7 things MrBeast, Bezos & Thiel do that you don’t
If this was a VHS tape, it would be labeled Sean Hardcore Part 2.
People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. Like, there's an Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks.
CEO.
What I want to talk about is basically If you're a CEO of a company, if you're like running a company right now, which I think a lot of people listening to this are, there's a good chance you're not being hardcore enough. And what I wanna talk about is like 6 or 7 real anecdotes, stories of what CEOs do, moves that CEOs do that sound wrong, sound almost illegal, but they actually work. The idea being, when you're a CEO, there's no CEO school, there's no CEO training. There's no, nobody there to manage you. You're the one managing everybody else. And most people don't even give you like real feedback because you're kind of their boss. You're in charge.
Is this like famous examples or your friends?
I have a mix of examples. You'll know examples I think you won't know, but they're of famous companies. And then one or two from my friends. Okay, so I have, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I have like 7.
And whenever you come up with ideas like this, which you do all the time, they interest me. But what also interests me is why do you care? Why do you care right now?
Well, 2 things. One is in general, like, I want to be better at what I do. And so if I ever hear of somebody else doing something that I think could be either I haven't tried or I think like, wow, that sounds kind of crazy, but I guess I see how that might work. It's like I kind of found a new move in a video game and I like to know that. But the other is We talk a lot about, almost to the point of it being obnoxious, this phrase frame breaking, which is you see the world a certain way and it seems like there's a, there's a border. Everything about the world fits inside that frame. And then you'll hear this story that will just be outside of the frame. It breaks the frame. The frame has to expand to now incorporate this new information. And I don't know why I love it. I love it like dudes love Pokémon cards. I just want to collect as many of those frame breaking. Okay. ideas and stories. And the reason why is, if you've ever heard that story of like the elephant who has a young age, like they tether him to the stake in the ground, and then he grows and now he's so powerful he could easily rip out the stake, but he doesn't. There's many examples in my life where it feels like there's the illusion of control that like I'm limited by something that in actuality I'm not limited by at all. The stories I'm going to tell you are sort of like elephant and the stake things where you're like, oh, I couldn't possibly do that. Why not? Why can't you do that? Before I go into like kind of the famous stories of people, you know, doing this, I'll tell you the guy who I was having breakfast with that told me a story like this that got me thinking, got me paying attention to these. So I was getting breakfast recently with this guy, Martin, who will come on the podcast, Martin Basiri. Now, Martin was, he was like the one that got away from me. The very first angel investment I ever wanted to do. 10+ years ago, I started making like a little bit of money. I think I was making like, I don't know, $160 grand a year. Not even that much money. Not enough money to be, I would say, an angel investor. But I wanted to be. I was sitting in San Francisco and I thought that would be the thing to do. I should start angel investing. And I had this kid who was like this 13-year-old kid who was using one of our products. And he, he always used to hang out in the tech rooms and hang out around tech things. He emailed me and he said, hey, I'll be your scout. So here I was, this guy who had never made an angel investment, and now I got a scout. And he said, I'm gonna send you 3 companies a week. And, you know, You don't have to invest in any of them, but it'll just be great practice for me if you just give me feedback on those. I'd love to learn.
What age are you at this time?
I'm probably 24, 25. Okay. Yeah.
All right.
He sends me this email with the first, first company and he goes, this guy Martin Bashir, he's in Canada where I live. And already I'm like, I'm not trying to invest in a Canadian company. I want to invest in Silicon Valley companies. He's like, what he's doing is really cool. He's got this company called ApplyBoard. And what ApplyBoard was doing is very simple. They were letting international students who, you know, if you've ever lived internationally, the dream of most international students is to come to school in the United States.
Yeah.
To go to university here. But imagine just being like a kid in Malaysia with Malaysian parents and it's like, great, why don't you apply to whatever, UC Davis? And they're like, what is UC Davis? Where is that school? How do I apply? How do I fill out this form? Like, it's a very— like, there's a huge gap between where you are and where you're trying to go and you need a bridge. And ApplyBoard became that bridge. They basically made it very easy for foreign students to apply to US universities. And what they did, they realized it was very smart, was that US universities absolutely rip off foreign international students. There's a reason they love international students is because they charge them 3 times the price to go to school and this to the same school, get the same education. So if you're a state school, you'll obviously charge less for in-state tuition, out-of-state tuition. And then there's a third tier called international tuition. That's crazy. 3 times higher. And so he went to the schools and he got the schools to say, yeah, I'll pay you $5,000 or $10,000 per student that we admit, like as a, as an affiliate fee, as a bounty. Yeah. So this is like incredible. And the international student is dying to go there. So it's not the hardest sell in the world. They just needed a bridge. So I hear this, I'm like, dude, this 13-year-old might've actually sent me a good company. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna use this.
The guy was 13?
The scout was 13.
Wow. Okay.
And so he, I'm like, dude, I think I'm gonna do this deal. And so he, he comes out, I meet him in San Francisco and I agree on the spot, I'm gonna invest $25 grand into this company. And I said it very confidently to him.
Which is, which is a huge amount of money, by the way. It was a huge amount of money. Your annual savings in San Francisco on $170,000 was $20,000.
Yeah, exactly. I was basically putting all of my like post-tax disposable income into this one random Canadian startup. Well, guess what? A day later, your boy's got cold feet. I'm like, oh man, that was a lot. I shouldn't have said that. I felt stupid coming down. I was like, you know what? Do I go back to him and say $5,000, $10,000? That felt stupid. And you know what I did? I didn't back out, but I just didn't say anything. And like, I didn't follow up and he didn't really follow up. And some time went by and then I got unavailable. And anyways, I missed out on this deal. Applyboard today, I think it does over like $1 billion a year in revenue or something crazy. It's like a multi-billion dollar company. It's, it's insane. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a multi-billion dollar company. So huge miss for me. On that, that's for the very first possible angel investment.
What was his valuation back then?
Oh dude, it must have been like, I don't know, $10 million or something. Yeah, 5, 6. I would have been the first investor in it. Oh yeah, first Silicon Valley investor in it. Yeah, there was, it would have been amazing. So last week I'm having breakfast with him and I've now invested in his new company Passage, which is doing some amazing things. But, uh, I'm saying like, dude, how's it going? I was like, how is it like, how do you operate? I was like, tell me like, We're having breakfast right now. You're gonna go to the office. What do you do? And he was like, I work pretty hard. And he's like, I was like, okay, what does that mean? And so he's telling me his work schedule. The guy basically is like, I drop off my kids, you know, 8:00 AM, I'm in the office at 8:30 and I'm there from 8:30 to, you know, midnight every night. And I'm like, midnight? Jesus Christ. I was like, are you the only one there? He goes, I used to be, but not anymore. I was like, well, what do you mean? Like, how'd you get people to start staying so late to work like extra like that? Like, what'd you do to inspire them, motivate them? He goes, option drop. I said, what? And, and he is like, option drop. I said, what's an option drop? He goes, at any time in my company, if anybody does something awesome, I just say option drop, 50,000 options. I just give them share options in the company on the spot. Like if somebody has a great idea, they go above and beyond for a customer, they solve a problem in the meeting right there. Option drop.
It's like Dana White giving out a bonus.
What I'll do is it's a bonus, but stock in the company on the fly. And he goes, and, and then at night he goes, if I'm there at 10:00 PM and if there's like, let's say 12 people there, I'll just say, everybody here, option drop, 20,000 options, all of you. He's like, I don't do it every night, but I'll do it once every, you know, 50 days. And guess what? It got people to start doing the things that I cared about. They'd know if I solve a big problem, if I unlock some new growth, if I solve a customer's problem, if I'm working really hard, That's how I get more options. Option drop. And I was, and so I'm sitting there and I'm like laughing. So I'm laughing at him first 'cause I'm like, that's just hilarious. Just the phrase and the way he said it, I just was cracking me up. And then I was like, well, of course, of course that wouldn't work. Of course that would reinforce behaviors rather than saying, well, I put our company values on the wall once 6 years ago. I sure hope they're doing it. You know what I mean? Like obviously a, in-the-moment incentive, positive reinforcement for a behavior. The more specific, the more concrete, and the more immediate a reward, the more, more of that behavior you're gonna get. That's kind of basic behavioral science. So I was like, okay, I guess that does work. And I was like, is that legal? Can you do— I was like, I don't know. I just can't feel like you can't just throw around options like that. He's like, why not?
Yeah, you could.
He's like, I just send a message to my assistant, option drop, these people, this amount, and then it gets papered. That's it.
Well, and, and it's an option, meaning they still have to buy it, right? So it's not like it's free money.
Yeah, like this has a strike price. Yeah. So you can, you can exercise the option if you, if you so choose, but there's that exercise window. You don't have to buy it right away. You can, you know, you can wait if you want. So, okay. OptionDrop was the first one of, I was like, oh, obviously a way to incentivize the types of behaviors that you want right there on the spot using your company's share options. Can I give you the next one?
Keep going. This is exciting.
Any, any, you wanna rate these? Maybe gimme a, you know, gimme a, you have, Very simple. Let's do Gladiator. Thumbs down, lukewarm, thumbs up, or double thumbs up. That's your options.
Not a double thumbs up. So just one, one thumb up.
Okay.
Yeah, that's, that's very effective. Good. Not that like extreme.
Do you do it?
I don't do options, but because, yeah, like I just give money.
Okay. Do you do that on the spot?
No.
Okay.
But I'm also not the CEO and I'm also not extreme. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not playing that game.
What, the game of trying to win? What do you mean? Of course you are.
Not, not at the price of being there at midnight. No, I'm more of a—
Well, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be midnight, right? Like, that, that's one, you just decide of the things I care about, do I on the fly reward the behaviors I want?
We do it via having a gong in the office, and when someone does something awesome, we smack a gong. So auditory reinforcement. Well, well, it's just like, 'cause everyone stares at it and you're like, we're gonna like celebrate what is happening right now. But no, I don't give up money.
Okay, here's the next one.
Hey everyone, really quick, if you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff, so delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring, then I've got something for you. So the team at HubSpot, they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that Sean and I use in our own companies, and they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. And so if you wanna just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, then you should check it out. I wish we had this A long time ago, would have helped me a lot. But there should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan or a link in the description. So check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome.
OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, they are trying to fight friction. So in every company, there's just a whole bunch of bullshit, especially as you grow. And when you're like them, you grow very fast. There's always just things that are just drag and bureaucratic drag in the company. policies, procedures, you know, potholes, things that just start to trip you up as you're working in the company, just trying to do good work. So they created what they call the Friction Removal Service. And it's sort of like a Doge idea inside the company. Yeah. But it's actually very simple, which is there's an email inbox called friction@openai.com, and you could just email Friction with anything that's causing, that's causing you to not get your job done. So like, is there something slowing you down? Is there something that's missing? Is there something that's a problem? So anything that's there, and there's a person assigned to the company whose job is to triage everything that comes in there. And if there's something that seems like, oh, that's actually a pretty, like, legitimate source of friction, we should get— we should eliminate that. That's gonna help our people move faster. Smart. And then they go and they move, they, they remove that friction. And it creates a culture of saying like, look, we are going to actively fight the bloat that comes in companies that grow really big and grow really fast by having a janitorial crew for a bureaucracy. I was like, oh, I kind of love that idea. So, for you.
Yeah, that's brilliant.
Give me a score.
2. Just 2. Am I allowed to do 2?
Yeah, yeah. Double thumbs up.
All right. A Caesar would never do that, but that's okay.
Yeah, that's, it's sort of, it's sort of giving like Chuck E. Cheese instead of Gladiator.
Uh, no, uh, 2, because that is like less heroic and more systematic. Uh, yeah, I'm totally on board with that.
All right. Next one is 1-bit communication. So do you remember this app Yo from back in the day?
Yeah. Hilarious. All the rage when you and I were 26 years old.
So people, you don't, you, you'll only know if you know, which is back in the day in San Francisco, this app became the rage for like, I wanna say 30 days.
Yeah. If there was like a one-hit wonder, like song list for Silicon Valley, that would be Chumbawamba. I get knocked down by Chumbawamba and then Yo. are both on that list.
So describe what Yo did.
I think it was just an app where your friends downloaded and you clicked one button and it said yo to the other person. I think that's it.
And then if they clicked the button, it would say?
Yo.
Yo right back. All you could say is yo to each other. And so it seemed like the stupidest thing in the world. It was going viral for being almost so silly. And then Andreessen Horowitz wrote a big check into them and we were like, what? You know, one of the smartest investors invested in Yo? Are you kidding me? It was like straight outta the TV show Silicon Valley. In fact, I think they, they mocked this by with the Bro app in the, in the show, whereas you said bro to each other. But I was like, why? And Marc Andreessen wrote this blog post called One Bit Communication, and he talked about how like, um, there are many forms of communication, right? You can write letters, you can write text messages, which have 100, whatever, 40 or 160 character limit. We had beepers back in the day, and a beeper was just a way to get your attention. And you kind of had to know if I'm beeping you with this code, that what that code means. And he goes, the smallest form of communication would be a one bit Communication, just a single bit back and forth. Yo, but yo can mean a lot. And he wrote this like very like this like thesis on yo. And I just remember reading it and being like, honestly, kind of half convinced about this. You know, like a smart guy could really sell you anything. And he did. He sold me that. Well, I've learned that there's a couple CEOs who use one-bit communication. So here's the first one, Siemens. The Siemens CEO came out and he said, yeah, I have a very specific management system. My management system is this. You email me anything you wanna talk to me about and I will respond with okay or no. That's it. Huh. I'm just gonna say okay or no to your email. And if it requires more than that, then, um, you're gonna come talk to me. And when do you come talk to me? We don't have weekly recurring like calendar meetings. We don't have like scheduling. If you need me, you'd come talk to me right now. And that's it. That's how I unblock everybody in the company. And I will not be the bottleneck. I'm simply gonna give you permission, rejection. Or if there needs to be more detail, you'll find out that you need to come talk to me right now and we'll discuss more. And then you'll get the okay or no after more detail has been revealed.
Yeah, this guy's having like a moment right now. I think I saw a few articles about him. What happened with him?
Well, he's, he's like a theoretical physics background CEO, but he's a CEO. And so they always kind of, if you come from a nontraditional background, they're quirky
and cool.
And he goes, I love this quote. He goes, they go, so you don't have any recurring meetings with your direct reports, like to sit and just catch up and discuss? And he goes, I don't entertain people and they don't need to entertain me. Which is, if you think about like, if you've ever been in a company, a lot of like the meetings you have are really theater, right? Yeah. It's, it's progress theater. Like, I would like to put on a little play for you of how good I'm doing. And then you, you sit in the back and you, you gimme a little, you know, theater clap back to me and I feel good. And then I go on my way and we've both just kind of wasted an hour of each other's time. It's not, the work isn't getting done there. That's just basically like, You don't trust me enough to just do the thing, and I don't trust you enough to know that I can just show you the work and that's it. That's enough for you to understand my value. So this guy's— we'll tap dance for each other.
Is he German?
It's a very German behavior.
Yeah, he's German. I had to look him up because I think Siemens is a German company. This guy's great. Is this going to be like the new Snowflake CEO?
Maybe. Maybe. Early signs. My scouts, my scouts are paying attention to this.
We have to get on this train early, uh, too.
All right, related, the Jeff B escalation. So this is Bezos. So Bezos famously would read any customer email, you know, his, his email was out there so customers could email him, and he would just be like a router. He would route the email to the team if there was a problem, and it would only have one bit in it, one bit communication, just a question mark. Which has gotta be like the most annoying thing that any CEO could do. But he trained the team that the question mark has a very specific meaning. And the me— if he sends you the question mark, it means, is this true? Why is this happening? And what are we gonna do about it? All encoded into a one question mark thing, allowing him to actually like triage his email way faster than having to like take each thing, find a good time to bring it up. When can I bring this up with you? You know, then I delay and then I bring it up and then we're gonna have to have this long conversation. Just one question mark. And that's what he would do. And his take was this, he would say at the beginning, a lot of the teams would say, no, no, that's just, you know, that's just one loud, angry customer or something like that. Look, the data shows that we're 98%, you know, success rate. And his take was, look, we're a very data-driven company, but these customer anecdotes matter and they matter a lot. And I want you to investigate these because I'm not saying when I send you this customer email, I'm not saying drop what you're doing and go satisfy Joanne in Wichita, this Prime customer. You know, you don't need to solve her problem. What I'm saying is Amazon is a machine. The machine might be broken. And this anecdote is a little bit of a signal. It's a squeak in the machine that I'd like you to investigate to see why this would happen, because that's not how the machine is designed to work.
Yeah, I tend to think those stories are more important than, than traditional data.
And what he said was, he goes, look, you're not wrong that maybe 98% is happening the way you want. What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete, that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters. And both the metric is right and the customer is right. The metric is just incomplete because it's not capturing this part of the customer's experience. I was like, oh, I kind of like that. That's a very— that would've been a very satisfying explanation. for what would've otherwise been an absolutely infuriating thing of just getting this one question mark from your CEO forwarding a random customer complaint to you as the head of whatever, some part of the business.
And I think a question mark from you or I would come off incredibly douchey. There's something about Jeff that seems a little bit more polite and respectful. And so I don't take it as a douchey thing. Originally when I heard question mark, I was like, that's, that's pretty disrespectful. But I don't view him as a disrespectful guy. When I— if you see me send a question mark, assume it's disrespect.
It is disrespect.
Yeah.
It's because they don't have a backhand slap emoji.
Yeah. Yeah, I can't punch you through a screen. Hey,
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All right, what's the next one? All
right, next one comes from Peter Thiel. Okay, so Peter Thiel famously, when he was the CEO of PayPal, he had this thing that I really loved, which he goes, we are gonna be a single-tasking company. You are not gonna be a multitasker, which is great because PayPal was full of some of the biggest brains in the world, right? Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, the creators of YouTube, the creators of Yelp, the creator, obviously, like a bunch of big brains in that room. You would think if anybody could multitask, it'd be those people. Well, no. Peter's take was this. Everybody has one big problem that you're trying to solve at any given time. Like, you might be fighting fraud from the Ukraine right now, and you might be trying to optimize virality of the PayPal button on eBay. And this other guy might be trying to, you know, lower our, you know, processing fees. With the banks, right? So everybody's assigned one problem, and his thing was this: they go, "Well, you know, how do you get people to actually do that?" Right? Because sounds good in theory, right? Focus is always a word everybody nods and agrees on, but we were all pretty bad at focus. So how did you get your teams to actually do it? And Peter Thiel's answer was, "Oh, if if they tried to talk to me about anything besides their problem, I would just simply walk out of the room, and the nonverbal communication was pretty clear how I felt." And and people were like, "Did he really do that?" And Keith, you know. through boy was like, yeah, he would literally do that. He would, if you tried to bring up anything else besides your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away. And then you got a signal of how important that was. And if you wanted to be valued by the CEO, you would stay on task of your problem.
He would just do like the autistic clomp, just your feet just clomping away at the door.
Did you think he's wearing shoes? No chance that he was wearing shoes in that office. So,
no, dude, he's a loafer guy. You, 'cause he's the type of guy where you just hear it clomping around. I can tell. He said, that's ridiculous.
Focus is convex. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid to understand exactly what that means, but it sounds very provocative and I've used it 3 times since. Um, the good news is nobody else I work with knows what it means either.
I don't know what this has to do with focus. That's what convex looks like.
He, he explains a little bit. He, he goes, If you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you were 90%. Meaning the jump from 80% focus to 90% focus will double your impact. And so you really want this, the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your focus will double. You'll get 1 or 2 more doubles in the output, which kind of makes sense. Like, if you look at any field, right, if you're the 80th percentile swimmer, Nobody knows your name and you work at a tire company. If you're the 90th percent swimmer, people in your county might know your name, but you still, you manage the tire company. If you're the 99th percentile swimmer, you might be able to swim professionally. But if you're the 99.99999, right? Like the final, it's that last leg. You're Michael Phelps and you get all the gold medals and the millions of dollars and so on. And it's basically like your use of focus that the last mile of it, the last level of obsession, Is what gets you like a disproportionate amount of the rewards.
So what's point number three, or are we on four on Sean's hardcore? If this was a VHS tape, it would be labeled Sean Hardcore Part Two.
People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. Like, there's an Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks.
CEO.
Put the O in CEO. All right, here's what we got. What's left? I got, I did 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I got 5. I got 3 left. All right. Jack Welch, CEO of, of GE. When you ran, when you run a big company, it's very easy for, you know, all your children are sort of not equal. They're not loved equally. All the different business divisions. And GE was in very, a bunch of different business divisions. And he had 2 simple rules. when he was running GE. One was every division, you need to be number 1 or number 2 in your market. Otherwise, you have 1 year to fix it, sell it, or close it. That's it. We will trim the business divisions unless you can be number 1 or number 2, which is an incredible forcing function because it's a sort of Darwinian pressure to survive. And the other Darwinian pressure he applied was every year Jack Welch would fire the bottom 10% performers in the company. Every year. And so a continuous culling of the herd, which sounds— I mean, I'm sure people interpret that different ways. Some people will think he's an asshole for that. When I first heard it, I was like, oh, that doesn't sound that hardcore. But then you go try to do it. Go try to do that every year. It is incredibly difficult. Or go look at your own track record. How much low performance have you tolerated? Because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove.
I think Jack Welch is, I think he's controversial. We actually should do a deep dive one day on him because people say that he was a horrible CEO because if you look at like GE, it was kind of became this like amalgamation of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out. But I don't know enough about Jack Welch to know if that was his doing or what happened. But, but I know that he was well loved as a leader. But at the same time, I hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing, like Jensen from Nvidia. Yeah. He was like, He was like, I'm going to smother you in greatness. I'm not going to fire you. Like, it's so funny how great people, assuming they both are great, have different opinions on firing as— I mean, as well as everything else. Like, it's like total opposite, right?
Yeah. And you will find that for every single one of these, you will find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite, which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great. It's just meant to say, damn, I thought these stories were pretty hardcore, huh? That's really kind of all we're saying. And that there are it kind of pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable, tolerable, and potentially effective. I think firing your low performers is a pretty, I would say, logical thing to do. Meaning,
yeah,
I could see why that works. I could definitely see why that works. And I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, like, I think Jensen, when he made that point, he was like, yeah, I don't fire them, but I turn up the intensity so much that You either become great or quit, right? Which is more of a sink or swim version of like, yeah, they quit instead of getting fired. But either way, you weed out the low performers one way or another. So last 2. All right, I'm gonna skip this last one. I'll tell you, I don't even really like it. The Ford CEO, this guy comes in, this guy Alan becomes the Ford CEO. They had just lost $17 billion the last year. And he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track or off track. And there was like color-coded, green is on track, yellow is at risk, and red is off track. And everything was green. And he's like, guys, we lost $17 billion last year. How's everything green? And he realized they had like a culture where, you know, people were sort of afraid to admit failure. And so he's like, you can't be afraid. You have to be honest. And so the next week they were all green again, except for one was red. And he stood up and started clapping and changed the culture around failure. And I was like, it sounds a little bit like a Disney movie to me.
Yeah, that's the Cool Running shit.
Yeah, so I think we're gonna— I think we're gonna thumbs down Alan together here. Nice try, Alan. Consider me uninspired. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe 7 or 8 businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. All right. The last one comes from Jimmy, a.k.a. MrBeast, which was— I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy, which we were like, so, dude, how do you train your employees? They're all really young. Seems like they're all new. You're growing so fast. Like, do you have— like, I'm just curious, like, you don't— you know, you never went to college or business school or anything like that. Like, what do you do for your, like, kind of management? And he's like, oh, I just do cloning. And we're like, that sounds illegal. What does that mean? And he's like, Well, if I hire you in one of like kind of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere. Like you literally shadow me every single place I go. And I think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in. Like it was like that, that hardcore, like from morning to night. Like the guy, I remember one guy he hired, he was also Jimmy's alarm clock. Like he would go wake him up. And from the moment Jimmy woke up, they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep. And he would do that for 6 months. And he's like, by the end of the 6 months, you know exactly how I think, 'cause you've been with me everywhere. You know, you saw every decision I made. So essentially you're like a proxy for me. Like, I can now be in 2 places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation. And yeah, cloning works great. And I remember there was like a room full of CEOs, like multi-billion dollar CEOs, as he was telling us this, who were like, I think that's awesome and illegal. Like, wait, what? People don't like get weekends? He's like, no. You come here to, you come here to win. I don't know if he still does it, but in the early days of his thing, I thought that was pretty, pretty awesome.
How is that going? Like, it's, it's interesting to hear about extreme people and how it ends up, like if they, if they soften it when they have kids and stuff. It appears as though Elon is not a guy who has softened at all as the company has gotten bigger and has, he has had more kids. I wonder if that's happened with Jimmy and what's it called, Beast Enterprise, or I don't know what it's called. industries?
Yeah, I think both. Right. I think he matured, right? When we met him, he was probably only like 25 or 24 years old or something like that. Right. So like, you know,
matured like 30, hugely from year over year.
Yeah. You're going to mature. And his rate of learning, like he's, you know, pretty obsessive about learning from smart people. And so he is— the slope of his line is pretty crazy. Right. So I'm sure a lot has changed at the same time. if something's working and that's your edge, you got to be pretty careful you don't just dull out all your edges. And so, yeah, he does have a CEO now of Beast Industries. I'm sure they have more people and they're less like kind of business malpractices, you know, you do in the early days when you're kind of rough and tumble and figure things out. But yeah, dude, I think they still go pretty hard and try to win. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of the fundamentals are probably still there of the stuff that works, right? Like, like anything, The stuff that's working tends to survive and the stuff that's ineffective tends to get pruned out over time.
I am not compared to these guys. I've— we're not even in the same ballpark in terms of being like hardcore. I don't know where you are, but I know that when I hear this, I'm like, it sounds like a lot of work. I'm not into that. I don't, I don't want the same outcomes. And I had a story for you today that is the exact opposite of hardcore. I didn't mean for this story to be a matter of hardcore or not. More so a matter of there's money everywhere.
Can I give you an anecdote that, like, supports what you're saying about the other side of the coin here? David Perell, friend of the pod, had Kevin Kelly on the podcast. And Kevin Kelly is this guy who I really like and admire. He had a really eclectic career. He, like, started Wired magazine and he wrote A Thousand True Fans, which really shaped kind of my thinking.
Is he like a— was he— I know he's like a thinker and a writer, but was he a successful businessperson too?
Yeah, I think he's done well. Like, he's—
I think he's done, done very well compared to normal standards, but like, you know, not, not like some crazy whatever billionaire type. But I don't think that was ever his goal. But he's just done a bunch of really interesting projects, and his projects have been very successful. He asked him a great question about this. He asked him something like, like, what's been the cost of being Kevin Kelly? Like, what have you given up to be Kevin Kelly the way you, the way you have? And Kevin's like, you know, that's a great question. To have this life I have, I had to give up on greatness. And he goes, what do you mean? And he goes, well, I think the cost of greatness is some level of being extreme. And I just never wanted to be extreme. I didn't want the cost of extreme. And so he's like, I surrendered to the path of I'm not going to be as great as I possibly could be had I been obsessively focused on one thing, had I been more extreme, had I given up certain parts of my personal life. And he goes, I'll give you a very specific definition of greatness.
And he goes, let's just, for lack of a better word, because I could say greatness and it means 2 different things in our heads. He goes, let's say greatness is being remembered by people other than your family more than one generation from now. And he goes, I don't think I will be remembered for anything more than one or 2 generations from now from anyone outside of my own family. And he goes, to be To be able to be, he goes, like a gadfly, where I just kind of float from thing to thing and I, I get to dabble and explore and like kind of see different projects and bring them to life in little ways, but I don't own any of them. Not any of them became the biggest thing in the world. To be the gadfly, I had to surrender and give up on the path of greatness. And I'm perfectly happy with that. And I thought it was just a very— I never really heard anyone say it that way. Like, I kind of respected his thinking on 2 levels. One, I don't think people ever define the words. what they mean. I just like that he started by being like, I can't give you this answer if I don't define what this word means to me.
So was it grandchildren or great-grandchildren?
So let's just say grandchildren. Yeah.
Okay. That's actually interesting. I've always— I've had a similar definition of greatness, but it's always been way longer where it's been like 120 or 150 years, which I guess would be a couple more, add a few more generations to that. But that's actually an interesting way to define it.
Yeah, like you could, I mean, I don't know who you would consider to be great, but like whether it's, you know, Steve Jobs on the business side, right? Like you could go into like, you know, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and like people who did great in terms of their civic actions or people like Houdini, people who are great artists and great creators that way, right? Like there's all these kind of people who are great.
If you look at them, very few of them live very chill, balanced lifestyles, right? Like—
There ain't normal people on the top of Mount Everest. Like, you're not gonna find well-balanced people. I actually think about that all the time because I love history and I'll see street names and it's clearly named after someone and I'll go and research who that person is. Like, for example, Fort Greene is named after Nathanael Greene. Fort Greene's a neighborhood in Brooklyn and it's a, it's a park. And it's named after Nathanael Greene, who was a general in the American Revolution. And he's, he was a big shot in the American Revolution, one of the key generals. And it's like, Does remembered mean his name is named after a park in which no one even knows that Fort Greene was Nathanael Greene? Right. And I'm like, this guy was one of the key top 20 people in the American Revolution, which is one of the most consequential, consequential revolutions of all time. And I don't even know him. And when you think about it, over the last 500 to 1,000 years, of the billions and billions and billions of people who have ever existed, The ones who do, who we remember more often than not, it has nothing to do with money. For example, if you and I do the best that we will ever do when it comes to business, the likelihood that we will be within— like maybe there's a world where we'll crack the top 5,000 or top 10,000 living Americans in terms of wealth. Maybe that would be obviously 0.000001% of like that, right? And yet even that is not going to get you remembered for 500 years. You can't name who the 80th richest person was in the 19— In the 1930s. 50 years. Yeah. Yeah. You can't. So that's like, so, so therefore—
Who's that person today?
You don't know now.
Yeah. You don't know. And so, and then you're like, okay, so I won't know that. Okay. So money can't really be it. And then it's like, okay, what about business? It's like, well, there's some companies that have lasted that long, but like, it's basically when you really think about it, it's like humanitarians, a handful of amazing like leaders or politicians, which would also include like the Mother Teresas of the world, like someone who did something really special. And then it's like inventors. Like, it's like— Or occasionally an
artist.
Or an artist, occasionally an artist. And I'm like, so when I think about that, I'm like, well, the odds, if I defined greatness as me being remembered, like let's say 150 or 200 years, I'm like, A, I'm doing it wrong, and B, the odds are so low. And then I was like, therefore, maybe I just shouldn't care. Like, I, like, I spent like years working through this.
Can I tell you where I landed with that same idea? Being remembered or legacy type stuff never really appealed. I think I was pretty quick to shed that one. In fact, there's a great— Hormozi once said something I really loved. He was like, you know, the queen died 6 months ago and guess what? She was the queen. And I bet you haven't thought about her since she died. I was like, oh, that's so true. That's the queen, you know, uh, that's the queen of England after 100 years, you know, dying. And so I never really cared about the legacy stuff so much, but I wanted to achieve greatness. And when I thought about achieving greatness, it was some version of success or, you know, building something that mattered in the world or, you know, like the number one of something, being the number one of something. And what I've realized is that achieving greatness was sort of like not, not for me. It would be a fool's errand for me. It's not what I'm wired to do. It's not what I would enjoy to do. It's It comes at a cost that I would not be willing to pay once I knew the cost. But there's a big difference between achieving something great and being great. I know a lot of people who are great. Our buddy Ramon is great. He's a great friend. Yeah. He's a great dad. He's a great guy, and he's a great hang. And he, you know what I mean? He, he, he is good at being great. You, you'd mentioned Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson right now is being great in handling such a difficult circumstance with absolute, you know, class and courage. And there's just being great. And my trainer, he's a guy, he's just great. He's, he's a great guy. He's a great uncle to my kids. He's a great, you know, great trainer. He cares about people. You know, he's so fun to be around. He's, he's always in a great mood. He's, that's called being great. And so I realized like being great, the active tense, the day-to-day thing, that's the thing to chase. Yeah. 'Cause you could do it right now and in the moment how you're showing up, you could be great right now. And you could also fall out of being great if you lose track of that. And you should get right back on the horse, try to be great again. And I think that was where I landed. I was like, okay, I think that resonates for me. I feel comfortable with that. And it's a far more holistic sense. You could be great when you're exercising and you're in the last 3 reps of the set, and you have to decide if you're going to put the weight down or if you're going to push yourself and try to really see what you're made of. That's a moment of being great. You could just be courteous and kind to somebody. That's a moment of being great. Sometimes I'm at the park and there's other kids and they're kind of talking to me and I'm kind of just like, I don't know why this 4-year-old is talking to me. And sometimes I brush 'em off and I just wanna be on my phone. I don't really wanna talk to this stranger kid about this caterpillar that he found. And sometimes I indulge them and I'm like, no, I'll say something to them that plays back into them. 'Cause that's how I would want someone to treat my kid. It's a moment. Or I get to choose if I'm going to be great or if I'm not going to be great. And I'm not always— I'm not always the best at that, but increasing that hit rate is the goal. And that's one I can kind of get behind.
What's the phrase again? Say this again. I think this is good. Instead of building something great, be great.
Yeah. Don't try to achieve greatness. Like, just be great right now. Like, just being great.
Did you see the guy who went viral this week on Twitter where he was like saying, like, someone was talking about like hard work and he was like, I think you should work hard, but But there's a, there's this age between like 3 years old and 13 years old where your kids don't dislike you yet and they're willing to spend time with you. You know, past 13, that doesn't happen and they're out of diapers. So they're a little bit easier and they start having opinions and then they can think. And for a lot of men who are ambitious people, what they notice is that their ambition goes away or dials down during this period because they love being around their kids. And it doesn't happen to everyone, but a lot of men do. And what I've noticed is that the people who are fearful of this, I just wanna let you know that it tends to come back. Ambition does come back. And the reason why this went viral is because I'm experiencing this. And I think maybe you are, and a lot of our, um, our folks listening are, but like, there is this moment where you start like experiencing these things with your kids when they start having opinions and they still like hanging out with you and you're like, I don't know if I care about the same things like ambition or these other things where I dedicated my life to 'em. I guess I'm not willing to pay that price. And frankly, I find it to be kind of a pain in the ass because you're like, life was so much simpler. Just climb the ladder, make money. You know, it's like, fuck chicks and get money. Like, it's so much simpler that way. And then you have kids and you're like, shit, everything I thought to be true, it's not true right now. Right. And the poster was like, but it becomes true again later on. Like, it does come back. But I remember reading that last weekend and it really hit with me because When you're talking about these like guys who are hardcore, I'm like, I don't want— I'm not staying till midnight right now.
Yeah, no, my chair has lumbar support. I don't think I'm gonna be here till midnight.
That ain't happening.
No option drops for us.
Yeah,
yeah, dude, I gave him a great idea at the breakfast and he option dropped me and I was like, yes, immediately, like hook, line, and sinker. I was like, wow, how do I get that again? That was a really— I like I like that reward.
I was going to bring up another story, but I'm not going to anymore. I think that was perfect.
Yeah, that'd be a little too hardcore for us too. We're going to chill out at 55 minutes and not go to the 60s.
No, I think this has a good bow tie to it. Or bow tie, a good, you know, whatever that phrase is about. It's going to a gala. Rapid shit. It's all done. I don't know. All right, that's it. That's the pod.
Through the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
All right, let's take a quick break. I wanna tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.