High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / evaluation

Published · transcript-backed

Speaker unverified: evaluation

2 Sept 2026 · 27:48 My First Million 7 things MrBeast, Bezos & Thiel do that you don’t

“like he would go wake him up and from the moment Jimmy woke up they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep and he would do that for 6 months and he's like by the end of 6 months you know exactly how I think cuz you've been with me every everywhere you know you saw every decision I made so essentially you're like a proxy for me like I can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation and yeah cloning works great and I remember there was like a room full of CEOs like multi-billion dollar CEOs as he was telling us this who were”

— Speaker unverified

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
2 Sept 2026 · 27:48
Publisher
My First Million

Transcript context

…t would be labeled Shan Hardcore Part Two. [laughter] >> People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. >> Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks. >> CEO. [laughter] Put the O and CEO. Uh, all right. Here's what we got. What's left? I got I did one, two, three, four, five. I got five. I got three left. All right. Jack Welch, CEO of of GE, when you ran when you run a big company, it's very easy for, you know, all your children are sort of not equal. They're not loved equally, all the different business divisions. And GE was in very a bunch of different business divisions. And he had two simple rules when he was running GE. One was every division, you need to be number one or number two in your market. Otherwise, you have one year to fix it, sell it, or close it. That's it. we will trim the business divisions unless you can be number one or number two which is an incredible forcing function because it's a sort of Darwinian pressure to survive and the other Darwinian pressure he applied was every year Jack Welch would fire the bottom 10% performers in the company every year and so a a continuous culling of the herd which sounds I mean I'm sure people interpret that different way some people will think he's an for that when I first heard it I was like oh that's that doesn't sound that hardcore but then you go try do it. Go try to do that every year. It is incredibly difficult. Or go look at your own track record. How much low performance have you tolerated because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove. I think Jack Welch is I think he's controversial. We actually should do a deep dive one day on him because people say that he was a horrible CEO because if you look at like GE, it was kind of became this like amalgamation of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out. But I don't know enough about Jack Walsh to know if that was his doing or what happened. But but I know that he was well loved as a leader. But at the same time, I hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing. Like Jensen from Nvidia, he was like he was like, "I'm going to smother you in greatness. I'm not going to fire you." Like it's so funny how great people, assuming they both are great, have different opinions on firing as I mean as well as everything else. Like total opposite, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. And you you will find that for for every single one of these, you will find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite, which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great. It's just meant to say, damn, I thought these stories were pretty hardcore, huh? That's really kind of all we're saying. And that there are it kind of pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable, tolerable, and potentially um effective. You know, I think firing your low performers is a pretty, I would say, logical thing to do. Meaning, >> yeah, >> I could see why that works. [laughter] I could definitely see why that works. And I'm I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like like I think Jensen said when he made eah, >> I could see why that works. [laughter] I could definitely see why that works. And I'm I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like like I think Jensen said when he made that point, he was like, "Yeah, I don't fire them, but I turn up the intensity so much that you either become great or quit, right?" which is more of a sink or swim version of like, yeah, they quit instead of getting fired. But either way, you weed out the low performers one way or another. So, last two. Um, all right, I'm going to skip this last one. I'll tell you, I don't even really like it. The Ford CEO, this guy comes in, this guy Allen becomes the Ford CEO. They had just lost 17 billion last year, and he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track or off track. And it was like color coded like green is on track, yellow is at risk and red is off track and everything was green. And he's like guys we lost 17 billion last year. How was everything green? And he realized they had like a culture where you know people were sort of afraid to admit failure. And so he's like you can't be afraid. You you have to be honest. And so the next week they were all green again except for one was red. And he stood up and started clapping and uh changed the uh the culture around failure. And I was like it sounds a little bit like a Disney movie to me. Cool running >> Yeah. [laughter] So, I think we're going to think we're going to thumbs down Allan together here. >> Nice try, Alan. Consider me uninspired. Um, >> all right. The last one comes from Jimmy aka Mr. Beast, which was I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy, which we were like, "So, dude, how do you train your employees? They're all really young. Seems like they're all new. You're growing so fast. Like, do you have like I'm just curious like you don't you know, you never went to college or business school or anything like that. like what what do you do for your like kind of management? And he's like, "Oh, I just do cloning." And we're like, "That sounds illegal. What does that mean?" And he's like, "Well, if I hire you in one of like kind of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere. Like you literally shadow me every single place I go." And I think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in. Like it was like that that hardcore. Like from morning to night, like the guy I remember one guy he hired, he he was also Jimmy's alarm clock. like he would go wake him up and from the moment Jimmy woke up they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep and he would do that for 6 months and he's like by the end of 6 months you know exactly how I think cuz you've been with me every everywhere you know you saw every decision I made so essentially you're like a proxy for me like I can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation and yeah cloning works great and I remember there was like a room full of CEOs like multi-billion dollar CEOs as he was telling us this who were you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation and yeah cloning works great and I remember there was like a room full of CEOs like multi-billion dollar CEOs as he was telling us this who were like I think that's awesome in illegal like [laughter] what these people don't like get weekends. He's like, "No, you come here to you come here to win." I don't know if he still does it, but in the early days of his thing, I thought that was pretty pretty awesome. >> How is that going? Like it's it's interesting to hear about extreme people and how it ends up um like if they if they soften it when they have kids and stuff. It appears as though Elon is not a guy who has softened at all as the company has gotten bigger and has he has more had more kids. I wonder if that's happened with Jimmy and what's it called? Beast Enterprise or I don't know what it's called. Beast Beast Industries. >> Yeah, I think both. Right. I think he matured, right? When we met him, he's probably only like 25 or 24 years old or something like that, right? So like you >> matured like hugely from year over year. >> Yeah, you're going to mature and his rate of learning like he's, you know, pretty obsessive about learning from smart people and so he his the slope of his line is pretty crazy, right? So, I'm sure a lot has changed. At the same time, if something's working and that's your edge, you got to be pretty careful. You don't just dull out all your edges. And so, yeah, he does have a CEO now. Beast Industries. I'm sure they have more people and they're less like kind of business malpractice as you know, you do in the early days when you're kind of rough and tumble and figure things out. But, yeah, dude. I think they still go pretty hard and try to win. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of the fundamentals are probably still there of the stuff that works, right? like anything, the stuff that's working tends to survive and the stuff that's ineffective tends to get pruned out over time. >> I am not compared to these guys, I we're not even in the same ballpark in terms of being like hardcore. Um I don't know where you are, but I know that when I hear this, I'm like, uh it sounds like a lot of work. I'm not into that. I don't I don't want the same outcomes. And I had a story for you today that is the exact opposite of hardcore. I didn't mean for this story to be a matter of hardcore or not. More so a matter of there's money everywhere. >> Can I give you an anecdote that like supports what you're saying about the the other side of the the coin here? David Prell, friend of the pod, had Kevin Kelly on the podcast. And Kevin Kelly is this guy who I I really like and admire. He had a really eclectic career. He like started Wired magazine and he wrote A Thousand True Fans, which really shaped kind of my thinking. Was he like a was he I know he's like a thinker and a writer, but was he a successful business person, too? >> Yeah, I think he's done well like he's I he's done done very well compared to normal standards, but like you know, not not like some crazy whatever billionaire type, but I don't think that was ever his goal, but he's just done a bunch of…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence