Inside MrBeast: The Man Behind the Biggest Videos | Sean Klitzner | The Jared Goetz Show

I had joined Jimmy almost 4 years ago. I had done content since 2004. I was in production, I was creative, I was a director, I was a writer. I just did anything that was creating content. It got to the point where I was being told too many times because of the mindset that I had, "You're a lot." I got told too many times, "We don't know what to do with you." I was like, "I'm done with the business." Wasn't really satisfied with what I was doing, and my wife came in and she goes, "You gotta get back into this." Jimmy happened to tweet something that's like, you know, "I'm looking for really passionate people," and I was like, "All right, this is it. I'm gonna put I'm gonna put everything in this. And so I got this MrBeast job. I picked up and I moved to North Carolina. I'm in a long-distance family. My wife and kids are at home. My wife is now essentially a single mom. I had to make it worth it or else.

What was your first experience with MrBeast where you're like, holy shit, this is crazy?

We wanted the most, the biggest, $5 million grand prize, 1,000 people. Let's break every record we could. We can do whatever we set our mind to, because if we can't, The question's gonna be, why not? But when it finally happened, being like, holy shit, this is everything I've dreamed of.

Hello, hello, welcome to the show. What's going on, guys? In this episode, I'm interviewing Sean Klitzner. He is the co-creator and showrunner for Beast Games. That's right, Beast Games is the game show from MrBeast that broke 40-something world records. As a matter of fact, I started watching it a little bit before this interview, and it is insane. Insane. There's 1,000 contestants fighting for $5 million, and the production is just mind-blowing. Naturally, I was very interested in how the hell do you guys pull this stuff off. It takes a certain type of person, a certain type of grit, a certain type of commitment to figuring things out that Sean has really figured out. And the things he's learned along the way were really powerful and could be extremely useful for you to learn in your life as well. So stay tuned, guys. I hope you enjoy. I'm not gonna lie, I had never watched the Beast Games until today. I knew the show was coming up. MrBeast's stuff is obviously crazy and interesting. Um, but I went on Amazon Prime and I bought the season today and I started watching and it was mind-blowing.

Season 1, season 2, season 1. Oh, okay. So you started from the beginning?

Yeah. And I flicked through all the episodes and it was like, I was very captivated. Like I didn't want to get up outta my desk and stop watching it. It was mind-blowing what you guys put together.

So even watching season 1, you get the sense of what we tried to do in season 1. We wanted the most, the biggest, $5 million grand prize, 1,000 people. The goal behind the show was like, let's break every record we could. Like, let's set out what has competition shows done. Let's just break all the records. Yeah.

What were the records like? What was like, because it seems like you guys blasted records out of the water.

Like it, Yeah, I think we hit 42. Don't quote me. I think it was 42 Guinness World Records from when we finished shooting the show, and it might have expanded after that as well. But I mean, it was everything from how many cameras we used, how many crew we had. Without giving you any spoilers— oh no, this isn't a spoiler. Ooh. But it was like, it was like a— there's a coin flip that happens. And so that was a record of like the most amount of money you can win from a coin flip. Really? It was, uh, largest non-cash prize, which was an island that we gave away. So I mean, everything that we can do, we like went through our whole list of tech and creative and we just, we hit every record. Yeah.

How many cameras did you guys use?

Oh, I think it was over 1,000. I think it was like 1,800. God, that was season 1. I just don't remember, but it was a lot.

So over 1,000 cameras, you have 1,000 contestants, you have $5 million in cash. Also, when you watch the film, everyone's standing on a platform that they can fall— how do you guys set all this up?

It's so crazy to me talking about Season 1 because we're knee deep in Season 2, we're like 7 or 8 episodes into Season 2. And I think Season 2 is so much better than Season 1.

Really?

Yeah, because everything was like— we took Season 1, we put it up on a board, And then we, like, tried to figure out how to make it better. So as you watch Season 1, and hopefully you're, like, blown away, and— like, there are things that you, like, are longing for as you're watching it. Yeah. And so, like, for example, we have 1,000 people, right? And by the way, we even started earlier than that. We started with 2,000 people. And we have a video called Episode 0. OK. And the point of this was to put it on the MrBeast main page. To kind of push people to watch the show.

Yeah.

Episode 0 for season 1 was how do we get to 1,000 people? So we started with 2,000 people. Yeah. In Las Vegas, in an arena, and we did 4 or 5 challenges, and it got us down to 1,000 people.

What does the planning look like to come— like, for example, when I watch the video, I'm gonna need a swig.

I mean, before we get going, yeah, I'm gonna need—

take a swig of the good stuff. It's water. Good water.

I gotta show, like, people aren't gonna believe it. You were drinking this, I was like, what is wrong?

Yeah, he walked in and I was like, hang on one second, and I just went—

I mean, there's nothing in here other than the word water that would make me believe that this is water.

I know, I have this in my golf cart, and on the course I'm always drinking it, and everyone's like, wow, you really like to drink when you play, huh? Well, if you think about it, water is a really important part of life. Why wouldn't you get the best?

Yeah, biggest resource.

You know? It is. It's the biggest part of your body. Yeah, the best water. Yeah, it's one thing that I would definitely splurge on.

Well, I'll bring it full circle. When I have to prep, I drink a lot of water. Yeah, so when I have to prep for things like Beast Game season 1, which— how I prep for it was— see, I brought us, I brought us back here. No, the— so I'll give you the kind of history of where I kind of fit into all of this as well, and I think that's important as we talk. So, so I had joined Jimmy— it's almost 4 years ago now. And every position I had with Jimmy was, uh, to try to— my role kind of became this guy who understood how Jimmy thought. And we connected. He and I became really good friends because I would tell him stories of like— I'm almost twice his age and I'm telling stories of how I've gone about my everyday life thinking the way I do. And it's very similar to the way this guy thinks. And we both have this passion for content. So what ended up happening was I learned very specifically Jimmy, and I learned his style. I learned exactly how he wanted. We worked really well as a team. And then over the course of about 3 and a half years, there was something in the company that just was, was either broken or we needed something that was more efficient. And so he would throw me at it. So I oversaw for a short period of time like the shorts division, and I restructured that, or I helped restructure that. Or then we were relaunching Feastables, and I helped do the content for Feastables. And then There was one moment where I was being brought into all the executives and I was being told like, "Hey, we think you're going to like just run production, be like the chief production officer." And I walk in and they go, "We got this role for you." And I was really excited and they go, "All right, what's the role?" And they go, "It's a chief of staff." And I was like, "Wait a minute, what?" And he was like, "You're going to be my chief of staff." So essentially I became Jimmy— after doing all of these like massive things for the company, I was like Jimmy's assistant.

Yeah.

And I was like almost operating and helping his life. And he and I became really close. It was a big challenge that lasted I think 40 days, and then I became the chief production officer. I kind of ran just every production or oversaw like how we were gonna do it efficiently, how we're gonna do it on time, you know, the budget had to be, you know, like honed in and stuff like that. So then to recap, over the course of 3.5 years, every really big video— I— you have to reverse engineer it. Any video I worked on ended up being a really big video, and we started recognizing that pattern as to why. But so looking back, every really big video, whether we went to— it was 50 YouTubers in a Box was our record-breaking video, or we we took over the pyramids for a couple of days, right? And so I would lead a lot of that stuff. And it's funny, in the beginning of the pyramids video, Jimmy goes, "I somehow got access to the pyramids." I'm like, "Somehow?" And my wife like grabs me by the arm when she watches. She goes, "You're somehow." I go, "I'm somehow." So I mean, it was such an honor to, I guess, work for, like, work with like such high-level people and do all this stuff, right? And to connect with Jimmy and Tyler, who was like my partner in crime over there, he was really focused a lot on the creative, you know, and the ideation. And, you know, our roles kind of blended a little bit, but he was really creative and I was really production and understanding how those two worlds kind of met.

What was your background in production before you joined?

So prior to that, it was— man, you opened up a lot there. Because I kind of left and was like, I'm done, like, with the business. Yeah, because I just felt like I got told too many times, we don't know what to do with you. Yeah, you know, so I'm gonna try to bring this all full circle for you. So I, I was living out in Los Angeles. I, you know, I was in production, I was creative, I was a director, I was a writer, I just did anything that was creating content. I really enjoyed that. And it got to the point where I I was being told too many times because of the mindset that I had, like, you're a lot. And I understood that and I accepted it. And I didn't really connect with people in the industry. Like, I couldn't look up to Spielberg, wasn't known as being this guy who was like, we're going to fucking win championships. And I was, anytime I got on set, I was like, let's do the best job we can. And let's, let's win. Let's win at this project. So at some point I just kind of like left and I moved back to Orlando with my family. And it was a great choice. We got closer to family and, you know, I found jobs where I was like the head of social media for, you know, like a radio company and a vacation company and an NFT company. And I wasn't really like really satisfied with what I was doing. And my wife came in and she goes, you got to get back into this. Like, you've got to do what you love. And she I mean, she's the reason I'm able to do all this. And Jimmy happened to tweet something that's like, you know, I'm looking for really passionate people. And so I got this MrBeast job just through the fact that I had left and I was like, all right, this is it. This is the last— like, I'm going to put everything in this. And I picked up and I moved to North Carolina. I was in a long-distance family. Wow. So, yeah. So background was I had done a lot of content. I knew I had only done content since 2004. I was doing digital online content. And so now it brings me all the way up to, okay, well, do it on the highest level.

So you moved to North Carolina without your family for— how long were you there for?

3 and a half years. Wow.

And were you just going back and forth?

As much as I could. But I mean, I knew that if I was going to be there, I knew like the first thing I thought of was like Apple and Google and all these big companies. I was like, there had to be a guy or a group of people that literally sacrificed everything in their life, right? I was like, I, I will make this the most important thing. And I'm not proud of a lot of that. It was all my choice. But yeah, I mean, you know, there was a lot of moments where my family was second. I missed my 10-year anniversary. I missed everybody's birthday. Yeah, you know, that was a choice. But I knew that putting everything into this job was what I felt the company needed. And I, I was gonna give— like, this was it for me. This was my last chance of saying I'm going to be as passionate as I've always been. And this was a company that accepted it, right? They were like, no, no, we love this. We love that you're putting everything into it.

It's kind of like the sky's the limit in that company.

Yeah, yeah, totally. But, you know, it's a division where the genre of creating content is different from any other— like, like, lawyers don't think like that, you know, or doctors have like a 9-to-5 or structured jobs, right? Doctors. And the— and again, I couldn't really connect with anybody in my industry. The only people I really connected to was like athletes. And we started recognizing the pattern of, you know, males and females who worked for the company who were athletes prior had this like really unique mindset.

Yeah.

Where they were like, yeah, whatever it takes, we need to win. Yeah.

So what was your first experience with MrBeast where you're like, holy shit, this is crazy?

Jimmy himself?

Yeah, just working at the company. Like, what was the first video you worked on where you're like, wow, how are we going to do this? Or like something that you didn't think you guys can pull off or didn't think was possible?

Yeah, yeah. So the first video I worked on was a video called Girls vs Boys where we had 100 boys vs 100 girls, 2 sets in the studio. It was awesome. It was crazy. It was awesome. But that wasn't it. It was the video after that where Jimmy was approaching 100 million subscribers and he was going to give away an island to his 100 millionth subscriber or one of his 100 million subscribers. I'm sorry. And so he had a bunch of contestants who were going to play on the island that they were going to win. To get to this island, I'm going to tell you my route. I had to fly to one location. Then we had to fly to another location on that same island. Then we had to fly a, like, small plane that only fit like 8 to 10 people to this other island. All right. Then we had to get in a boat and we had to go boat 45 minutes to the island, to the location.

And how many people did you guys—

100 people had to do that. And that was contestants only. That wasn't crew from all over the place, right? From all over. And that was— that wasn't crew. I mean, we had a massive amount of people who did that, and I remember like doing it, getting up as early as I needed, and you know, whatever, and just like being there with 100 people when it finally happened and being like, holy shit. Like this is everything I've dreamed of. That, you know, I feel like I had a superpower going into it because again, you gotta think, I'm in a long-distance family, my wife and kids are at home, my wife is now essentially a single mom, right? She doesn't have me or any support directly.

4 kids.

4 kids. And managing 4 completely different kids in different age ranges as well. And I had to make it worth it or else, like if I wasn't putting my, like kids, I had young kids at that time. It was like, you know, my kids were like 4, 5, you know, 4 and like 7. Yeah. Like I cuddle my kids to sleep. Yeah. And to not be able to do that, I was just gonna work harder than anybody else. I had to. I had to make it worth it for myself.

So I can't— like, I'm— I was supposed to go on a trip to Dubai for a week, and I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna leave the kids for a week. Yeah, that's— that's insanely challenging. And for people that aren't parents, they probably don't realize how complex the emotional connection is.

Yeah.

And trying to keep yourself in a high-energy state you know, while balancing all of that. It sounds like a— sounds like something that you were able to learn a lot from.

100%. I, you know, I will give credit to the company as well, and Jimmy. And, you know, I have to say, at the end of the day, it was my choice. Of course it was. Of course it was a choice that I made that I knew I was making. Yeah. That I look back at, and there's a lot of relationships that I had to sacrifice, friendships.

Yeah.

That I like literally sacrificed And, you know, yeah.

So you guys bring 100 contestants, all the crew to this remote island. I mean, you got to think just basic infrastructure, electricity. Do you need generators? Do you need, you know, housing? And what are you guys setting up, like tents? Did they have a building on the property? Like, how do you house 100 people plus, I mean, what, another 100 crew, something along those lines?

Like, yeah, I don't remember how many crew we had on that, but The logistics have to be— logistics were crazy. Now keep in mind, I had just joined the company. Yeah, so I wasn't in charge of any of this.

Yeah.

All right. What I was only in charge of was really learning and learning creative, and it was there that I kind of really got to know, you know, who ended up being like one of my closest friends in the world who taught me everything. Yeah. And But seeing it from that perspective, so I can't really talk to the logistics and how that was operated other than you have a team of really talented people who knew what they were doing. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so that, that's, that was my big holy shit moment of like, we, like, this is true blue sky zone. Yeah, we can do whatever we set our mind to because if we can't, the question is gonna be why not? Yeah, and then we're just gonna challenge it.

You know, I think back to, I had a job at a startup called Yik Yak about 10 years ago.

Yik Yak, it sounds so familiar.

It's like a social social media platform. It's like Twitter, but it's local and anonymous. So if you post something, you post a yak, everyone around you sees it. It was like the hottest thing in 2014. Actually, it was the fastest growing startup of 2014. But I joined the company because they had raised the Series A, and they raised $10 million, and they reached out to me because I was a concert promoter and I had these shows I did, and they wanted to like partner or whatever. Meanwhile, I had went bankrupt and didn't have the shows anymore, but I gave them advice. Yeah, I was like, this is what you guys should do. And basically when I joined the company, the, the mission was to create a college campus tour. So get a tour bus, wrap it. We got a mechanical bull and put a yak head on it. I had to get 8 people on the bus. I had to find 35 universities to stop at, 35 hotels that can house a bus, you know, background checks on everyone, promotional materials, like, and I had to get it all done in one month. And it was like extremely challenging to plan that whole thing and orchestrate it. And there were so many things that were kind of on the fly, like in the moment, you got to make decisions just left and right. And it was a big success. And looking back at it, it was, you know, great memories thinking back, but in the moment it was really hard. But when I look at the stuff that you guys are doing, like the Beast Games, I just think about how much orchestration goes into planning something like that.

Can I ask you something? When you were doing the 35-city tour, Did you— was that a passion you had? Did you care about what you were doing?

So when— so prior to Yik Yak, I had created a company called Electric Flurry, the world's largest foam party. You can still look it up online. We used to book arenas and had these giant foam cannons that shot foam 200 feet in the air. And, and but we figured out a way to go into new cities and sell out, you know, 2, 3, 4,000-person shows with like 2 months of promoting. And so I was like, you guys should use the same type of marketing tactics that I did for my shows for this app. And so for me, it was a passion because I had just went bankrupt and I was like down and out and this was like my opportunity. So I was like, I'm going to crush this thing. I was also single at the time. You know, it wasn't even— my kids weren't even a thought yet. And like, this was my thing. So I did have the passion behind making it.

Yeah. Success. The drive I think you had, you were driven by you know, maybe being— I won't call it rock bottom, um, although maybe— I mean, bankrupt, you might have.

I mean, I was at rock bottom. Well, for me, I mean, I had— when, you know, when I was 21, I made my first million dollars. I lost— and, you know, I grew up with a single mom, only child. Yeah, I lost it all. I got sued for $250 grand, and I had nothing to my name. And then I was sleeping on my mom's couch again.

Oh my God.

And like, it was like—

okay, so, so because of— because you, you hit such a high this was truly a rock bottom.

Yeah.

Okay.

And this was like my way out of the rock bottom.

Yeah. And this was also proving that you're not a one-hit wonder kind of deal.

You're proving a lot to yourself, to myself and to like my peers, like all the kids I went to school with, they're like, oh, Jared's a successful guy. And meanwhile I'm like, I'm like eating ramen noodles, you know, sleeping on a couch in a one-bedroom apartment with my mom. So I'm like, this whole facade, it was, it was mentally, emotionally, like, very challenging to get through.

Of course. So I think— and the reason I bring this up is I think care is the driving force for anything. If you don't have care, you find people in your company with care, and you're set. They have to care about what they do. A lot of times when I interview people, I don't look at their resume. I ask them what they want to do. Like, what is it you want to do? Can it— then can that fit my company? I want you to care about what you're doing.

Yeah, that passion goes a long way.

Such a long way. And, and then I ask, what makes you tick? What do you— what drives you? All the things that you're mentioning. Because if I know, like, you're driven by money, or you're driven by the story is another one. And it sounds like you were driven by a combination where the story was probably the biggest driving force. Yeah, holy shit, I was down, I was out. Plus you're probably thinking in your head, man, what a story. Yeah, I hit a million, I'm at rock bottom, now I'm gonna prove that I'm— that I know what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah. So we'll get back into logistics of things and we'll tie it all together because care, it means everything. Yeah, and what I've discovered over, you know, doing this line of work for 25 years is that the pattern that I see throughout my career— so not just at Beast, it was prior to Beast, it was at the 8 companies prior— the pattern that goes even beyond that care is most— first of all, everybody is a producer. Everybody is. You're producing something in life. The term producer is synonymous with creating content, for the most part. If you are just a producer who executes, you're a dime a dozen. Anybody can execute. Literally, I can hire anybody to just— and tell them, hey, go order 1,000 shirts from Amazon, and they'll go order 1,000 shirts from Amazon. It's a great example, and I'm gonna use that in logistics of how you get something done of scale.

Yep.

So let's use this as an example.

Real quick, before you get into that.

Go for it.

It's something I always say on this topic with like our C-level execs or people that are really important in the company is like, and I say this bluntly, I say this needs to be something that when you're taking a shit in the morning, you're thinking about, right? You're not just executing on your to-do list. No. It's like, this is the thing that you're passionate about. You're thinking about it in the moments when you're not working. Like that's one way to put it.

So, so there's 3 things that no matter what we say, I can guarantee they fall into one of 3 buckets of successful people. What you just described is care. You care when you're shitting, when you're in the shower, You like, you're, you're, you're almost obsessed, and that's like underneath the umbrella of care. Yeah. All right. So care is one. We'll get into the other two at some point. Yeah. So we have 1,000 t-shirts I need. Yeah, right. And I tell a producer to go to get 1,000 t-shirts for me. So here's what I would do if I was told 1,000. Very first thing I would do is go, why do I need 1,000 t-shirts? Like, what is the mechanic behind it, right? And what your story— what's so interesting is when you when you failed and then you're coming back up with Yik Yak, you really needed to prove the mechanic of what you did, because you even said, hey, this is similar to what I did with these events over here. It's a mechanic. Yeah. And so same thing, it's like, tell me why I need these t-shirts, because at the end of the day, we might not need t-shirts, right? And so what makes a really good producer is understanding the why behind everything. So I sit here and go, well, we need 1,000 t-shirts. Because we're gonna get a crowd of people and I need— there's gonna be one person with a red t-shirt, and so I need that one person with the red t-shirt to stand out. Well, holy shit, I might have ordered 1,000 red t-shirts. Yeah, so first of all, I need to know the info. Now, second of all, now I understand what we're trying to accomplish creatively. Yeah, we don't need t-shirts to accomplish that. We need that one person to stand out, right? That's the mechanic of what I'm trying to solve, right? So I look up 1,000 t-shirts, I get a deal for $5 a shirt. That's $5,000. Right. However, what if everybody was wearing whatever they wanted? I saved the 5 grand. Yeah. And instead that one person who needs to stand out, we get them a funny hat and we focus on the one. Yeah. So now I come back to you and I say, hey, you asked for 1,000 t-shirts. Here's the cheapest I can get 1,000 t-shirts. Here's what I can get with every color. Also, here's the physical t-shirt so you can feel it and hold it and see it. Here's what it looks like on camera. Yeah. And here's now a bunch of options that won't cost 5 grand. These options cost anywhere from $10 to $100 and we can save $4,900. $900. Yeah, that to me is a psychotic way of doing one little task, and that sets you apart from everybody else in the world.

Yeah, if you have an organization of people working like that, you can build something world-changing.

Crazy.

Though I actually love how you just explained that, because I look for those words oftentimes when I'm leading my company or mentoring people in the business. It's like, you know, when you're taking a shit in the morning, you got to be thinking about this thing, and then it's like And I'm going to actually use this moving forward. But the way I articulate things is like, you know, over— communicate more than you think you need to with people. Because if everyone really understands what we're looking to do and we're aligned, then you can tap into the flow state. You could tap into your intuition. You can tap into something that if you're just executing on tasks, you're never even going to get near that flow state or that creative genius you have.

Thing number 2. So 1 was care. 2 is honest information. You have to have a level, and honest information can come with humbleness, could maybe be the umbrella, but the actual idea of information that is up to date, that is honest. I'll give you another story about this because we talk about logistics of how you do something this big. But by the time we're done with these three, yeah, it spells itself out. Now when I talk to it, you'll be like, oh, I get it.

Yeah, you have already following.

Okay, so honest information is this. This is a wild one. I love this kid to death, and I hope he sees this, but he doesn't think it's him, but it was him. So I once was waiting for a car. We needed a car, we were going on location, and I called the person who was in the car. I said, "Where are you? How far are you away?" And he said, "5 minutes." I said, "Great, 5 minutes?" He goes, "5 minutes." I said, "Great." 5 minutes goes by, he's not there, and we're ready to go. We're like raring to go, right? Call him back up. I was like, hey man, it's been 5 minutes. He's like, well, I'm almost there. I said, okay. I said, is it in your GPS? No. Why not? Well, I know where I'm going. Okay, that makes sense. But you told me 5 minutes. Can you put it in your GPS and tell me accurately how much time?

Yeah.

And he did it and he goes, 7 minutes. And I went, perfect, thank you. So now the original 5 minutes was an actual 12 minutes. Okay. In the, in the scheme of things, it doesn't matter. All right. No reason to get upset by this. 5 minutes, 12 minutes, who gives a shit? Yeah. But if you get into the habit of starting to talk in a way that is real and honest, when it comes to the bigger things, it's gonna follow. So I have a group of people I work really close with, or I did when I was over at and working with Beast, and we just, we had different, like, we had different lies. Like, if you lied about something like that, we would call it out with— I don't want to mention the person's name, but that would be a blank lie. Yeah, like a person, like a Tim lie. Yeah, right, gotcha. And we'd say, "Oh man, that's a Tim lie, that's a Tim lie, 'cause you said 5 minutes but it was 7." So what we started doing was, naturally we'd be like, "Hey man, I'm about 7 minutes 30 seconds away." And then I hit a light and I call back, I'm like, "Hey dude, I know I said 7:30, it's been 4, you gotta tack on an additional 2:15," right? Whatever it is. And again, it's not a big deal. It's stupid little timing things, but then when it came to, Hey, we can't get that location on this day, but we can do this, this, this. And I start talking through logistics with people. They believe me, right? They trust me, right? Because I'm to the second of, you know, when I'm going to show up. Accurate information, honest information. And it trains the brain into just speaking truthful stuff because 99% of what people say is made up by either the person or some— or somebody else. And a follow-up story is, because I want to hear your thoughts of this, is if I'm working with a producer and they say, hey man, we can't get the location this weekend, and I go, well, why not? He goes, well, I don't know, the guy just said no. And I was like, well, hold on, like, we have to, we have to understand. And you end up following up and he goes, well, we can't do it because the guy isn't open on the weekend, so we can't get the location over the weekend. Yeah. And I go, okay, well, what if we paid the guy $50 more? Yeah. And like, $100. Oh, no problem. It's like, of course, of course he'll come out. And I was like, so a normal person would go, hey man, I trust you and totally good. But so let's try to find another solution. Maybe we shoot on Monday, maybe we find a different location. But that, all of that costs money. If I push to Monday, that just cost me $20 grand.

Yeah.

Rather than $100 to work on the weekend. Yeah. And that's completely more efficient.

Yeah.

Honest information, getting the right information, very important.

These are powerful things at an organizational scale, which leads into how do you build the logistics of something that big. Yeah, but this is really important stuff because it's like, okay, and maybe in like 20 years from now we're going to have, you know, Neuralinks where, you know, people can work together like exponentially more efficiently.

Yeah.

But today all those micro efficiencies make a huge difference at scale.

Yep.

A huge difference to produce one episode, a year of episodes, a decade of episodes as they start to get bigger. All those things make a huge difference. It's really interesting. And the honest info part, I'm curious, do you think it's because people want to please you in the moment and they say 5 instead of 12 because they want you to feel better in that moment?

Of course. Of course. And it's all education. Being a manager is not just taking on the hardest parts of a project, but it's also educating your team to understand how you want to think through things.

Yeah.

And by the way, it's not just, well, Klitzner wants this specific thing.

It's—

no, I try to teach people, like, I'm just speaking in logic. It's why I can solve— in my opinion, I can solve almost any issue. Yeah. Is I might not know about the issue, but I'm using the base idea of what I've discovered as a very logical process and way of thinking to solve anything.

And the second thing you said, like, really, you know, the guy can't show up. Oh, can I pay him $50? That as a concept is also extremely powerful.

Yeah.

It's like, it's not like, oh, don't take no for an answer, but it's don't take like, like actually explore how to make something happen before you take no for an answer. Like I'll use the Yik Yak tour for example. When I, you know, when I was running the tour, if I had operated in the way when people said no and I just like, we never would have happened. I mean, there was every single day, there was many things that you had to continue to press and try and think and try. And you can solve like 9 out of 10 problems can be solved relatively easily. Yep. But I think it comes from having the passion and the care. Yeah. You take no for an answer if you don't really care. But if you really want something, your subconscious is going to guide you how to figure it out.

Let's take it a step further. You just said we're going to have so many issues, you know, and we're going to solve all these problems. So now let's reverse engineer that concept. Well, how do you get ahead of all of that? And the answer is, is that And again, you know, I just need to say, like, this is 25 years of doing this, right? This is being raised by my parents, my father, who's a lawyer, my dad, who is— my dad, who's a lawyer, my mom, who's like the sweetest, most personable person in the world. And I'm like a 6, 7-year-old watching my parents operate and just being a kid who, like, absorbed all of this shit. What I discovered is it's not about solving a problem. If I'm given a problem, first of all, that's a whole issue. Like, I don't want you to give me a problem. Give me like a couple of solutions. Give me your thoughts. But let's just say I was handed a problem. I always tell the people I work with, if I ask you a question or I need to know info about something, the, the worst answer you can give is, let me go find out from blank, from a vendor. Like, I want you to be an expert at that, right? I don't know shit about turf or carpet before I, before I was doing my job. Now I'm a carpet expert, right? Because I just dove into it. I understand how carpet works, how it works with lights and everything.

Which, by the way, the difference between a non-carpet expert and a carpet expert is like 12 minutes of conversation.

That's it, man. It's just more conversation. It's doing that extra 30 minutes of— and by the way, some business owners are like, hey, this is my time. Great, can I pay you $250 for an hour? It is so valuable to have information. To me, information is the biggest resource you can have, right? And there's a— this maybe is an off-camera thing, but there's, there's a level of me that at one point in my life was so addicted to information it actually became a problem. Because I didn't know how to like hone in information in a way that this is the important thing you need to know and this is not, right? Because that's important as well. So now you get all the information about a situation, forget a problem, you can solve any problem here. So it's not just about, hey, how do we solve this problem about getting a location over the weekend? Learn about that guy, learn about the location, right? Because yes, maybe we solve this by getting it over the weekends, and then next thing you know, there's no AC or there's some other problem problem. Become an expert at that location. You can solve any problem.

And then I'll take it a step further on the information stuff. Like one thing that I see in my company often is that we'll set up basically like databases that automatically pull in information. Problem with that is no one's there. Like I said, I'd rather have one human being or 5 human beings each hand filling in information because then they're looking at it, they're thinking about it, and if there's a problem, they're either solving it or looking into what that problem is. So by the time I look at the information, yeah, when I have a question, the answer's already there or it'll be served to me with a, oh, by the way, this day there was this problem and this is why. But automatic information, like people need to consume it as a team.

Yeah.

I'm curious, how do you guys instill these things you're saying? Yeah, they're very simple, but they're very powerful for someone.

They're very complicated. It's—

well, the, the, the concepts are simple.

Hold on, hold on. You're right. They're very simple. Simple. What I meant by that was they're very complicated to understand.

Right.

Well, and to—

they're easier to understand for someone like me because, you know, we have over 200 people in our organization and we've grown. You know, this stuff really speaks to me. I'm curious, though, do you guys intentionally instill these types of concepts into the culture of the company? Is this something that is talked about openly, or is this stuff that you've just kind of learned and you're sharing now?

Yeah, well, let me be clear. So I'm no longer with The Beast Company.

Yeah.

So I think you're referencing when I was there, but I'd rather talk to how I do it with my own companies because I have, I have my own companies. And the answer is yeah. You know, I just hired 2 people for a company that I started and I told these 2 people, I said, part of your job, like a majority of your job, is just to get trained. Like I'm going to pay you to educate you. Yeah, because almost everybody in the world who is now an adult getting out into the real world, they were taught a certain way to count. All right. 1 through 10, we all know, or 1 through 5, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I'm now coming in going, hey, 1, 2, 4, 3, 5 is actually more efficient. People cannot understand that. It doesn't make sense because since I was a kid, I was told no 50 different times for 50 different ways. And I'm trying to tell you now, get back into your kid mode. Yeah, let's relearn how to do— it's like concepts and how to do things and start from scratch. It's very, very complicated for somebody to take a concept, believe it, and then go execute it. Yeah, you know, so, you know, when you're, when you're producing something— and I can talk to my work within the company— so when producing something like Beast Games, first of all, we have an incredible amount of people and high-level people But understand that, simply put, you have 200 people that work for your company. That's 200 thoughts and ideas. Yeah. In order to be successful, you really have to have one, right? 200 people can follow, right? Or else you're gonna have— you know, I always say if one person reacts or says a certain thing, they stand for 200 different ideas if you have 200 people.

Mm-hmm.

So you have to, you know, almost like have— it's hard because you want people to feel the freedom of creativity and everything, but you still have to have a line that goes like We need to operate in a way that's efficient, and that comes directly from the top down. Yeah, you know, and whatever that top down is, it could be wrong. Yeah, but it needs to be unified across the board for sure. So when doing something like Beast Games or Beast Games Season 2, which is more, more recent, and I had a different role in Season 2, I was the person who got to make, you know, 10,000 decisions over the course of the season. So when you do that, it does have to come with— first of all, it comes with a lot of pressure. It comes with a lot of decision-making. You have to keep to a pretty consistent way of going about solving something and in real time training people to come back with different answers. So if somebody goes, you know, I'm thinking of an actual problem and logistically how to solve something that's so massive is— I'll try to think in Season 1. Season 1, there's a great example of something that I— again, we have a lot of producers, but something specifically I worked on. In Season 1, Episode 1, "Have You Seen People Drop Yet?" Yeah. Have you seen the shot where it goes and the drone goes and it just drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, drop?

Yeah, I just watched that scene.

It's an iconic shot that we've learned is iconic because once it's released, like, it's been clipped and people talk about it. So that was an idea from Tyler, who again, God, I miss that kid. But it's an idea from Tyler. He goes, I just have this vision, I want to see it just like that. All right, the complications behind doing that and the nos from every different department— the only way to turn something like this is to understand the technology, right? So rather than go and try to execute something like this— again, this all logistics all comes back to understanding how the operation works and not just going, hey, I just trust you because you said you can do it. Well, hold on, they probably could do it, but that's a different way of thinking. Does that fit with the rest of the architecture of the building? Because if it doesn't, something's gonna break around here.

Yeah.

So an example like this where we want this shot, it's learning how the safety works. It's learning how the trapdoors open. You know, it's literally walking to the human being who hits a button and goes, show me how you hit the button. Yeah, because you would think it's this, and they go, well, my mouse goes over here, and I, and I was like, all right, well, we want real time. Like, all of this makes a difference. Once you figure out all the information, you come up with a solution that every department can understand. Yeah, because if not, it's gonna get a no here, maybe here, a no there, and it's a general no. The moment you understand it, you're able to, with one thought, go, here's how we accomplish this. Yeah, we need enough safety people around. Safety said that they can cover 3, whatever the math was, I don't remember. And then everybody goes, yeah, that fits with me, fits with me. Anybody have a problem? And somebody goes, um, how's the lighting gonna work? All right, we'll worry about that later. We've got this, right? And then lo and behold, you have that shot.

Let me ask you a couple questions. So you were chief producer?

Chief production officer for Beats.

For season 2?

So I, so for the company, yeah, I was the chief production officer. That was my last title before I then transitioned into— like, Jimmy, remember Jimmy was putting me in places that kind of needed help. Season 1 kind of needed that help. I wasn't there from the beginning. At the end of season 1, he said, why don't you just handle all of season 2 marketing? Like every decision.

Perfect. Yeah, I'm asking—

showrunner, create, co-creator.

I'm gonna ask one more question because I'm leading to another question.

Yeah.

How many people were reporting to you? Kind of at the peak? How many, like, how many individuals were working under you, essentially?

I don't know the answer. I know time. I know that. I know that all questions would bubble up to where, you know, let's say hundreds of people, like between all the people working on the show. I mean, I mean, there was, there was over 1,000 people working on the show.

Okay. So my question for you is, with all these moving parts, with all these different people, How did you get to a point where all the right information bubbled up to you? Like, what kind of reporting? How do you do that? Right? Because there's so many different things to think about, so many different metrics, so many different, you know, tasks on to-do lists that need to be done for another thing to be done. Yep. How were you able to think about the big picture and just walk me through that? Like when you'd wake up in the morning and you, you know, you got to go to work essentially.

Yeah.

What information are you consuming, and how did you consume it in a way that was effectively—

it's two things. It's prioritization, and it's understanding that problems are gonna happen.

Yeah.

And once I accepted both of those, like, I need to constantly prioritize the most important things, the minimum that we could— we need to do in order to get the shot or the, the, you know, episode or whatever. And then it's the— so it's prioritization, and then it's understanding that as we go on throughout the day, It is constant problem solving. So, you know, there's never a sit back, hands behind the head, let's like enjoy ourselves while we watch it. It's let me be constantly alert at a problem that might come up at any given moment because we missed something or something wasn't thought through logically. And there were plenty of times that that happened. And then in the moment it's a headset going, hey, we're producing in real time.

Yeah.

It's, by the way, it's the most important thing for me. Is a producer who can think on their feet and not just produce and go, great, executed, I'm off. Yeah, it's like, great, executed, I'm on standby because chances are I've got to assume something here is off. Yeah, and I have every option that these guys will need to produce this in real-time content.

Yeah, how do you keep yourself organized with all this stuff going on?

Memorization. We discovered this early on. Okay, I love— I saw you have a whiteboard in your office. I love that. Yeah. I write a ton of things on whiteboards. I erase them, I take pictures, write more, more stuff, and then it's really retaining it to a way where if a problem comes to me and I already wrote it down somewhere, I already know how to solve it.

Okay.

Because I keep a principle of how to solve something based off of basic logic. Okay. So therefore I don't need to memorize every solution when the problem comes back, because now it's higher on the priority list, which is why we're saying it's prioritizing and then constantly dealing with issues. Well, now an issue that was a low priority here is now top of my priority list because it just popped up. I go, okay, how would I solve that today? And I think of it and they go, oh yeah, yeah, that's what we talked about a month ago. And I go, great, let's do that. Yeah, but memorization is, is such a— it's such a hard thing to say it's a requirement. I've just noticed that like when we worked as a team, things were changing so often. If you constantly sent out like the new report of how we're gonna do things, It made it really difficult to execute and pivot and do all of this stuff.

Yeah.

So now let me pause, because when you have a bigger company, saying something like that is incredibly dangerous to actually implement into a company.

Yeah.

It's why we have paper trails. It's why we— well, now this goes into another concept, which is you have to be an individual who takes ownership when there's a mistake, period. If there's a mistake, that means it wasn't 100% done properly. Meaning if 1% is off and you did 99% right, look at that 1% and go, what could I have done different? Don't put your— don't throw your team under the bus.

Yeah.

And just go, hey, let's try to solve this here. My fault. I could have made one extra phone call to double-check something I didn't. If you do that, nobody is afraid to not keep this massive paper trail. The— God, my emails. Even today, my emails, I can't keep up with it. Yeah. So I just sit here and go, if you're not communicating with me with honest information in my ear or in person, yeah, we can't consider that communication right now, right?

You know, the topic that you're talking about, we call radical accountability.

Okay.

It's like one of our company pillars.

I love it.

It's like not being accountable only serves your ego.

Yeah.

But being radically accountable always serves you no matter what the situation is.

Yeah.

But why, why, why aren't people radically accountable because people's egos get in the way. They want to be, oh, it wasn't me, or they want to feel better about themselves.

I think there's also fear there.

Yeah, if I admit to a mistake, I'm gonna get fired, which is in my— the way I use the term ego, that's your, you know, your personality that feels like it's gonna get a hit.

But if you—

again, like, these things are powerful across an organization. If you can implement radical accountability into every person in the organization, yeah, you're gonna get things done exponentially more effectively and efficiently than by not instilling that.

Yeah, of course. Well, I also think that these concepts that we're talking about and relating with, like, we both have similarities in how, you know, we will implement these into a business. If a business just tries to implement these tools, it's so dangerous if they don't understand or they don't hold these tools and keep up with them and make sure that they're not breaking your company. You're gonna break your company. You need a human being who can come in who understands how to do this And that might be you who has to like take that accountability and make sure that you're not just throwing out a concept like, hey, we're, we're going to have radical accountability. And then when somebody goes, well, that wasn't me, there needs to be a human being that goes, hey, come here for a sec. Yeah, totally. Okay.

Yeah.

I want to teach you. You're not going to get fired.

Yeah.

You know, don't worry about your ego. Let's move forward from it. If you don't have that, you know, it becomes dangerous. Of course. Of course.

So random question, how do you guys find $5 million in cash to stack up on a pyramid?

Yeah. So when I was working there, a big thing that was part of the brand, which Jimmy was very open with, is the idea behind this is real money. It's not just a visual. You can smell the money. You have contestants walking through touching actual money, right? Logistically, part of my job is making sure nobody gets killed. Because we have $5 million sitting on set, right? And, you know, it's, it's the ultimate challenge with having somebody as great as Jimmy is who now is going to be at a location. Everybody wants to go to that location. So doxxing Jimmy, where Jimmy's at, is dangerous for a production. You have to take that into consideration, right? Security is incredibly important. The way to go about something like that would be making sure that you're walking in the shoes of anybody who will be on set or be off set or discover that there's money there. Yeah. Right? And then it's really logistics behind it. You can't— and also other countries. If we go to another country and we want to bring 100,000, like, you know, that's a tough thing. And part of my job was to understand how we do it, because we're always told no. Yeah, because no is the easy answer, which is why doing something that is difficult to do has such an impact. Yeah. But how do you guys even—

how do you even source $5 million in cash? Is it a phone call to the bank? Is it—

yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of it's a phone call to the bank. The funnier question is like, we got the— or when I was working at Beast, we had this guy who was literally in charge of the money. Like he was our money— he was the money man. I think we even like credited him in the credits as Money Man, like his middle name Money Man. And his job— like, he knew everything. I knew that I can call him and go, how much— how much density does this amount of money cover? How much weight is this?

Yeah.

So the logistics go far beyond like, how do we execute this? Again, we pull back and go, okay, well, you know, is this even gonna accomplish what we're looking for? Also, crumple the money. Yeah, we have to crumple it. That's gonna make it look good. It takes 3 seconds to crumple a bill. Yeah, I know that. That's crazy.

Million seconds.

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy, but then you start doing the math and you can figure out, you know, it's, it's tens of thousands of dollars to crumple dollars depending on how much you need, and labor and service and, you know, hands getting cramped up and having to sub people out. It's crazy. But yes, there's a whole world, because that is such an essential part to, to the brand at that time that, you know, there's so many logistics that go behind it. So it's, it's sourcing by calling, you know, of course.

Yeah. But then how are you guys protecting the location? I mean, you have 1,000 people working on this set. Everyone knows other people. How are you making sure people aren't just showing up? Is it a crazy security operation?

Like, security is important for, I think, for any set. Security is going to be important when you're dealing with a lot of people. Yeah, you have to think through— again, you have to— okay, I did a video. I'm gonna tell you this, and this will kind of help why you have to think through things. But yes, short answer is yes, of course you have to think through everything, and security's a massive part of all of this. I did— I was part of a video where I led called Vacations. So we went to vacations that cost $1 all the way up to vacation that cost $250,000.

I think I've seen that video.

Okay, we had 2 weeks to do it. Okay, 2 weeks. So we found out about that video—

2 weeks to execute on that whole video?

So we found out about the video while we were filming a video called Ages 1 Through 100 Compete for $250,000. It was the first iteration of the Ages 1 Through 100 series.

Yeah.

And I was the lead at that point. I was like a lead of a team. We had multiple teams, and it just fell that in order for us to hit— like, we were waiting for our next video, and then during that we found out from the data team or whatever that this was the video. It's called Vacations. We're gonna stay— we're gonna do a vacation for a dollar, stair-step it all the way up to $250 grand, right? And we have to shoot this thing in about 2 weeks. And we're filming another video. So the team— we're done with the ages 1 through 100. It was like a, you know, 6-7 day shoot. Damn it. Sorry, kids. Sorry, parents. So We filmed that video. At the end of it, everybody takes a rest day, rest 2 days, whatever it was. We get back in the office, we have no idea what the creative is. And my thing was always as a producer, because I came into the company as a creative underneath Tyler, who taught me for 8 months, taught me everything about creative, and then I moved over to production. So I thought with the creative brain. Yeah, so we don't have creative. So the answer isn't let's wait to execute. The answer is, hey, We're all creatives now. Yeah. So we get there 2 days later. I said, all right, I want to list everybody. Let's draw on a list of places that we would want to go on vacation. Hawaii. Let's, let's do countries. Japan was up there. Switzerland was up there. France. Paris. I said, all right, we've got all the lists here. You two, you're going to Paris. You're going to Switzerland. You're— and they just went. They booked a flight and they went. And I said, call me when you're there. Let's work on it. And Switzerland's the best because the dude who I just talked to recently, he, he went to Switzerland. He went to a random location in Switzerland. He produced this, this literal village, like ice igloo village we would have to ourselves. And you can do all the ice vacations. And then when we pitched it, it was like, no, we feel like we need something with the Sidemen. And logistically, the Sidemen are gonna come in, they can't can't do that because the flights don't match up. So we've got to now go to Geneva. So the kid gets on a train literally at 6 in the morning, goes to Geneva, produces something in Geneva. Monster. Yeah, unbelievable producer. I'm gonna sidestep for a sec because I talked to him and I said— he goes, you know, somebody asked me the other day what it was like to work with you, and I said it was a fucking nightmare. And I went, what? Why? And he goes, you just have a benchmark of the highest content ever, and you just will not let up. If I told you we couldn't, You dug, and then we figured out we could. And I said, how's the content working under me compared to others? He goes, well, it was better, but like still a nightmare. And I said, okay, well, I don't feel as bad. Was there anything I can do? And then we, you know, had a good laugh. But he was a monster. He ends up producing this thing with, you know, with the team in Geneva. So, all right, so we're doing this whole video and we're in Mexico, and I get to a resort and I talked to their security team. I said, hey, listen, Listen, we got this guy. His name's Jimmy, MrBeast. He's going to be here. And they're like, we are exclusive. You can't even get in through the gate if you don't have a reservation. Don't worry about it. We have J.Lo comes here. We had Oprah's been here. All these people are other people who are just here, guests. Leave our celebrities alone. I said, with all due respect, I said, people are going to think Jimmy's walking around with $10K. Like, that's the— that for me, from an outsider, I go, Yeah, he gives away money. He's really gracious.

Yeah.

Or you have parents who want to go up to him and say, thank you, you've been incredible, great inspiration. You have people who are just fans, kids, and they go, well, we have no kids. I said, I'm just telling you, it may interrupt our production. Let's just have another plan. And they were hesitant, but then they go, okay, well, Plan B, this is this. Well, lo and behold, Jimmy shows up and And he just has that aura about him. Like, of course people are walking up to him and interrupting the set. We're trying to like, or interrupting our shooting, trying to figure it out. And Jimmy's so nice. He'll always take a picture when he can, you know, but when we're filming, it's kind of like, ah, but I'm filming. And I was like, I don't want to put him in that position. So to pull back, how do you now stop 1,000 people from coming? It's having the knowledge. That 10,000 people are gonna show up, because it's happened before and you can, you can see it online. And once you think of that, you no longer walk on a set and go, great, I've accomplished this set, this is gonna be a great video. I walk on set as Jimmy, I walk on set as a contestant, I walk on set as Tyler, the, you know, our creative. I walk on set as a person off the street. Yeah, I try to break everything. Yeah, and when you do that and you put yourself in those people's positions, you pull back, you've gained a lot more information, and you go, okay, all right, that fence right there is too open. If 100 people showed up at that fence, they could probably climb it. Yeah, that might be a problem. And it's overprotecting your set and making sure you're thinking through everything. Because when we film, we're filming in real time. We're not calling cut like Jimmy is. In real time, we are doing this thing.

Yeah.

So 10,000 people show up, we kind of, we kind of got to figure that out in real time. Yeah, we can't just stop. Like, we have a competition going on, we can't just stop. Yeah, so it's just thinking through every little thing and getting ahead of it and taking money. And that's a great investment because if 10,000 people show up and we have to push a day, that might cost me, you know, I don't know, that might cost me $100 grand. But if I put a $15,000 in place stop for that and nobody shows up, it's insurance policy. It's insurance.

Yeah. How do you guys building these crazy sets? Like, for example, the thing that the people fall down through.

Yeah.

On, you know, someone could push a button and a thousand different people can fall through this thing.

Yeah.

Like, where they fall safely. Like, is someone building this stuff from scratch?

And you're fucking with my brain because you're mentioning things and I'm thinking of like, that person does that, that person, that And it almost— I want to pull back and go, what the, the sign of a really good leader, in my opinion, is you know exactly who to turn to who has the answers for every little problem you have. So as you're talking about this, it's like, how do we develop a trapdoor? Yeah, you got to become a trapdoor expert. We go out to vendors who've built one trapdoor, and then we understand, hey man, you're gonna have to build 1,000. Here's your timeline. Can we do it? Why not? Well, what piece can we remove that doesn't affect safety that, that's maybe more of an aesthetic, but that cuts weeks off of our time. And it's, it's problem solving that. All right, then you have the technology side, which I'm obsessed with. And God, I'm gonna give a shout out, the guy's name's Simon. He owns this company. He's brilliant, and he just will figure shit out. And he does the tech. So you hook everything up into his computers, and now he has control and can automate, you know, like a computer system with like mechanical stuff in front of you, like robotics. And he can now program this thing to now communicate with all of, all of the trapdoors. Well, then you have to understand the science behind everything— a drop, an opening, how far you're going to go, what safety precaution. You have to test it. Testing is going to be the biggest thing here. But everything I'm talking about here, you have to do, and you can't think that somebody is asking you to do it. And that's the third bucket, you know. So we have now— do a little recap here— we have care, we have honest information, and now we have integrity.

Yeah.

And integrity defined by when nobody is watching, are you doing the work you need to do?

Yeah.

And I always have this thing that like a good narcissist can't get caught because you can't tell the narcissist what they were thinking, and they can just— they can claim, well, well, I didn't know that. I'm gonna give one example because I love giving these examples. Is if you're on a beach and you walk and some guy— and you walk by like a clean beach, you walk by a piece of trash, you pass it, you're like 2, 3 feet ahead, and a guy stops you and goes, hey Jared— or he doesn't know your name, that's creepy— but he goes, hey man, you walked by that trash. The normal thing a normal person would do is go, oh my god, I'm so sorry, I didn't see it, and you'd pick it up and throw it out.

Yeah.

The real answer is, you know what, I I saw the trash, I didn't want to pick it up, it was too much effort, but since you called me out, I'm gonna pick it up. The integrity side of you picks up the trash, throws it out, that guy turns, never sees the trash, nobody in the world saw you do it, and you don't go, hey, I just picked up trash. You just move on because that was the thing you needed to do in the moment, right? So back to your question. Tell me your question again. Well, I ramble a lot.

No, I mean, this is something so interesting because there's so much to it. I was just curious, how do you build these sets and choreograph every— yeah, and set it up so that you can do it in real time? And actually, you know, it's just— there's so much preparation.

It comes down to preparation and testing, and that goes with any business, any job, any business you have in the world. You have to test. Yeah, don't just wing something for the first time when it actually matters. Yeah, spend the— most people don't want to spend the money, and it goes, you know, we can bring up the Iron Triangle of time, money, you know, um, uh, quality. But the truth is you can, you can get all 3. You just need to, you need to put in more time.

But like when you think about Beast Games, you're starting with 1,000 contestants and you're supposed to have 10 episodes and it's going to get down to 1 winner.

Yeah.

There's so many little details. For example, in the game where they have to stack the blocks.

Yeah. Right.

It's like, well, what happened if 999 people did it right? You didn't lose any people. Yeah. We're like the, the perfect amount How do you know how many people are gonna fail something?

Yeah, this was a— so first of all, it goes far beyond that because, you know, again, and I'll always say part of my job because I can talk to my job. So, so there's— it's not just how can we predict it. There's a whole group of people dedicated to game mechanics and the legalities behind— not game mechanics, the legalities behind games. We have a compliance team. Yeah. And lawyers who are on standby going Hold on, because I'm very much black and white as well. Okay, if 1,000 people fail, or let's say 999 people fail this challenge, and you have 1 person succeed, 1 person wins this game, the game's over. And we go, yeah. And they go, well, you can't do that. We need 10 episodes.

Yeah.

And we go, okay, well, what if we had 1,000 people on standby? And if that happens, we just bring in those 1,000. Yeah, great. That's a great solve. Do you have 1,000 people? Well, no, but you just admitted like, we can do this. We now need to figure it out. Yeah, so it's really twofold. There are things in the nature of competition shows that have things called pocket rules, like rules that are there that don't necessarily need to be said, but that need to be there as a safety just in case something happens. Yeah, and then there's intuition. And if you can combine the two, you won't have to worry about dipping into any sort of like side rules because you guessed properly. Right. Pisses me off. I've never seen Tyler miss on this. Yeah. He just is so brilliant at understanding how a mass amount of people are going to perform that he almost hits it on the head where he'll say, all right, well, we'll have all these pocket rules. Klitzner, you take care of that. And I'm like, all right. If this happens, this happens, this, this, this, this, write it down. We're good. And Tyler will go, I think we're only going to get rid of 200 people here. And lo and behold, or 237, and it'll be like 234. I'm like, how the hell do you know that?

Like, for the people listening that haven't seen this, there's a moment in Beast Games where you have to stack a certain number of different shaped and colored blocks on top of one red block. And if you, if it falls over, you get eliminated. It's like, how do you determine how many blocks to stack up? It's like if you said, hey Jared, if you could do this, I'll give you $10 million. There's no way I'm knocking over those blocks.

Yeah, of course.

But 200 and something people knocked over the blocks.

Yeah, pressure.

Who's determining the number of blocks and the, like, the specifics?

So if you haven't seen Beast Games, it's a great example. Basically you have to set up, we'll call it 10, I think it was 10, set up 10 blocks and And it's on one base block set up. And if it falls over at the end of time, at the end of the time limit, you're eliminated.

That's another element, time limit. It's like so many elements.

The pressure.

Yeah.

I'm going to bring it up to season 2. Little spoiler for you. So in episode 2, we do a giant version of this. OK. All right. 6-foot blocks. All right. They're massive. Yeah. OK. And you have to build it. I think it's like 40 or 50 feet in the air and there's a green flag and you have to capture the green flag and you're on a team. So your team has to like put together these massive blocks. You have to climb this structure, grab onto the green, and the losing team completely went home.

Wow.

Okay. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Cause I was very, very heavily into the, um, part of my job was to do the testing of this Yeah, we tested this over and over and over and over, and there's video of testing and testing and testing. And that's the nature of doing something like this, is you test it.

Yeah.

And so after you test it, every test doesn't go well. I try to break it. Hey, I'm coming in. All right. Hey, this team, you can only use those blocks over there. Those blocks didn't work. Great. Let's implement these blocks. Safety's there. How do we keep it safe? Block falls. We don't want— we don't want to crush somebody. You test it so many times to where you break it, to where you also have a consistent answer, to where at some point I took a team in and I said, hey, here's how you solve it, here's how you do this. Did it in 45 minutes. Yeah, on the show it took 4+ hours, whatever the time ended up being. Yeah, but we already knew it was able to be done. We knew every inch of how long it would take, why it would take this. Now we expected it to take 45 minutes because we expected people to figure it out, right? They didn't figure out the things that we knew was consistent in solving this, right? Which really anybody can look at, and any architect would go, well, you had multiple architects building a structure, and at some point it's gonna keep breaking. One architect with one voice building a structure, you would have been able to do it pretty simply, right? So at the end of all of this, you have, you have a, you have these structures that are built. It's, it's 4+ hours But now what? Because it's over 4 hours, the game's got to end. And if they're not figuring it out, so of course we implement like different ways that first of all, the best version is we're doing this till somebody wins, right? And that's the nature of what, you know, I did for the company was follow the brand, which was this could take 3 days of you building and you're sleeping on the floor. Yeah, but the whole idea behind the show is anything can happen. We built this sandbox and so now you can come out as a viewer watch this thing and go, holy shit, anything can happen in this game.

Right.

Like, that's incredible.

Yeah.

You know, there's real stakes there. Yeah.

So you guys designed these giant blocks. Yeah. How many people were on each team for that one?

I think we had 25. This is season 2. Yeah. So I think we had 25.

And how many teams were there in that?

Uh, just 2. And season 2, we started with 200 players. At this point, there's 100 players.

Gotcha.

And I think there's 50 people in this competition.

Gotcha.

25 are gonna get eliminated. Wow. Something like that, I think. Yes.

It's just fascinating to think, you know, as someone who's never done something like this, it's like, all right, come up with the concept. Now you have to go source these giant blocks. What materials are gonna use? How do you make sure someone can climb a structure that's—

all of these things, you're like, you're like in the production room right now. All of these things are really important. For you to think through. Yeah, size of block. And, and the size of blocks— I remember our amazing art director, he, he literally, because he knew, he, you know, it's not the question of, well, how big do you want them? He goes, Klitzer, come in, come in. I was like, ah, he's got something to show me. He's like, all right, we can do this size. This is how— and he just knew, this is how many you would need, this is the total cost, this is the weight of each of them. And he did it with cardboard. He goes, this is the general size. Yeah, then you have this version, and he showed me 4 versions of this thing, and he showed me the weights of all of them, and we just talked it through. It, it was visual. We can like literally touch and play with this stuff. Yeah, then he gets a prototype, and then we, we test out the prototype, and then we do a build, and yeah, you know, it's in stages.

You guys spend time together and you're in the flow state together and you're solving problems together.

Totally.

Which is the opposite. A lot of remote companies, it's like, oh, I have something, I send a message, someone receives it later, they look at it, they understand 80% of it, they send something back. By the time it comes back, I'm not in that flow state anymore. And it's like, dude, that thing just fizzles into nothing.

No. And, and it's why I always tell people, call me. Yeah, yeah, just call me, right? Call me. Yeah, if it's important enough, call me. If it takes more than like a sentence to explain, call me. Yeah, if you just need a quick yes or no, yeah, text me. Yeah, but I might hit you back with, I gotta see it, call me.

Yeah, you know, exactly. So do you ever show— have you ever like had days where you show up and you're just like really in a low energy state, really tired? Like, how do you snap yourself? You got to really show up. Yes, thanks.

So I don't drink a lot of coffee. I brought coffee today because I wanted to be— I wanted to be on. I don't drink a lot of coffee. It's, it's mental preparation with a light at the end of the tunnel for me. Yeah, I don't know how anybody else does it, but I knew we were filming season 2 for about 40 days. And I said, I'm gonna give every— I'm gonna give my body, my brain to this 40 days. And it just didn't matter, you know, if we shot an overnight and the next morning, or we shot an overnight and I'm going to bed at 7, 8 in the morning, and 8 o'clock rolls around, 8 in the morning, I'm in my PJs, I'm in bed, and somebody is now starting a shift to prep for the next night, and they call me. Yeah, what do you need?

You're answering.

I'm getting up. I left my hotel and went and met and made sure everything's good. It's having somebody who cares so incredibly much, and then when I get the information, I'm passing that honest information along, and half the time nobody's watching, but I'm doing it anyway because I know the product needs something like that.

Yeah, you know, for you, it's like you have— there's a finite amount of time and there's really infinite energy you could put in, and you just—

100%. And then afterwards, man, I am, I am accepting. I, I get to be beat. I get to not have energy there. But I don't know what's in my blood. I naturally have just— I can wake up with 2 hours of sleep and it's annoying to people. Yeah. And I'm just like, you guys ready to go? And that energy, by the way, everybody's gone to bed for 2 hours. Yeah. You know, and so to have somebody like that instantly, you know, you're gonna get one person who's like, bro, what are you doing? I'm just thinking of our camera listener. What are you doing? And then he daps me up and I jump with him and he jumps and he smiles. And then, you know, like an hour later, you know, he's, he's up and raring and ready to go. You know, it's just, I don't know, it's just a mindset.

I think at the end of the day, what was the most seemingly impossible feat that was brought to you that you thought there's no way we can do this, that you guys ended up pulling off?

I can't say we can never, I've ever said that because I'll always go into what's the mechanic of the base of the creative. So if we can't, if we truly can't do it, how do we pivot? Yeah. And then I'll think of like 3 or 4 different ways to pivot, and then I'll turn to our director or creative and I'll go, hey man, I got 4 things, and I'll pitch him 4 things and he'll go, all right, what about this? And he'll, he'll have a 5th thing. I'll go, great, that fits everything. But I'll do the work for you.

An example of something that was just like something that, yeah, sounded crazy.

Well, because I've been brought so many nos where it's like, hey, we can't, we can't, and then we end up doing it. So there's not really an excitement behind that story because it simply is, I just asked a couple of questions and realized we can pivot and do it. But something— here's a great one. Oh, this, this one's so good. And we ended up not doing it. Yeah, actually, there's two things, uh, three things in my full 25 years of working. Two of them came at Beast that we just could not accomplish. And I'll give you— ah man, I'm gonna give— you can cut one of them out. Uh, so two specific things at Beast. One was we were in Japan for the Vacations video, and Tyler goes, "Klitz, how cool would it be if the boys just walked around Japan with one of those robots at the restaurant?" And I was like, Tyler, Be so fucking cool, man. And I was like, all right, how do we do this? Because I'll never go into it's impossible because, you know, we're dealing with power. So I was like, all right, we can get— literally, we can have on a cart a portable generator, like, like if it needed that, like, okay, so that's solved. How do I get this robot? So I'm calling the restaurant directly. You guys have these robots? And it ends up the guy didn't speak English, wasn't his first language, so I didn't know how to talk to this guy.

Buy a robot?

Yeah, I was like, well, I want to rent it. What can I do? You tell me, it's your robot. I'll buy it from you if I need to, I'll return it, like, what do you want? And I just couldn't get past it. And Tyler, Tyler's okay with it, he doesn't make me feel bad about it. But it was like, man, that was the one thing on that video. The biggest one though, the biggest thing we ended up not being able to do. And I feel really comfortable saying this because the world should hear this, or whoever watches this. You can't climb the pyramids. Don't try to climb the pyramids. It's not safe. It's not doable. All right. However, we did— I did talk to people about it. I was like, all right, would be really cool if at the end of this video Jimmy is on top of the freaking pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's been done before. I know You don't want to promote it because then people will do it. What can we do? Can we put him on safety gear? Can he literally say, do not do this? I have 30 people. If you do this, you'll get arrested. We could actually get messaging out there for you. And we were close, but then at the way end, we finally got a yes, but it was contingent on us doing a big awareness campaign. I'll tell you the number off camera that they told me. And I was like, guys, I can't even bring that. That's, that's a no. Yeah, just in different form. And they're like, well, it's a yes if you can so, so, so, so. I was like, who are you dealing with?

Government?

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's the government. It's the, the head minister of, of Egypt. It's wonderful people. Like, they were really accommodating.

Did you guys go down below the pyramids?

We did. Yeah, we went below. The coolest place we went to, a place We were told this and we tried to do research, so we found research supporting it, that more people have been on the moon than the place we went to.

Really?

Which was the top of the pyramid from the inside.

Mm.

There's a— if you watch the video, there's a secret passage that any tourist can't get to because you need a ladder to literally climb up like 20 feet into this little hole, into a tunnel. You're climbing in a tunnel. And then when you get there, it's a space about this big that you're climbing ladders and you're climbing the different levels of the pyramid with scriptures from like, you know, when the pyramids were built and people who— no, I'm sorry, scriptures from when it was built, then scriptures of archaeologists who found it over like the, you know, last couple of centuries. And we were there.

Wow.

And yeah, and it was just, it was the talent one camera, and then Tariq had a camera, and then it was Tyler and I, and that was it. Wow. And it was with our guide, of course, you know, our archaeologist guide. And that was it. And that was one of the coolest moments, I think, of my entire career. Wow. It was so awesome. Yeah.

Did you feel anything when you were in there?

Yes. Yes. And I told my wife, I was like, when I get home, I need to be grounded. I was like, this is an experience. Like, I'm doing something that nobody in the modern era has ever done. Yeah, me as a person. Like, granted, yes, like, we gave this experience to the world for them to see, and Jimmy got to like showcase all of this, but I got to as well. And I said, this is like messing me up a little bit. Yeah, like, this is, this is, yeah, this is screwing me up in a lot of ways.

Did you feel any energy? You know, the pyramids, they, you know, allegedly are energy generators or whatever.

Oh, I don't know about that, but there was definitely a different different feeling when you're inside.

Yeah.

You know, and, and there's a limited amount of air that's in there. So you got to get in, you get out. We were there for, you know, I think an hour and a half maybe.

Wow.

But man, there's, there's a, there's, there's this, like, you slow down with your thoughts for a minute. You know, it's, you're in a place that nobody goes. Yeah. Like nobody in the world. And you're trying to comprehend that your brain doesn't, like, one thing that kept popping in while I was in the pyramids was, oh, we're in a Disney attraction. I kept thinking I was in Disney Disney.

Yeah, you're like, uh, no, this is real.

This is real. Yeah, you know, you're touching, you're like, wow, this is like, this was built.

You guys went down below the pyramids and we did. Yeah, and then we went down, which, which is like a giant, like a huge room down below there or something.

Huge is an overstatement. Okay, big in comparison to the hallways you're going into. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, there's, there's, um, I forget what they're called, but basically the, uh, the tomb, the whatever they're called, where gods or gods and leaders were buried. Yeah. Yeah.

They had those. I mean, from what I've heard, there are these giant boxes.

Yeah.

With like unbelievably heavy covers that are cut perfectly. Yeah. That are down there. And it's like, how do they make this thing?

I don't— I— we didn't see that. The covers weren't there.

Okay.

But the openings were. Yeah. And, you know, we went to another place that was not in the pyramids. It was like off pyramids, but it was like 100 feet underground. And we climbed ladders down and then there was water. And it's where I think Osiris was, which is the god of— it was a portal god. I don't remember. You got to watch the video. But a portal god, the god of— I forget who he was, but like that was his burial site. And you were like, like waist deep in water.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it was crazy. And then his thing— I got a water— God of Ocean.

I don't know.

Anyway, wild.

So yeah, are those places that are off limits to the public?

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

It was cool.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So after doing all this stuff and working on all this interesting stuff, like, what else could excite you moving forward?

It's a great question. I don't I mean, I have to look at it and go, there's a lot of pressure, I think, in my own head of saying, what do I do next? Because, you know, I leave a company— I wouldn't even say at its peak, you know, it's, it's, it's just— if you think it's at its peak, it's still driving upward as a business. And so for me, where do I go? I— for me, that is the biggest place you're creating content today. I think the most important thing for me is trying to educate traditional on what to do next. Every meeting I've been having is, well, we want the next big creator, you know, and I'm trying to— I would love to be in a position that I can use what I've learned over 25 years to really help shape what happens the next 25 years in traditional. The things I'm really good at is I understand how people are consuming content. I understand what kind of content they want to consume. And for me, my bread and butter is I understand how to create that content, like how to bring that content to life. What traditional is really asking for, Hollywood is really asking for, is how do we get more eyeballs? And I think I have the answers, and I'm not asking to come in guns a-blazing. I'm asking for I have a track record. I'm asking for one of the big networks and Netflix, Paramount+, HBO, Peacock, like one of these studios or streaming platforms to bring me in and just hear me out. Yeah, because for the last like 2 and a half months, I've literally whiteboarded the psychology behind how people— what the next generation of content on streaming platforms needs to be. Yeah. Or else you're going to be playing catch-up. It's already out there. It's already obvious, but nobody has identified it. Yeah. And I do believe I have because I've been in the space. So if anybody out there is watching and they know a network or anything, I would love to just— and I'm in connection with people, right? But I want, I want the decision maker. I want—

what does the future of content look like moving forward? Like what is the future of— because I mean, if you think about it now, we're in a time where anyone can become a creator and now you throw AI in the mix and now anyone can create essentially anything that their imagination could even think of.

Yeah.

For a little bit of money. What does the future of content look like?

I'll tell you, I'm going to keep close to my chest what I truly believe, but I'll give you a metaphor, which is with AI and with content in general, and with complaints from people who have been doing this 40, 50 years and they're older now or, and they're trying to figure it out and they're like, you know, woe is me. And like, listen to us, you can't do AI and content needs to be done this way. And it's traditional and all this. My 8-year-old doesn't have empathy toward you because my 8-year-old doesn't know to have empathy. She only knows a world with AI and her kids. Are only going to know a world that is completely different. My daughter is on Sora and we're waiting in line to go on a Disney ride. She's on Sora creating.

Yeah.

Again, she has no sympathy towards somebody who goes, don't use AI. I need to teach my daughter not to use AI. AI is not going anywhere.

Yeah.

Content creation and how she consumes is the new way that people are consuming content. You can't ignore it, but you do need to understand it. And it's very difficult to understand. But once you get it, You'll be able to create content that will get eyeballs because it's how people want to consume it.

Yeah.

So the future of content is really not ignoring how content is currently being consumed, leaning into that, and just remembering that the next generation that doesn't understand your complaints is going to use everything that they can to one-up everybody who's complaining. Yeah, you'll always have a mindset that goes, I'll just work harder. Well, nobody wants to use it. I'll just do that. Yeah, I'll just identify— I really look up to— because I think we're wrapping up, I want to, I want to connect to two athletes that are the people that I've looked up to because they have a mindset that is accepted in the, in the world of content. It's not really accepted to be as hardcore, I think, as I am, which is every time I create something, I want to win a Super Bowl, I want to win the Finals. And Tom Brady and Kobe Bryant, I think, have two mindsets that finally made me feel normal in life. Brady— I watched this thing called Tom vs. Time. It was on Facebook Watch like 10 years ago, and I was like, oh my God, there's somebody like me, right? And by the way, I'm not comparing myself to either of those guys. They were great in their own realm, but the way they thought about things is something that I finally connected with, which I think a lot of business owners can connect with. We're gonna go out there You know, we're— I don't care if you're not working, you're not working with me right now. Like, work as hard as I am. Let's fucking do this thing. And Brady said something I read recently, years ago, that was, I'm not the best athlete, I'm not the most skilled athlete, but I am going to find— I'm botching his words, so don't quote me, but basically what I took from it is I'm going to find a section that nobody has mastered, and I'm gonna master that, and that's how I'm going to win. And I'm going to always identify a sector of what I do that isn't mastered. I'm gonna master it, and I'm gonna do it. And if that's not what he said, I think it's still a pretty good quote, but that's what I took from it.

I love that.

Yeah, and the same applies here with, with content. There's gonna be a sector that people are like, you can't do that. Great, my 8-year-old's gonna do it. Yeah, so either you do it or she's gonna do it.

You gotta embrace it.

You got to embrace it.

Yeah. Well, this is super interesting. Yeah, one of my more interesting conversations, and I appreciate you sharing everything. Just to wrap up here, if you have, you know, and you've given a lot of really well-thought-out advice that can be generally applied to a lot of different things, but to, you know, young hungry people that you know, want to get out there and win, what's one piece of advice you'd share?

Wow. I think care. Like, I go back to that first thing, man. You have to care about what you're doing and you have to identify— care needs to be the most important word in your life. And that's with yourself and that's with the people around you. If you identify somebody isn't caring about something, they're not going to win because somebody else will care more. You have to care the most. So care the most or find something that you care the most in. Yeah, that's my advice.

I love that.

Yeah.

I'm going to hit you with one or two more questions.

Yeah.

General questions. What's one habit or ritual that you've implemented in your life that's allowed you to stay in a high energy state and stay in that winning mindset? And it could be a thought or a belief, but something that you've done that allows me to stay this locked in.

Yeah, it's, it's something that is great, and it's something that I'm giving advice that could be really dangerous. All right. Is sometimes I live in the past because I use— I, dude, I've had the shit kicked out of me time and time again. You have as well. And I use it, man. I use it to— I had— that is my benchmark of, hey, I got the shit kicked out of me. I thought I was here. I thought I was going here. I've never— so I thought I was here. So let's assume that I thought I was going here. I didn't get there. And now I'm here. That's my new benchmark. And every single time I've hit it, and I think of people and I think of situations, anything that drives me, you know. And, you know, God, man, 25 years, I still think of, you know, bosses I had decades ago that, you know, that just fire me up. Yeah. And I use it.

Yeah, I love that. David Goggins uses the cookie jar. He's like, you know, when he's getting toward the end of a really long run, he's running out of juice, he thinks back to something, reaches down into the cookie jar and grabs the little bit of energy he needs to keep fighting. Yeah. Um, last question. What is something that you've believed for a long time and maybe you think society believes that turned out not to be true about life?

Uh, I can give a little more of a broad answer. It's the first thing that popped in my head, which is, uh, Nothing is final. And I think, I, you know, I think people do believe this as a whole. You get a job, you think, oh, I have security. Nothing is final. Not your house, not your relationship, nothing. There's always a 0.00001% chance that something crazy can happen, like an earthquake, that, you know, or the LA fires. That's a tragedy that happened. All right, so that was such a low— like, nobody would have thought that many lives would have been change, but it happened. Yeah. So if you're able to think like that, then you're actually able to reverse— like almost reverse engineer that idea and go, okay, well, when I do things, I just need to be flexible. I got it. I got to be ready for something to change. I've got to be ready to elevate and do something better.

Yeah.

And if you're in that solid state, like consistently, you're only gonna kind of produce the best content, and you're always gonna be ready so you don't panic or freak out when there is some sort of issue or problem.

Amazing. I love it. Thank you so much. Oh yeah, dude, this is great.

Yeah.

All right.