of Optics light electricity and photography which is obviously what is
what ad Lan dedicated his life to Lan slept with Wood's book under his pillow and read it nightly in the way that our forefathers read the Bible a few years into the future Edward land's going to go to Harvard go to the library and read every single book about light in the Harvard Library then once he reaches the end drops out moves to New York and does
the exact same thing with the New York Public Library you see this absolute obsession with collecting as much information is possible over uran John de Rockefeller before he started his own business he works for it's hulet and Tuttle and so he's a bookkeeper and an office boy for them he's very young look what he does it says a fascination with
business that can only be called a passion held him to the the office figures in the ledgers were to him like words to a poet the yearly accounting books resembled volumes of History I used to go over the old books he said and soon he read the he read the entire every single accounting book for the entire history going back to the entire history of the company this is the end
result of that and soon he knew more about the firm than huet did and more about the commission business past and present than anyone else in Cleveland there's a ton of examples in Steve Job ber of him knowing the entire history of Silicon Valley knowing the companies knowing the founders in many cases if the founders were alive he'd go build relationships with them but he would
also study the great work from the past he could tell you how the work he was doing on the Macintosh related to Alexander Gran Bell's work on the telephone and I want to bring that up as we go into the next section because I think a lot of what Jimmy's writing about it's like this is effort this is caring this is passion I don't know if you can teach this my personal viewpoint
on this is what what um what Jeff Visa said people don't have ideas ideas have people so he continues on top of learning from watching YouTube I'd love you to read the book The goal I used to make everyone read it I know bottlenecks may seem obvious but just not knowing and understanding something as simple as bottleneck has tons of videos and so we give some examples of mistakes
made in the past and how to avoid them let's say you're in production and a video you're assigned to is put up 45 days out a lot of things need to happen before you can start working on it the big things would probably be a thumbnail sketch and creative on your team to write the video do not just go to them and say I need creative let me know when
it's done and I need a thumbnail let me know when it's done this is what most people do and it's one of the reasons why we fail so much I want you to look them in the eye and tell them that they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both on the same page Tyler you are my bottleneck I have 45 days to make this video happen and I
cannot begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done now let's say Tyler and you agree that it'll be done in 5 days you don't get to set a reminder for 5 days and not talk to him for 5 days every single day you must
check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date I want less excuses in this company take ownership and don't give your project a chance to fail I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn't stop you from making this video on time and so again I think this section this is this is not you don't have to be a genius this is effort this is caring
about what you're doing when he gets to the point he like I want less excuses in the company because I just reread my past highlights from that book the billionaire and the mechanic which is about Larry Ellison it made me think of Larry Ellison again let me read this this excerpt from the book Larry was teaching the sailing Master about other kinds of high stakes decision-making
Larry had told Russell a story of when he was working with the Israeli Defense Forces reviewing the progress on one of their new Oracle systems the Israeli General began the meeting by studying Larry and asking him what did you bring me today results or excuses and so there'll be several times in the memo where Jimmy repeats you know the idea it's like we're all working
together if you ask somebody to do something and you don't follow up and then they don't do it you can't just say oh well I did my job no the job is the result the job is not asking it to be done the job is getting it done and then Jimmy just continues he says hey I just want to brain dump about a bunch of random things and explain why we do or
why we say certain things these are cheat codes and you should take them to heart so one of them that he says is say the negatives do not just tell people on your team or me why something is good it is infinitely more valuable to tell us why it's not good and what you could say here is really just tells the bad news because the good news takes care of itself this is what Charlie Munger calls
the Persian messenger syndrome and in poor Charlie's almond act Charlie says ancient Persians actually killed some Messengers who sold fault was that they brought home truthful bad news of like a battle loss for example it was actually safer for the messenger to run away and hide instead of doing his job as a wiser boss would have wanted it done Persian
messenger syndrome is Alive and Well in Modern Life the proper anecdote to creating Persian messenger syndrome is exactly what Jimmy's doing here and its bad effects is to develop through exercise of will a a habit of welcoming bad news at Burkshire there is a common injunction always tells the bad news promptly it's only the good news that can
wait another section I want to talk to you about don't take anything a face value always dig one of the common themes you're probably seeing is accountability and this doubles down on that don't take anything at face value always dig if someone says something's too good to be true find out why if you need 10,000 pillows by next week and you called 10 pillow companies and none of
them have more than a few hundred in stock but the 11th company magically has 10,000 pillows investigate are the pillows shitty why the does no one want your pillows push and get answers what tends to happen is people think their job is done by finding 10,000 pillows and just order them only for us to find problems when they arrive but then it's too close to the filming
window to fix it do not overly trust people outside the company verify what they say it is your fault if they don't pull through so I'm on page 16 when you print this thing out I think it's 36 pages in length and what I would say is the summary so far is just handful of things that all work well together it's ownership it's accountability its creativity and its effort and you've
probably had a very similar experience to Jimmy has had the fact that when you're when you're working with other people it's remarkable how rare the combination of those four traits are in a single individual and that the single individual can apply those four traits consistently over a long period of time and so then Jimmy goes into how does he want people in the the company to
communicate and he calls this a higher form of communication if you spend any amount of time with James you'll hear him bring up higher forms of communication a lot because it's important and somehow very overlooked by most people the worst thing you could ever do when you need something for your critical component is email someone at the company the best is to talk to them
in real life it's very important you know when to call people for stuff grabb them in real life and when to text them the lower the form of communication the more miscommunication you will face as I'm typing this to you you have no idea if I'm laughing smiling happy mad or sad you can't read my body language or my face and because of that it's not
guaranteed that you'll understand what I'm conveying one week out from a video and the thing you're working on just went South minimum a multi- call with the heads of that video ideally you grab them in real life the more complex what needs to be said is the higher the form of communication you should use call first then text if they don't answer since we're on the topic of
communication written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it and then the next section goes back to the importance of ownership own your mistakes I hate excuses and it Asis with my entire soul when people just try to save face instead of learn from how they messed up mistakes are okay genuinely they are and
I expect you to make a lot that is perfectly fine every veteran here has cost me a million dollars at one point or another and you can go ask them yourself if I ever held it over their heads the reason I'm okay with your fuckups is because I know that's how you learn I see it as me investing in you and your brain hence while I have zero tolerance for C players and they must go
immediately those fuckups could be done by an a player that will retain the information learned I just beg you that you learn from every mistake and try not to repeat it that's a really important point that he makes mistakes are okay genuinely they are I expect you to make a lot there's this great line in this book called the unpublished David ogy which is this collection of internal
memos that David wrote over like half a century as he was building his company and he's warning his companies like as we get bigger and more successful we stop taking risks we stop being entrepreneurs and so he tells a great story about the importance of this he says are we free willing entrepreneurs ready to take risk in new Ventures or are we too frightened of making mistakes
when the toy buyer at Sears made a mistake which cost this company 10 million bucks I asked the head of Sears are you going to fire him he replied hell no I fire people who don't make mistakes that's a similar line of thinking that Bezos says I think he said it in his Sher letters he might have said it in an interview but if you're not making any mistakes you're not
taking enough risk and so and Bezos even takes it a step further he's like well the bigger the company gets the more expensives expensive the mistakes should be as a because we're getting bigger as a company and so this next part went viral on Twitter and was sent to me by a bunch of people it says use Consultants Consultants are literally cheat codes need to make the world's largest slice
of cake start by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake he's already done countless tests and can save you weeks save you weeks worth of work I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer and Consultants because I spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube I can show a brand new Creator how to go from 100
subscribers to 10,000 in a month on their own it would take them years to do it Consultants are a gift from God please take advantage of them in every single freaking task assigned to you always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you this is so important that I'm demanding you repeat this three times in your head
I will always check for Consultants when I'm assigned a task and then this next piece of advice really has to do with finding High agency really working with high agency people and so he says when dealing with people outside Mr Beach Productions never take no at face value if we need a store to buy everything inside of and you call the local Dollar
Tree and the person that aners says no you can't film here that literally doesn't mean talk to other employees and see if they or if any of the other employees are fans or if they have kids that are fans of the channel try talking to their boss talk to their boss's boss have me DM them on Twitter and try their social team if after all avenues are exhausted and you're left
with a no that doesn't mean don't try the other Dollar Trees because the manager of those could be huge fans and willing to bend the rules this is what we call pushing through no do not just stop because one person told you no stop when all conceivable options are exhausted and so if you want to see what a high agency person looks like one of my favorite examples of this is when I
was reading a biography of James Cameron the filmmaker when he was in his early 20s he was uh he first of all he couldn't get into University of Southern California um film school was like the best in the country he couldn't get into it he was working like a bunch of bluecollar job so he's a janitor he's a truck driver and so he'd work a bluecollar job during the day and then
at night he would just obsess over movies and so one day he had the idea was like well I can't get into film school but that that doesn't mean they can stop me from creating my own film school and so he went to the library at USC he would start photocopying all the graduate student thesises on very esoteric filmmaking subjects he would fill fat binders with all these
technical papers and then on breakes from driving a truck and at night he would read through and so there's a line in the biography that says for the cost of a couple hundred in photocopying he essentially put himself through a graduate course in visual effects at the top Film School in the country without ever meeting a single Professor James Cameron gave himself a graduate level
degree in film making for a few hundred okay then he has a section just really random things you should know he says I still have tons of notes around producing content I can't really break into their own sections so I'm going to Rapid Fire them here so you at least hear them once before starting your journey goes back to what I said earlier
one of the most important ideas is don't do anything else don't do anything someone else can do spectacles are videos that only the Mr Beast channel can do not every video should be a spectical and we realize these videos are hard but that is the point another random rapid fire note I'd rather you be honest with each other than nice to each other and I think that sentence I'd
rather be honest with each other than nice to each other we should actually stop for just a second and go into a little more detail because this goes back to when you're reading the memo if you watch any of Jimmy's interviews where you talk to him it's like very obvious that he hel he holds up the work as the most important thing that does a few things one I think I said earlier
makes some easy to interface with but to it also like if you're going to work there like you you understand what what's going to be asked of you and you're an adult you can choose if you want to work in that environment or not and the story that's in my mind that I think illustrates this perfectly is Johnny I was talking to Vanity Fair a few years after Steve Jobs died and it's
like a three-minute video I've probably watched the video I don't know 50 times Maybe at the end of the video he says something that's very fascinating and he tells the story when Steve called him Vain and it's interesting to note this is one of the top three lessons he ever learned from Steve Jobs this is what the one of the three answers he gave to that
question what are the three lessons you learn most from him so this is what Johnny said I remember asking Steve about this I said it could be perceived that his critique of a piece of work was a little harsh and that we've been putting our heart and soul into this and I asked him could we not not moderate the things we said a little and he said why and I said because I care about the
team and Steve said this brutally brilliant insightful thing he said no Johnny you're just really vain you just want people to like you I'm surprised at you I thought you held the work up as the most important not how you believed you were being perceived by other people and Johnny said and I was terribly cross because I knew he was right when Jimmy writes I'd rather you be
honest with each other than nice to each other what he's saying is that he holds work as the most important so then he asks and then answers what is the goal of our content to excite me the goal of our content is to excite me that's what is always has been and always will be I'm willing to count to 100,000 bury myself alive or walk a marathon in the
world's largest pair of shoes if I must I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately makes the viewers happy this channel is my b and I've given up my life for it this is the one thing I will never compromise on I have zero issues throwing away a multi-million dollar video if I don't think it's up to my standards there's examples in both Steve Jobs biography and inner winter
biography of them doing the exact same thing there's a guy that worked for Steve Jobs who was part of his advertising agency for many years he wrote this book called insanely simple talks about you know they they spent millions of dollars or a million dollars on an ad campaign and after the money was spent Steve didn't think still didn't think it was good enough so he
didn't care he scratched he he he scratched the whole thing same thing with Anna winter I think in her case it was like you know many photo shoots they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on she didn't think the quality was there she would not allow it to go out so he goes back to this this is the one thing I I will never compromise on I have zero issues throwing away a
multi-million dollar video if I don't think it's up to my standards we must always be approving and innovating the camera angles need to always get better the pacing the story The jokes the color the lighting the music the props the people our framing our ideas literally everything must always be improving and innovating that is what excites me that is literally what I live
for and so there's also something that pops up a lot especially when he's talking about the way they're making videos the metrics that they Dem monitor it really has to do with the fact that he's obsessed with every single second of the video so you can think about that as a Founder being obsessed with every single aspect of the customer experience
it's very similar to to what Walt Disney said that if we lose the details we lose everything and I think what the great Founders know is that Details Matter at the very beginning when you're your company's small because the attention to detail is what makes your company grow large and then these tiny changes in a large company can have massive effects and so I I just want to pull out this
this one instance so he says this one example I guess one video he's comparing the the performance of two different videos one gets 12 120 million views and one gets only it's funny he says only 45 million which is still up time so says you know one video getss 120 million views and the other only 45 million look at these retention numbers and see if
you can pick which one got tripled to views so remember he's saying why he's a stickler for every single second of a video may seem significant when you're small but it's the attention detail that makes you grow into a large company and then the details really matter because a tiny tiny difference can have a massive impact with as we're about to see because there's nobody else that's
operating at the scale that Jimmy is he's the biggest internet Creator in the world and so he shows a graft he says people on average watch watch this video a minute and 38 seconds longer than the other video of the same length and then he types in all caps of course it got triple the views it's clear as day for YouTube that people like this video much
more the longer people watch the better a video will do this is why I'm such a stickler about every single second of a video now the point that jumped out on me is the fact that the difference if you can make two products and in this case it's a video both of them are about 11 minutes long if one is watched if you're at at Jimmy scale right if one is watched just a minute and a half longer
on average 90 seconds 90 second difference at this scale gives you 80 million views and then he goes back to something he's already repeated multiple times you should watch our videos if you're going to be working for the Beast brand you should be a fan of the Beast brand a lot of very valuable knowledge comes while watching vast amounts of our videos quantity has a quality all of
itself own and this is something that repeat over and over again I just did this episode on this rare Bernard oal interview you know at this point in his career he's done 10,000 store visits tens of thousands of hours dedicated to retail in the same way that Mr Beast has tens of 20s 20,000 30,000 hours studying YouTube which means that Jimmy could
look at a video and see things that are invisible to you and I and exactly the same way that's referenced in the rare Bernard anal interview that he walks into a store and something's obvious to him that's invisible to everybody else that comes from quantity so it says a lot of very valuable knowledge comes while watching vast amounts of our videos I feel silly for having to write
this but all the time I talk to new people that have seen at most like five of our or six of our videos and it's mindblowing that they don't see a problem with that to get 60% up to speed I'd watch our last 50 videos if you're a monster and really want to understand the history of the company and the Innovations we've been through I'd recommend you watch every video back
until you hit the 10 million subscribers special if you've seen every video we've made since 10 million then you will have a lot more context and informations that others don't and it will make you that much more valuable and then he ends the memo with a finer chapter called your career if you've made it this far you're probably at least semi-in interested in this
being your career so I wanted to chat about that because if you're ambitious and you want to dedicate your life to work you've picked the best company in America to do it at I really don't care to hoard a bunch of money and I deeply believe in rewarding the people that help this business get to where it needs to be so this is something I knew before reading this memo because I've used it
as as an example in talks with a lot of different Founders to something that Jimmy told me a long time ago he pays for talent there's a line that Steve Jobs said that in everything I've done it really pays to go after the best people in the world if Jimmy thinks you're the best videoeditor or the best person running the videos or the best data guy he is going to pay you a ton
and met when I was there I met a bunch of the top people on his team and they're young but they're the best in the world at what they do and so this is actually really I would use I I would use Jimmy as an example in private conversations of this idea that that pops up in the books that you you can't overpay for talent and so I was going back and searching through Founders
notes of like what's the best way to describe this and I actually found the TR I searched through the transcript of this book by Brad Jacobs called how to make a few billion dollars I think Brad's now on his ninth separate billion dollar company maybe his eth if you haven't read his book go read it it's incredible if you haven't listened to the episode go listen to it it's
incredible and so I just want to read from that transcript because I think this will illustrate the idea of what what Jimmy just said here is is accurate he's like I really don't care to hoard a bunch of money I deeply believe and rewarding the people that help this business get to where it needs to be and so in the episode on how to make a few
billion dollars it says and what do you do with a players you overpay the hell out of them because here's the thing the reason you should overpay them is because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent meaning somebody's the best in the world with what they do think about Steve Jobs uh what Steve Jobs said earlier in some Fields the best person is not twice as good they're
as hund they're hundred times as good think about when Steve Jobs was coming back to Apple Apple bought next for almost half a billion dollars the way to think about that is Apple paid a half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs and they got the deal of a century and so Brad Jacob says it makes no Financial sense to skimp on a salary and incentives to save $100,000 a year when
hiring the second best candidate May cost you millions of dollars in Lost profit another way to summarize that is never ever forget the dynamic range of humans so he goes back to this we need more leaders in the company we need hardworking obsessive coachable intelligent Grinders that can step up and Lead if you want to become a production manager tell James your
intention and ask him why you suck and how you can become better seriously he will give you a list of things that you need to improve prove on to become what we need and if you actually listen and master those things we will give you a shot at the role I think the best biography of Steve Jobs ever written was becoming Steve Jobs and in that book it said Steve didn't give his team much
formal feedback during the US versus Microsoft antitrust case Microsoft subpoenaed all my Personnel records at Apple so I'm sitting down with our lawyer and he says I've gotten your file from HR he pulls it out and there's only one piece of paper in it something meaningless and he's like where is your file where's your annual reviews and all that I told him that i' never had an
annual review Steve didn't believe in reviews he disliked all that formality his feeling was I give you feedback all the time what do you need a review for and so back to this just go and ask like what do you want to why how this is the role in the company that I want how can I get there and he says we'll give you a list of things that you need to improve
on to become what we need and if you actually listen and master those things we will give you a shot at the role this isn't a bureaucratic corporate company the more responsibility risk you help us navigate and overall that you deal with the more you'll make and if you want more of that we will gladly help train you to receive it there is infinite room for you to grow here we
will win and we are going to build something amazing I see a world where this company is worth tens of billions of dollars and those of you that help build this will be rewarded I want nothing more than for you to go all in be obsessive all day every day and become so godamn valuable this company can't operate without you and in return for becoming so valuable I
hope to give you an incredible experience a fun place to work and of course more money than you could ever dream of making at any other company now read this all over again because I guarantee you you didn't retain enough and that is the last line of the memo the last line of the memo made me think of this line from Les Schwab who's one of Charlie merer and Warren
Buffett's favorite Founders and Les Schwab said whatever you do you must do it with gusto you you must do it in volume it is a case of repeat repeat repeat and that is where I'll leave it for the full story highly recommend reading the leaked memo I will leave a link down below you can read it for free online that is 366 books down 1,000 AO and I'll talk to you again soon