#351 – MrBeast: Future of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram - Transcripts

is a conversation with Mr. Beast, the mastermind behind some of the most epic and popular videos ever made. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for a satiating and delicious snack, 8 Sleep for, you guessed it, naps, and Better Help for Mental Health. Choose wisely, my friends. Snacks, naps, or mental health. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by House of Macadamias.

that gets one billion views? I think maybe one of the videos we've already made might get a billion views. Which one do you think? Probably like the squid game video with enough time. I mean, it's only a year old and it's already on 300 million or some of the newer ones we've done have gotten like 100 million views in a month. So those four projected over 10 years because YouTube's not going anywhere. Probably one of those. So over time, they don't necessarily plateau. It's interesting. We were literally jumping right into it. I love it. It's good.

I love it. What about one billion subscribers? You've passed PewDiePie's the most subscribed to YouTube channel.

When do you think you get a billion? Let me do some math real quick. So around 120. So you think about this? No, I don't, honestly. Because one thing you'll find if you want to gain subscribers, if you want to get views, if you want to make money, almost any metric in this video creation space, if you want something, it all comes back to okay, well then just make great videos. So instead of like focusing on all these arbitrary vanity metrics, I just kind of focused on the one thing that gets me all that, which is make good videos. And I do think we will, when they hit a billion subscribers, say I don't have a plan on going anywhere. Even though we're only on 120 million right now on the main channel, I think we're doing around 10 million a month now and YouTube just, yeah, I just don't see it going anywhere and I don't see any reason why I'd ever get burnt out

or quit, so I think with enough time, yes. I wanted to ask you those family-friendly questions before I go to the dark questions.

So now, we have dark questions. But if you wanted to hook them, you would start off with the dark questions. That's how you get them.

Okay, well, that's how you get them. Okay, well, let me ask you about the, a Twitter poll you posted, a $10,000 death poll. You tweeted, if someone offered you $10,000, but if you take it a random person on Earth dies, would you take the $10,000? And 45% of people said yes. That's, at least at the time I checked, 850,000 people committing murder for just $8.5 billion in total.

So what do you learn about human nature from that? That's a good question. Honestly, this is like late at night when I threw that up too. I was just like, huh, this'll be a funny thing. I assumed it'd be 90% no and like 10% yes, but there are a lot of serious people. For you guys listening, I just did this random Twitter poll. I was like, would you take 10 grand if it meant someone random in the world died? And a lot of the replies on the suite were like, hell yeah, why not? And I was just not expecting that. And so, I don't really know.

I mean, I feel like your take would be better than mine.

Was that disturbing to you, surprising to you? A little bit, yeah. But obviously, a lot of the people were trolling, but I actually, when you read through those replies,

I do think like 10% of them were like dead serious. Well, I think sometimes the trolling and the lols reveal a thing we're too embarrassed to admit about the darker aspects of our nature. So, I don't know if you listened to Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast. He has a episode on painful attainment, which he describes throughout history how humans have been really attracted to watching the suffering of others. So, public executions, all that kind of stuff. And he believes that's in all of us. That, for example, if something like a YouTube or a different platform streamed a public execution or streamed the torture of another human being, a lot of people would say that's deeply unethical, but they would still tune in and watch. And that we're attracted to that drama, and especially the most extreme versions of that drama. And so, I think part of the lols reveal something that's actually true in that poll. That like- Your answer is so much better than mine. Do you think about that? Maybe even with the squid game, like, so I think, how many views does the squid game currently have?

if it was like real squid game? Yeah, assuming YouTube was like, oh, we'll turn the blind eye, we won't take it down. Yeah, I mean, obviously,

we'd probably have billions of views. How do you think you will die,

and do you think it would be during a video? Probably doing something dumb, like going to space when I'm older, like, trying to go to Mars or something like that. I know for a fact it won't be on a video, every video we do we'd safety experts and stuff like that. It's not really risk, but... Yeah, I could see myself, after a million people go to Mars or something like that, I'd probably be like, you know what, let's go, and something like that, maybe.

So not in the name of a video just for the holiday?

No.

No, heck no. Are you open to taking risks when you shoot videos, You just went to Antarctica. I mean, like, you're putting yourself

in the line a little bit, right? Of course, but, you know, we've had that video in the works for three years, and then we consult with tons of experts, radar the entire path we're gonna walk beforehand to see if there's crevasses. So we know there's no crevasses, we do training, we consult with experts, and we have survival guides there with us, and, you know, monitor the weather and everything. So it's like, any variable that, where we could get harmed, we just pre-plan for it. Same thing with Buried Alive. Like, I had David Blaine, spent a week underground. And so I consulted with him, and consulted with basically anyone who ever buried themselves alive. You know, the coffin we used to bury me, we did so many tests. Like, that coffin was buried 10 times before I was, you know, for a little longer than 50 hours. It tested the airflow and everything, to the point where I was safer in that coffin underground than I was above ground. Like, so we just tend to just not leave anything up

to chance, you know? Another strange question then. So you recorded these videos to yourself, you know, five years, 10 years from now. Have you recorded a video that's to be released

once you die? Well, first off, I am just glad that not every one of your questions have to do with, like, views or things like that. It's nice getting different questions. So this is, this is good. No, seriously. Little duck, it's a little duck. No, no, but it's fine because a lot of people just be like, how much money do you make? You know, it's just something I just, everything's always about money now, when people talk to me. So it's nice. But for the videos I made, for you guys who probably don't follow me too closely, when I had 8,000 subscribers and I was a teenager, I filmed a bunch of videos, and scheduled them years in the future. And I said, I'd film one where I was like, hi, me in a year. And the video went up a year later and it was just like, hey, I think you'll have 100,000 subscribers.

And I think something like that would be cool.

Seriously, it's a little, I don't know why, but I've fantasized about it, not fantasized, but I've dreamt about that a lot. Like I don't know if, if I only had 30 days to live, what would I do? And for me, I would try to make like a decade's worth of content and schedule upload it. So they automatically go public in the future. And so it's just like, I never died.

I'm just there. kind of immortality, but it's also a kind of troll on the concept of time, that you can die in the physical space but persist in the digital space. I actually, I recorded a video like that because I had some concerns and I just thought it's also a good exercise to do. A video would like to be released if I die. And it was actually a really interesting exercise. It's cool, like it shows what you really care about. I guess it's like writing a will. But when you're younger, you don't think about that kind of stuff.

Exactly, mine was just dumb. Yeah.

My bones in a coffin.

Yeah.

Yours is probably so serious. No, it's fun actually. Where you realize there's no point to be serious at this point. It's a weird thing, I guess you've done this, but it's a weird thing to address the world when you the physically use no longer there. So you know this would only be released if you're no longer there. Exactly.

That's a weird exercise. Exactly. You know what's funny? Of all the people listening to this, we're probably the only two people that have made videos for when we die. It's like such a niche thing

and the fact that we're bonding over it's kind of funny. Yeah, I think people should think about doing that. It's not just about YouTube, it's also social media. Just think about it. Like there's gonna be a last tweet and a last, I don't know, Facebook post, a last Instagram post. And yeah, I feel like there's some aspect that's meditative to just even considering making a post like that. And also it's a way for the people that love you

to kind of like celebrate. Do you think that would help them cope or not? Like if someone randomly watching this did film a video for if they accidentally died in some freak accident to be given to their family,

do you think that would, and it was like a genuine? I think it would really help.

I mean it depends because like, Like how would you even intro that? Like, hey mom, if you're seeing this it means I'm probably dead, and you're still alive. Yeah. Exactly.

That's why you intro in a kind of funny way And just talk about the things that mean a lot to you, because otherwise, you're at the risk of the last post you have is like, I don't know, talking shit about. McDonald's screwing my order.

Exactly, exactly. McDonald's screwed on my order. Exactly, exactly. But then you're dead.

That's it, hundred years. I do recommend it. It's like the Stoics meditate on death every day in the same way to kind of meditate on your death when you make a video like that. Because it's actually not just and talking to yourself, it's talking to the world. And it like, for some reason, at least for me, they made it very concrete that there's going to be an end. And I'm like, it's almost, it's over for me. If I'm making the video, it's over for me. It's just an interesting thought experiment. I recommend people try it.

Okay, are you afraid of death, by the way? Yes, it's hard because like, what if you just die and then you just see nothing forever, you know? Yeah, the nothingness. It just fades to blackness and you're just like that for trillions upon trillions to billion squared years. And it's just, it's scary. But also, before you're born, you don't remember those X amount of years either. So that gives me a little comfort. But it's definitely very scary. Something I'd rather not think about until I'm like 80. I'll deal with that problem then. I don't know if I told you this, but I'm kind of hopeful that someone like Elon or one of these like freak smart people would just like be like, you know what, screw it. I'm gonna figure out a way where we could slow down aging, get it where, you know we could live to be 200, 300 years old and just like set their sights on that and then just kind of save us.

in my lifetime the life expectancy doesn't just expand. The nothingness. Well, it also could be that the immortality is achieved in the digital realm. Like it could be long after you're gone as a Mr. Beast, run by a Chad GPT type system.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that consumes everything I ever said, everything I ever wrote, and I don't want that. I want to live. What are you smart people out there figuring out? I'll keep you entertained, but I need you to figure out how to keep me alive. Give me till 200.

That will make me happy. Well, that's funny. Who owns the identity of Mr. Beast once the physical body is gone? Like, is it illegal to create another Mr. Beast that's Chad GPT based? I don't know what the laws are on that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once I'm done, I don't care.

Well, you just said you did care. I mean, there could be AI,

like many Mr. Beasts that are created after you're gone. Yeah, I mean, that'd be cool to be able to like train up a model and let them loose

so my content lives on, I guess, yeah. Yeah, but it somehow feels like it diminishes the value you contribute. Yeah. Yeah, it's inauthentic, but it's also, there's some aspect to the finiteness of the art being necessary for its greatness.

Oh, 100%. The value you contribute. Yeah. Yeah, for its greatness. Yeah, once the second that thing starts spamming out videos, the videos lose all meaning

and it's pointless and it's a money grab. If you were on YouTube for how long should you run it? For a year, how would you change it?

How would you improve it? It's hard because, you know, obviously I'm biased because we're doing really well, but I feel like when I open up YouTube on my television I get the videos I want to watch. I don't know. I don't ever open them and wonder, like, what are these? What are these 10 videos on my homepage? When I click on a video, I'm like, I don't ever wonder what these are like. And maybe it's because I'm very adamant about like the kind of videos I watch and I try not to watch videos and I don't want to get recommended more because I just, that's how I think, but I'm very happy with how it is at the moment. I think, one thing though that I just hate the passion is the comment section on YouTube. It's just so bad. But I know that's not something that's gonna 10X the growth of the platform, but if you think about it, you go to Reddit to read comments, and somehow, usually the top 20 posts on a popular Reddit post are not spam, you know what I mean? Have you ever clicked on something on the front page of Reddit, and then most uploaded reply to it is like, go check out my site right here, and it's trying to scam you out of $1,000? I can't even think of one instance I've ever had that happen.

trying to get you to give them $1,000 for a fake ad. That comment section is one of the most lively on the internet, and so it would be amazing if YouTube invested in creating an actual community, like where people could do high-effort comments and be rewarded for it, like on Reddit.

Like actually write out a long thing. That would make me so happy, because when I upload a video, I usually go to Twitter to see feedback. I read my comments, and I'll flip through newest, but it's just, I feel like Reddit and Twitter just give me so much better filtered feedback, especially now that with Twitter Blue, because people pay $8 a month, I've noticed like any tweets I get from verified users now, they're usually not just garbage troll takes, like these are people paying $8 a month, like they're usually relatively sensible, and so it's been pretty nice. Like after I upload a video, I just go on the verified tab on Twitter and just see what people have to say,

and anyways, I live for the day that YouTube's like that. What do you think about Twitter? What do you think about all the fun activity

happening recently since Elon bought Twitter? Yeah, I think he should make me CEO, like I tweeted.

Well, I should say sort of we had, we just like a couple hours ago had a conversation with Elon, and you guys sent an exchange of some excellent ideas, so yeah, I legitimately think, obviously you're exceptionally busy, but I legitimately think it would be awesome

if you somehow participate in the future of Twitter.

Yeah, it would be fun. Because there's so much possibility of different ideas. First in the sort of the content, like dissemination, hosting, and all the different recommendations. The assertion, discovery,

all the things that YouTube does well. I think the most exciting thing is he's willing to move fast, and so I think there's gonna be a lot of interesting things that come out of it because he's just moving quick, and a lot of these more mature platforms just take years to do the simplest stuff, and they're very bureaucratic. It'll be interesting to see which way it goes. When you just kind of take a move quick, break things, whatever type approach to social media, I'm actually pretty curious to see

what features he rolls out.

So what would be your first act as Twitter CEO? I can't spoil it. Okay. I gotta get hired.

What do you think about video on the platform? On Twitter? Yeah, do you think that's an interesting, or is it like messing with the medium,

the nature of the platform? I think Twitter will always be closer to TikTok than it is to YouTube, at least in its current form. I don't see 20 minute, one hour long videos or whatever, even 15 minute videos being watched over there. I see it more as like the short and snappy stuff

closer to TikTok. But at the same time,

Twitter is a really good comment section for the internet. I mean, it's almost weird why, like why doesn't Twitter allow you to embed YouTube videos? Like why does, you should just ask Elon that. Like, I don't know if that's a YouTube thing, but when a YouTuber posts a video, why do they have to link to YouTube? Why can't they just embed it on Twitter and you just play it there? I mean, wouldn't that just solve a lot of problems?

Yeah, but then the two companies

would have to agree to integrate each other's content. I don't know, but it seems like a win-win. I mean, well, it's more of a win for Twitter because then people don't have to leave the platform.

I mean, that'd be the easiest solution. But who gets, like when you watch the ads on a YouTube video that's embedded in Twitter,

who gets the money? It would still be YouTube, but at least then right now people just post a link and it takes you off Twitter

and it just kills your session time on Twitter. That's really interesting. But yeah, because the Twitter, whatever the dynamics of the comments, especially once the spam bots are taken care of, Twitter just works, it's really nice. So Reddit is a nice comment section for the internet. It's like slower paced, more deliberate, like higher effort. Twitter's like this high-paced, like ephemeral kind of stream, but there's the up-voting and the down-voting works much better, because you can do re-tweeting, right? Because the social network is much stronger

than it is on YouTube, like the interconnectivity change. Yeah, on Reddit you're gonna get, the top replies are gonna be the most refined ones versus Twitter, stuff flows to the top that's not super refined, but like you're saying, it's more off-the-cuff stream of consciousness,

which a lot of people prefer, it's a little more personal. How do you think Twitter compares to YouTube

in terms of how you see its future unroll in 2023? I mean, I think YouTube's gonna be YouTube and not much is really gonna change, but it's gonna keep growing just because, that's just what it does, because it's owned by Google. But Twitter, I don't know, I mean, it's one of those things like you can't predict if a year from now an economy's gonna be in a recession or booming, and I think Twitter's kind of the same thing. One thing's for certain, a lot of things

are gonna be rolled out, but who knows, honestly. You responded to Elon saying Twitter's unlikely to be able to pay creators more money than YouTube.

What do you think that is? Well, yeah, because I think the tweet I responded to is one where he was saying that users will jump over if Twitter can potentially pay more than other platforms. I was just saying, obviously, because Google has Google AdWords and that's Google's whole thing, it's putting ads on stuff. They've been doing it better than anyone else in the world for a very long time. It's very unlikely in the next few years that Twitter's gonna just magically, or any platform, give a creator the ability to make higher CPMs than on YouTube. It's kind of crazy, like some creators in December, Q4 because ad rates are higher because of Christmas and everything, some creators literally make like 30, $40 per 1,000 views, and that's after YouTube's cut. It's almost like hard to think about, like how high the RPMs get. And even then, once you pull out of financing cars, the high CPM niches, and you move into just normal stuff, it's still just crazy. There's sheer volume of creators, and the fact that all of them get these multi-dollar CPMs

at scale, it's pretty beautiful. So you do, I don't know what you would call them, but like integrated ads in your videos, and you do, I would say masterfully, it's like part of the video. Are you talking about brand deals? Brand deals, is that what you would call that? Yep. So it's a brand deal, it's part of the video. It's still really exciting to watch,

and yet there's a plug for the brand. Are you talking about brand deals? In general, just brand deals, since you brought it up, integrating them well. I think that's something a lot of creators don't do. Like, they'll just do a brand deal out of the blue. They'll just be filming a video, and then around the three minute mark, just start talking about a random company. And I feel like if you don't want viewers to click away, and you want people to not get pissed off, and call you to sell out, you gotta find a way to integrate into content. And ideally, use the money in the video to make it better. Like, the easiest thing you do when you do a brand deal is just tell people how you're using money from the brand deal to make your content better. And if you do that, no one cares. Now, they're supporting you for it. And you go from being a sellout to like,

oh, I'm doing this to make better videos for you guys. I don't know if you can share, but would those brands, when you have discussions with them, are they strict about how long you need to be talking about it? Or is it more about, they're leaving control to you

about the artistic element of it? The problem is, the ones who don't give us artistic element we just don't really work with anymore because it's just you know we get a hundred million views of video now and I can confidently say I know how to entertain them and convert them better than these random brands so

yeah if they don't give us that freedom I just won't work with them. You have

that leverage but for smaller creators it's a lot harder it's a lot harder yeah and they're gonna just say 45 seconds here's what you say take it or leave it and it's like pretty brutal because I think just in general if brands were more accommodating to let creators tell their story of the brand and talk about the brand in a way that felt a little more natural I think it'd be less cringe if people would be less likely to go you know tap tap tap skip and obviously it would convert better but they're just so afraid and they want this standardized

thing say these words and 45 seconds right here at this three-minute mark yeah I often think about how to resist that you just don't do them though right not on YouTube right I do an audio I do ads in the very beginning and I say you can skip them if you want like the point is they so the funny thing about podcast is different than YouTube videos podcast people actually do listen to ads a lot because they it's slower paced and they like the the creative voice like talking about the thing but in general I just don't believe you should be talking about a thing for a minute exactly and that's going to be effective I want to see the data for that I think what's much more effective is the way you do ads which is like integrate into the content like put a lot of effort into making a part of that like doing the brand deals and I just it's difficult to have that conversation it's like a very strenuous conversation you have to have with with brands if each one at a time and I just wish there's more of a culture to say like the quality of the ad read matters a lot more than the like The silly parameters like the timing of it Uh-huh. How long it is the placement of it all that kind of stuff

What percentage of your viewers do you think have seen one of my videos before?

What percentage of the viewers on refused your viewers of the viewers on YouTube though. Yes. Yeah, okay

Yes, your viewers. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Sure or all of them It's just interesting cuz you're you're speaking very Specifically like about my brand deal process and some of my head I'm like I wonder what percentage of these people even have any

no idea what he's talking about. That's interesting.

I love the thinking about numbers. The whole time we're having this conversation, it's all I could think about. God dammit. There's probably like 50% of these people have no fucking clue what he's saying. And we're about to torture him for five minutes. Yeah. Probably. But it's something I can't turn off in my brain.

Yeah, yeah, probably. Less than 50% Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that exciting to you? That there's like 50% of people don't have not watched the Mr. Beast video.

Isn't that an opportunity to like, I guess it's an opportunity to grow. I don't know, honestly, I was just kind of excited to hang out with you. Yeah, me too. And it was a lot of fun. Who cares of the mics? Yeah, so it was kind of like having a buddy to go along the journey as I'm just kind of eating shit and doing my normal ride. It was like kind of fun. And also you just say really wise stuff constantly. So honestly, no, I never even put any thought into like that demographics are what I could gain. It's just interesting. Cause like my retention brain, when you talk about something, I'm instantly like, hmm, what value are they gonna get? How many of them are gonna be interested?

My like bells are like air, air, this is bad. Yeah, me too. And it was a lot of fun. Who cares of the mics? What are the different strategies for high retention

for your videos and in general? It's like, how do you cook good food? You know what I mean?

That's like the same kind of question. I see, so there's so many different ways that you're, so it boils down to, I mean, do you think at the level of a story or do you think like, literally watching five seconds at a time am I gonna tune out here? Am I gonna tune out here?

Am I gonna tune out here, not here? That's all of it. You need the overarching narrative and then you also need the micro where every second needs to be entertaining. And basically what's interesting is the longer people watch something, the more likely they are to keep watching. So you don't have to try as hard in the hypothetically back half of a video as you do it in the front. Like even right now, we're so deep into this where a lot of people listening are probably just gonna keep listening relatively close to the analyst. We just have a really boring part of this conversation because they're just saying it, they're immersed. And so a big, like to really boil it down to a simple level, you just wanna get people where they're immersed

in the content and then just kind of hold them there. We had this discussion offline.

By the way, I should mention that this is like late at night. It is, what time is it?

It's nine o'clock. And I only slept one hour last night because I'm an idiot

and I flew to the wrong location. Well, here, we're like, hey, let's just book you a hotel and a flight, and he's like, no, I got it. We're like, you sure? We just do it, we always do this.

He's like, no, I got I got it.

He's gonna have to rub it in. I know, and then today, and coming to find out, he flew to the wrong airport, airport with the, or a city with a similar name to ours- Just same name.

Yeah, just- The same name. Yeah.

Same name in a different state. And I was like, that's why he used to let us book it. And so he's on one hour's sleep and he's literally been dying all day. Before this podcast, he down like two things in coffee. We've been going all day hard.

Yeah, I've been, I got to interact with you. I should say that this gave me an opportunity to, I got a ride from a stranger and it was an incredible person that I got to interact with him. So there's so many kind people around here. Just like this kind of Southern energy. And then I got to go to a diner because I could, there's only one hour between me arriving and having to fly out. So I went to a diner, there's a really kind waitress that called me Honey.

So that was a beautiful moment. I was so confused you tweeted about that and like Steele's like liks my assistant was like Lex isn't here yet I saw your tweet and I was like he's here. Yes. He's like, no, he's still flying I was like for like an hour ago. He just tweeted about a nice diner. Yeah There's a diner in a different state and then you had to fly over here that was and then I called you you didn't answer I was like, hmm

Something's not add enough. I feel like it's such an idiot because um but apparently the world has cities like Springfield, right?

Every single state has a Springfield.

Oh, really? I think so. That's like a Simpson's joke, right? The city in the Simpsons is Springfield and I think every single state, or most of them have a Springfield. And the same is true for Georgetown, I think what the most popular one was, but there's like a list of things people get when they run out of ideas to just keep using the same thing.

They're your Achilles heel. I forget, keep using the same deal. They're your Achilles heel.

Anyway, I got to meet a bunch of people from your team who's just an incredible human being. So let me just ask on that topic, how do you hire a great team? Like what have you learned about hiring for everything, for the main channel that you

do, for the React, the gaming channel, to Mr. Wieseberger, to Feastables, all that. The big thing is, especially in this content creation, because it's not like anything that's done on Netflix or different content medians, I really need people who are coachable and like really see the value in what I care about, because it's a very specific way of going about things. And it's like a thing, there's no one like plug and play. Like if Netflix wanted to hire someone to do a documentary, there's probably tens of thousands of people you could hire that have worked on documentaries before. But if you want to hire someone to make super viral YouTube videos like we do, there's just no one you can really pull from. Sometimes I'll hire people from game shows, right? They have all these preconceived notions about pacing and how a video should be, and you have to spend the first year breaking all these habits and they think they're better than you. Like a lot of people in traditional think they're better and they think their way is better than what we do. And so for me, it's almost easier to hire people that are just hard workers that are obsessed and really coachable and just train them how to be good at content creation and production, than to hire someone from like traditional which is the only way to really do it. Because there's not that many YouTube channels that have scaled up so it's not like there's a huge talent pool of people who've worked on YouTube channels. So it's easier just to train someone than just pull them from traditional because traditional people, I don't know, they have all these opinions and things and they just think our

way of going about things is dumb. Yeah. So you want people who have the humility to have a beginner's mind, even if they have

experience. Actually, you'll still get it. It's so crazy. Like especially some of my other friends that are scaling up their YouTube channels, there's people that will come on. And you'll ask them like, what do you want to be doing in five years? And instead of saying, oh, I want to be working on this channel, they'll be like, oh, I hope to be working on movies or this, that, and they see like work on a YouTube channels, the launch pad to go into traditional. And it's like, no, like you just don't get it. This is the future. This is the end goal. This is your career. And so I'm just so tired of having those kinds of conversations. Like I feel like people really should be coming around.

These are the future Are there like recurring, interview questions that you ask?

Is there ways to get? Yes. but the biggest thing is like, what do you want to be doing in 10 years? And their answer isn't, you know, making content on YouTube or you know, if their answer is anything like movies or traditional, stuff like that, it's like just a hell no. Like it just won't even remotely work.

Oh, so you really want people to believe

in the vision of YouTube, it's a pleasure? Yeah, I mean, ideally it's like oh,

working here, you know what I mean. So, it's less about the medium and more about just

being on a great team, that's doing epic stuff. Yeah, well and, yeah the medium as well. Because it's hard to put into words, but it's just two completely different ways of going about things. Our videos aren't scripted, and it's a lot more run and gun. And if we hypothetically blow up a giant car or whatever, you only have one take, and it's not scripted. And so you have to over film, overshoot things, overcompensate for the dumb way of going about it. And a lot of traditional people would be like, well, just plan what you're going to say and just plan the angles. You can cut the cameras in half, you can save 50 grand here, you can save $75,000 editing, this and that. And it's like, yeah, but that's not authentic. Blah, blah, you get it. It's almost so obvious that it hurts that I have to constantly have these conversations,

but it's what we live in. But there's also detail, like there's a taste. I've watched a bunch of videos with you, and it's clear to you that you've gotten really good. I don't know what the right word is, style or taste, to be able to know what's good and not, in terms of retention, in terms of just

stylistically, visually. I don't have to think, I can just watch a video, and it just screams in my head, like this is what should change based on the million videos I've watched, and all these viral videos I consumed, like this is blah, blah, blah, what's optimal? And things like that. It's almost like your brain's like a neural net. And if you consume enough viral videos and enough good content that you just kind of start to, like, train your brain to like, see it, and see these patterns that happen in all these viral videos. So that anytime I watch a video or a movie or anything, I just can't stop thinking about what is optimal. And so it's like, it gives me a headache sometimes when I watch something too slow or I don't think it's optimal. Obviously, my taste isn't the end all be all.

But that's something that kind of torments me if that makes any sense. Oh, you can't enjoy a slow-moving movie. No, I can't.

No, I can't.

And that's not to say there's- There's tension on the Godfather is horrible.

Yeah, no, I've tried to watch that movie like three times, but that's not to say slow movies are bad. There's no audience for it, it's just obviously not what I've trained my brain to like and

in social media and YouTube right now, like, that's just not the meta. And in general, like you said, in neural network, you're training your brain in part on actual data, right? So you're actually data-driven, so you're looking at like in terms of thumbnails and titles and different aspects of the first five, 10 seconds and then throughout the video, the retention, all that, you're looking at all of that for your own videos to understand how to do it better.

So that's where the neural network is training. Yeah. Basically, there are ways you can kind of see like the most few videos on YouTube everyday and stuff like that. And I just kind of consumed those every single day. I've been doing that for way too many years. And then you just start to notice patterns. Like the thumbnails on the most few videos, or videos that go super viral, tend to be clear, tend to not have much clutter, tend to be pretty simple. Titles tend to be less than 50 characters. Intros tend to be this, stories tend to be this. And you just kind of like after you see those thousands and then tens of thousands of times, it just starts to click in your head.

This is what it looks like, you know? So how are you able to transfer that taste that you've developed to the team? So for like, cause you said like broad things, but I'm sure there's a million detailed things. Like what zoom to use on the face

you use in the thumbnail, right? The answer is whatever makes the best video. Cause the problem is the more, I have so many friends who are like this, they'll make like checklists for their editor. So like, you know, this beat and this beat, and you need to have like a three part arc and then this, but the problem is that's how you, the more constraints you put on the team, the more repetitive and less innovation you get. And the more like, you know, after 10 videos, people are gonna be like, all right, I've already seen this. So to me, and I'm 24, and you know, I'm probably, my mindset will change over the next 10 years. I just haven't been in this industry too long, but the only way to like really make innovative content and keep things fresh is to not put constraints on or put as little as possible. And so that's why I'm very hesitant on all that stuff, because the more I say, the more they're gonna be like, oh, then that's what we do. And then you know, I'll say one time like, oh you know, ideally there's to cut every three seconds. And then next thing you know, every video there's like cut every three seconds or whatever. So it's hard, because I tried to give as little train, not training, but as little facts or as possible and more just make suggestions, if that makes any sense. You mean publicly or to a team?

To my team, yeah. Yeah, what was so you talked about sort of teaching your voice or your Style, whatever we want to call it to other people on the team so they can be kind of Mr. Beast's replacement

So what's the process of teaching that so you don't know? I get changed. No, I getuez Yeah, you're more time about like what I would call almost like cloning, right? Like like Tyler and other like that Yeah, so when we were hanging out today I was showing him how we have multiple people in the come it's I it's almost like talking to the cameras Yeah, he turns slowly to the camera.

It was a habit. Yeah, he turned slowly to the camera.

Is it weird to you to not be looking at the camera? This whole interview, I constantly have been turning towards the camera and I'm talking to him. Yes. It's a habit because my whole life, I've just been talking to a camera.

The camera looked like I'm talking to him. What are you thinking about when you looking at the camera?

You imagine somebody? I'm fully thinking about the person just sitting, watching it and it's weird. When I'm looking at the camera, I don't see a camera. I'm in a haze picturing what the viewer is seeing when they watch it if that makes sense. And that's where I'll be saying things or doing something and then when I'm watching it I'm, like, that's not what I want. And then I'll freeze up. It's very weird when I'm filming and for people who haven't worked with me too much, they'll think like, I don't know, it's very weird like how I go about it because I'll just be doing whatever. Like lighting a firework car. This is a thousand dollars fire going to go to... And I'll freeze because in my head I'm like this.. I don't know, I don't like how that float or how that shot look, because it's weird. I can perfectly picture what I'm filming by just looking at the camera and then putting myself through the lens of the camera while making content.

I can do it at the same time. It's weird, but... So you're like real-time editing the video.

Yeah, yeah, that's something that didn't at the start come natural to me, but in the last probably like five years, it's happened. And so I would say it's one of my greatest strengths, but I don't know how I developed it. I don't feel like I'm filming anything, like it's almost like the right sound every day

and I just can just look at it and I see exactly when I'm filming and I can just picture it. Well, it's probably doing band recording the video, being the talent for the video and then watching the editing and like analyzing you're careful and do that over and over, over, over and over. Yeah, you do that 10,000 times, yeah. You do the editing more than being in front of the camera, so like, you start to see yourself from that third person perspective. Exactly. Now maybe that actually helps with the nerves of it too, like you see it as creating a video

versus performing, right? And over and over and over, you develop. Yeah, you do that 10,000 times, yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, yeah, I think so. You know, it's weird, I've never been nervous talking to a camera. It's harder for me to talk to a person than to talk to a camera, which I feel like a lot of people say that though, that are whatever, make content, right? Interesting. I've heard that so many times.

Interesting.

I've heard that, or maybe not, maybe I'm just awkward

and dumb. Maybe they're practiced. To me, it's, I mean, both are terrifying, but being in front of the camera by yourself is most- So much easier.

Really? So much easier. Really? Yeah, so much easier. I've preferred a million times over, but that's my whole life, so it's just, that's why it's interesting. Like you spent more of your time talking to people

as it comes to natural and I talked to a piece of plastic. I guess you're talking to a person too. There's just then on the other side of the camera. Yeah, there's just a pixel on the screen. So cloning, how do you achieve the-

Oh yeah, that's right. This whole rabbit trail. So I was showing him that I have a lot of people in the company who were able to think like me basically make decisions like I would make if I was like if you were asked hey in this video should we climb a mountain or should we dig a hole right and like you know they would pick the same answer I'd pick 90 plus percent of the times and so like one example is Tyler who I was showing you and he was pitching some content and you can see like this he was on point and basically for just four or five years we just spent an absurd amount of time together and worked on every single video together and we worked side-by-side and same thing with my CEO James he literally lived with me for a couple years I'm a big fan of just like finding people who are super obsessed and all in and a players that you know they really just want to be great and they're just dumping everything

I have in them and then you were saying because I'd love to find that and develop that you're saying you're basically for a long time just said

everything you were thinking to them exactly like James the guy who's basically my right human right now for two years he lived with me and we probably talked on average of those two years seven hours a day I mean every time I had a phone call at phone on speaker and I'd let him listen I'd anything I was reading any content I was consuming like really just training his brain to think like me so that way he could just do things without my input without me having to constantly watch over him or give him advice and and that's where we've gotten like so for the first six months he didn't do anything he just studied me and studied everything I cared about and how I spoke and blah, blah, and then the next six months, he started taking on some responsibilities and now he can just run the company and I don't ever really have to check it on him. Most of the decisions he makes are exactly what I would do. I call that cloning, I don't know what other people would but it's just like finding people that are really obsessed and they just kind of really want it and just giving them an

avenue to get it, if that makes any sense. Another way to see it is you're converging towards a common vision and that makes like brainstorming much more productive.

Yeah, it just makes it where I don't have to be so involved in everything because I just have these people I know will think like I will, at least relatively close to it. So I can kind of almost be in multiple places at once per se. And so these things that, you know, I still approve every idea we film and, you know, everything before we film and all the creative, I approve it. But I don't have to like be in the weeds and nuances and do all this minor stuff. I can just let them handle it.

I can just do the more macro things. I got a chance to sit in to a lengthy brainstorming session with Tyler and others. That was really cool. Can you talk about the process of that, of people pitching ideas and you pitching alternatives

or shutting down ideas and just going like plowing through ideas, Rick? I mean, you kind of just described exactly what we did.

Yeah. I mean, but the ideas are really, really good at just tossing out like different categories of ideas and then also fine tuning them to see like, how do I change, like think about the titles and the thumbnails.

I work so well off of inspiration. It's like, it's something like, give me anywhere. I don't know. Space. Yeah, like I went to space, you know, what happens if you blow up a nuke in space or I went to the moon. I went to Mars. Because you said that one word, it was able to inspire me to come up with four ideas and so, cool. For me, the way to get a hundred million views on a video is you need something original, creative, something people really need to see, ideally never been done before, all these like, things and so you need like, if you want to consistently go super well, you need just a constant stream of ideas. And the only way I've really found that I can consistently come up with 100 million view videos is to intake inspiration and then see what my brain outputs and so that's kind of at its core foundation what I'm doing there it's just like in taking a lot of random inspiration to see what spawns in my mind so I can

output it but what the neural network of your brain is generating the video the

title the thumbnail all like jointly jointly exactly and that only comes because I spent 10 years my life just obsessively studying all that stuff

does you I mean it seems like you would literally potentially shut down a video

just because you can't come up with a good title yeah oh yeah that's what happened to 70% of those in that pitch session it's like oh what was one of them

genius vs 100 people or yeah like maybe average intelligence versus Genius or

that I was like what the heck is the thumbnail even if the title was good

yeah I mean this so many but yeah people don't click they don't watch yeah that's That's so interesting, but you developed over time the ability to kinda give it, what makes it a good title?

Short? Not just short, it's also, I mean, if someone reads it, do they have to watch it? Is it just so intrinsically interesting that it's just gonna fuck with them

if they don't click on it, you know what I mean? So it doesn't have to be short, but it has to be, like you almost want to have a retention

to word by word reading. Ideally, it's a title also that, you know, cause the titles don't live in a vacuum, right? So it has to lead into the content, so ideally the title represents content that you would wanna watch for 20 minutes. So if it's a 20-minute video and the title is I Stepped On A Bug, it's not gonna, cause it's all of it combined. The click-through rate's gonna be much lower than if it was like a five-second video. People might click it, so you gotta, like even nuances of the length of the video based against the title will affect whether people wanna click it, because sometimes they just all add up. I mean, its that yes. Ideally you want to blow 50 characters because above 50 characters in certain devices you run the chance of it going dot, dot, dot. So like, I took a light pole and I saw how many dollar bills I could stack on top and they would just go dot, dot, dot cause it's too long and it can't finish it, and that's the worst thing because then people don't even know what they're clicking on and so it's going to do even worse. Short, simple, ideally, and just so fricking interesting they have to click and it is a good segue into the content and it represents

the length of the content. And there's probably stuff you, it's hard to convert into words for you. Like, I stepped on a bug versus stepping on a bug versus Mr. B stepped on a bug versus

bug stepping video bug versus bug stepping video. So it's like, yes, the more extreme the opinion, typically the higher the click-through rate. If you can like pay it off in the content, then it just supercharges it.

So like- Oh, so you have a kind of estimate of the extreme-

Yeah, like this water, right? You're like Fiji water sucks. That'd do fine, but if you said Fiji water was the worst water bottle, or the worst water I've ever drank in my life, way more extreme opinion would do way better. But you have to deliver. Yeah, but then you have to deliver because the more extreme you are, the more extreme you have to be in the video.

Yeah. That's almost an inspiration for you to step up.

Yeah, you can be more extreme in a positive way. A lot of people, it's easier though. Positive. Negative click baits, much easier than positive click baits. It just is, it's so much easier to get negative clicks. And so a lot of people are just in my opinion, you know, a little bit lazier. They just take the route like, oh, well, this one gets the same amount of clicks and it's easier with less effort.

The positive one is doing a large number of numbers of something.

Like I spent this number of hours doing this or whatever, if you just wanted to help people or, right, it's just harder to get 10 million views on a video helping people than it is to get 10 million views on a video tearing down a celebrity, you know what I mean?

or whatever negative video you wanna insert there. Well, that said, most of your videos are pretty positive.

So, what's. But not a lot of people do those kinds of videos because they're hard.

Yeah, they're hard. Some of that is giving away money, right? Yeah. What's the secret to that? How do you do that right? Yeah, give away money or? In the video to make it compelling.

Yeah, yeah.

Give away money or? So there's a number that is better than another number,

right... The higher number is always better than the lower number. Yeah, for the most part. You know, it's interesting, some videos will give away $1 million, some videos give away half a million, there's not really, I guess. So I'm retr Okaying what I just, I was more joking with that, but there's no difference whether I put 500 K or million, it's probably not even really a difference between 100K or a million. I haven't really looked into it, like some of our mostly videos are not us giving away a million dollars and sometimes the million dollar videos just don't do as well as the other ones. So, there is a certain point where a dollar amount is just a large dollar amount to an average human and so I think that point is 100K. Like anything above 100K, the average human is just like, that's a lot of money. It doesn't, 100K in a million, like doesn't really move the needle, if that makes sense. Which that's a very nuanced piece of information

that applies to very few people, but yeah. Well, no, I think it applies, it's fascinating. It's fascinating, human, our relationship with money is fascinating. Like why is it so exciting to get, I mean, I, you know, the times I've found like 20 bucks on the ground are like incredible. I don't know why, right, why? Why are you so happy? Like what exactly is so joyful about that? I mean, it depends where you are in life, what the situation is. Yeah, I don't know. There's also a gamified aspect to it.

It's exciting, I don't know why. Yeah, I get it. Like why people want to see people win money. It's just interesting that past 100 grand, it doesn't really seem to make a difference.

Like it's the same, basically. So you found that to be true with all the money you've given away.

I just didn't click through it. Like obviously in terms of someone receiving it, yeah, a million dollars changes their life drastically more. Like that's the difference. Like, oh, if you wanted to, you could really quit your job.

I suppose 100k is like, not really. You probably do like a scientific study, like a formula, giving away money to click through rate. Yeah.

There could be some kind of diminishing return. Yeah, I got it. It definitely, the returns level off dramatically after 100k. 100k.

That's basically the premise. That's basically the premise.

What about 10,000? No, there's 10, 100,000, it's funny because this is such a small niche thing, but yeah, 100,000 does, from what I see in our videos, get more clicks than 10,000, but the difference between 100,000 and a million is just so little. I just, I think big number, big number to a lot of people.

I pass that point. Yeah, so for 100,000, you can, like a given average salary, you can probably live for a year, given what they have average salaries in America.

So that's like a big, that feels something. Yeah, I think it's also just more when they read the title, it's just like, it's a lot of zeros. It's like, fuck loads of zeros. Okay, click. I don't know.

Yeah. I've watched it. Yeah. Oh man, that's fascinating. So on the thumbnail side, again, that's gonna be much harder to say, probably, but offline, I got a chance to look at a bunch of thumbnails and it's fascinating which ones do well and which ones don't. Is there something you could say about what are the elements of the thumbnail that work well? Or is this also deeply in-

Well, that's where, yeah, it's the same thing, like how do you cook good food? But it's easier if you pull up a thumbnail and it can be like, that's why, that's good. That's why, that's bad. That's like an example would be like, one of my friends, he just uploaded a video recently and I called him. I was like, what is this? Because he's a very, very smart guy. And then the thumbnail, he's getting chased by cops, but the cops are wearing yellow vests so they don't look at cops. So I was like, oh, why are the cops on your thumbnail wearing yellow vests? It's like, that makes it so much more boring. And he was like carrying a flag, but the pole and the color of the flag, sort of the same color. So it was like, it's a little harder to see the flag. I was like, also, you're wearing, a shirt with like five different colors.

How much iteration? Because I also got a chance to see the number of iterations you do on...

It's a problem now.

It's an addiction. It's an addiction. Is it? So you kind of, there's a lot of the versions are really good. Yeah.

How do you know when to like stuff? I love how you, when we pulled up that, uh, the burger one and we were flipping through them, you're like, that's really good. I was like, oh, that's version like one of like a thousand.

But even the sketch, the idea was good. Like already even the original idea is strong.

Yeah. Yeah. So we, one of our coming up videos, we made the world's largest plant-based burger and the thumbnail, we're thinking it's like me standing beside the burger cause it's six feet tall. And that's what he's talking about. So like just picture a giant six foot tall burger, super wide thousands of pounds and then I'm beside it. And then it's like eating the world's largest burger. Like you, that's just something you have to click. Like, so you were saying like, how would you describe a good thumbnail?

Like that, you know what I mean? Like, but I think you said the one I noticed first, that was good, where you were very small in it, and you didn't like that one.

I needed to come forward a little bit. And also, the photo we took was just my upper body. So they photo-manipulated and created my legs in Photoshop. And that's why I said I didn't like it because my right leg was a little like off. It was like bent the wrong way because I had to build those legs in Photoshop.

I had to build those legs in Photoshop. Does the physics and the thumbnail have to even make sense? I mean, you can just like exaggerate the head size and all that kind of stuff, right?

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, things don't have to be relative. You can have a car in the background, maybe three times the size. Yeah, and every one of my thumbnails, my face is in the left side, very big. So brand recognition, so just people know. Oh, especially because now that a lot of people copy our videos, it's just nice to like, everyone else might make thumbnails like this, but this is mine.

And obviously, we usually over-deliver and do bigger stuff. Would you recommend to other creators that want to make it big, and they see Mr. Beast and they look up to you to copy some elements of you

or to really try to be unique? Unique, 100% unique. You're not. The next Mr. Beast, quote unquote, it's weird saying that, third person, but whatever, is not gonna do what I'm doing better, they're gonna just invent their own life. Like you're just not gonna do what I do better than me. I have so many. I literally have the best people in the world working here. And I reinvest everything I make, even to this day, you know what I mean? Like it's absurd, the amount of money I spent on content. And I don't care, I'll just stop sleeping and I'll just film every other day. Like, you're just not gonna beat me at my own game, and that's fine, you shouldn't. I didn't get where I am by just beating someone else at their own game, I just found my own lane and innovated and adapted.

And so I'd advise you don't. You give away a lot of the secrets, basically everything about how you operate. I don't hold anything back, go for it. How do you think about that?

Because that's pretty rare. I don't hold anything back, go for it. I think and this is definitely not. Most people in my stance I don't think would take this or my position would take this stance but I see every other YouTuber or person on social media, even, because we're also focused super heavily on YouTube but last year we were also the most followed TikTok creator in the world as well. Actually, we were most subscribed to YouTube channel in the world and the most followed TikTok account in the world. But in general, I just see everyone else as collaborators, not competitors. I don't think giving advice and helping other creators

well in any way harms me and I think it only brings more value to my life. How was it jumping on TikTok and trying to understand that platform from scratch? Yeah. So from being a successful YouTuber to understand a totally different algorithm, fundamentally different algorithm.

It's interesting. Well, not even just the algorithm, just the content. Like I'm going from basically 15 minute short films to one sub one minute vertical content. It's a whole different just ballpark. And so the first little while I was doing TikTok is just kind of figuring out what does Mr. Beast look like in this short form content. But recently we've really started to catch our stride and come up with some original concepts and figure out how to innovate over there just like we did on YouTube. Because I don't want it, I didn't want it to just be shitty YouTube videos. And so like an example is we played The Rock for 100K and Rock, Paper, Scissors, and the loser had to donate 100K to charity. We went to random people on a campus and we offered them. So I said, I'll give you $100 if you fly to Paris to give me a baguette. And then they said, no, then I was like, I'll give you $300 if you fly to Paris and give me a baguette. And I was expecting this person to say no and go up to like 10 grand.

And so we're starting to find just tons of original content over there.

But it seems like an epic video to make for one minute. Exactly. No one on ShortForms is doing it. That's the thing. It's like, it's just so funny because like TikTok's been big for a while now, years. And then, you know, as we started to really figure out things on the YouTube channel and get it cranking where I have some free time, we set our sights on TikTok and like, okay, what are people not doing? How do we make it better, put in more effort, make it good? And we did the same thing we did at YouTube, just different over on TikTok and it worked. And now we're at the fastest growing or most followed TikTok account in 2022.

And it's just funny that no one else did that. And you're not afraid to do epic stuff, which also during the brainstorming, some of the ideas you're like, that's better as a short.

That's crazy. Yeah. Can you remember one?

Because I remember I said that a bunch, but I can't think of one. All I remember is that there were like epic videos. Like really, you're going to do that for a one minute video? Yeah. That's crazy.

So like, are you posting similar content to a YouTube short as a TikTok video? Yeah. Yeah. Those would just double up. It's just hard. You know, what's actually pretty fascinating and people who do social media listening to this will probably find this pretty interesting is picture like the content creation meta three years ago versus now where you can make sub one minute vertical content and it go viral on TikTok and go viral on YouTube shorts, go viral on Instagram reels. It goes viral on Facebook. It goes Reddit, you know, you swipe through vertical content now and Twitter when you click on a video and you flip through it. So this is actually very weird. This is the first time in the history of, I guess, Western social media that one form of content could actually go super viral on every single platform. It's never been like that before.

So they're going viral individually. They're not like interpreting or whatever.

Yeah, like I can post something on TikTok, they'll get 100 million views and then post on shorts and I'll get 200 million views and then post it on Instagram and I get 50 you can't post 100 million views and then, you know, I have it yet, but you can then turn around and tweet and get tens of millions of views and then you can post on Reddit and get tens of millions of views and Facebook can get tens of millions of views and that just wasn't a thing. Three years ago, Twitter didn't have, because a lot of you probably don't even know this, but when you tap on a video now and you swipe down, it just turns into TikTok. That wasn't a thing even a year ago. Reddit, that wasn't a thing a year ago. Probably two years ago, that wasn't a thing on Instagram, three years ago, that wasn't a thing on YouTube, right? YouTube Shorts, so this is all new. I don't, it's weird, I haven't heard a single person talk about it, but this is the first time where content can actually go viral on every single platform. And you don't have to write or film a video for Facebook, film a 12-minute video for YouTube, film a sub-60-second video for TikTok, write a tweet for Twitter, and post this on Reddit.

You can just do the same thing on every platform. And the fact that your content has gone viral on multiple platforms regularly means that virality is not accidental.

Sometimes it can be, of course, but it can be engineered. It can be engineered. So many people say it's luck, and they're like, you're just lucky, or this or that, but what do we have to? Probably like 1,000 videos over 10 million views. We don't ever have a dud. You can call it luck, but I think it can be trained. I counsel YouTubers all the time and show them how to go from getting a couple million views a month to 10 million views a month very easily, and from even certain ones. Just one of my friends, he was just really struggling, and so I just started showing him basically everything I know, and just doing like once every week, sometimes once every two weeks calls, and he went from $10,000 a month on YouTube to over $400,000, just doing these little counseling calls. And so, I mean, people can make excuses all they want and say it's just luck, or say, you know, well, anyways, I don't even wanna quote all the other stuff, but it's just, it is. It is a teachable skill, it's a learnable skill. You can study your way to consistently make viral videos, no matter how small your channel is. Even if you have zero subscribers, you could if you actually studied hard enough and like, basically if you knew what I knew and some of these, so I don't sound so arrogant, also like some of these other friends that have that, I'd say, are the smartest people in the world when it comes to content creation online.

they're just like, no, it's just luck, you know? So you do lay it all out there, but I gotta push back to one interesting thing. I think a crucial component of your success is the idea stage, the idea generation. The brainstorm that I heard today, but getting really good at generating ideas. So it's not just the selection of the thumbnail and the title, that creative process. It's also just the engine of generating really good ideas. And getting that, I mean, I would say that is probably the thing that needs to be trained the most for most creators, right?

They just don't put enough ideas on paper. And getting that. Yes, but also a lot of creators also just don't, you know, which I didn't either for the longest time, just didn't don't make good enough content.

Content that's worthy of getting 10 million views.

In the idea or the execution of the idea? Both. I mean, like, think about how many people just make videos, they film in under 20 minutes and they don't really put any effort into it. And like, you know, it's like, my first 500 videos didn't deserve to get a million views. Like there's a reason they did. They're terrible, you know, but at the time I thought they did, right? And I'm in the mindset of a lot of small YouTubers where I thought those videos deserved a million views and I thought that really paid me. But I watching back now and I can tell you exactly why the videos were just fricking horrible.

You know what I mean? You know what I mean? So what was the breakthrough for you to start realizing, to start having a self-awareness, you know, about these videos aren't good enough. You're probably still going through that,

you probably still growing to see. Yeah, every six months you used to look back and hate your videos. Or at least see things you could improve and be like, oh, I could've done this better, that better. If not, then you're not learning quick enough,

in my opinion at least. Where's the source of that learning even for you now?

I mean, I just got back from a mastermind where I just got like ten of the smartest people I knew and we just locked ourselves in a cabin and taught each other stuff. Constantly, every day, not every day now, probably every other day, I go on a walk and it's called random people. I'll just say, yeah, teach me something. And I mean, it's just, you just have to have a never-ending thirst for learning. That's very imperative, especially if you want, like if you want to get on top and then stay on top, the only way to do it is just to constantly be learning. Or someone who is learning is just gonna,

yeah, I'll have a leg up on you in the knowledge game. And what kind of stuff are you, because you've talked about offline that you just love learning of all kinds, doesn't matter but in terms of videos are you studying videos are you studying

recently not as much I'm more because they get to the videos I want I have to build this business and scale up and hire so more my recent time has been like my teenage years were spent studying virality and studying content creation now I'm studying how to build a content company so I can actually produce the

crazy ideas I want to produce if that makes any sense so yeah on that the

business side we talked about hiring do you have trouble firing people no I'm pretty sure almost every person yeah actually every person I've ever fired we you just give them severance, and I like to see it more as. It's no ill will. Like if there's if like, if I fired you if there's some other job you want me to help you get I'll DM them on Twitter like you know if you want to go work for I don't know insert whatever MTV give me someone to DM. I'll DM like you know, I I try to make it more like a transition and do whatever

we can to make it as easy as possible. And there's something that was just not working for you because you want people like you said super passionate.

Because at the end of the day if you hold someone that you onto someone that you you don't see being here in 10 years, you're just doing them a disservice, you're just giving them more ingrained, more enrooted and where they are, and the sooner you do it,

and help them move on to their new life, the better. Given all the wisdom you have now, if you were to give advice to somebody or if you were to start over again, you had no money, what would be the first 10 videos you tried to make on a new channel, I guess that's advice for a new person.

And nobody knows you. And nobody knows you. Yeah and nobody knows me,

I would think they have a mask on.

And then you also, I guess don't have the wisdom. If I don't have what I have in my head then I would just say just fail. A lot of people get analysis paralysis and they'll just sit there and they'll plan their first video for 3 months. Any of you listening especially if you have zero videos on your channel, your first video is not going to give views. Period. It's not. Your first 10 are not going to give views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end Like all you need to do this this applies to people who have not uploaded videos But have dreams of being a youtuber is make 100 videos and improve something every time do that and then on your hundred first video We'll start talking like maybe you can get some views But you know your first hundred are gonna say there are very freak cases like Viscoshi or Emma Chamberlain who have really good personalities and it doesn't take them so as many videos And it's just like people who are seven foot five and making the NBA like yes There are freak cases you can find but for the average person like us You know who don't have these exceptional personalities and you know Backgrounds of filmmaking just make a hundred videos improve something each time and then talk to me on your hundred first video

Well the improve something is time is the tricky one

How do you improve something each time the second one just I don't know put more effort into the script The third one try to learn a new editing trick the fourth one Try to figure out a way that you can have better inflections in your voice the fifth one Try to you know study a new thumbnail tip and implement it the sixth one try to figure out a new title There's infinite ways, that's the beauty of content creation online, there's literally infinite ways. From the colouring to the frame rate to the editing to the filming to the production to the jokes to the pacing to every little thing can be improved and they can never not be improved.

There's literally no such thing as a perfect video.

So, if you knew everything you know now, with no money, but no money. Step one, i would just brainstorm like, okay, I don't have money, what are some viral things like I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is something as simple as when I counted to 100,000, which is what I did do when I was poor, and I like that work, but like what's something like that I could do that would be even more attention-guided.

Yeah, you were, as part of the brainstorm, you would throw out a lot of ideas, and people throw out a bunch of ideas,

and one of the questions is, is this even doable, right? Yeah, first off, come up with ideas you think would do well, and then ask yourself later if they're doable, because there's different ways

you can accomplish something.

Don't be cynical about the doability of stuff. Yeah, because there really are so many different ways you can accomplish a goal. Like when we give away an island, like we gave our 100 million subscriber an island, you can't find private islands that don't look like shit for less than $10 million, so this isn't doable, right? All right, the idea doesn't exist. Not doable, exit off, but then you dig into it, and you find different alternatives, and you find, okay, what if we just buy a $2 million island that sucks, and then spend a million dollars importing some sand, let's build a beach, let's import 300 trees, let's build a little bit of canals, cut some paths. Boom, now it's a really nice island, but it's actually affordable, because we don't have $10 million to spend on a video, but we can afford to spend three and a half, and lose whatever, a million dollars on that video. So that's an example of, yeah, if you just went off the gut test, you'd be like, this isn't doable. Every island's $10 million, we're screwed. If we go cheaper, it's just a terrible island, no. And so if you, there are so many different ways you can achieve what you want, you really gotta push through notes, which not a lot of people do. You have to have more of a dominant personality, and just a willingness to, when people tell you it's not possible, just actually go through all the variables

and eliminate them all yourself.

Have a stubbornness and a resilience to failure, maybe. For what we do, and creators online, it's very imperative that you have, that a no isn't a no to you. You really have to think, and just, we take a personality test, and just having a dominant personality, is a better indicator that when someone tells you, oh, there's no way you're gonna build a brick wall for under $100,000, you'll be like, okay, and then still go check the next 10 vendors,

and figure it out. Yeah, what advice would you give to an already established channel, like with one, two, three, four million subscribers, how to 10X it, increase it, without losing, maybe?

Yeah, that's where it's very channel by channel. You can't give general advice. Okay. Yeah, because if I do, millions of creators are gonna see this, and then they're gonna do it,

and I'm gonna fuck them over. Oh, I see, I see. So, let's say I'd like two million subscribers on this podcast. Yeah. Like, how would you 10X that without sacrificing what it is? 10X your stuff. Does it matter? So, you've talked about what's success.

Yeah, it's different for everyone. Yeah. 10X your stuff. It's different for everyone. Like, is 10Xing your definition of success? No. Well then, it's gonna, right off the bat, it's hard, because if you don't give a shit about 10Xing, it's even harder than 10X. He does this because he likes helping people. That's one thing I found throughout this day. Every time I talk data, it's so funny with him, cause it's like, you know, you could do this to get more views, and he'll just be like, blank. I don't see like that doesn't register anything, you know, he just like doesn't care, which is,

it's really, really cool- I'm really, I'm really nervous about that. I'm really nervous about the numbers affecting, cause it's so fun. Yeah. It's so fun to focus on the numbers, and I'm, I'm really worried about that. But at the same time, you should be cognizant of that, because you've created, not just some of the most watched videos, but some of the most amazing videos ever. So there's a strong correlation there. It's not like you're selling your soul to make a highly viewed video. It's actually, if you look at the metrics, it helps you understand what is compelling and not.

And so I feel like I am,

I feel like there's some value to investigate what work, when people tune on and when not, to be more data-driven, even on podcasts.

But I'm really afraid of that. On the flip side, I think part of the appeal

is that you don't care about that kind of stuff. But there could be stuff that doesn't have to do anything with that and it has to do with stylistic choices of lighting and cameras, or maybe with, for example, topics. Yeah.

You know, like. Yeah. Even what you've asked me here is like,

different than what most people ask me. Yeah, so it could be, I mean, and it'd be nice to understand that. But again, I'm worried about polluting the creative process.

At the end of the day, it's, at the end of the day, this is a true case of its your own intuition. Like, you know your viewers better than anyone else,

it's whatever. It's whatever. See I'd like to push back on that, I really don't. You do.

I do. You do.

Name one person who knows your viewers better than you.

Somebody that looks at numbers of podcasts? No, you know your viewers. You know, you're the only,

how many episodes have you done? 350? Exactly.

But I'm not peanut? Exactly. But I'm not pigmented. You're the only one who's watched every second

of all 350 of them, probably. Okay, that's just, that's just not, no, well I haven't.

but the okay well I haven't. But the, okay. because you did it. So you do know what's in album it's your content is new P I'm telling you you do. And this is just one of those moments where you're an intelligent guy and you just have to trust your like instincts. Like, just think what is the typical ex viewer

and what do they want? It's your content and new people. I don't think like that my tip but that's all you would have to

my tip that's all you would have to do. And whatever your gut tells you

that would be the best guess. You don't know what the typical view is though, I don't, because, to investigate, that would be very, very difficult. And then you have to start looking at the numbers. You have to start to consider demographics. The only way I know that anybody even watches it is because I'll sometimes run into people, like when I run on the river, and they be like, I love you, Lex. It's like, okay, well that's the data point, and they're like cool people. But, I don't know, I don't have any other, it's difficult man it's difficult to know, it's difficult to know who listens to boxes, it's difficult to know. Do you have a sense of who's, I mean, like, you're so huge that everybody watches. Yeah. But no, I still do.

I'd say, but no, I still do. I'd say if you were to just put a gun to my head and you're like, all right, we're gonna pick a random person that watched your last video and you have to like roughly guess what they are and if you're not close, we'll kill you. I would say probably like a teenager that plays video games. Like some, like that would be probably the typical one. And then there are people that are maybe a little bit younger. A lot of people are older as well, but in a random sample size, yeah, it's probably like a male boy that plays video games. Like that's the best way I would describe it. But I don't try to pertain to them. I just make whatever I think is interesting and good content. And this is what we were talking about before, even though hypothetically 35 to 40% of my audience is women, which is, you know, less than a majority. If we get 100 million views of video, that's still 30 to 40 million females that watch every video, which is probably the largest, you know, views per video for women on the whole platform, which you wouldn't think that. You know, like I can't think of a single other creator that gets more women to watch their videos than that.

So we hit a large group of kind of every demographic, if that makes any sense. So what if we look at other maybe more challenging kinds of channels or not? But if we look at educational, for example, like lectures, or if we look, yeah, educational, it could be short videos, like how would you 10X that? Like something on robotics and biology and science and engineering and all that.

That's more educational focused. That's more educational focused. We would honestly just have to pull the date because it's the same way as if you went to Gordon Ramsay and you said, how would a new cook cook better? You know, it's like, even then that's not even specific, you have to go channel by channel. You really do. Or I'm giving horrible advice because if there was these just golden rules, everyone would do it. You know what I mean?

Like if there's these magical little principles. How quickly, when you look at a channel, can you kind of give advice?

Yeah. Give advice. Yeah. It's like surface love at the start. Like if we watch 10 videos, I feel like I'd have a good profile and I could tell you, in my opinion, you know, especially once I look at the analytics and I get more ingrained and like, okay, the typical viewer is this, they're from here, here's how they're feeling. You know, because there are people who make videos for rednecks. And like the rednecks taste of content is just so much different than obviously women watching makeup videos, which are so much different than, you know, teenage boys watching a Minecraft video. They're just all different. So the biggest thing you have to do is put your head in the headspace of the viewer and see the content, how they would, because if you just try to only give your taste, which is what a lot of people do and things from your perspective, it's very biased and it's just not going to work for everyone. And that's actually how you do more harm than good, which is something I'm very careful

of. Yeah. But at the same time, just generating a lot of ideas. I think the first time I've talked to you was on Clubhouse actually. Yeah. I mentioned something about robots and like almost immediately you went to generating a bunch of ideas around robots. Oh yeah.

Easily. Oh yeah. Easily. 100 robots versus 100 humans. Yeah.

Yeah. I think your idea, like the first idea was because you just said so many ideas I never even thought of, but it shows the value of basically brainstorming with people that think

differently. But at the end of the day, my ideas are probably, you know, might lean towards some people a little bit younger than your audience. Like some of the stuff.

Could be. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. There's still ideas. Like I think the first one you said, because we're talking about a quadruped, like robot dogs, you said to replace a biological dog with a robot dog and see if the owner notices something. You were just quickly brainstorming different ideas of like how- Yeah. This was years ago. I remember it though. Yeah. It was just, I mean, it's like, oh yeah. I never really thought about that kind of sort of, it's the basic, the tension between what does it take for a robot and our AI system to replace the biological systems that we, the biological creatures that we love in our lives.

It makes, it's much easier to make a video around a good idea, obviously, than a bad one. You just send yourself up for success.

Okay. So that's for 10Xing already popular channel. What's the hardest number? And the numbers that matters, click-through rate, average view duration, and surveys.

What's the hardest number to optimize for? Probably surveys. Do you have any, do you have an insight into the surveys at all? No, no, not really. But if you just click on a bunch of random videos online, you'll eventually get a survey. What's this video transformative, heartwarming, inspiring? What people rate does make a difference? And it's like, you can give people a click of a video, you can get them to watch it, but you can't really fake whether or not they're satisfied. They don't lie, the surveys, you know? Maybe one person here or there might troll, but once you aggregate enough, it's a pretty clear telltale of the video.

So either you're making a great video or you're not.

What is it, minimizing the non-regrettability- Yeah, I think Elon tweeted, that's what he's trying to do on Twitter.

For Twitter, and that's for Twitter, and that's interesting.

That's basically the survey metric, how happy you are that you've been using the platform on a platform. Yeah, yeah. Elon tweeted, we want to limit the amount of regrettable minutes people spend on Twitter, and the first thing I thought, it's like, that's something YouTube already has a lot,

their whole survey system and feedback loop. How tough is it to take on YouTube, you think? Like- For Twitter?

Yeah, for Twitter for anybody else. For Twitter? I mean, it's going to be basically impossible. I mean, YouTube's not going anywhere, and I don't know, I don't think anyone's going

to do what YouTube does better than them, or at least not in the next 10 years. You asked on Twitter, would you rather have 10 million dollars or 10 million subscribers on YouTube?

What would your own answer be at various stages in your career? If I had nothing, I would say 10 million dollars, because with 10 million dollars, you can hire some people and pump out content with like a million or two, get 10 million subscribers

and then keep the other eight million.

So that's if you believe in your ability to grow a channel, if you- Well, yeah, if you don't believe in your ability to grow a channel, then you shouldn't take the 10 million subscribers, because you're just going to kill the channel. Yes, you're going- So the 10 million is definitely, a better question would be would you rather have a million dollars or 10 million subscribers. That's where it gets a little tricky. Because now it's like, hmm, you know, a million dollars life-changing amount of money, but if you semi-knew what you were doing, you'd probably make a million dollars off a 10 million

subscriber channel, but it is a little bit of risk. So a million dollars might not be enough to build a strong team, because you don't know how to do it so you might waste all of that money.

Yeah, or they just keep it and retire.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, that's true. Yeah, because 10 million is just so high, it's like, just never work again, who cares?

For the average human, that's so much money. It's interesting to me also to the value of the subscriber versus the value of the dollar. I suppose how valuable is the subscriber for, like, what percentage of the videos, like, how active are the subscribers in watching the video?

For you. That's hard, I don't know. I was actually thinking more about the subscriber to dollar. Like, if someone has 10 million subscribers, have they made 10 million dollars? I don't know why that kind of popped in my head.

It's an interesting thought. Do you ever, when you analyze videos, do you ever analyze videos like we've talked about offline of other videos across YouTube in general to understand trends, to understand social behavior?

Oh, all your, not all, but a lot of the questions are analytic space. Yeah, it's so funny.

Because I love it. Yeah, it's so funny. Because I love it. It's just like a giant social experiment, right?

Like what people like to watch, what people share, it's like a fascinating, it's like a fascinating. So, like I said before, what percentage of your audience do you think care about this kind of stuff?

Like, this deeply about YouTube analytics? I think a large amount care about curiosity and exploration of interesting ideas.

So, in that sense, yeah, this would fit it. In that sense, yeah, I love it. This is funny. This isn't me like trying to make, I love you, and I actually, I loved your Magnus one and even your Hikaru one was really good, a bunch of other ones, but I think we're getting to the point now where only analytics junkies would want to keep hearing more analytics talk and the normie is probably like, they've had their dose of YouTube talk for the next

three years. I love you.

I actually, I love you too. Maybe I'm wrong. Comment if I'm wrong. I could be. I don't know your audience.

See, this is where you would tell me, shut up, I know my audience, you dumbass. And I don't at all. I actually, I just follow the thread of curiosity and I think there's just a lot of curious humans in the world. And to me, it's like, so the question about analytics is the question of basically stepping away, stepping outside of yourself and thinking, why the hell do I like TikTok so much? Why do I like Twitter so much? Why do I like YouTube so much? And getting, even if you're not a creator, getting an insight into that is really interesting. It's like, what, because all these platforms are fundamentally changing the nature of content. People are reading books less, they're probably going to be watching movies less and less, they're probably going to be watching Netflix less and less. Do you ever think about the sort of the darker side of YouTube and with shadow banning and censorship and all that kind of topics, especially if you see it in other platforms like Twitter, that Elon recently highlighted the shadow banning that was happening and in general, the censorship that was happening on those platforms. Do you think about the role of centralized control of which information is or isn't made available through search and discovery? I'll be honest, I never really think about it.

You just try to make fun videos that- Yeah, I'm more, I'm kind of more in my own lane, but it's not like that I don't just specifically think about, I just like a lot of stuff in general, I'm just kind of in my own lane thinking about my own stuff. But now that you asked, I'm curious, what are your thoughts on YouTube and that kind

of stuff? Well, I'm generally against centralized censorship or shadow banning. Shadow banning is the worst one because not that the goal of creating a healthy platform where you're having great conversations and videos that are not spreading misinformation, that sounds like an admirable goal, but that's too difficult of a job for a centralized entity.

That's too big of a- Yeah, there's the misinformation stuff and then there's also just like the videos where they do something that causes, what happened back in the day, the adpocalypse and a lot of creators revenue plummets because people are doing videos that advertisers don't deem acceptable and then now all these big advertisers are pulling and the little guys are getting hit because ad rates dropped by 30% and the person who just quit his job to go full-time consecration now can't sustain it. So it's also, it's like a lot of different variables as well. That makes it so complicated.

Well, I think the big thing is transparency, especially around shadow banning for people.

I agree, I agree. On shadow banning, you should be transparent. You should let people know it, you know, obviously there has to be some type of controls. People can't just post whatever and so if you're pulling those levers, they should at

least know. Yeah, so they know how to improve their content. They can understand it, they can, if it's a wrong shadow banning, like as a society that we should not shadow ban this kind of content, that means you should be publicly

discussing it and having that. Because if not and if it's not known, then it's just kind of like, well then who's pulling the strings and like, how do we know they're not just manipulating things to get whatever

message they want out there and silence other ones? Yeah, and there could be sort of in the background, government influence, which is where actual freedom of speech comes into play, that government should not have any control or be able to put pressure on censorship of speech, and it gets weird if none of that is being, there's no transparency around it, but to be fair, that's a huge responsibility.

The amount of content that YouTube is uploaded on YouTube that is shared by YouTube, viewed by YouTube. But even more of a reason why it would probably make sense to be transparent, because then

people can help fact check it. That's right. But that requires building a platform that makes that easy. To make fact checking easy, to make Twitter now has being able to share context and all that kind of stuff. That crowdsource it. Crowdsources the way Wikipedia crowdsources it. I mean, there's... Right.

It's right.

And then you open a random Wikipedia article. But people criticize Wikipedia because there is a political lean to the editors of Wikipedia and then they get some articles that definitely have a bias to them and all that kind of stuff. It's a difficult problem. It's a difficult problem to solve that ultimately, as much as possible, it would be nice for the viewer to have control of that versus the entity that's hosting it. So for the viewer to decide.

I'll let you just figure that stuff out.

I'm just going to make fun. Cool videos?

Yeah. Yeah.

Let's go to Antarctica again. How was that? How was going to... You just came back from Antarctica. I watched the video. That was fun. That was a really fun video. Thank you. I mean, there's a lot of things I can comment about that, but what was the hardest part

of making that video? The hardest part was just getting out there. It's just so remote. And you land the plane on just this ice runway and it's so sketchy. And then once the plane takes off, you're just there. You're the most remote place on the planet. And it's just very breathtaking. If you have the chance to ever go to Antarctica, I would recommend it. It was probably like the... In the video, we climbed a mountain that wasn't named, so we can name it. And standing on top of that mountain and just seeing nothing, because once you get outside the outskirts and you get deep in Antarctica, there's no penguins. Nothing lives there at all.

There. Yeah. You guys come with this several times how beautiful.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it's just...

Yeah. It's just very beautiful. What about shooting itself?

Like the technical aspects of shooting it? Oh, I mean... Well, somehow we lucked out. One of the days was like the warmest day in like forever that's been in Antarctica. It was like... It was positive degrees. But at certain parts, it was also like negative 20, negative 30. And that's where the cameras, you constantly have to be switching out the batteries and heating them up and like putting them basically in like your pants or they'll just get way too cold.

And we were prepared for much worse, but it ended up being much better than we thought. So for that video, but in general, maybe some other challenging videos, how do you go from the idea stage to the actual execution to the final video? Can you take me through like a full process of like we're talking to bought some crazy wild ideas today.

How do you go from that to a final video we could publish? Well, I mean, obviously, first things first, you got to figure out the idea and then it just depends. I mean, pick any video you can think of on my channel.

I can take you through it. Well, what about the... in a circle? You have to stay in a circle for 100 days.

100 days. For 100 days. Yeah. So for that one, step one.

One of the most popular.

Yeah. Yeah. That video did really well. Yeah. So we... Problem is we have to... This is where you get really into the nuances of the company because we have a lot of videos going on. You can't just, in a vacuum, be like, all right, we're not doing anything for 100 days. We're only filming this. So step one is we had to build an independent crew that could actually do that for 100 days. That way everyone else could keep working on the normal videos and not just screw everything up. Yeah.

the intro. Yeah. And that's like, I need an iterative process where you're like, okay, this will be funnier. So this is just not all up front that you've written inside gear.

Yeah. Ideally it would be.

But as you kind of see things, you get inspired and then you think of more and more.

This would be better with a crane. Yeah.

I dropped out of the house. That was crazy that you decided to do that.

So fearless in the kind of crazy stuff you're willing to do. Exactly, I'm a broken record, but whatever makes the best video possible.

That's all you focus on. Okay, so what about the delegation of who gets to, what are the cameramen, the people operating the cameras, who's responsible for different things?

Is it like a distributed process? That's where whoever the lead cam would be on that video would just decide it. We got one because we shot over 100 days. A lot of it was just Sean, the guy who was in the circle just vlogging. We just gave him a camera and he figured it out. And then we'd have like for him just set hours each day that a cameraman would come. So if he had any content, he needed extra hands. Instead of just having someone on standby 24 seven, it made more sense to do set hours. Nice. And yeah, it was hard,

but explaining it in hindsight sounds so simple. Yeah, nice. And I guess like the more, because that one is relatively simple, I guess, because it's a low number of people.

Yeah, the hard part about that is just the time. Like, you know, I checked in on them so many different days and it's like an hour here, two hours there, three hours there, over 100 days adds up to be a ton of time. And even then, like, you know, if you have a 10 person crew, you know, paying them daily rates for 100 days,

it just all of that adds up. What about like the 100 versus 100, 100 adults versus kids? What was bringing that to life?

That seems exceptionally challenging. Yeah. Basically the thought process was we did 100 kids versus, or sorry, 100 boys versus 100 girls. People loved it. Honestly, I didn't think they'd like it as much as they did. Video did really, really well. So the second I saw that video was crushing, I was like, all right, we're doing it again. But last time we did it, we did it in our studio. So we built a giant room, put 100 girls in it. Sounds bad when I explain it like this. And then a giant room put 100 boys. And then we're like, after 100 hours, whichever room has the most people, we'll give them half a million dollars.

And then, you know, it's figuring out, do we want the, yeah. Those videos came up at least today as ones that are like really complicated

in terms of the audio, in terms of how it's to film it. Yeah, that's the problem. We had a lot of audio issues because in the first one, we didn't have a roof on it. The second one, there was a roof. So there was a lot of reverb, which then in editing made it brutal. Like half the shots weren't usable and it really screwed us over. So we had to do a lot of Frankenstein-ing

in the editing to make up for basically my ignorance. So you mentioned that you were surprised how well that one did. A lot of creators talk about getting depressed when the videos don't do as well as they kind of expected. There's a kind of feeling. You can get really worn out by that. Do yourself feel that? And also do you have advice for others that feel this?

Yeah, it's weird because I am a numbers guy, but also it used to. It used to very much, especially when I was betting everything I had on a video. When it did bad, that was devastating, man. I'd cry and I'd be depressed for days and it really would have a severe impact on my mood, but I don't know, now it doesn't really matter. If a video does better, just look at it and I'm like, oh, why did this video do bad? Probably, oh, there's a little retention dip there. I don't think people like the thumbnail. Maybe we should switch it. And I just look at it objectively, unemotional, and then just move on. And I feel like that's a much healthier way of going about it. If a creator is listening, that is the ideal way to respond to a video that's doing bad. Just remove emotion from the equation and just look at it and figure out

how you can improve the next one. Is there tricks to being able to detach yourself from that? Because in your case, that's true for creators, but in your case, there's a lot of money on the line. Yeah, well, there's videos cost a lot. Months of my life?

Yeah. Months of my life and so much time, but no, I mean, you just, I mean, I don't know. The only real answer is it's just a conscious effort. You just have to unemotionally look at the video, determine the problems, and then move on. Like, there is no secret. You know what I mean? It's just, it's that. And if you really can't bring yourself to do it, then you're just screwed.

Honestly, maybe you're not meant for this game. Okay, so that's part of the development as a creator, is like being able to be.

For longevity, yes, yeah. For longevity, yes, yeah. You have to unemotionally be able to look at videos that flop and figure it out. Because if not, just getting, not every video can be a one out of 10, and so when a video does bad, you know, that just stress and depression,

it's just gonna eventually get to you in the long run. So you said you've failed in a bunch of videos, sort of taking them to completion,

so what are some of the biggest fails? Yeah, weirdly enough, as we've matured and we've done this before, we don't have that problem as much, especially how we're getting into the multi-million dollar budgets per video. It's like, failure's not really an option anymore, so I'm a little more particular about what I do, but back in the day, yeah, like we would do a video where we spent 24 hours on a deserted island, and we filmed it, did it all, and I just, I didn't like it after the edit, so I just grabbed the voice and we went back to the deserted island and spent another 24 hours there and refilmed it, or.

Could that have been caught and prevented at the idea stage, like where?

No, it's a good idea, it was just poor execution. To be honest, when we were out there, it was hot. We were just like, we all, at one point, just kind of wanted to die, it was just miserable. So how do you avoid that these days? Well, I just went with it as a little cooler, to be honest, and then we had, literally, the amount of fun we had in the video was like, 10 times higher.

Oh, interesting. So you, like, there's some practical details that you just learned.

Yeah, I don't, videos, yeah, I don't, videos where it's very hot or it's on water because I get super seasick, it was like a, kind of like 10 things that if they have these variables, I'm down to do it. But my fun meter is not as high as normal. Like, we tried to, anytime we do anything on a boat, like when we spent 24 hours in a burement or a triangle, or when I tried to spend like, which didn't get uploaded, but tried to spend like 100 hours at sea or whatever, just like on a raft, it just like, it makes me want to throw up and I get so seasick, I can't even see straight. But there are just some videos that require me

to be on a boat, so I just suck it up. So when you spend months in creating a video, I know this is probably stressful to some creators, like how much stress, how do you feel when you have to click publish on a video? No, not much. So you're able to detach yourself?

Yeah, yeah, again, and old me, tons. I'd be like scratching and nervous and like my hands would be sweating, like to the point where I'm almost about to puke, I'm like, I really hope people like this. But, you know, I don't know, I think that's just part of maturing it. There's different, as a content creator, there's different phases. And you just like once you get over the fear that you're just going to wake up one day and be irrelevant, you know, and you just, you know, accept that like you believe in yourself and you believe in your content and that you can continue to be relevant, then you don't, I don't know, you kind of, it's a little bit easier to detach yourself, I guess. And it's a much healthier place to be. You can't do this for 10 years if every little thing just causes these huge emotional reactions. It's like, that's why a lot of creators go a little, you know, mentally insane. You have to get out of that game because it really messes with you.

We've talked about this a little bit, but how do you define and how do you suggest others define success on YouTube? So subjective.

Some people, some people success is retiring their mom. You know, for you, success is inspiring people and educating them and, you know, whatever the peak in their curiosity. Um, for other people, it's just quitting their job.

So you have to self reflect on what your definition of success is. Cause I think a lot of creators kind of don't really think, don't introspect. Like they kind of want to keep getting more and more subscribers kind of thing.

Um, yeah, but subscribers is just a vanity metric. You know, it doesn't, subscribers don't correlate to views.

Sure.

Or views what, yeah, I know, but that's more, that was a direct view. That was more direct to people listening because, uh, a lot of people do really care about subscribers or even followers like on Tik TOK. But if you look like your view on YouTube, very, very few percent, if even a percent of your views come from the sub feed, right, they're almost all home feeder suggested. What's the last time you clicked on your sub feed to watch a video?

Oh, almost never.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe five years ago, it used to be a thing. It's not anymore. No one does. Um, and it's getting harder and harder to find the sub feed.

I subscribe to way too many channels, I think.

Yeah, that's what everyone does and you subscribe to 10 channels. They're great, but two years later, your taste evolves and it's like, it's a mess. And so, um, there's subscribers don't really matter. Followers on Tik TOK don't really matter. Um, so anyways, it really, they really are the definition of a vanity metric.

And, but what about views?

They do, obviously, because if people are showing up time and time again, that's what matters.

Okay. So that, that's a good thing to define a success. I just feel like, um, that too can be a problem because, uh, I would say, you know, if I wanted to be successful, like as a young creator, I might start copying Mr. Beast or something like that. Right? Like there's, you start trying to take shortcuts as opposed to find your, your own unique voice, right? So like chasing views is a problem too, it feels like, or no. Um, as long as you detach yourself from that.

I mean, um, I mean, if you're, sounds bad, but if you're lazy and you just want to copy someone else and not experiment and find your own way, but yeah, I mean, you can't make that excuse for them and someone just isn't coming up with the original stuff and putting in the effort. You can't just say, Oh, it's cause they're chasing views. And we need some match, different metric for them to chase. No, they just need to find their own way.

The rich, it just feels like unique type of content will often lead to sacrifice in the number of views in the short term.

By the longterm you win. Okay. Or if you do win, you win more, I guess would be a better way of putting it.

Okay. Or do you think you will IPO miss Mr. Beastberger or Feastables in the next five, 10 years?

Beastberger or Feastables? No, I kind of think they're something, actually, you know what? I just realized this is our first time talking about those. We're like an hour and a half and that's so funny.

So actually, you know what?

I just realized that we started talking about what, uh, my retention brain kicked

in, um, I wonder if you have retention brain for like life itself.

Oh, I do.

Every time I'm talking to someone, I can, I'm like, okay, what about like loved ones? Like spending time with loved ones, thinking like we could be doing something much better right now.

Yes. No, that is a serious problem, uh, with, so we'll pause the Beastberger question. Yes. But that's why, uh, my current girlfriend, uh, which I was telling you before when we were talking about this is she has a genuine love for learning and that's something I have, like, I, I always feel like I need to be learning something to justify the time I'm spending. And so that's why it's such a nice trait because I feel like the time is being used optimally because whether we're watching a documentary or we're going in, in, you know, taking IQ tests or reading about whatever, just why modern art is the thing, I don't know, whatever weird thing we decide to do, I'm always learning and improving, so it justifies the time.

So to maximize retention in your relationship, you want to spend time at that time learning as much as possible. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Which conveniently I don't have to force, right? Or, or I want to be recharging so I, when I do work, I can, you know, hit the ground harder and luckily we're into a lot of the same things, which, you know, happen to be learning and sometimes it's not learning, like maybe watching an anime or something like that. But I'm a big believer and you're either, if you, well, if you, if your goal is to be like a super successful entrepreneur, you need to either be working or you need to be doing something that decompresses and recharges you. So you can work again. If your goal is to be like a really kickass entrepreneur. Obviously we're boiling this down to like a very basic thing. And so the things you're doing in your need out time, when you're not working, if it doesn't recharge you, you're screwed. you're just a ticking time bomb waiting to implode. And so you gotta like heavily recharge. And like, so like watching for me, anime or whatever it is, playing a board game, like that is actually kind of crucial to my success, which takes a lot of maturing to come to that conclusion because I used to be the kind of guy that wanted to work every hour of the day.

give yourself time to recharge in between working.

So there's a kind of balance you have to find. You have to even, and I hate it more than anyone else

because I, you know.

You hate not working. Yeah, because it's just not optimal for time. Like it's, as a human, I do need to occasionally watch a mindless show and play a board game. And it took me a very long time to like come to peace with that and not, I would have like borderline panic attacks when I do it because I just, what am I doing right now? Why am I doing this? I should be, you know, like what if one day I have to lay off an employee because we're not doing so well? Like, how could I justify watching this show or whatever I'm doing right now? You know, it's like, there's a lot of things like that

that go on in your head, but it's necessary. Before we return to Mr. Beasburger. Well, what is like, since we're on the topic, what is the perfect day in the life,

perfectly productive day in the life of Mr. Beas look like? Oh boy, well I mean. Well or like a standard. I mean the perfectly productive day is we film a main channel video. Like, because those get 100 million a pop.

I mean, it doesn't really get any better than that. Or like a standard. What about like the average day when you're not on the set? Yeah. And you're like, because you're running a lot of things, right?

Yeah, yeah. So right now we have our snack brand, Feastables. We have a restaurant chain, Peace Burger. And then we basically, which we haven't even really launched any products yet, but we have the data company that I was showing you where we're gonna roll out some tools for creators. And then we have the Reacts channel, the gaming channel, the main channel, and then we have my charity, which also has a channel. And so, I've structured my life right now is whenever I have free time, we just kind of go, hey guys, Jimmy's got an hour from 2PM to 3PM. And everyone's just like, I need this. I need this. And the channel's like, I need this thing filmed. Or whatever, the guy who runs my TikTok's like, I need this TikTok filmed. Or, Beast Burger's like, I need this menu item approved. We need to talk about this marketing thing.

Yeah, it's just based on priority and then trying to keep it as short as possible

Yeah, so just the things that you're needed on. Yeah, it doesn't get more optimal than that. If I clear the bottom next, or some bottlenecks for all my companies then it's, yeah,

that's a perfect day. Yeah, I mean even just me, cuz, you're like you're showing me around and you're being a great and gracious host, but on top of that

you're just doing all these meetings, you basically. I felt bad at some point, I was like, oh, I just tricked him into going to meetings with me. He's like my little meeting buddy.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it was fun, it was fun to see, it was fun to see how effectively you've delegated, you basically trust the team to do a really good job on the various things and there's just a strong team that's able to carry the flag on all the different tasks. From the brainstorming in the main channel to the reacts and so on. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, it's really interesting what it takes to build a team like that, because you very quickly build a very large team

that's able to scale. Yeah, which is very scary, because it's my first, you know, I'm 24. You know, and I think I was telling you this earlier, it's funny because six years ago I had to raise my hand to go use the bathroom and now I'm in charge of hundreds of people and entertain hundreds of millions of people. And so it is crazy just how quick it comes up and I wish I was a little bit older so I could have ran a couple of companies and failed a few companies in the past and like learn from those and apply those here. Because I know for a fact, when I'm 34, I'm 24 now, when I'm 34, I'll know so much more about running a business and scaling and hiring and how to lead people and better effectively communicate in all these different skillsets that will make me a better leader, that that's the only thing that sucks is I just don't have those because I just haven't been through the lessons and I just have such a lucrative thing on my plate right now and it just sucks that I have to learn the lessons with the lucrative thing, you know what I mean?

Yeah, because you already have so much influence, so much impact, but you have effectively scaled. What lessons do you draw from that, how to effectively scale as a 24 year old? Like you believe-

Yeah, that's something I feel like I actually could give a lot of value to, to young people who are doing it. Like older people who've built five companies or whatever they do, I probably couldn't, you know, they're gonna be like, oh, this is so obvious, but for younger first time business owners, you gotta just experiment to be honest and for us, like it's just a new space. No one had really ever scaled up a 100 person team to build, make content on YouTube. So there wasn't no, I spent all this time, like I hired one person from Disney at one point to come in and help. And obviously that was a dumb idea looking back on it, but you know, I thought, oh, they make great stuff people wanna watch and they come over here and help me build a team. And you know, and they build it more the traditional way and not like how it should be online. And so then it's like, okay. Now I'm not trying to trash people. Like they all tried their best. But then I hired this one person who does this different type of media and runs a 100 person team. And then you come in here and they try to build it that way and they don't really listen to your value or see the difference. And I tried basically for building this company with like four or five different people who worked in different veins of media and, you know, every single time, it's just like they just don't get it and they don't understand my world and the eventual solution was just like to roll up my sleeves and do it myself, you know, with like James where I hit man and just like, no one's ever done this and like, no one's gonna just give us a golden carrot and tell us how to build this company, we got to figure the fuck out ourselves.

And you have to kind of build up people from scratch then.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was talking about earlier and all the lessons I learned along the way. And so for me, that was a big part of like, stop trying to have someone build this company for me and just do it myself because it's scary, like I spent my whole life studying YouTube videos of virality, not business building. But fuck it, I was like, I guess we just got to do it ourselves and that's where things really start to click and we got the exponential growth, we start getting the right people and training them the right way and, you know, just throwing conventional stuff out the door and focusing on what's actually practical for YouTube, which is just completely different

than traditional media. So you train people and then those people train people and so on.

Yeah, I mean, it's just even like, you know, how you do the lighting on sets or like how you do the audio or, you know, not writing scripts. So you know, we're just not as efficient with our filming, like sometimes I have to have 30 cameras running. Why? Because it's not scripted. I don't know what Chris is gonna do when we start filming. He might run over there. But guess what? We got to have it planned because there's only one shot.

I can't, you know, tell him not to do that. Yeah, that's the shooting.

But then there's also the editing. Yeah, and then the editing as well and not having guardrails and kind of you know, at the end of the day it's whatever I want. The video, their job is to make a video that they think I like because it's my channel, but you can achieve that kind of however. And so it's just, everything's just different. You know, it's much more, I guess, like a startup as opposed to.

Are you often surprised like would the result like... You think a certain, like we watched the video today, that was really nice, that was different than you would have potentially edited it. Yeah. Are you sometimes surprised by like a decision editor makes? It's like, okay, that's not the way I would have done it,

but it's actually, this is a cool idea. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. The thing, my biggest fear is I don't ever want to get trapped in like a bubble of, you know, because we are getting 100 million views of video on the main channel. Like, but I don't want to get in this feedback loop of just, my ideas are great or, not feedback loop, but stop learning and improving. Because it is easy sometimes to be like, what we're doing is working, we need to just keep doing it. I want to keep learning and trying new things, and I guess one way I would put it is like, you don't, when, when you're on a come up or you're growing, you don't want to test new things once you start the plateau or have a downtrend because if you're like, you know, you you're skyrocketing, right? You're up, up, up, and then you level off and you start to go down. you're like, oh this isn't working. Let's start experimenting. Well, if you have a bad experiment, now you're in like a tailspin, you're nose diving and you have one more bad experiment, you're like, screwed, kind of oversimplifying. You want to test things while you're still growing to keep the growing from happening because once you like have, you know, again, very oversimplifying, that like you know kind of level off, you do a couple test, they go wrong. And you're like, screwed, you know?

even if you're getting crazy, unheard of growth. And so that outside of the thing that brought you to the dance, you just dived right into Mr. Beastburger and Feastables. This is a whole nother industry.

Like what was that like? Well, so Beastburger, we kind of, it was supposed to be like just a pop-up. Like we just partnered with someone who had 300 restaurants and we were just like, you know, let's just sell Beastburger's for a day or two. Let's see what happens. We didn't really think it would be as big as it was, but those first, like that first day, we do six figures in sales and they all sell out and they're running to local Walmart so they can't keep up with the demand. And it's like, okay, well, maybe let's just leave it open a week, whatever. And we're just doing crazy revenue. And it's like, okay, well, let's add some more restaurants and let's just leave them open for a month. And we're just still doing six figures a day. And it kind of just went from this thing that was, I don't know, it wasn't really, I didn't really plan on running a restaurant chain, but here I am.

But didn't that in some sense also open your mind

to something like Feastables? Feastables is something I've always wanted to do. Because I think just in general, American snacks are just full of so much horrible ingredients to be honest. And they're not, I don't know. I feel like there also just hasn't been any innovation in American snacks in quite a while. And so that's just something I've always been pretty passionate about. We built that from scratch. So we hired the CEO and built a team around them. And we spent probably over two and a half years before we even launched. It's like building the right team, figuring things out and making sure it was actually ran the way I wanted. Which Feastables has just been crushing. It's very interesting.

So what are some interesting challenges

about scaling there that surprised you? The biggest problem, which I didn't think would be, was just keeping the shelves in Walmart stock, to be honest. So that supply, the supply chain. It was brutal. Well, even then sometimes like, you know, you get them the stuff and they're like, it takes them like a day or two to put it out in that specific location. And I had to stop promoting it because every time I'd mention it, like 40% of people would just be like, it's not there. It's not in Walmart or I can't buy it. And so there was like a three-ish month period where I just didn't promote fee stools because I was scared that someone would go buy it and it's just not there. And so like, it took us a very long time to catch up to the demand. And also, you know, it's not like we have unlimited money. So I didn't, but now we're relatively caught up in keeping up, but it's gonna be interesting because now this year in 2023, we're gonna basically, you know, 10X, the amount of locations we're in. So we're, and we're gonna try to launch new products.

than I ever thought, to be honest. It was- You've talked to a couple of places about maybe doing mobile games or computer games in the future. Yeah.

Is that something you're still considering? Yeah. Yes, because, you know, do you normally talk with people as much as we talk before him?

Is that? No, no, that was the problem.

We spent all day today talking about some day to day, talking about some- I just looked in my head, everything you asked me is stuff we already talked about. Not really. Well, no, no, not everything. I take it back, but sorry. The last two questions, yes.

And so, it's just funny. Not really. Well, no, no, not everything, because- What? No, I tried. It's okay. There's a different style of asking those questions because I, on purpose, didn't dig further with you. I could tell. Yeah. I could tell you- Okay, this is, by the way, okay. All right. Well, this is the first time I've ever talked to somebody as much as I did with you beforehand.

I could tell. Yeah. I could tell you- Yeah. On the same day. I know. Not even same day. We spent all day together. Even though I only slept one hour. Yeah. Literally, it's funny.

This is the same day. I know. Not even the same day.

What was the question, the mobile games? Anyways, mobile games. So the interesting thing is with Beast Burger and Feastables that there's physical goods as opposed to making mobile games or a PC game, which everyone may end up doing, which is software. And I actually have a giant international audience. Most of my audience is obviously outside of America. And so the problem we're running into is it just takes time to build up the supply chain and get Feastables in Southeast Asia, get Feastables in India, get Feastables in Brazil and Mexico and all these other places where we have giant pockets of our audience. And same thing with Beast Burger. It's going to take probably years, unless we partner with someone who already has a distribution, which we're figuring out. But the beauty of software is I can make a hypothetical game or whatever we end up doing and all my fans can use it tomorrow, the day I mention it. And so if I promote something in a video to 100 million people and it's basically like a game, they can all download it. But if I promote a Feastables bar, right now it's only in America because we're struggling just to keep up with American demand. We haven't even gotten the chance to go outside of America.

It's the thought process. It's the thought process. Especially if there's a social element to the gaming, too. Because it's not unlike Feastables.

That's a product you consume. You missed it. When you're setting up for this, we were doing some basically just laying out everything that we're planning for. So we're at the phases where we want to start hiring the team to build it. And we're kind of just laying out the game. And I was actually really curious to get your thoughts. But I can't say it. Because whatever I say, someone's just going to take it and run with it.

I had a pretty good idea. I had a pretty good idea. About the kind of games you're thinking about. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine we also talked a little bit about it. It's super awesome. It's so much good ones.

It's super awesome. So much good ones. I did. So much good talks. Not the juicy talks happen to you.

She's like, I gotta go set up. Well, you know, I really heard a lot of awesome stuff. I mean, but that is a different kind of team you would need it hire. Is that a little nerve-wracking,

like going into a new field and trying to? A little bit, but then I remind myself, like Steve Jobs didn't know how to code, right? And you know, he just knew what a good product was. And I feel like as someone who wasted so much of his life playing video games, I have a good sense of it. And that might be ignorance.

Ignorance? Well, that's really important, right? It's not about coding, it's about what makes for a good game.

Exactly, and again, that might genuinely be ignorance. And maybe I end up getting bit in the butt because of what I'm saying now. But I think just like with YouTube, I just want to obsess over making a great product and things that I think my audience will love. And I think as long as I keep that as my North Star,

it'll do well.

What is the path to being worth 100 billion look like? There's a path to being worth 100 billion look like?

I don't know. I don't know. Okay, let me just pause here, 24. And there's so much awesome scaling, so many great ideas. Do you think about different trajectories? Yeah.

What those possible trajectories might look like? Yeah, I mean, if the goal was to just be worth $100 billion, yes, I mean, my goal, I'm a broken record, is to make the best video possible because I know whatever else I want will come obviously. So, the video is the foundation. Yeah, exactly. So, the path to $100 billion is to keep getting 100 million views of video, you know what I mean? Or more. Yeah, or more. Exactly, if we can keep growing. But, you know, if we can keep Feasibles growing, right, and we eventually spend international, one day we're in 100,000 retail locations and we're selling the same amount of units per SKUs like we're currently doing, I mean, that would crush and then obviously, ideally, one day we open up hundreds of Beast Burgers, we get it where we turn out, you know, like super sell a couple hit games. I don't want to make dozens or hundreds of games, I just want to make games that are just great and, you know, we rarely drop them when we do their bangers and just, you know, whatever other stuff we end up doing, all that combined, I mean, it's just interesting because, like, what's a show that's pooled 100 million views per episode, basically? Like, we're doing. Like, you know what I mean?

You heard that. The video is the foundation. Yeah. But it's also a show that has a singular kind of figure that you can now use as a...

Like, I don't have a network tell me what to do, I don't have anyone, like, I can do whatever I want. It's a very interesting position because I put out content and 100 million people show up, and then I also have a gaming show and I put out content, 15 million people show up, and every action on I put out content and 10 million people show up and I have a TikTok and I put out content and on average 20 million people show up. As long as I can keep that going and then we build these businesses, it's, like, it's honestly pretty scary to see what will happen, you know, over the years because Feastables launched, you know, last year, 2022, so it's a relatively new thing. We just started scaling up the physical side and we haven't obviously even launched any mobile games yet So I think I'm at the antithesis of it I don't see a world where my YouTube channels are relevant in the next couple of years I just this is what I live for and so if I can keep that going and then really start to expand these businesses that leverage off of it then

Yeah, I mean, hopefully there's the day one where I could give away a billion dollars in a video. Honestly that yeah That would be one hell of a video Let me ask you the ridiculous question since you went from being broke to being rich, although you keep spending all your money Does money buy happiness how has money changed sort of your

Contemptment your happiness in life. Oh, I'm telling me your happiness in life money by happiness Um, no, not I mean to a point. Yes, once you can take care of your health You can take care of like any immediate dangers and you can take care of your family relatively No, it doesn't like, but those things do like when I first came into money One of the first things I did was retire my mom and like that brought me tons of happiness You know I mean and like, you know If my brother had a medical emergency and we couldn't afford it and I made money to afford it That'd bring tons of happiness. You know, so once you take care those basic necessities So we'll say makeover, hypothetically, a million dollars. No, it really doesn't. Adding an extra zero, going from 10 million to 100 million

or whatever it is, makes no difference. So you're, given that,

are just fearless in spending the money. Yeah, well, let me re-frame. I guess it could for some people, if you really, I don't know, you spent your whole life obsessing over cars, it probably would bring you a little bit of joy to buy a nice Lamborghini. I'm coming more from the frame of mind of an entrepreneur, someone who's really obsessed with business building. For me and a lot of my friends and people I hang around, what brings us happiness is winning and building companies and do, you know, changing the world. Like that is fun. It's a complex problem you can wake up every day and it gives you something to obsess over and devote your life to,

where it's just having money doesn't, you know? Well, one interesting question I have for you psychologically. So because you have become wealthy and because you give, like part of your work is giving away a lot of money, do you find it hard to find people you can trust? It's a good question. Do people see you basically as a source of money?

As opposed to another human being. A good question. As opposed to another human being? It's weird because you'd think yes, but I feel like I also know the right places to look. But yeah, if I just walked into Target and tried to make friends with 10 random people, of course.

You can kind of sense. Oh yeah, you can sense the right thing in their heart.

So quickly, oh yeah, you could sense the right thing in their heart. So quickly, wait, yeah. Yeah. It's so obvious. I don't even want to go into the descriptions, but honestly, a lot of my friends, like Chandler, I played Little League with him, and Tyler, the guy, I mean, I went to school with him, Chris, he was my first subscriber. Carl was here after we got big, but whatever, he's friends with the boys, and it is a lot of my closer friends, even like my YouTube friends, I knew before I was big. So maybe there is some merit to that, maybe it is, I don't know, I've never really put too much thought into him, maybe there's a reason I hang around a lot of these people I knew before I got big because it's much easier.

And they help you keep your radar sharp of who can and can't be trusted, because you know you can trust them. It's difficult when you become richer and richer

and more powerful. Well, one thing you'll also find when you get richer, not even richer, but more famous, one thing I thought is as I climbed this ladder of YouTube and got bigger, I thought there would be tons of people like me, people that take the kamikaze approach and building a business, you just throw all your money in it, you throw all your time, you throw all your energy, you throw everything, you're just like fuck it, if it's this or I'm dead. And I thought there'd be hundreds of me. And there is like maybe one or two, and I talk to those motherfuckers every single day, sick and tired of talking to them, but I love them. But it's just so interesting, because every level I got up I'd get a million subscribers, I'd be like alright, where's all these guys with a million subscribers that are fucking psychopaths?

You know, you know, they're like- Yeah, people become like conservative as they get,

they get more and more- Especially as they get bigger, yeah. And you know, 20 million subscribers, 30, it's like every step of the way, it's like, I just got more and more lonely to be honest. So if you, you know, it sounds cliche and you hear that kind of shit in movies and you're like, oh, that's not how it works, but it is like there's just not many people that just want to give up everything, go all in and obsess over making the greatest goddamn videos every single day of their life, like,

they're really hard to find. And be able to sacrifice everything for that video. Yeah.

Like basically put all the money right back in. Yeah, or the people doing it, they're on just a small scale and if I talk to them, it's just 99.9% of the time

I'm teaching them things and it's like- So it's lonely because there's not too many people,

especially in the creative space, they're as crazy as you. Yeah, it is, 100%. It's so, it's not what I was expecting.

I was expecting there'd be a lot of people like me, but- Well, I guess the guy who talked to you on Musk is a bit like you in that sense. Yeah, just in a different domain, yeah. Exactly. Just willingness to put it all back in, right?

Yeah, just in a different domain, yeah. Exactly. And that's why I've found right now, a lot of the people I relate to don't even make YouTube videos. Like, I'm veering more and more away from fellow content creators and more to just, I'm just looking for those other people who just share a little bit of it so I don't feel so fucking crazy all the time. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, people I feel normal around, they tend to just be doing the randomest things,

but, you know, loving it. Well, I think that's really inspiring. It's like the Bukowski line, find what you love and let it kill you is really put everything, put everything into the thing you love. And that's like the way to really create special stuff, but it's also the way to- Yeah, it's-

Live out your life, most of all- Yeah, it's- Live out your life, most of all. Yeah, it's, you have to be careful giving this advice, because they're like, they're like body builders. You'll be like, just go to the gym. You gotta be disciplined, I'm disciplined, go to gym, but I would argue for those people it's like, it's not even disciplined, they just enjoy weightlifting. Because there are people who are jacked but they don't make much money or run a business. If they were that disciplined they would be hitting every area of their life, they just really like business and there's people like me who just to an extreme level, love building companies. It's not even disciplined for me, it's just in my blood, it's what I wake up, I don't think about it, I don't push myself, I don't need to watch a fucking motivational video to go work. It's programmed in me at this point and I couldn't imagine a world where I don't wake up and do it every day But I think that a little bit of it is genetics and just how you're hardwired Not that it can't be trained or taught and not that you know And obviously the friend group you're in influences these things and over time I think can change it but Someone's just not gonna be able to flip a switch and then just start doing a kamikaze approach to building a business Just like a lot of people try to flip a switch and start bodybuilding and quit majority of the time

You know, it's just not innate to them. I think a lot of us have the capacity to do that in some domain

Yeah, I think if you went about strategically if you surrounded yourself with fellow like-minded people and you know slowly over time switched it But if you just try to like hardcore do it, you're just gonna lose your mind

Do you ever worry about your mental health? Did you take step to protect it to?

Yeah, do it like for the long run to make sure you have the mental strength to go on. Yeah your mental health Did you just yeah? Yes, weirdly enough. The best thing for mine mental health was giving in to my innate nature to work Any and the most depressed I get is when I try to restrict it and like I don't work weekends I don't work this day. What's best for me is just to work when I feel like working and then Just not work when I don't like and just have no constraints because there are just some nights where I don't want to sleep Then whatever reason I feel compelled to go all night whatever, just do it, do whatever you want. It's what I tell my working brain, and I just give into it, and that's where I feel the happiest, and then it's typically like, when I'm really in the grind mode, it'll be like seven or eight days, just nonstop going, going, and then it's like, I'll realize, oh, I need some recharge time, and then go fucking binge a season of anime. Yeah, but that's the thing, people will tell you, don't work weekends, or don't do this, or don't work past this, or blah, blah, I'll give you all these constraints, but for me, and it's unconventional,

I just give into it, but that's the thing. I think there's something really to be said for that. I try to surround myself with people that, like when I pull an all-nighter, they don't go, like, you should get more sleep. There's a reason I pulled that all-nighter. Like, if I'm really passionate about something, they say, they basically encourage it, because I have no problem getting sleep and getting rest. What I need in my life is people that encourage you to kinda keep going, keep going with the stuff

you're passionate about. Normal people, they don't want that life, and they probably shouldn't, it's not good for you. But yeah, if you hang around people, like, just whatever, different people, you're gonna feel crazy, and it's gonna wear on you, whereas if you're around similar people, it's just, it's so much easier. Like, if you, you know, I've started weightlifting more, and like, one thing that's helped is just having JAC people around because they naturally just eat healthier. They do, like, they naturally just have fricking grilled chicken and all this shit and high protein meals and it's just like easier for me to just piggyback and be like, oh, can you just order me whatever you're getting, and they're like, oh, I gotta go to the gym, and I'll be like, oh, shit, I'll just join you, you know? And it's like it's just, it's cheat coats, you know what I mean? Just surround yourself with people that you wanna be and it makes it like 70% easier, in my opinion. It's like, that is the cheat coat to life and I wish, obviously, you audience is definitely a lot older, But, you know, to the older people listening, like if you are in a place of mentorship for someone younger or have influence over younger people, you should really try to drill that in their heads. Like the people, they are around 100% dictates the outcome. I would not be on 120 million subscribers if I didn't find when I was around a million, I had a couple of friends that were just also psychopaths, you know, I outgrew them, but at the time it was great and I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for them. And just all along the way, the friends that I hung out with had such a dramatic impact on where I am. Like I'd probably have 80 million less subscribers, you know, if it was, if I wasn't so strategic about hanging out with people that I had value to

and they also had value to me. They naturally just eat healthier, they do. So the advice for young people would be to

be very selective about the people you're so much so. So selective, it's crazy. Like Chris, you know, he's really funny and that's why he's great for the videos. And part of why he's so funny is he consumes copious amounts of cartoons and just funny content. And so I'll find, like when I spend more time with Chris, I'll start just quoting these weird cartoons and shows and I, like my speech will literally change just after like a week of spending more time with him. It has like, it's like that quick of an effect, you know. Now picture that over the course of years. I mean, yeah, it has such a huge influence. Like pluck one of their friends out and hypothetically put me in there and you know, there's no doubt if they're trying to become a content creator, their odds of success is 10X, right? Obviously you can't do that,

but you got to find your closest version of it. And just be selective, yeah. But this also applies not to see younger older people too.

Agree, but they, it's even more, I like, when I was a teenager, I just, you know, I couldn't relate to many people. I just thought it was like a freaking nature because no one was obsessed with building businesses or any of this kind of stuff. And so like back then, you know, that advice would have been helpful. Maybe not that particular, but just knowing that there are, you know, it's not that you're a freaking nature.

You just haven't found people that have the same interests. So the task is not to feel sorry for yourself or somehow change yourself. It's more to find people... Find people you fit in with.

Yeah, I mean, find people you fit in with. Yeah, I mean, assuming which, you know, you're not getting compliment, like I assume it's not something bad, right? like if you're hobby is shooting things you know or shooting things you shouldn't be shooting,

you know, they'll find people that encourage that, you know. but outside of that for sure. Actually as an answer to what is the best advice someone ever gave you, you said you're crazy until you're successful

then you're a genius. 100% all along the way. People gave me so much advice on why I shouldn't be doing it, why I'm crazy. Every step of the way people wanted to tell me why I shouldn't be doing this and should get a life, should stop being too obsessed, everything. Everything under the book. And then once I'm successful those same people are like, dang, you're a genius.

Wow, you really, you pulled that off. Those are probably the same people that will give you advice now. You're the most successful video creator of all time. Stick to that. Anytime you wanna do something new, right? They'll like pressure you not to do feastables or mobile gaming or whatever lays beyond.

It's funny how people don't. Well honestly, the type of people I just don't talk to anymore.

So I wouldn't even know what they have to say now. So most people on the team are like, yes and. They're like, whatever the idea you got, they're with it.

No, I mean, it's weird. We actually have a, my team pushes back on me pretty hardcore, which I want. I don't want Yes Men. And they're like, James, the CEO who helped me build all this, he's very adamant. We're not Yes Men and he trains people to really think for themselves. And even when I give them orders to really think, is this optimal, is there context or information Jimmy could be missing that I could provide that could help him make a more updated decision? Like I'm not God, you know what I mean? Like I'm human and I make errors.

And so don't take what I say as the Bible. So even like in the brainstorming and so on, they can push back.

Yeah, you can see it. Like Tyler, anytime I said something, he would give me feedback and push back, which is what I want. I don't want him just to be like, yes, you're a fucking genius. Good job, Jimmy. I don't need that.

I need negatives. Good job, Jimmy. You talked about being in a relationship. What role, Jimmy, does love play in the human condition?

I think, well, the big thing is love can be scary because this is the human you're gonna spend the most amount of time with in your life. And so for a project that over 50 years, they can be a liability or an asset. I love the metrics. No, but seriously, it's got to be someone that makes you better. For me, I can't truly love someone that doesn't make me better because- Yeah, in the long run, across the years. Because if not, then it's a negative to everything I've spent my life building. But luckily, I'm very happy with the partner I have and like we were talking about before. I do think she makes me better. There's a lot of actually positives I've noticed. Even things as simple as like, I struggle to turn off my brain at night because I'm just thinking about all the businesses and how we could do better or whatever weird thing I have on my mind. But just chatting with her and hanging out with her helps me basically just shut my brain off and mellow out. There's just a ton of little things like that that I've noticed are positives, especially when you really look for them, that are easy to gloss over if you're not.

Does that make sense? Love the metrics. You know, I love- No, but seriously, it's- In the long run, across the years. Absolutely, what advice would you give

on finding somebody like that? Just really don't give up until you find someone that, you know, there's so many people on the planet. I mean, there really is.

There's billions of-

The odds are in your favor. Of, yeah, like just don't settle and find someone

that, you know, makes you happy. Yeah, just like you said, tying yourself with people that, that make you a better person, in this same case, surround yourself with that one special person

that really makes you a better person. And maybe that's just an entrepreneurial brain looking at it. I mean, not everyone wants to hyperoptimize their life like me, but for me to like truly love someone,

they have to make me a better person. In every way, yeah. Well, what do you hope you're 24? We started talking about death. Let's finish talking about death. What do you hope your legacy is? When you look a hundred years from now, and the AI has completely taken over, and the aliens visit and discuss with the AI what this last of special humans that existed on earth

was like, what do you hope they say about you? It's a deep one. Probably just that, because it's hard, right? Like I said before, Elon is overdone with my age. I could live every second. I've lived up to this point in my life, and still not even be Elon's age. So I have so much time. I just hope whatever it is that it's a net positive on the world, and it impacts billions of people

in a positive way that makes lasting change. So you admire people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for having sort of reached for that goal as well. Yeah, of course.

To help millions. I mean, the iPhone's the most successful product ever invented.

It's hard not to admire what he created, you know what I mean? The same with sort of, as Johnny Ive talks about, like the passion, the effort they put into designing the iPhone, that like little bit of love is transferred to the whole world. Like they get to experience the joy of that

from the designer. It's what a beautiful thing to do. You know what I mean? I couldn't think of anything better, you know? To create something that, even after you're dead for decades, just has such a profound impact on basically half the human population.

Yeah. It's wild. Brings joy to people. Yeah. Well, I hope you do just that, man. You've already done it for millions and millions and millions and millions of people, and I hope you keep doing it. I can't, like, it's so exciting to see what happens this year and next year. I know. Like the sky's the limit. I can't, I mean, the videos, but all the other businesses you're in, and you as a human being, as you grow, I can tell, I know, as everyone knows, you have a kind heart and the fact that you're really damn good at actually using that kind of heart to help a lot of people. It's awesome to see, man.

I appreciate it. Yeah, I know. I know. Like the sky's the limit. Yeah. Man. I appreciate it. More importantly, before we go are we gonna play Dun in tonight, some board games? We're not going to play Doon. I have to, you don't have to play Doon, you don't wanna play board games...

You don't want to play board games with me? I want to, I'll play board games. You don't want to play board games? Board games? If only I wasn't an idiot and actually flew to the right airport. If you don't play board games with me, they're going to dislike the video. Thanks for listening to this conversation with MrBeast. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Reach high for stars lie hidden in you. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.