I'm here with Mr Beast the brilliant Mastermind behind some of the most popular videos ever created do you think you'll ever make a video that gets 1 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 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 um 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 what's
interesting we're literally jumping right now I love it it's good um so I I'm a firm believer that it's much easier to hypothetically get 10 million views on one video than a hundred thousand on a hundred and part of why it's much easier in my opinion is like if you make a really good video it's just so Evergreen and it never dies because YouTube when you open up YouTube and look at the videos they're just serving you whatever they think you'll like the best you know and so if you just make a great video and it's constantly just above every other video you know even two years down the road then they'll just keep serving it never
stop you know which is why it's much easier to make one great video than a bunch of mediocre ones what about 1 billion subscribers you've uh passed PewDiePie's the most subscribed to YouTube channel uh when do you think you get a billion uh let me do some math real quick so we're on 120 what do you think about this no I don't honestly I because one thing you'll find if you want to gain subscribers if you want to get views if you want to make money and almost any metric in this uh 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 focus on the one thing that gets me all that which is make good videos but and that I do think we will when they hit a billion subscribers 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 like we're doing around 10 million a month now and um 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 doc question so now we have dark questions right now but if you wanted to hook them
you would start off with the dark questions that's how you get them okay well let me ask you about the uh a Twitter poll you posted a ten thousand dollar death poll he tweeted if someone offered you ten thousand dollars but if you take it a random person on Earth dies would you take the ten thousand dollars and uh forty five percent of people said yes that's at least at the time I checked 850 000 people committing murder for just 8.5 billion dollars in total so uh what do you learn about human nature from that that's a a good question um honestly this is like late at night when I threw that up too I was just like
huh this will be a funny thing I assumed it'd be 90 known like 10 yes but there are a lot of serious people um 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 this week were like hell yeah why not and I was just not expecting that um and so I don't really know I mean I feel like your take would be better than mine was it disturbing to you surprising to you a little bit Yeah but I you know obviously a lot of people were trolling but I actually you know you read through those replies I do think like 10 of them
were like dead serious well I think sometimes the trolling and the laws reveal a thing we're too embarrassed to admit about the darker aspects of our nature so I don't know if you listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast he has a episode on painful payment which he describes throughout history how humans have been really attracted to watching The Suffering of others so um 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 stream to public execution or streamed the torture of another human being a lot of people would uh say that's
deeply unethical but they will still tune in and watch and that where we're attracted to that drama and especially the most extreme versions of that drama and so I think part of the laws reveals 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 how many views does this game currently have 300 million yeah something like this so just imagine a thought experiment how many views that video would get if it was like real yes because I mean YouTube was like We'll
turn the blind out we won't take it down yeah I mean it I've obviously I probably have billions of views how do you think you will die and do you think you'll be during a video probably doing something dumb like going to space when I'm in the 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 with safety experts and stuff like that so it's not really risk but um yeah I could see myself like you know after a million people go to Mars or something like that I'd probably be like you know what let's go and and something like that maybe so not in the name of a video just no for the holiday heck no
are you open to taking risks when you shoot videos you just went to Antarctica I mean like you're you're putting yourself in the line a little bit right of course but you know we 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 to the weather and everything so it's like any variable that where we could get harmed we just pre-planned 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 way 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've recorded these videos to yourself you know five years ten 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 um no seriously stuck 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 for when people talk to me so it's nice um but for the videos I made uh 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 filmed 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 then I did one where I was like hire me in five years I was like Hey in five years I think you'll have a million and then one that hasn't come out yet but it comes out in two years is was high me in 10 years and I try to predict 10 years later how many Subs I'd have that's what he's referring to and yes there there are some that are scheduled like 20 years in the future and so if I don't die I'll just move them up and I remember because I filmed these though like seven years ago but uh it was I remember saying a line like you
know if I'm dead then I'm currently just in a coffin and like whatever blah blah because the only way the video go up is if I'm not alive and if I'm not alive then I won't be able to push back to schedule upload date so go public automatically yes and so yeah I have a couple of those uh like if I knew I was gonna die of like cancer or something I had like three months to live I would Vlog every day I'd film so many videos and then I would just schedule upload a video a week for like the next five years so it's like I'm still alive and I would completely act like I'm still alive and everything and I think something like that would be
cool it's I don't know why but I've fantasized not fantasize but I've dreamed 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 decades 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 yeah it's a kind of immortality but it's also kind of troll on the concept of time yeah 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 like 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 but exactly mine was just dumb yeah like I'm bones in a coffin yeah yours is probably so serious no it's fun actually what you realize it's like 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 you is no longer there so
like you know this would only be released if you're no longer there exactly that's a weird exercise you know what's funny of all the people listening to this yeah you know 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 I think people should think about doing that it's not just about YouTube it's also social media because think about it like there's going to be a last tweet and the last I don't know Facebook post their last Instagram post and uh yeah I feel like there's some aspects
that's meditative to just even considering making a post like that and also it's a way for your 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 you know 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 how would you even intro that like hey Mom if you're seeing this you know it means I'm probably dead yeah exactly that's how you enjoy it that's the opener oh I just want you to know yeah I guess yeah and I
guess you could say in a kind of funny way but um and just talk about the things that you that mean a lot to you because otherwise you're at the risk of the last post you have is like like I don't know talking [ __ ] about like McDonald's McDonald's exactly and then you're dead that's it 100 years I don't know this I I do recommend it it's uh like the stoics meditate on death every day in the same way you kind of meditate in your death when you make a video like that because it's actually not just even 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 um uh try it okay uh from Are You Afraid Of Death By the way yes I I 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 the 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 what x amount of years either so um that gives me a little Comfort but no 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 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 will just like be like you know what screw it I'm gonna figure out a way where we can slow down aging get it where you know we can live to be two 300 years old and just like set their sights on that and then just kind of save us so it'd be really nice like it's it's almost absurd to think that in our
lifetime they won't figure out a way to just even slightly slow down aging where we could live to be like 120 or 130 and then that extra time they won't figure out somewhere we could live to be 200. like obviously not Immortal but I don't I don't see how in my lifetime the life expectancy doesn't just expand well it also could be that the immortality is achieved in the digital realm like it could be a long be long after you're gone there's a Mr Beast run by Chad gbt type system exactly yeah that consumes everything I ever said everything I ever wrote and thought I don't want that I want to live what are you smart people out there figure it out I'll keep you
entertained but I need you to figure out how to keep me alive give me until 200. that will make me happy well that's that's funny who owns the identity of of Mr Beast wants 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 like I mean once I'm done I don't care well but you just said you did care I mean there could be a AI like many Mr beasts that are created after after you're gone yeah I mean that would be cool to be able to like train up a model and and let them loose so my content lives on I guess yeah yeah but it somehow feels like it
diminishes the video you contribute yeah yeah it's an authentic but it's also there's there's some aspect to the finiteness of the art being necessary for it yeah I want 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 run YouTube for uh how long should you run it for a year uh 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 I don't know I don't I don't ever open
it and wonder like what are these what are these 10 videos on my home page when I click on video messages I don't ever wonder what these are like I I and maybe it's because I'm very adamant about like the kind of videos I watch and I try not to watch videos that 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 with the passion is the comment section on YouTube it's just so bad um but that 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 like that you know usually the top 20 posts uh on a popular Reddit post are not spam you know what I mean like have you ever clicked on something on the front page of Reddit and then most upvoted reply to it is like go check out my site right here and it's like trying to escape me out of a thousand dollars yeah yeah I can't even think of one instance I've ever had that happen so like Reddit it's so nice to click on post and just see what people have to say and I almost wish like you had that same feeling when you read the comments a YouTube video instead it's like it's so many people just copy and pasting so many Bots that just grab the top comment
from your previous video and paste it over so top comments on every videos are the same and the things that break through that are just scammers trying to get you to give them a thousand dollars for a free uh you know fake ad that comment section is one of the most Lively on the internet so 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 yeah like actually right out along that would make me so happy because like when I upload a video I usually go to Twitter to see feedback like I read my comments and I'll flip through newest but it's just I feel like
to read it and Twitter just give me so much better filtered feedback especially now that with Twitter blue because people pay eight dollars a month um any 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 eight dollars a month like they're usually relatively sensible and so it's been pretty nice like after I upload my video just go on the verified tab on Twitter and just see what people have to say and yeah anyways I live for the day that YouTube's like that uh what do you think about Twitter what do you think about all the
fun activity happening recently since uh Elon yeah bought Twitter I think you should make me CEO like I tweeted well I should I should say sort of we had with just like a couple hours ago had a conversation with Elon and uh you guys had an exchange of some excellent ideas so yeah I 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 uh the content like dissemination hosting and all the different recommendations like
the search and Discovery all the things that YouTube does well I think the most exciting thing is he's you know willing to move fast and so I think there's going to 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 and um so it's gonna I mean 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 Futures he rolls out so what will be your first uh act as Twitter CEO
I can't spoil it okay I gotta get hired what do you think about video on the platform I mean yeah do you think that's an interesting or is it like messing with the the medium the nature of the platform I think Twitter will always be closer to tick tock than it is to YouTube but I gotta at least in this current form I I don't I don't see 20 minute one hour long videos or whatever you know even 15 minute videos being watched over there I see it more as like the short and snappy stuff closer to tick tock 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 why does that you should just ask Elon that like I don't know if that's a YouTube thing but when uh YouTuber posts the video why do they have to link to YouTube why can't they just embed it on Twitter and just play it there I mean wouldn't that just solve a lot of problems yeah but then the two companies that 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 would be the the easiest 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 that yeah because the Twitter whatever the the Dynamics of the comments especially once the spam Bots are taken care of Twitter just works it's really so Reddit is a nice comment section for the Internet it's like slower Pace more deliberate like a higher effort Twitter's like this High paced like ephemeral kind of stream but there's the vote the upvoting the downvoting works much better because you can do retweeting right because the social
network is much stronger than it is on YouTube like the interconnectivity yeah on Reddit you're gonna get the the top replies are going to be the most refined ones whereas Twitter stuff floats 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 gets 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 going to change but it's going to keep growing just because you know that's just what it does and because
it's owned by Google um but Twitter I don't know I mean it's one of those things like you you can't predict if I you know a year from now an economy is going to be in a recession or booming and I think Twitter's kind of the same thing one thing for certain a lot of things are going to 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 um what do you think that is well yeah because I I think the tweet I responded to is one where he was saying um that they you know users will jump over if Twitter could potentially pay
more uh than other platforms and I was just saying obviously because Google has Google AdWords and I mean that's Google's whole thing it's putting ads on stuff they've been doing it better than anywhere else in the world for a very long time it's very unlikely in the next few years that Twitter is going to magically or any platform you know give a Creator the ability to make higher cpms than on YouTube uh it's it's kind of crazy like some creators in in December you know Q4 because ad rates are higher because of Christmas and everything some creators literally make like 30 40 per thousand views that's after YouTube's cut like it's almost
like hard to think about like how high the RPMs get and even then once you pull out a financing cars the highest CFM niches and you move into just normal stuff it's still just crazy the sheer volume of creators and the fact that all of them get these multi-dollar cpms at Scales 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 you're 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 in
general just brand deals since you brought it up uh 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 yeah and you 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 got to find a way to integrate in the content and ideally use the money in the video to make it better like is 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 like 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 you know I don't know if you can share but with 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 their leaving control to you about the artistic element of it the problem is the the ones who don't give us the artistic element we just don't really work with anymore because it's just you know we get 100 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 uh yeah if they don't give us that freedom I just won't work with them so you have that leverage but for smaller creators it's a lot harder yeah and they're 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 onto Brandon talk about the brand in a way that felt a little more natural I I think it'd be less cringe it people would be less likely to go and you know tough times tap Skip and uh 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 um but Brandon loves that I don't like the point is they so the funny thing about podcasts 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 Creator voice like talking about the thing um 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 fact it was 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 you have to each one at a time and I just wish there was more of a culture to say like the quality of the ad read matters a lot more than the uh like the silly parameters like the
timing of it like 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 YouTube right yeah that's your viewers of the viewers on YouTube though yes okay sure or all of them it's just interesting because you're you're speaking very specifically like about my brand deal process and so in my head I'm like I wonder what percentage of these people even have any 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 is like God damn
it he's there's probably like 50 of these people have no [ __ ] clue what he's saying and we're about to torture him for five minutes yeah yeah probably but that's something I can't turn off in my brain less than 50 is that a good thing or a bad thing is that exciting to you that that there's like 50 of people don't I've not watched the Mr Beast video isn't that an opportunity like yeah I guess there's an opportunity to grow I don't know honestly I was just kind of excited to hang out with you yeah yeah me too I mean who cares yeah so it's kind of like having a buddy to go along the journey as I'm just kind of eating [ __ ] and doing my normal ride it
was like kind of fun and also you just say really wise stuff constantly okay so honestly no I never even put any thought into like that demographics of what I could gain it's just interesting because 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 going to be interested what percentage of people do I think we'll lose and I'm like running all those calculations in the background and that whole conversation like the law is anyway it's just something I can't turn off my like Bells were like this is bad what are the different strategies for high retention for your videos 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 so it boils down to I mean uh do you think it's 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 going to tune out here that's all of it you need the overarching narrative and then you also need the micro where every second you know needs to be entertaining and you 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 in the front like even right now we're so deep into this where a lot of people listening are probably just going to keep listening relatively close to the endless we just have a really boring part of this conversation because they're just they're saying it they're they're immersed um and so a big like to really boil it down to a simple level you just want to get people where they're immersed in the content and then just kind of hold them there we had this discussion offline and by the way I should mention that this is like late at night it is what times it's
uh nine o'clock and I uh 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 book your hotel on a flight he's like no I got it we're like you sure we can just do it we always do this he's like no I got it I got it he's gonna have to rub it in I know and then today I come to find out he flew to the wrong airport the airport with the uh our city with a similar name to ours the same name same name in a different state and I was like that's why you should let us book it and so he saw one hour of sleep and he's literally been dying all day before this podcast he downed like
two things of coffee we've been going all day hard uh yeah I've been uh got to interact with you I should say that this gave me an opportunity to I gotta uh ride from a stranger and it was an incredible person that got to interact with them so it's like 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 you know 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 uh honey so that's a beautiful moment you know I was so confused you tweeted about that and like Steel's like like my
assistant uh Lex isn't here yet and I saw your Tweet and I was like he's here he was like no he's still flying I was like four like an hour ago he just tweeted about a nice Diner yeah it was a diner it was a diner in a different state and then you had to fly over here yeah that was and then I called you you didn't answer I was like something's not had enough yeah I feel like it's such an idiot because um apparently the world uh has cities like Springfield right like there's like every single state has a Springfield oh really but I think so I think that's whatever that's like a Simpsons joke right that like it's uh the the city and
and The Simpsons of Springfield and I think every single state or most of them have a Springfield and the same is true for like uh Georgetown I think the most part I forget what the most popular one was but there's like a list of these people get when they run out of ideas they just keep us if they're your Achilles heel anyway I got to I got to meet a bunch of people from uh from your team it'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 um everything for it for the main channel that you do uh for the the react again uh the the gaming channel to uh Mr
Beast Burger to uh feastables all that the big thing is especially in this content creation because it's not like anything that's done on Netflix or or different uh content medians I 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 a 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 you know like we do there's just no one you
you can really pull from like sometimes I'll hire people from uh game shows right they have all these preconceived notions about pacing and how a video should be and you have to spend like the first year like breaking all these habits and you know 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 like be good at content creation 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 um so it's easier just to train someone than just pull them from traditional because traditional people just 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 see the value like actually you'll still get it it's so crazy like especially some of my other friends that are Skilling 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 workout movies or this and they see like working 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 is the end goal this is your career um and so I'm just so tired of having those kinds of conversations like I feel like people really should be coming around are there like recurring interview questions that you ask is there is there ways to get yeah 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 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 media as well because those it's just it's hard to put into words but there's it's just two completely different ways of going about
things you know like our videos aren't scripted and you know it's a lot more Run and Gun and when we if we hypothetically blow up a giant car or whatever like you only have one take you know I mean so um and it's not scripted and so you have to over film overshoot things over compensate for like the dumb way of going about it a lot of traditional people would be like well just plan what you're gonna say and just playing the angles you can cut the cameras in half you can save 50 Grand here you can save you know 75 000 editing this and that and it's like yeah but that's not authentic like that's you know but you
you get it it's it's almost so obvious that it hurts to have to like constantly have these conversations but so where we live in but there's also detail like there's a taste like 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 yeah just stylistically visually I don't have to think I can just watch a video and it just it just screams in my head like this is what this is what should change based on the you know million videos I've watched and all these viral videos are consumed like
this is blah blah what's optimal and things like that it's almost like your brain's like a you know like a neural net like 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 and 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 feel um but that's something that kind of
torments me if that makes any sense oh you can't enjoy a slow moving no I can't movie and and that's not to say there's attention on The Godfather is horrible yeah no exactly I've tried to watch that movie like three times but and that's not to say slow movies are bad like there's an audience for it it's just obviously not what I've trained my brain to like and and 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 it's data driven so you're looking at like in
terms of thumbnails and titles and different aspects of the first five ten seconds and then throw out the video the retention all that you're looking at all that uh 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 view videos on YouTube every day and stuff like that and I just kind of consume those every single day and I've been doing that for way too many years and then you just start to notice patterns like the thumbnails on the most view 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 time it just starts to click in your head like 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 because you said like broad things but I'm sure there's a million detailed things like what Zoom to use on the face to use in the thumbnail right like the answer is whatever makes the best video because the problem is the more
which I have so many friends who are like this they'll make like checklists for their editor or something like you know uh this be in this beat and you need to have like a three part Arc and then this but the the problem is that's how you the 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 a cut every three seconds and the next thing you know every video there's like cut every three seconds or whatever so it's it's hard because I try to give uh as little train not training but as little uh facts or as possible and more just make suggestions if that makes any you mean publicly or to your team to my team yeah what's so we talked about sort of uh teaching your voice or your style
whatever we want to call it to other people on the team so they can be kind of a Mr Beast replacement so what's the process of teaching that so you don't wanna no you're more talking about like uh what I would call almost like cloning right like like Tyler and other things like that yeah so when we were hanging out today I was showing him how we have multiple people and they come it's it's almost like talking to the cameras yeah it turns slowly to the camera I was like anyways have it is it weird to you to not be looking at the camera this whole interview I constantly have been turning towards the camera like yeah I'm talking
to him yes it's a habit uh because my whole life I've just been talking to a camera who are you thinking about when you're looking at the camera do you like imagine somebody I'm fully thinking about the person just sitting watching it and I almost it's weird but I'm looking at the camera I don't see a camera I'm like in a haze picturing what the viewer is seeing when they watch it yeah that makes sense and that's where I'll be saying things and or doing something and then like when I'm watching I'm like that's not what I want and then I'll freeze up it's very weird when I'm filming and then for people who haven't worked with me too much they'll
think like I don't know it's very weird like the how I go about it because I'll just be doing whatever like lighting a firework all right this is a thousand dollar firework I'll go to lighting and I'll like freeze because in my head I'm like this I don't know I don't like how that float or how that shot looked because I 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 and I can do it at the same time so you're like real time editing in my video 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 but anytime I'm filming anything like it's almost like the like right side of my brain I just can just look at it and I see exactly what I'm filming and I can just picture it well there's probably recording the video being the talent for the video and then watching the editing and like analyzing you careful and do that over and over again you'll do that over and over you ten thousand times yeah you do the editing more than the being in front of the camera so like you you start to see yourself from that
third person perspective exactly then maybe that actually helps with the nerves of it too like you see it as creating a video versus performing uh right yeah yeah I think so you know I it's weird I've never been nervous talking to a camera it's it's harder for me to talk to a person that doesn't 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 or maybe not maybe I'm just awkward enough maybe they're practiced I to me it's I mean both are terrifying but being in front of the camera by yourself
is so much easier really yeah so much easier I preferred a million times over [Applause] but that's my whole life you know so it's just that's why it's interesting like you've spent more of your time talking to people yeah it comes natural and I talk to a piece of plastic oh yeah I guess you're talking to a person too they're just then on the other side of the camera yeah there's just a pixel on the screen so so cloning how do you how do you achieve this oh yeah that's right that's all right so I was showing him that I have a lot of people in the company who are able to think like me
and uh 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 one example is Tyler who I was showing you and he was pitching some content and you could see it like this he was on point and uh 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 uh side by side and same thing with uh 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 then just dumping everything and like you were saying because I'd love to find that uh and develop that you're saying you're basically for a long time just said everything you were thinking to them exactly like uh James the the guy who's basically my right handman right now um for two years he lived with me and we probably talk on average of those two years seven hours a day I mean anytime I had a phone call I'd throw it on speaker and I'd let him listen anything I was reading any content I was consuming like
really just training his brain to think like me so that way um 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 you know I don't ever really have to check in on him like I most the decisions he makes are exactly what I would do um and so I 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 being like giving them an Avenue to like 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 uh 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
it 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 uh people pitching ideas and you pitching Alternatives or shutting down ideas and it's just going like plowing through ideas very good I mean you kind of just describe exactly what we did yeah I mean but the ideas are really really good it's just tossing
out like different categories of ideas and then also fine-tuning them to see like you know I changed like thinking about the titles and the stuff I worked so well off of inspiration it's like that's a something like give give me anywhere I don't know space yeah like I went to space you know what happens if you love a nuke in space or I went to the moon I went to Mars right because you said that one word it was able to inspire me to come up with four ideas and so that's just it's for me if you the way to get 100 million views on videos 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 supervisor 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 is just like in taking a lot of random inspiration to see what spawns in my mind so I can output it but the neural network of your brain is generating the video the title the thumbnail all
that jointly exactly and that only comes because I spent 10 years of my life just obsessively studying all that stuff because 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 or a thumbnail yeah I mean that's what happened to 70 of those in that pitch session I was just like oh what was one of them genius versus 100 people or yeah like maybe average intelligence versus genius yeah I was like what the heck is the thumbnail even if the title was good yeah yeah I mean there's so many but yeah people don't click they don't watch that's so interesting but you developed
over time the ability to kind of give it what what makes for a good title short not just short it's also I mean if someone reads it are they like do they have to watch it is it just so intrinsically interesting that it's just gonna [ __ ] 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 um you know because 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 want to 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 because it's all of it combined it's the click-through rate is going to be much lower and then 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 want to click it because sometimes they just all add up I mean it's that yes ideally you want it below 50 characters because above 50 characters on 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 because
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 um short simple ideally and just so freaking interesting they have to click and it is a good segue into the content and represents the length of the content and there's probably stuff it's hard to kind of convert into words for you like I stepped on a bug versus stepping in a bug versus Mr B stepped on the bus well I mean that bug stepping that up so it's like yes the more extreme the opinion typically the higher the click-through rate if you can like uh
pay it off in the content then it just supercharges it so like oh so you have a kind of estimate of the experience this water right if you're like Fiji Water sucks yeah that would do fine but if you said Fiji Water is the worst water bottle or the worst water I've ever Drank In My Life yeah 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 inspiration for you to step up yeah but you can you can be more extreme in a positive way a lot of people it's easier though
pause it uh negative clickbait is much easier than positive Cliff 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 and they just take the route like oh well this one gets the same amount of clicks and it's easier less effort the positive one is doing a large number of numbers of something like I 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 want to 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 um what's the secret to that what's how do you do do that right yeah like give away money or in a video that made to make it compelling um is it so there's a number that is better than another number right the higher number is always better than the other number yeah for the most part and you know it's interesting like some videos will give away a million dollars some videos will give away half a
million there's not really I guess so I'm retracting what I just said I was more joking with that but there's no difference whether I put 500k or a million it's probably not even really a difference between 100K 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 there's 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's just like that's a lot of money you know it doesn't it doesn't 100K a
million like it 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 found like 20 bucks in the ground are like incredible really 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 yes no I get it like why
people want to see people win money it's just interesting that past 100 Grand it's 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 that 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 you if you wanted to you could really quit your job as opposed to 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 digestion return it
definitely the the returns level off dramatically after 100K that's basically the premise what about ten thousand uh no there's ten a hundred thousand is that it's funny because this is such a small Niche thing but yeah 100 000 does it from what I see in our videos get more clicks than ten thousand but the difference between a hundred thousand million is just so little I just I think big number big number to a lot of people past that point yeah so for 100 000 you can like give an average salary you could probably live for a year given give them a day out average salaries in America so that's like a big that feels yeah I think it's also just more when
they read the title it's just like it's a lot of zeros [ __ ] loads of zeros Okay click yeah oh man that's fascinating so on the thumbnail side again that's going to be much harder to say probably um but you know offline you know 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 a thumbnail that work well is this also deeply well that's where yeah it's the same thing like how do you cook good food but um it's easier if you pull up a thumbnail I could be like that's why that's good that's why that's
bad that's uh like an example would be like one of my friends I was 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 he's getting chased by cops but the cops are wearing yellow vests so they didn't look at cops I was like whoa why are the cops in your thumbnail wearing yellow vests it's like that makes it so much more boring and he was like carrying a flag but the poll and the color of the flag were the same color so it's like it's a lot harder to see the flag I was like also you're wearing like a shirt with like five different colors like so it's like it's
hard to tell what even what your outline is and then in the background there were cars and I was like oh if you have cops chasing you why not make the cars cop cars and you know and it's like because in my head I'm like dang if he just did those like four or five things the video probably got like seven next the views how much iteration because I also got a chance to see the number of iterations you do on a on just it's a problem now it's an addiction is it so you kind of there's a lot of the versions were really good yeah how do you know when to like 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 so we one of our coming up videos we made the world's largest plant-based burger and the thumbnail we were thinking is like me standing beside the bird because it's six feet tall that's 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 relative to the and you didn't like that one I needed to come forward a little bit and also the photo we took was uh just my upper body yeah so they photo manipulating created my legs 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 does the physics and thumbnail have to even make sense I mean you can just like exaggerate the head size and all that kind of yeah 100 yeah things don't have to be relative yeah you can have a car in the background be three times the
size yeah because yeah every one of my thumbnails my face is in the you know 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 you know 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 wanna that wanna make it big to 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 feels weird saying that third person but whatever is not gonna do what
I'm doing better they're gonna just invent their own lane like you're just not going to do what I do better than me you know I have so many I literally have the best people in the world working here and I 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 like I didn't get where I am by just beating someone else out there again I just found my own lane and innovated and adapted and so yeah there's a lot of people that do copy me
and it's fine whatever do it but just know you're not gonna get to where I am doing that um and so I'd advise you don't you give away a lot of the secrets basically everything yeah about how you operate is there uh I don't hold anything back go for it you know how do you think about that because that's also that's pretty rare I think and this is a definitely not uh 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 so person on social media even because we're also focused super heavily on YouTube but last year we're also the most followed Tick Tock
Creator in the world as well I actually remember most subscribed to YouTube channel world and the most followed Tick Tock account in the world um but uh in general I just see everyone else as uh collaborators not competitors I I don't think giving advice and helping other creators do well in any way harms me and I think it only brings more value to my life how is it jumping on Tick Tock 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 at least a whole different just ballpark um and so the first little while is doing Tick Tock it was just kind of figuring out how 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 yeah you know and so like an example is um we played the rock for 100k and rock paper scissors and the loser had to
donate 100K to charity we did um we went to random people on a campus and we offered them so I said I'll give you a hundred dollars if you fly to Paris to give me a baguette and then they said no and I was like I'll give you 300 if a lot of hairs and give me a big hat and I was expecting this person to say no and it go up to like 10 grand he's like yes and so he flew to Paris got a baguette and brought it back and gave it to me and that across everything got like 450 million views and because it's just really cool just to see this random guy get on a plane spend a day in Paris and we cut it up real nicely and bring it back 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 short forms doing it that's the thing it's like okay it's just so funny because like tick tock's been big for a while now years and then um you know as as we started to really figure out things on the YouTube channel and get it cranking where I have some free time we we set our sights on Tick Tock 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 Tick Tock and it worked and now we're the fastest growing or most followed Tick Tock 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 what all I remember is that they 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 tick tock yeah those would just double up it's just hard you know what's actually pretty fascinating in people who do social media listening to this will probably
find this pretty interesting because the picture of like the content creation meta three years ago versus now where you can make sub one minute vertical content and it go viral on Tick Tock 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 like something or whatever I can post something on Tick Tock they'll get 100 million views and then post it on shorts and it'll get 200 million views and then post it on Instagram and I get 50 million views and then you know I haven't yet but you know you can then turn around and tweet it and get tens of millions of views and you can post it on Reddit get tons of interviews and and Facebook and get tens of millions of views and that that just wasn't a thing three years ago Twitter didn't have when 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 Tick Tock 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 with YouTube shorts so this is all new and uh 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 tick tock 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's it's just it can be engineered it's yeah so many people say it's luck and they're like you're just lucky or this or that but what are we up to probably like a thousand videos over 10 million views like we don't ever have a dud like you can call it luck but I think it could be trained I 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 if I'm even certain ones like just one of my friends like 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 it went from ten thousand dollars a month on YouTube to over four hundred thousand 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 um well anyways I don't even want to 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 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 I have that I'd say are the smartest people in the world when it comes to content creation online if you had the knowledge that was in our heads you could do it very easily I see people do it all the time um and what's even more interesting is I go on podcasts and I say everything I know and these people are also very open some of them I know it's all out there and a lot of people instead of just studying that and trying to absorb and apply it in their own way 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 I think a crucial component of your success is the idea stage the idea generation the brainstorm I heard today but getting really good at generating idea is so it's not it's not just the uh the selection of the thumbnail and the title that creative process it's also just the the engine of generating really good ideas of course and getting that I mean I I would say that is probably the thing that needs to be trained the most for most creators right that they're they just don't put enough ideas on paper 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 you know 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 now I'm in the mindset of a lot of small YouTubers or I thought those videos deserved a million views and I thought the algorithm hated
me but I watched them back now and I can tell you exactly why the videos was [ __ ] horrible you know what I mean well 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're probably still growing to see like yeah every six months you should look back and hate your videos or at least see things you could improve and be like oh I could have 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 uh just look at it I just
got back from him no I'm I just got back from a mastermind where I just got like you know 10 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 I just call random people I'll just say teach me something and uh I mean it's just uh you just have to have a never-ending thirst for Learning Link 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 you know have a leg up on you in the
knowledge game and what kind of stuff are you because you you've talked about Offline that you just love learning of all kinds it doesn't matter but in terms of videos are you studying videos are you studying recently not as much I'm more because to get to the videos I want I have to build this business and scale up and hire so one of 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 and that's the business side uh 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 heard we just give them Severance and I like to see it more as it's no ill well like if there's like if I fired you if is 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 something 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 uh onto someone
that you don't see being here in 10 years you're just doing a disservice you're just giving them more ingrained more and rooted and where where they are um and the sooner you do it and help them move on to their like 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 uh you had no money what would be the first 10 videos you tried to uh to make on a new channel I guess that's advice for a new person and nobody knows you yeah and nobody knows me yeah like hypothetically I have a mask on and you also I guess don't have the wisdom well
if I don't have what I have in my head then I would say just fail like just a lot of people get analysis paralysis and they'll just sit there and they'll plan their first video for three months and yeah I'm any of you listening if if you especially if you have zero videos on your channel your first video is not going to give views period it's not your first ten are not gonna give views I can very confidently say that so stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end and just get to work and start uploading 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 101st video we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views but you know your first hundred are gonna there are very freak cases like Liza koshy 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 an NBA like yes there are free cases you can find but for the average person like us you know who don't have these exceptional personalities and you know backgrounds in filmmaking just make 100 videos improve something each time and then talk to me on your 101st video well the
improve something his 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 coloring 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 no there's literally no such thing as a perfect video so if you knew everything you know now but no money step one would I 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 count to a hundred thousand which is what I did do and I I was poor um and like that worked but like what's something like that I could do that would be even more attention 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 yeah because there's 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 um when we give away an island like we give our 100 million subscribers Island yeah you know you can't find private islands that you know don't look like [ __ ] for less than 10 million dollars so this isn't doable right all right the idea
doesn't exist not doable exit off but then you know you dig into it and you you know find different Alternatives and you find okay what if we just buy a two million dollar Island that sucks and then spend a million dollars you know importing some sand let's build a beach let's import 300 trees let's put a little bit of canals cut some pass boom now it's a really nice Island but it's actually affordable because we don't have 10 million dollars to spend on video but we can afford to spend three and a half and lose whatever a million dollars on that video so like that's an example of like yeah if you just went off the gut test you're like this isn't
doable you know every island is 10 million dollars we're screwed like if we go cheaper it's just a terrible Island no and so if you like there are so many different ways you can achieve what you want you've really got to push through notes which not a lot of people do you have to have like a more of a dominant personality and just a willingness to um when people tell you it's not possible just actually go through all the variables and eliminate them all yourself have a stubbornness and uh 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 deal that you really have to like think and um and just like we we take a personality test and like just having a dominant personality is a better indicator that when someone tells you oh there's no way you're going to build a brick wall for under 100 Grand you know you'll be like okay and then still go check the next 10 vendors and you know figure it out yeah uh what advice would you give to an already established Channel like with one two three four million subscribers how to like 10x it like increase it um without losing maybe yeah that's where it's very specific like 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 [ __ ] them over you know oh I see so let's say I had like two million subscribers on this podcast yeah like how would you 10x that without sacrificing what it is 10x is your stuff does it matter so we you've talked about with success yeah 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 [ __ ] about 10x thing it's even harder for 10x um 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 because it's like you know you could do this to get more views and he'll just be like blank I'll be like that doesn't register anything he's just like doesn't care which is it's really I'm really nervous about that I'm really nervous about the numbers affecting because it's so fun oh 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 it's 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 uh 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 on the flip side I think part of the appeal is that you don't care about that kind of stuff but there there could be stuff that doesn't have to do anything with that it has to do with stylistic choices of lighting and cameras or maybe with uh
um for example topics yeah you know like 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 yeah again I'm worried about polluting at the end of the day it's it's this is a true case of it's your own intuition like you know your viewers better than anyone else it's whatever see I'd like to push back on that I really don't you do who else name one person who knows your viewers better than you uh somebody that looks at numbers of podcasts no you know your viewers you know you're the only how many episodes Have You Done uh 350. exactly but I'm
not paying it you're the only one who's watched every second of all 350 of them probably that's just that's just not no you haven't but the okay well because you did it so you do know what's in all of them sure your content is you people 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 X viewer and what do they want I don't think like that my tip but 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 viewer is though I don't I know because to
investigate that would be very very difficult and then you have to start looking at the numbers you have to start to like consider demographics the only way I know that anybody even watches it is because I'll sometimes run into people like when I run along the river and they'd be like I love you Lex it's like okay well that that's that's the data point and they're like cool people but you know I don't know any like I don't have any other it's difficult man it's difficult to know it's difficult to know who listens to boxes the difficult do you have a sense of who's I mean like you're so huge that
everybody watches yeah uh but no I still do I would say if you were to just put a gun to my head and you're 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 something 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 are older as well but in a ramble random sample size yeah it's probably like I'm a male boy that plays video games like that's the best way I would describing it but I
don't try to pertain to them I just make whatever I think is interesting and good content um and this is what we were talking about before even though hypothetically 35 to 40 of my audience is uh 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 uh you know views per video for women on the whole platform which you wouldn't think that you know uh like I can't think of a single other creator that gets more women to watch their videos than that um and so it's just anything even like
people above the age of 30 even if it's only like three or four percent that's still three to four percent of 100 million views there's a lot of people that age so we we hit a large group of uh 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 uh something on Robotics and biology on science on engineering on all of that that's more educational focused we would honestly just have to pull the because it's the same way if
you went to Gordon Ramsay 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 I'm giving horrible advice because if there was these just school 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 it's it's like surface love at the start and then the more if we watch 10 videos I feel like I'd have a good profile and I could tell you in my opinion you know one especially once I look at the analytics and I get more ingrained in
like okay the typical viewers 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 put your head 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 went to generating a bunch of ideas around audiobooks uh it's just 100 Robots versus a hundred humans yeah how far can a robot throw a potato I think your idea like I think the first idea was because you just said so many ideas I never even thought of but it's it's it shows the value of uh 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 yeah but there's still the ideas like I think the first one you said because we're talking about uh quadruped like a robot dogs you said to replace a biological dog with a robot dog and see if the owner notices something you're just quickly brainstorming different ideas of like how this was years ago I remember that yeah which is just I mean it's like oh yeah I never really thought about that kind of so 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 that we love in our lives yeah and but like that was like the um the pace of idea generation was the thing that struck me today and in general it's like that's how you get at good videos is you keep keep things it's much easier to make a video around a good idea obviously than a bad one you're just setting yourself up for Success okay so that's for uh 10x thing already popular um Channel what's the hardest number you said uh the numbers that matters click-through
rate average view duration and and uh surveys what's the hardest number to uh optimize for probably surveys you know do you have any do you have an insight into the surveys at all 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 um and it's like you can get people to click a video you can get them to watch it but you can't really fake whether or not they're satisfied like they don't lie the service you know um you know maybe one person here
they're my troll but once you're 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 uh minimizing the non regrettability yeah I think Elon tweeted that's what he's trying to do on Twitter Twitter and that's interesting that's that's basically the survey metric how happy you are that you've been using the platform yeah you know untreated we want to limit the amount of regrettable minutes people spend on Twitter and uh the first thing I thought it's like that's something YouTube already has a lot like their whole Survey System when feedback loop how tough is it to take on
YouTube you think like um for Twitter yeah for Twitter for anybody else um I mean it's gonna be basically impossible I mean YouTube's not going anywhere and I mean I don't know I don't I don't think anyone's gonna do what YouTube does better than them uh 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 uh what would your own answer be at various stages in your career if uh if if I had nothing I would say 10 million dollars so 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 8 million so that's if you believe in your ability to grow a channel if you uh well if you yeah if you don't believe in your ability to grow Channel then you shouldn't take the 10 million subscribers because you're just gonna kill the channel 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 uh but you know if you Sim I know what you're doing you probably make a million dollars off
a 10 million subscriber Channel but it is a little bit a million dollars might not be enough to to build a strong team because you don't know how to do it so you might waste all that money yeah or they just keep it and retire yeah okay that's true yeah because 10 million's 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 do the value of the subscriber versus the value of the dollar um I suppose how valuable is a subscriber for uh like what percentage of the videos like how active are the subscribers and watching the video
um 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 that kind of popped in my head it's an interesting thought uh do you ever when you analyze uh videos do you ever analyze videos like we've talked about offline of other videos across the YouTube in general just to understand trying to understand social behavior all your not all but a lot of questions are analytics based yeah yeah it's so because I love it uh I mean it's just a giant social experiment
right like what people like to watch what people share yeah it's like a fascinating so I hate that 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 uh curiosity and exploration of interesting ideas so in that sense yeah this would this was fitted I love it this is funny this isn't me like trying to like I I love you and I actually I love future Magnus one and I um 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 maybe I'm wrong hey 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 threat of curiosity and I think there's just a lot of curious humans in the world and 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 Tick Tock 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 uh because 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 the sort of the darker side of YouTube and um with Shadow Banning and censorship and all that kind of topics especially if you see it in other platforms like
Twitter that yeah that uh 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 which information isn't or isn't made available through search and discovery I'll be honest I never really think about it so uh you just you just try to make fun videos that yeah 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 like I'm just kind of In My Own Lane thinking about my own stuff uh but you know now
you asked I'm curious what are your thoughts on on YouTube and that kind of stuff well I'm generally against centralized um 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 uh 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 and then there's the Mis information stuff and then there's also just like the videos where they do something that causes uh what what happened back in the the where
uh adpocalypse you know and a lot of creators Revenue plummets because people are 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 and because adverage drop 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 for people I agree on Shadow Banning uh you should be transparent you should let people know it 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 uh how to improve their content they can understand it they can exactly uh if it's a wrong Shadow Banning like it's a society that we should not Shadow ban this kind of content that means exactly you should be publicly discussing it 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 the 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 yeah let's see 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 you but even more of a reason why it it would probably makes sense to be transparent yeah because then people can help fact check it that's right but that that requires building a platform that makes that easy right like uh to to make fact checking easy to make
the like Twitter now has like being able to share context and all that kind of stuff that crowdsource it crowdsources the way Wikipedia crowdsource it I mean there's it's right and then you open a random Wikipedia article but like you know people criticize Wikipedia because there is a political lean to the editors of Wikipedia and then they get there's 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 The Entity that's hosting it so for the viewer to decide yeah I'm just going to make fun cool videos yeah yeah you know let's go to Antarctica again how was that how was going to you just came back from Antarctica that was I watched the video that was that was fun that was a really fun video thank you um there's I mean there's a lot of things I can comment about that but what was that what was the hardest part of making that video the hardest part was just getting out there it's just so remote and you know 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 and you're the most remote place in the planet and it's it's just it's very breathtaking I don't 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 um that wasn't named so we can name it and like standing on top of that mountain and just seeing kindling nothing and because once you get outside the outskirts and you get deep in Antarctica there's no Penguins nothing lives there at all um and so there's just nothing in every direction it's just snow and these crazy beautiful mountains and some of them
sticking to the clouds and it was in the um if you go during summer time the Sun never goes down so the Sun's Up 24 7 and it's just like spinning in circles at the top of the planet or whatever it looks like the top um yeah you guys come with it several times how beautiful yes 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 so somehow we lucked out one of the days it was like the warmest day in like forever that's been in Antarctica it's like it was positive uh degrees but at certain parts there's 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 uh 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 does how do you go from the idea stage to the actual execution to the final video what's can you take me through like a full process of like we're talking about some crazy wild ideas today how do you go from that to a final video where you click publish well I mean obviously first things first you gotta 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 uh uh well what about the in a circle you have to stay in a circle for uh 400 Days yeah so for that one step one one of the most popular yeah that video did really well yeah so we um problem is uh we have to this is where you get really into the nuances of the company because we have a lot of videos going out 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 um so step one you build that team okay we got the team now what do we need well to do this we need probably like 10 cameras at least rolling at all times so uh we're probably gonna need to get a trailer and hook up a bunch of storage and stuff so to just carry the sheer volume of footage we're gonna have and so get a trailer set up the cameras go on the field paint a circle now we need a house go buy a house bring it out there uh and then it's like oh wait I think it'd be funny if I brought the house in on the intro for yeah you know
find a crane that can lift up a house so I can drive it in and drop it in the intro and that's like an iterative process where you're like okay this would be funnier so this is not all up front yeah it's like your ideally it would be but as you kind of see things you get inspired and then you think of more and more uh and then this would be better with a crane yeah it'd be better if I dropped out of the house yeah that was crazy that you decided to do that uh so Fearless in the kind of crazy stuff you're willing to do exactly what I'm a broken record but whatever makes the best video possible yeah that's that's all you you focus on okay so uh what
about the delegation of like who gets to what are the cameraman like the people operating the cameras what uh who's responsible for different things this is like a distributed process like well that's where whoever the lead cam would be on that video would just decided that one because we shot over 100 days we didn't a lot of it was just Sean and the guy who was in The Circle just vlogging I'm just gave him a camera yeah and he figured it out and then we'd have like for him just set hours each day that I can't remember would come so if he had any content he needed extra hands instead of just having someone on standby 24 7. it made more sense to do
set hours nice um and uh yeah it was it was hard but you know it's funny and hindsight it sounds so simple you know and I 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 right like you know I checked in on them so many different days and it's like an hour here two hours or two hours there over a hundred days adds up to be a ton of time and 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 that adds up what about like the 100 versus 100 100 uh adults versus the
other kids was uh bringing that to life that seems like exceptionally challenging yeah basically the thought process was we did 100 kids or sorry 100 boys 100 girls yeah 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 in our studio so we built a a giant room put 100 girls in it sounds bad when I explain it like this and then a gyrant put 100 boys yeah and we're like after 100 hours which everyone has the most people give them half a million dollars
so did well so we're like all right we're gonna do it again so we threw out all these different ideas it was like 100 football players versus 100 cheerleaders 100 this 100 that and uh 100 prisoners versus 100 cops just craziest ideas and we settled on 100 Kids versus 100 adults um and then the next step was like how do we make it better the kids versus adults are the sorry the boys versus girls the first one we did was inside and the problem was every time it was night when we did these long time lapses you couldn't see the Sun go up and down so we're like okay this time I want to do it outside that's why the cubes are
outside um and instead of doing circles we want to make them cubes and then you know as figuring out do we want that yeah there's just those videos came up at least today as ones that are like really complicated in terms of the audio in terms of how yeah film it yeah that's the problem we had a lot of audio issues because uh in the first one we didn't have a roof on it the second one there was a roof so there's 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 frankensteining in the editing to make up for basically my
ignorance so you mentioned that you were surprised how well that that one did a lot of creators talk about getting depressed when um the videos don't do as well as they kind of expect it there's the kind of feeling you can get really worn out by that dude yeah um you do your yourself feel that and also do you have advice for others that feel this um yeah it's weird because I am a numbers guy but also it it used to it used to very much especially when I was like betting everything I had on a video when it did bad I was devastating 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 it's uh if a video that's bad I just look at it and I'm like oh why'd this video do bad uh probably oh there's a little retention dip there I don't think people like the thumbnail maybe we should switch it 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 so if a Creator is listening like that is the ideal way to um 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 search the next one is there tricks to detect being able to detach yourself from the from that because because I in your case I mean that's true for creators but in your case there's like a lot of money on the line yeah well there's videos yeah so much time but no I mean you just I mean I don't know the only real answer is it's just the conscious effort you just have to unemotionally look at the video determine the problems and then move on like there's there is no secret you know what I mean it's just that's 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 the Creator is like being able to be a different longevity yes yeah you have to unemotionally be able to look at videos that flop and figure it out uh because if not just getting you can not every video can be a one out of ten and so when a video does bad you know that that just stress and depression it's just gonna eventually get to you in the long run so you said you've uh failed in a bunch of videos uh 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 more we don't have that
problem as much especially that we're getting into the multi-million dollar budgets per video it's like failure is 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 desert island and uh 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 um or uh could that have been caught and prevented at the idea stage like where like no it's a good idea it was just poor execution to be honest when we were
out there it was hot we were we're just like we all at one point just kind of wanted to die it was just miserable so how do we how do you avoid that these days uh well I just thought it was 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 know what it takes videos that where it's very hot or or it's on water because I get super seasick it's 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 uh like we tried to SP um anytime
we do anything on a boat like when we spent 24 hours of beer in a triangle or when I tried to spend like which I didn't get up but I try to spend like 100 hours at sea or whatever just like on a raft it's just like I 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 um so when you spend months in creating a video I know this is probably stressful to some creators uh like how much stress how do you feel when you have to click publish uh video no not much you're able to detach yourself yeah again in Old me tons I
mean 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 and as a content creator there's different phases and uh you just like once you get over the the fear that you're just gonna 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 attach yourself I guess and that's I 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 know you have to get out of that that game right 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 some people success is retiring their mom is inspiring people and educating them and you know whatever they're peaking 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 because 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 and 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 drag to you that was more direct to people listening because uh a lot of people do really care about subscribers or even followers like on Tick Tock but if you look like your view if on YouTube very very few percent if even a percent of your views come from the sub feed right you know
they're almost all home features 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 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 subscribers don't really matter followers on Tick Tock 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 uh 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 it's a young Creator I might start copying Mr Beast or something like that right yeah 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 it's as long as you detach yourself from them I mean if you're lazy yeah 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 original stuff and putting in the effort you can't just say oh it's because they're chasing views we need some different metric from the chase no they just need to find their own way well it just feels like unique type of content will often lead to sacrifice in the number of views in the short term by the long term you win
okay or if you do win you you win more I guess would be a better way putting it do you think you will IPO miss Mr Beast burger or feastables in the next five ten years Beast burger or feasible snow I I kind of think they're something actually you know what I just realized that this is our first time talking about those we're like an hour and a half in that's so funny we started talking about what uh my retention brain kicked in um I wonder if you have retention brain for like life itself 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 well so we'll pause the b square 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 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 that time is being used optimally because whether we're watching a documentary or we're going in in you know taking an IQ tests or reading about whatever just why Modern Art is the thing I don't know
whatever weird thing we decided to do I'm always learning and improving so it justifies the time so to maximize retention in your relationship yeah you want to spend time with that time learning as much as possible yeah which conveniently I don't have to force right 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 sometimes it's not learning like maybe watching an anime or something like that um 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 Kick-Ass entrepreneur obviously we're boiling this down to like a very basic thing and so the the things you're doing your down time when you're not working if it doesn't recharge you you're screwed you're just a ticking time but I'm waiting to implode um 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 and I would try to train myself to not need that stuff and I you know and I almost resented like that I I have to do these kinds of things and it would piss me off because it's not optimal and you know I just really want to make content and entertain people but yeah as someone who's gone down that road and you know you just work every day for two three months straight and you know every hour of the day and then you just a bomb waiting to explode and lose your mind and the only real sustainable thing is to just like 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 yes because it's just not optimal for time like it's it's it's as a human I do need to occasionally watch a Mindless show and play a board game yeah 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 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 uh Mr Beast burger what is like is this one on the topic what is a perfect day in the life perfectly productive day in the life of Mr Beast look like oh boy well I mean or like a stand I mean the perfectly productive day as we filmed my main Channel video because those get 100 million a pop I mean it doesn't really get any better than that 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 so right now we have our snack brand feastables we have a restaurant chain piece burger and then we basically which we haven't even really launched any products yet but we have the 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 um and so kind of how I've structured my life right now uh is whatever I have free time we just kind of go hey guys Jimmy's got an hour from 2PM to 3 P.M and it's everyone's just like I need this I need this and this Channel's like
I need this thing filmed or you know whatever the guy who runs my tick tocks like I need this Tick Tock filmder um you know Beast Burger is like I need this menu item approved do we need to talk about this marketing thing and then we kind of just look at what everyone needs and we're like that one looks like the most important we'll do that and then so it's just kind of like you know if I just did that for every company in a day then that's optimal if I just kind of like an optimal day for me would be going down the eight companies and just whatever they're like two to three biggest pain points or things to need from me and just doing those based on
priority and then trying to keep it as short as possible yeah to just the things that you're needed on it doesn't get more optimal than that if I clear the bottlenecks or some bottlenecks for all my companies then it's yes that's a perfect day yeah I mean even just me because 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 you basically I felt bad at some points I was like oh I just tricked him into going to meetings with me he's like my little meeting buddy yeah I mean it was it was fun it's fun to see it 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 five on all the different tasks yeah from the from the brainstorming and the main channel to the reacts and so on yeah it's really interesting I mean it's it's really interesting what it takes to build a team like that because you very quickly build the very large team that's that's able to scale which is very scary because it's my first you know I 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 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 I'll know so much more about running a business and scaling and hiring and and how to lead people and better effectively communicate and all these different skill sets that will make them a better leader that uh that's the only
thing that sucks is uh 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 you already have so much influence so much impact but you have effectively scaled what what lessons do you draw from that how to effectively scale as a 24 year old like 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 um I probably couldn't you know they're
gonna be like oh this is so obvious but um for uh younger first-time business owners you kind of just experiment to be honest and uh but for us like it's just a new space no one had really ever skilled up a 100 person team to build make content on YouTube so there wasn't no uh I spent all this time like I hired one person from Disney to 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 want to watch and they come over here and help me build a team and you know they build it more the traditional way and not like how it should be online and and so then it's
like okay and now I'm not trying to trash people like they all tried their best but then I try hire this one person who does this different type of uh media and runs a 100 person team and then you come in here and they try to build it that way they don't really listen to you or value or or see the difference and I 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 just like they just don't get it and they like they don't understand my world and the the eventual solution was just like throw up my sleeves and do it myself you know with like James where I
hit man and just like no 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 [ __ ] out ourselves and you have to kind of build up people from scratch then yeah exactly all the stuff I was talking about earlier and all the the lessons I learned along the way um and Sophie for me that was a big part of like and try to stop trying to have someone build this company for me and just do it myself because it's scary like my whole life studying YouTube videos of virality not business building but [ __ ] I was like I guess we just got to do it ourselves and
um and that's where things really start to click and we got the exponential growth we started 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 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 or um 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 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 them 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 I at the end of the day it's whatever I want the video their job is to make a video that they think I'll like because it's my channel but you know you can achieve that kind of however and um and so it's just everything's just different you know it's much more I
guess like a startup as opposed to um are you often surprised like with the result like you think a certain like we watched the video today that was really nice those different than you would have potentially edited 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 of course yeah now um 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 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'd put is like you don't when when you're on a a come up or you're growing you don't want to uh Test new things once uh you start to Plateau or have a downtrend because if you're like you know you you're skyrocketing right you're up up and then you level off you start to go down and you're like oh this isn't working anymore 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 I'm oversimplify 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 tests that go wrong am I you're like screwed you know you're already out the door now you're just confirming that you're out the door an online entertainment so that's kind of how I see it so I think it's very imperative that you're constantly always experimenting and trying things 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 uh Mr Beast burger and feastables this is a whole nother industry like what was that like well so Beast Burger 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're just like you know um let's let's just uh sell Beast burgers for a day or two let's 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 you know we do six figures in sales and they all sell out and they're running to local Walmarts they can't keep up with the
demand and it's like okay well maybe let's just leave it open a week whatever um 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 don'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 festivals feasible is something I've always wanted to do because I I think just in general uh 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 um and so that's just something I've always been pretty passionate about the thing we built that from scratch so we hired the CEO and built a team around them and we we spent probably over two and a half years before we even launched just like building the right team figuring things out and making sure it was actually ran the way I wanted um which feasible has just been crushing it's it's very interesting uh this is
something I've never talked about publicly but having products in retail it's like before feastables everything I had done was online so if you wanted to you know anything from the cocoa peace brand you'd have to buy it online and ship it to you but feastfuls now that you know because our first product chocolate bars we started putting that in retail locations so like for example Walmart it's it's crazy like it's just it doesn't make sense how if you're which I guess it does for because we get 100 million views of videos so a lot of people know us if I go stand in Walmart those people recognize me and ask for photos like if I still don't enough I
could take 150 photos today in Walmart 200 whatever it is so obviously it makes sense those people go find feastfuls but then you just multiply that by every Walmart in America and it just gets so crazy and I didn't think we'd be doing the kind of Revenue we are and we're about to launch in some other I don't know if I'm allowed to say so whatever but other big retail you know locations and convenience stores and like by the end of next year we could be in like 40 fifty thousand locations and the numbers just don't make sense so you know 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 and Walmart stock to be honest like it would have to supply it was 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 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's like a three ish month period where I just didn't promote festivals because I was scared that someone would go by and this is not there and so like it took us a very long time to catch up to the demand
and also it's not like we have unlimited money so but now we're relatively caught up in um 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 they're in so or and we're gonna try to launch new products so we're in for an interesting ride but yeah I just hate I hate when I tell people you know like hey go try this product and then they go in their local Walmart and eventually other places and it's not there it's just so brutal you know they made that whole journey out there and they didn't get it and so that that was really it
um besides that no it's it's been doing way better than I ever thought uh you've talked to a couple places about maybe doing mobile games or computer games in the future yeah yeah is that something you're still considering yes um because uh you know do you normally talk with people as much as we talked beforehand is that no no that that was the pro who spent all day today look 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 because what no I tried
it's okay there's a different style of asking those questions because I I on purpose didn't dig further with you uh I could tell yeah so I can 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 yeah well on the same day I know we're not even saying okay together one hour yeah literally it's funny um this is a hilarious and awesome social experiment I think I picked this hotel and I just like harassed him all day to hang out with me and then great here we are now I love it
um I was secretly recording the whole time just you know I'm just kidding anyway so what was the question yeah so the interesting thing is uh with Beast burger and feastables that um there's physical Goods as opposed to like making mobile games or PC game whichever one we end up doing which is software and I actually have a giant International audience like um 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 festivals in India get festivals in Brazil and Mexico and all these other
places where we have giant pockets of our audience and same thing with peaceful it's just it's going to take probably years uh unless we partner with someone who already has the distribution which we're figuring out but the UDF software is I can make a hypothetical game or whatever we end up doing and all my fans can you know use it tomorrow the day I mentioned it and so if I promote something in a video to 100 million people and it's like uh you know basically like a game they can all download it so there you know um but if I promote a feast rules 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 America so I I alienate I'm uh a majority of my audience and it feels so shitty to just from you know mention something that most of them can't buy but on the flip side you can't just spawn this crazy infrastructure and just have tens of millions of bars and all your products in every single store across the world before you promote it so you can't put the egg before the chicken and so um it's like that that's that's what I'm excited about I want to get into less physical stuff and more stuff that everyone matters can actually use this is the thought process especially if
there's a social element to the gaming too because it's not unlike feastables like that's a product you consume you missed it when you're setting it for this we were uh doing some basically just laying out every everything that we're planning for so our interfaces 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 gonna take it and run with it but you're 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 good one I did so much good talk all right the juicy talks having you she's like I gotta go set up well you know I I already heard a lot awesome I mean but that is a different kind of team you would need to hire yeah is that a little uh nerve-wracking like going into a new field and trying to a little bit but then I remind myself like like Steve Jobs didn't know how to code right and you know he just he just knew what a good product was and I feel like as someone who wasted so much of his lives playing video games I have a good sense of it and that might be 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 ignorant so maybe I end up you know 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 will do well uh what is the path to being worth 100 billion look like doesn't have to be worth 100 billion look like I don't know because okay okay let me just like pause here 24 and there's so much awesome scaling so many great ideas you you think about different trajectories yeah uh what
those possible trajectives might look like yeah I mean if the goal was to just be worth 100 billion dollars yes I'm my goal of a broken record so make the best view impossible because I know whatever else I want will come obviously the video is the foundation yeah exactly so to Pat to 100 billion dollars just keep getting 100 million views of video you know what I mean um but or more oh yeah or more exactly if we can keep growing but you know if we can keep feasibles growing right and we eventually spend International and one day we're in 100 000 retail locations
and we're selling the same amount of excuse or units per skews like we're currently doing uh 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 supercell 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 while we do they're bangers um and just you know whatever other stuff we end up doing all that combined I mean it's just interesting because like what what's a show that's pulled 100 million views per episode basically that's like we're doing like you know I
mean like the Super Bowl gets praised because they get 100 million viewers but I can't think of a show um maybe in reruns or something so there's also a show that's has uh has a singular kind of figure yeah 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 so it's a very interesting position because I put out content and 100 million people show up and then I also have a gaming channel I put out content 15 million people show up in a reaction I put out content 10 million people show up and have a tick tock and I put out content and on average 20 million people show up
and like and I so 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 uh over the years because feastables launched you know last year 2022 so it's a relatively new thing and Beast Burger 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 that yeah that would be one hell of a video um let me ask you the ridiculous question since you went from being broke to being uh Rich although you keep uh spending all your money um but uh does money buy happiness how has money changed sort of your your happiness in life it's 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 what I mean and like you know if my brother had a medical emergency and and we couldn't afford it and I made money to afford it that would bring tons of happiness you know so once you take care of those basic necessities so we'll say makeover hypothetically a million dollars no it it really doesn't like adding an extra zero going from 10 million to 100 million or whatever it is makes no difference so you're given that or just fearless
and spending the money yeah well let me reframe I guess it could for some people if 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 I'm coming more from the frame of mind of of an entrepreneur someone who's really obsessed with business ability 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 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 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 um do you find it hard to find people you can trust is do people see you basically as a source of money as opposed to another human being it's weird because you would think yes but I I feel like I also know the right places to look um but yeah if I just walked into Target and try to make friends with 10 random people of course um you gotta
uh so you can kind of sense oh yeah that's the right thing yeah that's yeah it's so obvious so I don't even want to go into descriptions but honestly a lot of my friends are like uh Chandler I I played literally with him um and Tyler the guy I mean I went to school with him Chris he was my first subscriber um 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 I knew before I was big so maybe there is some mirror to that maybe it is I I don't know I've never really put too much thought into it maybe
there's a reason I hang around a lot of these people I knew before I got paid because it's much easier and they help you keep like uh your radar sharp of who can and can't be trusted because you know you can trust them yeah it's difficult when you become richer and richer and more powerful well one day one time when you get rich oh yeah not even richer but more fan one thing I thought is as I climbed this like ladder of YouTube and got bigger I thought there would be tons of people like me people how to like that takes like the Kamikaze approach to building a business you just throw all your money in it you throw all
your time you throw all your energy throw everything yeah you're just like [ __ ] it this is this I'm dead yeah I thought there would be hundreds of these yeah and and there isn't there is I mean there's like maybe one or two and I talked to those [ __ ] every single day I'm sick and tired of talking to them but I love them um but it's just so interesting because like every level I got up like I get a million subscribers like all right where's all these guys in the million subscribers that are [ __ ] Psychopaths and then you know you know there are people become like conservative as they get like they get 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 since you you know it sounds cliche and you hear that kind of [ __ ] in movies and you're like that's not how it works but it is like there's 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 you 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 that are as crazy as you yeah it is 100 it's it's so it's not what I I was expecting I was expecting there'd be a lot of people like me but well I guess the guy would talk to Elon Musk is a bit like you in that sense yeah just in a different domain yeah yeah exactly just willingness to put it all back in right and that's why I found right now a lot of the people I relate to don't even make YouTube videos like they're just like I'm viewing more and more away from fellow content creators
and more to just you know I'm just looking for those other people who just share a little bit of it so I don't feel so [ __ ] crazy all the time like you know what I mean um and like people I feel normal around and they tend to just be doing the randomest things but you know loving it well I think that's really inspiring it's uh it's like the Bukowski line to find what you love and let it kill you is really put everything put everything into the thing you love that that's like the way to really create special stuff but it's also the way to yeah
you have to be careful given this advice because they're like they're like bodybuilders who'll be like just go to the gym be disciplined I'm disciplined go to gym but I would argue for those people it's like it's not even discipline they just enjoy weightlifting right because there are people who are jacked but they don't make much money or run a business right if they're that disciplined they would 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 right it's not even discipline 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 [ __ ] motivational video to go work I just do it 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 um but I think that a little bit of it is genetics um and just how you're hardwired uh 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 that's just not innate to them but 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 uh but if you just try to like hardcore do it you're just going to lose your mind do you ever worry about your mental health did you take step to protect it to uh yeah to like for the long run to make sure you have the mental strength to go
on yes weirdly enough the best thing for my mental health was giving in to my innate nature to work and the most depressed I get is when I try to restrict it and like I don't work weekends so 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 and for whatever reason I feel compelled to go all night whatever like just do it you know do whatever you want it's what I tell my like working brain um and I just give in to it and I feel that's where I feel the happiest and and
then um you know it's typically like when I'm really in The Grind Mode it'll be like seven or eight days it's just non-stop going going and then it's like oh I'll realize like oh I need some recharge time and then go [ __ ] binge a season of anime yeah but listen here but that's the thing like people will tell you don't work weekends or don't do this or don't work past this or blah blah give you all these constraints but for me and it's unconventional I just give into it I think there's something really to be said for that I I try to surround myself with people that like what I don't 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 I have no problem getting sleep and getting rest um what I need in my life is people that encourage you to kind of keep going keep going with the thoughts that you're passionate about normal people They don't want that life and they probably shouldn't it's not good for you um but yeah is 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 just it's so much
easier like if you you know um I've started weightlifting more and like one thing that's helped is just having Jack people around me because they naturally just eat healthier they do like they naturally just have freaking grilled chicken and all this [ __ ] 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 uh and they're like I gotta go to the gym and I'll be like oh [ __ ] I'll just join you you know and it's like it's just it's cheat codes you know I mean just surround yourself with people that you
want to be and it makes it like 70 easier in my opinion it's like that is the cheat code to life um and I wish I obviously your audience is definitely a lot older but you know to the older people listening like if you have 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 are there around 100 dictates the outcome I would not be on 120 million subscribers if I didn't find uh when I was around a million I had a couple 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 um and just all along the way the friends that I hung out with had such a dramatic impact on wearing them 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 add value to and they also add value to me so the advice for young people would be to be very selective about the people you saw yourself so selective it's it's crazy like Chris you know he's I I 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 like my speech will literally change and just after like a week of spending more time with them it has like it's like that quick enough 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 yeah you know there's no doubt if they're trying to become a content creator there are 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 just to younger to older people to agree but they it's it's even more I like when I was a teenager I just you know I couldn't relate to many people I just I 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 finally
find people you fit in with yeah yeah assuming which you know you're not getting comproment uh like assume it's not something bad right like if your hobby is shooting things you know or shooting things you shouldn't be shooting you know don't find people that encourage that but outside of that for sure uh 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 you know 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 alive should stop being too obsessed everything everything under the book um and then once I'm successful those same people are like tank 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 want to do something new right yeah uh they'll they'll like pressure you not to do the um you know feastables or or mobile gaming or whatever lays Beyond yeah it's funny how people don't well honestly they're the type of people I just don't talk to
anymore I don'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 they're with it no it's weird we actually have a my team pushes back on me pretty hardcore which I want I don't want Yes Man and yeah they're they're like uh they're James you know the CEO who helped me build all this um he's very adamant like we're not yes men and and he trains people to really think for themselves and even when I give them orders like really think like is this optimal is there context or information Jimmy could be missing that I can provide that could help him make a more
updated decision like I'm not um God you know what I mean like I'm human I make errors and so don't take what I say that's the Bible so even like in the brainstorming and so on they can 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 [ __ ] genius good job Jimmy you know I don't need that you know I need negatives uh you talked about being in a relationship what role Jimmy does love playing The Human Condition
I think well roll this well the big thing is love can be scary because this is you know the human you're gonna spend the most amount of time with in your life you know and so for projected over 50 years they can be a liability or an asset I love the magic tricks you know I love 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 yeah across across because if not then it's like it's a negative you know to everything I've spent my life building yeah um but luckily I'm very happy with the the partner I haven't
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 you know 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 you know just chatting with her and hanging out with her helps me like basically just shut my brain off and like mellow out and even like 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
um and so for me yeah I have someone who I think it's very beautiful very intelligent makes me better it's constantly pushing me okay with me working hard makes me smarter and just all these different things that I think for me love just makes me a better person you know what I mean which makes me love her even more does that make sense absolutely what advice would you give on uh finding somebody like that um just really don't give up until you you find someone that you know there's so many people on the planet I mean there really is there 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 surround yourself with people that make you a better person in the same case surround yourself with that one special person that really makes you a better person and for and maybe that's just an entrepreneurial brain looking at it not everyone's to hyper optimize their life like me but for me to like truly love someone they have to make me a better person in every way yeah yeah well what do you hope you're 24. we thought we started talking about death let's let's finish talking about death
what do you hope your legacy is when you when we look a hundred years from now and yeah alien 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 what do you hope they say about you um it's a deep one as probably just that because it's hard right like I said before Elon is over double my age I could live every second I've lived up to this point in my life and still have 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 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 um the same with sort of as Johnny Ive talks about like the the passion the effort they put into the 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 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 um 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'm ex I can't like it's so exciting to see what happens this year and next year I know like this is the limit yeah I can't I mean uh the videos but ever 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 uh actually using that kind of heart to help a lot of people it's awesome to see man I appreciate it more importantly before we go yeah are we gonna play Dune tonight it's important I'm gonna play dude I have to I have you don't want one hour you don't want to play board games with me I wanna I'll play I'll play four games if if only I wasn't an idiot and actually flew to the right airport yeah I do more games with me they're gonna dislike the video thanks for listening to this conversation with Mr Beast to support this podcast please check out our
Key Themes, Chapters & Summary
Key Themes
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Pursuing Viral Content and 1 Billion Views
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Subscriber Growth and Content Quality
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Insights from Twitter Polls on Human Nature
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Digital Legacy and Posthumous Videos
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Risk Management in Video Production
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Strategy Across Multiple Social Media Platforms
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The Business of YouTube and Content Monetization
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Philosophical Reflections on Life and Death
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Trends and Innovations in Digital Media
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Ethical Considerations in Content Creation
Chapters
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Introduction to MrBeast and Content Creation
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The Quest for 1 Billion Video Views
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Focus on Subscriber Growth and Engagement
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Human Nature and Moral Dilemmas
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Contemplating Mortality and Digital Afterlife
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Crafting Safe and Adventurous Videos
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Navigating Different Social Media Platforms
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Monetization and Business of YouTube
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Life, Death, and Philosophical Musings
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Future Trends in Digital Content
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Ethics and Responsibility in Online Media
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Conclusion: Reflecting on Digital Creativity and Impact
Summary
The transcript of MrBeast's conversation with Lex Fridman offers a detailed and insightful view into the world of YouTube content creation, strategy, and the dynamics of social media platforms. MrBeast, a prominent figure in digital content creation, delves into various aspects of his work, providing a comprehensive overview of his approach to generating viral content.
MrBeast, known for his innovative and highly popular YouTube videos, discusses the prospects of achieving 1 billion views on a single video. He emphasizes the significance of creating content that consistently resonates with audiences over time, rather than focusing solely on short-term metrics. This long-term view is underscored by his belief in the evergreen nature of quality content on platforms like YouTube, where algorithms prioritize viewer preferences.
The conversation also touches on the concept of subscriber growth and audience engagement. MrBeast highlights the importance of concentrating on producing excellent videos as the primary driver for increasing subscribers and views, rather than getting fixated on vanity metrics. He shares his perspective on the sustainability of his content creation journey, indicating his lack of intention to cease creating content despite already having a substantial subscriber base.
A notable segment of the discussion revolves around a Twitter poll MrBeast conducted, which intriguingly revealed insights into human nature. The poll, presenting a moral dilemma involving monetary gain at the cost of a random person's life, surprisingly showed a significant number of participants willing to accept the offer. This outcome led to reflections on the darker aspects of human nature and societal fascination with extreme or morally ambiguous scenarios.
MrBeast further explores themes of mortality and digital legacy, discussing videos he has scheduled for release posthumously. These videos, intended to be viewed if he were to pass away, represent a unique form of digital immortality and an intriguing way to maintain a presence in the digital world even after one's physical demise. This discussion extends into the realm of social media, considering the impact of a person's final posts or videos on their legacy and how they are remembered.
In terms of content strategy, MrBeast provides insights into his approach to video creation, emphasizing the significance of risk-taking and thorough preparation to ensure safety and success. He shares the meticulous process involved in his productions, from extensive planning and consultation with experts to rigorous testing of equipment and scenarios. This level of detail and commitment underscores the complexity and professionalism behind his seemingly spontaneous and adventurous videos.
The interview also delves into MrBeast's thoughts on various social media platforms, including Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. He discusses the distinct characteristics and potential of each platform, reflecting on their algorithms, content styles, and audience engagement. His analysis of these platforms reveals a deep understanding of the digital landscape and the strategic considerations involved in content creation across different media.
Overall, the conversation offers a rich and multifaceted view of MrBeast's career, philosophy, and approach to content creation. It provides valuable insights for aspiring content creators and those interested in the dynamics of digital media, highlighting the importance of originality, audience engagement, and adaptability in the ever-evolving world of social media.