March 7, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:32:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Wow, I've done quite a few. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here, hold up. | ||
| Just talk to me for like a minute. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is so freaky to me. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Yeah, to hear my own voice. | ||
| We need to put this on the video. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| We're recording already. | ||
| Have you ever had a guest freak out about that? | ||
| No, you're the first freak out because of headphones. | ||
| Not headphones, no, it's because I hear my own voice. | ||
| I'm very conscious of that. | ||
| So now I'm like, fuck, my inflection or whatever isn't... | ||
| Sounds fine! | ||
| Okay, no, I know it sounds fine, it's just, fuck, whatever, I'll stock it up. | ||
| You don't have like a button you can press to kill it? | ||
| No. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| So when you play video games, you don't hear yourself, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, I don't either, but yeah, I hear it's different. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Yeah, don't worry about it, dude. | ||
| That's what you sound like. | ||
| Now you know. | ||
| I mean, I've seen videos. | ||
| I knew what I sound like just in real time hearing it. | ||
| It sounds like I'm speaking to myself. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| But you're not. | ||
| You're speaking to me. | ||
| The purpose of it is when you and I talk and we can hear each other's voice at the same sound level, we don't talk over each other. | ||
| Because people tend to talk over each other. | ||
| It's just normal. | ||
| One-on-one conversation? | ||
| Yeah, normal conversation. | ||
| People talk over each other accidentally. | ||
| But when you hear both sounds, both voices at the same sound level, it sounds really clunky in your ears. | ||
| It's imperative when you have three people. | ||
| If you have three people and you don't have headphones on, it'll be a disaster. | ||
| Everyone starts talking over each other. | ||
| And then when you're listening to it, it's like unlistenable. | ||
| It's hard to... | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so we're just rolling right now? | ||
| We're rolling, man. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| First of all, let me just tell you how impressed I am with what you've done. | ||
| I think what you've done is amazing. | ||
| Because your channel and what you've done on YouTube is completely unique. | ||
| It's completely you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Your personality comes through, the way you've crafted these things that people have to do, these tasks and these games and this fun shit you do. | ||
| And it's wildly popular. | ||
| And I didn't know about it until, I guess, about a year ago. | ||
| I told you my 11-year-old is fucking obsessed with your show. | ||
| Obsessed. | ||
| And she told me, and we were in a hotel in Vegas. | ||
| I was there for the UFC, and she was watching YouTube. | ||
| I'm like, what are you watching? | ||
| She's like, oh my god, it's Mr. Beast! | ||
| And she was so into this show, and then I watched it, and I was like, wow, this is actually really entertaining. | ||
| It's fun stuff, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it's been crazy because I've been doing it since I was 11. Really? | ||
| Yeah, so now I'm 23. And so it's just like basically every year it's just gotten crazier and crazier. | ||
| And I used to make a dollar a day back – well, the first few years I wasn't even making money off YouTube. | ||
| But once I started making money, I was making a dollar a day. | ||
| And I saved up for a couple months. | ||
| I bought a microphone, saved up for half a year. | ||
| I got a computer. | ||
| And I've just always reinvested it. | ||
| And so it's like literally just all – I mean, I was like as awkward as they came. | ||
| No money, no nothing. | ||
| And I just basically just obsessed over YouTube every day for a decade. | ||
| Are your first episodes available when you were 11 years old? | ||
| No, because I had a friend when I was 13 that found my channel. | ||
| And so I deleted like all the videos. | ||
| I got really self-conscious. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| But so everything from 13 and up is there. | ||
| And yeah, they're fucking terrible. | ||
| That's still cool. | ||
| So what did you do when you first started? | ||
| Like what was the first idea? | ||
| The very first video, weirdly enough, I played this stupid game and some hacker killed my base when I was 11, and so I uploaded it, and my first video got 20,000 views instantly, because all the people that played the game was like, oh shit, you can hack in this game? | ||
| It's a game called Battle Pirates. | ||
| I guarantee you no one listens. | ||
|
unidentified
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What is it called? | |
| Battle Pirates. | ||
| No one here has ever heard of it. | ||
| Battle Card? | ||
| Battle Pirates. | ||
| Battle Pirates. | ||
| Yeah, it was a really small game, but I uploaded that, and I got 20,000 views, and that was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because then I was hooked from day one. | ||
| Literally, like, most people, it takes hundreds of videos before you get, like, one view, and somehow the very first video I uploaded at 11 got, like, 20,000 views, and then I was just like, oh, I fell in love, and I've been hooked ever since. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it was kind of almost by accident. | ||
| Essentially, yeah. | ||
| It was that. | ||
| Because this was way before YouTube was even a thing. | ||
| Like, you know, no one was really a YouTuber. | ||
| Hardly anyone made money. | ||
| When did YouTube first get... | ||
| When did it launch? | ||
| Like 2006 or whatever. | ||
| YouTube was a thing, but the partner program wasn't really a thing. | ||
| No one was making money. | ||
| It was definitely back before school. | ||
| When I was doing YouTube when I was 14 and 15, now it's cool if you want to be a YouTuber in high school or middle school. | ||
| Back then, no one gave a fuck. | ||
| You're just worried they would try to play your videos in class or make fun of you or stuff like that for it. | ||
| But how did it evolve to what it is now? | ||
| Was it a vision? | ||
| Was it a slow, sort of a gradual increase in numbers? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was about as slow as it gets. | ||
| So when I was a young teenager, I was getting no views, had no money, had no equipment. | ||
| So for the most part, I was just trying to scrounge money so I could buy equipment, because I was using my brother's old laptop. | ||
| And so my first couple hundred videos, I didn't have a microphone. | ||
| Like, imagine just, like, crackly, terrible voice. | ||
| And so once I got monetized, I saved up for a few months. | ||
| Like I told you, I bought a microphone. | ||
| I can just give you a mile-high history. | ||
| And I saved up for, like, six months. | ||
| I mean, I was just doing video game videos, and they were terrible. | ||
| But I saved up. | ||
| I got a real computer. | ||
| So now I can actually record the video game in high quality. | ||
| I have a microphone. | ||
| I'm, like, 15. And I just kept going and going. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out, like, what are some of, like, the hot spots, like... | ||
| Essentially, up until 18, I had been doing YouTube pretty religiously, but I was making no money. | ||
| Kind of the turning point was when I graduated from high school. | ||
| And my whole life, I was like, I want to be making enough money by the time I graduated to do this full time. | ||
| And I wasn't. | ||
| I was still only making a couple hundred bucks a month. | ||
| So, I graduated high school, and my mom was like, either move out or go to a community college. | ||
| And I didn't have enough money to move out, but I really just, I hated school with a passion. | ||
| But she forced me to go to community college, and that was the worst thing ever. | ||
| That made me hate life. | ||
| Borderline suicidal. | ||
| I just can't stand having to just sit there and listen to this dumb stuff and listen to some teacher read out a book. | ||
| So, what I did was I would act like I was going to community college, but I would just work on videos in my car and edit and stuff like that. | ||
| I had straight zeros. | ||
| And so now the clock had started, because once my mom found out, I was screwed. | ||
| Were you aware of that? | ||
| Like, that you're running a risk? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And so I would act like I was going to college that whole time, but I wasn't. | ||
| And I didn't have enough money to move out. | ||
| And that was kind of when I was just like, 15 hours a day, all in. | ||
| I was like, I'm fucked if this doesn't work. | ||
| And I actually, I had some videos pop off. | ||
| I couldn't tell you which ones, but I had a month where I made 20 grand because I just had some videos just do really, really well. | ||
| And then I came home and I was like, yeah, I haven't been going to college and I moved out the next day. | ||
| My mom almost had a heart attack because she doesn't understand YouTube or anything back then. | ||
| And she was like, man, this guy's going to work at McDonald's. | ||
| I wasted all this time. | ||
| I invested 18 years and this is what I get. | ||
| Where were you living? | ||
| What part of the country? | ||
| North Carolina. | ||
| That's where I've lived almost my whole life. | ||
| And so how does she feel now? | ||
| Oh, she's great. | ||
| Is she flabbergasted? | ||
|
unidentified
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She's beyond happy. | |
| Yeah, she loves it. | ||
| Put her in front of her friends. | ||
| She loves talking about it, obviously. | ||
| Oh, I always knew little Jimmy was going to be a success. | ||
| No, she doesn't try to hide it. | ||
| We would fight all the time. | ||
| Even in high school, I never once studied. | ||
| I literally wouldn't even take my books home. | ||
| I legit don't think I studied once all of high school at my house. | ||
| And so we would fight a lot. | ||
| I didn't have the best grades. | ||
| And so I would just make videos, and she didn't understand it, especially because back then it was just a whole different world. | ||
| There wasn't really a thing as a full-time YouTuber and stuff. | ||
| And so it was a lot of arguments, a lot of drama, but it ended up working out. | ||
| She's happy. | ||
| The thing is, it's like nobody saw this coming, right? | ||
| So you can't... | ||
| You can't blame her. | ||
| Especially me. | ||
| In the middle of North Carolina, in a small town, I had horrible acne. | ||
| Especially back then, really awkward. | ||
| People would have bet a million dollars that I wouldn't be a YouTuber. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| But I have hyper-obsession, and I love this. | ||
| Given enough time, anyone can solve it. | ||
| Well, there's a lesson in that for people, really. | ||
| If you do have a hyper-obsession to something, there's a lot of people that think that because they're bad at school or because they're not interested in school that they're destined to be a loser. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| The problem is school is too rigid. | ||
| Like regular public school system, sit down, underpaid teacher, disinterested, not really connected with the work. | ||
| You're not connected with it. | ||
| You just can't wait to go home and do what you like to do. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you get this thought in your head like, oh my God, I'm going to be a loser. | ||
| I mean, that's how I was when I was in high school. | ||
| I thought I was going to be a loser. | ||
| Well, and you take it a step further because I thought, especially if you're like extremely passionate about something at a young age, where most kids are, then you're even, it's more exacerbated that it's like, you know, I didn't talk to anyone. | ||
| I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube as back then just no one cared. | ||
| So it's like, I thought I was just like, just didn't even know how to speak. | ||
| Literally, I just couldn't hold a conversation with a single person because people would just tell me all you talk about is YouTube. | ||
| And I would try to talk about something else, but back then I was so hyper-obsessed that I literally just didn't know how to. | ||
| But what were you obsessed about? | ||
| Were you obsessed about other channels, your channel? | ||
| Everything, from learning how to editing, the pacing of the videos, ideas, what's going viral, what's trending, what's hot. | ||
| Especially back then, I had no idea what worked. | ||
| I had to self-teach myself everything, even frame rate on cameras, coloring of the video, just stuff like that. | ||
| And how did you learn? | ||
| Did you learn from YouTube? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So like YouTube videos and tutorials or something? | ||
| Most of my growth came actually after I graduated high school. | ||
| Basically what I did was I somehow found these other like four lunatics. | ||
| Three of us were college dropouts. | ||
| One was a high school dropout. | ||
| And one, I don't know, he just like quit his job. | ||
| We were all super small YouTubers. | ||
| And we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but just like hyper study. | ||
| Like what makes a good video? | ||
| What makes a good thumbnail? | ||
| What's good pacing? | ||
| How to go viral? | ||
| We would just call it daily masterminds. | ||
| We would just get on Skype every morning, and some days I'd get on Skype at 7 a.m., and I'd be in the call until 10 p.m., and then I'd go to bed, I'd wake up, and I'd do it again. | ||
| We'd do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there's a correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got, or videos that get over 10 million views. | ||
| It's like, how often do they cut the camera angles, or things like that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So you micro-analyzed? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| We were very religious about it, and so that's where most of my knowledge came from, is I just surrounded myself with these lunatics, and just every day, we didn't do anything. | ||
| We had no life. | ||
| But everybody had sort of a similar vision. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So we all had like 10,000, 20,000 subscribers when we met. | ||
| And by the time we stopped talking, we all had millions of subscribers. | ||
| And we all hit a million subscribers within a month. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Because it's like, if you envision a world where you're trying to be great at something, and it's just like you learning and fucking up and learning from your mistakes. | ||
| Also, my mom told me not to curse. | ||
| Sorry, mom. | ||
| If someone could just edit out the swear words and give it to me, so I could give it to my mom to listen to, that would be great. | ||
| But you mess up, you learn from your mistake, you mess up, you learn from your mistake. | ||
| You, in two years, might have learned from 20 mistakes, or if you have four other people who are also messing up, and when they learn from the mistake, they teach you what they learn. | ||
| Hypothetically, you, two years down the road, have learned five times more of the amount of stuff. | ||
| So it just helps you grow exponentially way quicker, if that makes any sense. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| But it's interesting that you thought about it that way in sort of a systematic approach. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This is not dumb luck. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it was like, they say 10,000 hours of mass or something, we probably put in like 40, 50,000 hours. | ||
| We're talking like every day, all day, like literally nothing. | ||
| We had no friends outside of the group. | ||
| That was your life. | ||
| I'm actually rereading that book right now, that Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, that talks about that 10,000 hours principle. | ||
| It totally applies to what you did, 100%. | ||
| I mean, it sounds like you were just all day, every day, which makes sense. | ||
| What do you have now, 90 million subscribers? | ||
| Well, across everything, we're closing in on 200 million subscribers. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| Have you seen our dub channels? | ||
| No. | ||
| Can you pull that up? | ||
| Just search MrBeast in Esteban. | ||
| I'm kind of curious why you don't do this. | ||
| We do our videos in other languages as well. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I can't wait to show you this, because I actually have a really cool story. | ||
| Just go pull to the channel. | ||
| Who does this? | ||
| We do. | ||
| So you hire someone? | ||
| Hit videos? | ||
| Yeah, we have voice actors and everything. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So these are the exact same videos on my main channel, but we pay voice actors to dub over them. | ||
| We translate the text in the video, everything. | ||
| MrBeast in Espanol. | ||
| Yeah, that was actually one of the fastest growing channels last year. | ||
| That's so smart. | ||
| Okay, now click on a video so we can kind of hear it. | ||
|
unidentified
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- - Yeah. - - - And so scroll down so we can see the comments. - It's all in Spanish. | |
| That's dope. | ||
| Yeah, so that's, now just, I won't pull them all up. | ||
| Any other countries? | ||
| Yeah, search Mr. Beast Brazil. | ||
| Oh, so you got a Portuguese translator as well. | ||
| Wow, that's dope. | ||
| Yeah, same thing here. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| What a great idea, man. | ||
| Yeah, and so, because, you know, if you Google it, it's like only whatever. | ||
| Less than 10% of the world speaks English, so 90% of the world can't even enjoy your content. | ||
| And when I realized that, I was like, wait a minute. | ||
| But 90% of the world can't even watch this stuff. | ||
| And so go back to the Spanish one real quick because that's our biggest one. | ||
| And sorry for anyone watching who doesn't have the visuals. | ||
| So set it to most popular. | ||
| We just started doing this like six months ago, and it's crazy how viral some of these videos are going. | ||
| Wow, 51 million. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The problem with me is I don't know if someone's going to translate, if they're going to say exactly what I said. | ||
| Well, you have quality control. | ||
| So we have, like, before a video gets uploaded, we have three different people who basically write the transcript, and then if the words don't line up on all three, then... | ||
| Or, sorry, let me think about the process. | ||
| We have something like that, because I was worried about that as well. | ||
| I think we take the original transcript, and then we have it dubbed, and then after stuff, we have, like, two different people write out, and if it doesn't line up with the original, then there's, like... | ||
| It's a red flag, and we look at it. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, we built some system where I don't have to worry about that. | ||
| And the final point is, in Spanish, the guy who does my dubs is the same guy who dubs Spider-Man. | ||
| We managed to convince him. | ||
| So, a lot of those comments are like, why does he sound like Spider-Man? | ||
| Or is Mr. B. Spider-Man? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, and so what we do is, when we go into these markets, we get celebrities to do my voice. | ||
| So then, like, the local people in the language freak out. | ||
| So, like... | ||
| Japan's coming up, and I can't say who, but we secured a giant voice actor from an anime to do my doves, and whenever we launch in Japan, I know they're going to lose their freaking minds. | ||
| That's a brilliant idea. | ||
| That's so smart. | ||
| So you have how many employees then? | ||
| I mean, across everything. | ||
| Over 100. I don't know. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And what are you, 23? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| I think I just had the blessing of finding what I loved at a young age. | ||
| To get to this level, it takes a decade. | ||
| Most people don't find what they love until they're young 20s, so they'd be where I'm at in their 30s. | ||
| I just lucked out and found it when I was really young. | ||
| It's that, but it's also your vision. | ||
| One of the things that I was really impressed by when I started looking into you after my daughter introduced me is that you invest so much money into the show. | ||
| All the money I make. | ||
| Why do I need money? | ||
| So you don't, like, go crazy? | ||
| You don't have a Ferrari or anything nuts? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think living your life chasing, like, a nicer, nicer car and a bigger and bigger box to live in is kind of, like, a dumb way to go about life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I actually, funny enough, I lived in, like, a super below-average home, and I kind of learned why famous people don't live in below-average homes, because someone broke in, stole everything I owned. | ||
| So I had to get a little nicer house for security reasons, but before I was robbed, I mean, like, my place was... | ||
| A little duplex, $700 a month, you get a roommate's 360 split. | ||
| And just drive a normal car. | ||
| Well, now I drive a Tesla just because of getting off of gas and stuff like that. | ||
| So you don't go crazy at all with cash? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I really try not to. | ||
| I think that's just a bad way to go about life. | ||
| Also, it is a little hypocritical because I run a non-profit. | ||
| Have you seen our Beast Philanthropy channel? | ||
| No. | ||
| Can you pull that up as well? | ||
| We do a lot of stuff for helping people, and so also if I lived in a $10 million mansion while I'm feeding people and trying to help people, in my eyes, it's also a little hypocritical as well. | ||
| So in every area, I feel like it's just better if I just live below my knees. | ||
| You're just very wise for a young man, because a lot of 23-year-olds would be Balling out of their fucking mind right now. | ||
| Zoom out? | ||
| Well, yeah, I also have some stories about that too. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah, because I did have a phase where I did ball out a little bit, and then I realized, yeah, this doesn't make me happy. | ||
| What did you do during the balling out phase? | ||
| I bought an I-8, and I also bought some designer clothes, like some $1,000 shirts and stuff like that. | ||
| Ironically, all of which was stolen when my house was broken into. | ||
| So it was kind of perfect, because I was like, I don't know if I really care about this stuff anymore. | ||
| And then someone just stole all my expensive shit, and I was like, perfect. | ||
| Did you set aside a bunch of fuck you money at least so that you never have to worry about money again? | ||
| I've always reinvested back in the channel. | ||
| Sometimes I run out of money, and I've taken a loan. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've taken a loan? | ||
| Multiple times. | ||
| But you're making astounding amounts of money, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, but hypothetically, if you do a brand deal and a brand owes you half a million dollars, sometimes they don't pay for four months. | ||
| Well, I already spent that half a million dollars when I gave it away in that video. | ||
| So it's like, there's never been a point where I'm negative. | ||
| Technically, money's inbound, but sometimes you just have to wait. | ||
| But I've got to keep going and keep filming. | ||
| Wow, it's very unusual that someone would spend that much money reinvesting in the show. | ||
| Yeah, which ironically is why we made more money last year than any other YouTuber on the platform. | ||
| The thing is, for YouTube, a lot of people are very young. | ||
| There's so much money in this industry, but most people are so young that they just don't even realize the opportunity they have and they don't understand a lot of these things. | ||
| And so I think that's, like, it shouldn't be revolutionary that I reinvest all my money. | ||
| Like, that's something businesses have been doing for centuries, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not that crazy, but I think just, like I was saying, like, people are just so young and they don't understand, like, you know, the opportunity you have here. | ||
| I mean, if you have 50 million people that watch everything you do, you can start a business and you can do anything, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's very valuable. | ||
| Well, the thing is that you're treating this like an established business. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of people that get into YouTube and they have no idea what they're doing and they have no business sense. | ||
| And even though you didn't pay attention in school, you're obviously wise enough to recognize that the right thing to do is to invest. | ||
| That's what makes it unusual. | ||
| Because you give a 23-year-old the kind of money that you're making, most of them are going to just go fucking crazy. | ||
| Think even younger, because I started getting money when I was 19, 20. And so there's so many things I want to say on that, because I agree, and I feel like I have some good advice to add for people in those positions. | ||
| But there's a couple things. | ||
| First off, to be this successful as a YouTuber, you kind of have to understand there's three different pillars that make a Like, get us where we are. | ||
| Like, you have to have the business sense, reinvest, hire, scale up. | ||
| I mean, the things we're doing are huge logistical nightmares. | ||
| Have you ever tried to buy a private island and, you know, and you buy a private island and there's no beach, and so you have to terraform a beach and build a pier and stuff like that? | ||
| Is that what you did? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's so many... | ||
| You guys bought an island? | ||
| Yeah, because we did a video where Last Leave Island keeps it. | ||
| And then so we buy an island and it looks better on the internet. | ||
| And then you go see it and there's no beach. | ||
| Well, fuck. | ||
| Now you've got to import 5,000 pounds of sand and stuff like that. | ||
| So where's the island? | ||
| Somewhere in the Bahamas. | ||
| Someone won it. | ||
| So the person who left- Someone won a fucking island? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're actually about to do something similar again coming up. | ||
| How much does an island cost? | ||
| That one was like 800 grand. | ||
| And then we put like 100 grand into renovating it. | ||
| And then- Wow. | ||
| How big is the island? | ||
| It was huge, like three football fields or something like that. | ||
| It took quite a while to walk to the other side. | ||
| This is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| I bought this entire island. | ||
| You can get an island for $800,000. | ||
| Yeah, in the Bahamas. | ||
| That's kind of a shock. | ||
| How many islands are in the Bahamas? | ||
| I'm going to be honest, I have no idea. | ||
| But that beach you see there, we had to build that beach. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, so that sand wasn't there. | ||
| We had to import it. | ||
| So it was just like rocky coastline? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And we needed a beach to film on, so we basically had to build a South Park. | ||
| And so did you put a house up there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is it just an island? | ||
| The person who won it just sold it. | ||
| Oh, did they really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right away? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, I don't fucking want it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, well. | |
| Then sell it. | ||
| And so these people, how do you find them? | ||
| This one... | ||
| The contestants. | ||
| It's different for every video. | ||
| This one, I'd have to see them all in particular. | ||
| This one's a mix of random people and my boys. | ||
| The hard thing is sometimes I love pulling random people, but... | ||
| If you grab random people, sometimes people just don't know how to act on camera and they freeze up and they're really not good for content. | ||
| In an ideal world, everyone in my videos is just purely random, which is what I'm trying to get towards because I'm trying to get better at filtering out the random people that just freeze up and aren't good on camera. | ||
| That one's a little older, so some of those are people I knew because I knew they'd make good content. | ||
| I would bring someone in a video and they'd win something and they'd just freeze up and they'd do nothing. | ||
| They'd just be like, oh, thanks. | ||
| And then all the comments are like, no one just says, oh, thanks when you win $100,000. | ||
| This is fake. | ||
| MrBeast is fake. | ||
| All this is fake. | ||
| I'm like, no, it's real. | ||
| The fact that he's acting like that shows it's real, but the masses don't understand that. | ||
| So I have to be very strategic on how I pick people or everyone's just like, oh, this is fake. | ||
| They didn't react. | ||
| So how do you pick people? | ||
| Do you have an audition? | ||
| Do you have a conversation with them? | ||
| Do you meet them? | ||
| I literally just hired a casting director, and usually we just get large amounts of people. | ||
| They filter through. | ||
| And we're just looking for people. | ||
| A, do they need it? | ||
| Do they actually need this help? | ||
| Would it benefit their life? | ||
| Obviously, they can't be super rich. | ||
| And then it's literally just like... | ||
| Put a camera in front of them and do they freeze up? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I just can't have people like freezing up because then it just like, I don't know, it's just not content. | ||
| And I can't just pause the show and like explain like, oh, they're not talking right now because they, you know. | ||
| So when they meet you, is it for the first time? | ||
| Yeah, when we film, it's usually for the first time. | ||
| So the casting person sets everything up, and they get these applicants from... | ||
| It really just depends on the video. | ||
| Because some videos, like Squid Game, there's 456 people. | ||
| That one, we dropped a shirt, we grabbed 100 random people that bought the shirt, and then the other 356 we just got from a local college. | ||
| We literally just went there, put out flyers, and the first 356 people that called, we just brought them in. | ||
| You brought them in, but did you vet them? | ||
| No, because there were so many people. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's different videos. | ||
| Did you see that Squid Game video? | ||
| I saw part of it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was wild. | ||
| That was the most expensive thing we've ever done. | ||
| How much did it cost? | ||
| A little over $4 million. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, because we had CG, we recreated all the sets. | ||
| And the thing is, there's not really room for error. | ||
| This shit has to work. | ||
| Engineering. | ||
| The glass bridge, we legit had to build the glass bridge. | ||
| We dropped them and safety and all that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you're doing this, are you bringing in stunt people? | ||
| Like, how are you coordinating all this? | ||
| For? | ||
| For, like, to set up challenges? | ||
| Like, if you're doing something where you drop people off, how do you make sure that they don't die? | ||
| Well, there's foam below it. | ||
| And obviously, it's safe. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| You know, we do these safety tests beyond belief. | ||
| That video, we had over 100 different people working on. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So, like, yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, that... | ||
| I don't even know how many people we had working on that Clashbridge thing. | ||
| That one was very stressful. | ||
| Because it's also like, you know, you spot a trend. | ||
| Squid Game's hot. | ||
| It's not like you have six months to pull it off. | ||
| It's like, fuck, this is hot. | ||
| It's not going to be hot in a couple months. | ||
| If we're doing it, we've got to do it in the next month. | ||
| And so it's like, it was basically like three or four warehouses just filled with these crazy sets. | ||
| And all this stuff has to move concurrently. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's hard without the visuals to even begin to explain it. | ||
| Because the first set we had was literally the size of a football field. | ||
| Go to the very beginning. | ||
| Yeah, that's the Glass Bridge one. | ||
| But yeah, look at this set. | ||
| Those are real walls we built. | ||
| Those things are fucking huge. | ||
| Sorry, Mom, for swearing. | ||
| Sorry, Mom. | ||
| Yeah, oh well. | ||
| You can't even tell the scale of how big that room is in the shot. | ||
| But that's 456 people. | ||
| And look how tiny they are. | ||
| What are you hitting them with? | ||
| So again, this is like the crazy stuff that people don't even realize we have to do. | ||
| So we had to build these squibs on them. | ||
| So when people got out, because in Squid Game, you got shot when you got out. | ||
| We can't shoot people. | ||
| So the next best thing is we put a device on them that when they get out, it just shoots out ink to signify that they got out. | ||
| So everyone had a device strapped to their chest that we had to custom build. | ||
| And we had to build software in an app. | ||
| And then we had like 100 spotters around. | ||
| So if I said red light and they kept moving, the spotter would click the app on their app and basically pop their squib. | ||
| So you developed an app specifically just for this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I wish I had it on me. | ||
| And so you would see all 456 people. | ||
| You'd see their face. | ||
| And then when they got out, the spotter would pop them out. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| There's so much stuff that goes on behind the scenes to make this stuff happen that people don't even realize. | ||
| And that's why no one else does what we do because it's stressful, it's hard, and it's brutal. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And where did you get the doll? | ||
| The doll that spins its head around? | ||
| That one? | ||
| You built that? | ||
| Yeah, some company in Europe, they built it for us. | ||
| It was like 50 grand. | ||
| What do you do with that after you're done with it? | ||
| That's the problem, because none of our videos are the same. | ||
| Usually we give stuff away or we just put it in storage, but I know. | ||
| Where's that doll now? | ||
| I don't want to lie to you. | ||
| I have no earthly idea. | ||
| I'll buy it. | ||
| Oh, you'll buy it? | ||
| Yeah, I want to put that doll in my studio. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that would be dope as fuck, wouldn't it? | ||
| A little doll head? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| That thing would be cool as shit. | ||
| To have that here? | ||
| So now skip to the next scene. | ||
| I mean, because I can run you through it. | ||
| That's why, like, this originally was supposed to cost two million dollars, but as we're going through it, it's like, oh, fuck, now it's two and a half? | ||
| Oh, fuck, it's three? | ||
| And I was like, okay, you can't get any more than three million. | ||
| And next thing you know, like, you actualize the budget afterwards. | ||
| It's like fucking four million dollars. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| And this is, did you have to take all this down once you were done? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you just lease these warehouses? | ||
| No, we own them. | ||
| Oh, you own them. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| Yeah, we have one of the largest studios on the East Coast. | ||
| Oh, so you built warehouses specifically so that you can do all kinds of stuff like this. | ||
| Well, and so you can pause it. | ||
| He can suggest to this. | ||
| That's kind of the problem for me. | ||
| It's like we're reinvesting so much money in the videos and pushing it to the max, but I also need space. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So you can't just work on a video for a week. | ||
| You've got to be working on it months in advance. | ||
| So you've basically got to always be working on, in an ideal world, six to ten videos. | ||
| Well, if one video takes up your entire warehouse, how the fuck do you work on the other five? | ||
| So space is a huge bottleneck, and I'm in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. | ||
| There's not tons of studio space and stuff like that. | ||
| We have like three or four studios that we... | ||
| The newest one is what I call our campus that we built. | ||
| It's a giant $10 million studio. | ||
| And it's kind of like a money game because I want to reinvest to go big on videos, but I also need to build infrastructure, so it's kind of like a balancing act. | ||
| But we built this huge... | ||
| It's 70,000 square feet, or 55,000 of studio space. | ||
| Because also the problem is if you get warehouses, they always have beams, and you can't film if there's beams. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| It was easier just to... | ||
| Renovate this place. | ||
| Sorry, I'm just going on random tangents. | ||
| No, it's good. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And so basically we have this ginormous warehouse, soundproof. | ||
| I can do shit like blow up a car in it because there's like a thousand sprinklers that you'll drown before you burn to death in there or like light a fire or anything, which is good. | ||
| So we can do dumb shit. | ||
| It's like the perfect wonderland. | ||
| But even then, like even though this place is great and it's $10 million, it's still like usually only houses one or two videos. | ||
| So we need to build another one. | ||
| And it's just usually like a money game. | ||
| Now, how much micromanaging do you do? | ||
| Because I'm looking at this and I'm seeing, like, you've got everything. | ||
| You've even got the cookies, like, in the shape of the umbrella. | ||
| So you, like, have to get someone who makes the cookies for you. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| But make sure that you can still cut them out with a needle. | ||
| Bro, that's one of the easiest things, man. | ||
| Yeah, but even that being easy, it's like you've got to make sure everything's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can imagine, like, one screw-up. | ||
| Like, if someone makes bad cookies that you can't cut through right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And they crumble. | ||
| Oh, we do test on test on test on test leading up. | ||
| Dude, this one was crazy, the tug-of-war scene. | ||
| Look at that set! | ||
| Isn't that freaking crazy? | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, so they're over foam, so they just drop down into a giant pile of foam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's incredible, dude. | ||
| That's probably one of the coolest shots I've ever gotten. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is like something that looks like a set from Fear Factor or something. | ||
| I mean, it really looks like a big time... | ||
| Wait, look at this one, too. | ||
| Pause it there. | ||
| Look at that shit. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| No, it's really cool. | ||
| I love what you do. | ||
| I just think it's amazing how much dedication you have to this. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Because no one's telling you to do this. | ||
| This is not like you have Universal Studios behind you and they're like, Mr. Beast, this is what we planned and we have hired these people. | ||
| You're doing all of this yourself. | ||
| Taking all the risks, coming with the ideas, and, you know, every step. | ||
| Now people, it's like, what's it saying? | ||
| It's like you're crazy until you're a genius or whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Not that I think I'm a genius, but it's like basically up until like two years ago, every step of the way, two people are throwing tomatoes and telling you you're stupid for reinvesting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everyone thinks you're off your rocker. | ||
| You've lost your mind. | ||
| And everyone also thinks like the life cycle of YouTubers, like two years. | ||
| And it's like, well, you know, in two years you're going to be irrelevant when it's only two years if you just don't do interesting shit, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think it's two years if you don't continually push yourself. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Innovate. | ||
| Keep adapting. | ||
| If you're innovating, adapting, and doing cool stuff, you can have a career as long as 10 years, in my opinion. | ||
| But that's the same in everything, I think. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| How many television shows are really popular for a while and then they drop off? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because they don't innovate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they get the cookie cutter formula. | ||
| Also, that video too, looking at the view count reminded me, I think Netflix in total has 220 million subscribers, and that video just crossed 220 million views. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, it was a big dub. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously it worked. | ||
| I mean, just incredible. | ||
| Incredible that you were able to pull it all off during the time where Squid Games was really relevant. | ||
| Because, like, if that came out today, I'm sure it'd be really interesting, but people wouldn't be obsessed with it like they were. | ||
| No one would give a fuck. | ||
| Yeah, because when Squid Games first came out, I mean, it was a phenomenon for, like, a couple of months. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you had a small window to act in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you had to design everything and build everything and then... | ||
| And I also want to put out there, I have some amazing people on my team because that video without like, I mean, I have arguably some of the smartest people in the world when it comes to just creating viral content and YouTube and stuff like that. | ||
| Without them, that wouldn't be possible because it's not like I'm over there like designing every little set and I'm, you know, custom building the squibs that were rigging on them and designing the app, you know. | ||
| It's taken a long time, but I would literally, without a doubt in my mind, say we have the smartest people in the world when it comes to making viral content. | ||
| And no one else can do this type of stuff. | ||
| You have to be very nimble. | ||
| You have to really think outside the box. | ||
| And it's like, one day you're trying to figure out how to secure a sub. | ||
| The next you're trying to figure out how to go to Antarctica. | ||
| The next you're building Squid Game in real life. | ||
| The next you're burying me alive for 50 hours. | ||
| You don't find people that specialize in this stuff. | ||
| It's like just people, I don't know, who just have a willing to learn and adapt because it's all different. | ||
| And how do you find these people? | ||
| How do you find these people that you work with? | ||
| I mean, it's been hard. | ||
| A lot of them are just like lunatics that really love doing interesting things because it is fulfilling because it's different. | ||
| It's not like you're going and doing the same cookie cutter stuff every day. | ||
| So a lot of people find that fulfilling. | ||
| And usually it's people with good work ethic that want to learn and then we kind of train them up. | ||
| It's kind of been my best result. | ||
| Because like I said, no one specializes in all that stuff. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Also, people who work in unscripted or like shows like that where it's not like a set. | ||
| People who are not planned typically to do better in our environment, but if you worked on Wheel of Fortune, you would do horrible in our environment. | ||
| You wouldn't even understand. | ||
| We don't tell you what to do. | ||
| We kind of give you a little bit of rain to make decisions, and you've got to pivot. | ||
| We've never built Squid Game in real life before. | ||
| We don't know if it's possible to build a 40-foot wall in this coliseum. | ||
| They might cap you at 35. Well, then now you have to decide, well, does 35 still look good on visual, on the camera, and stuff like that? | ||
| So it's people who are also able to think for themselves a little bit. | ||
| So, I mean, do you guys have, like, weekly meetings where you talk about this stuff? | ||
| I mean, we work in the office every day. | ||
| Are you working every day? | ||
| Well, not every day, but, you know... | ||
| Pretty close to it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if it's closer to a video, you know, it gets crunch time. | ||
| But, like, right now, we're not even really filming that much. | ||
| Because we've just had a lot of videos fall through because of COVID. Is it stressful to have, like, such a big staff? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, my life is very stressful, because we haven't even touched on, like, have you seen our gaming channel, our React channel? | ||
| No, I want to get to all that, but just the way the whole thing is structured is fascinating to me, because obviously you're at the top, and you're the guy who's calling the shots, and it's your channel, but it seems like you've got a whole ecosystem under you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And you're fucking 23 years old. | ||
| I mean, that's wild shit to be managing all that. | ||
| I could step away and those guys could create just the most viral videos ever. | ||
| We have a machine. | ||
| These people are geniuses. | ||
| I mean, I lucked out with quite a few of them. | ||
| They're really intelligent. | ||
| The way you put them together was just finding people that you thought were interesting. | ||
| I mean, how long did it take to develop a hundred employee roster? | ||
| Yeah, well, not all 100 are on the main channel, right? | ||
| Because, like, we have the gaming channel, which probably has, like, 24 people. | ||
| Like, on our gaming channel, we have, like, four or five people that, like, their full-time job is just to build the maps. | ||
| Like, everything we do in Minecraft, we custom build, and we custom code stuff. | ||
| And then we have a dozen people that work on a React channel. | ||
| The main channel, I don't know where we're at, but it's probably, like, half of it. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| They just, like, the people, they just come from everywhere, you know? | ||
| I don't even know how to explain it, because it's, like, I basically just hired one person a month every month for, like, the last five years, essentially. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing. | ||
| So what is a typical day for you? | ||
| When you're trying to figure out what you're going to make a video of next, do you get together with your friends and brainstorm? | ||
| Do you have an idea that you come up with while you're driving your car or something? | ||
| So that's where it gets interesting. | ||
| So the difference between a video on YouTube, and this is where I can go infinitely in depth, the difference between a video with a million views or 10 million views usually isn't that like the 10 million view video, or actually a better example would be a million views and 30 million views. | ||
| The video with 30 million views usually didn't put in 30 times the effort. | ||
| Like, they might have put in two or three times the effort and just had a way better idea. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so, once you kind of understand that, which I understood, like, I kind of started to understand that, like, when I was 19, you realize that, like, the idea is so freaking important. | ||
| Like, you could, theoretically, most YouTubers watching this, you could pull triple the views with half the work if you just had better ideas. | ||
| Like, no joke, it's that extreme. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so once you realize how important an idea is, you just obsess over, well, how do I get more ideas? | ||
| How do I get better ideas? | ||
| So I used to just spend an hour every day brainstorming ideas. | ||
| I don't anymore, but probably like four years, every day I'd just spend an hour, and I'd just do something different. | ||
| One day I'd use a random word generator, like, I don't know, just say a random word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dog. | |
| You know, I adopted 100 dogs. | ||
| I gave my friend 50 dogs. | ||
| Or I gave a dog a million dollars worth of dog treats. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So I take in random words. | ||
| I see what pops in my head. | ||
| I write those down. | ||
| And I take in another random word. | ||
| And I've studied it very intensely. | ||
| I've tried lucid dreaming to see if I could trick myself to come up with ideas while I'm sleeping and stuff like that. | ||
| I work really well when I... Intake inspiration and I see what pops in my head. | ||
| That's like the most effective way for me to come up with ideas. | ||
| So it's like I just try different ways of intaking inspiration, whether it be like traveling, random words, flipping through a dictionary, things like that. | ||
| And that's always, for me, been the way to like consistently come up with good ideas. | ||
| So you actively seek these ideas out and you try to come up with different ways to just have them manifest. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then once you do, then you sit down with the crew and you go, okay, how do we make this? | ||
| And then how does that work? | ||
| It's a long time. | ||
| But then we can't start working on the video until we know what it is. | ||
| I have a guy named Tyler who I've known for years. | ||
| I went to high school with. | ||
| He's just phenomenal. | ||
| And so then we have to write the video and actually figure it out. | ||
| So if I want to bury myself alive for 50 hours, what does that look It's like, what are we doing in there? | ||
| Because until you know everything you're doing, you can't start working on it. | ||
| And then you come up with it, and then we have our people who basically make it happen. | ||
| But then the problem is it's like, oh, well, you wanted a giant ball in a coffin. | ||
| But they're like, oh, well, you can't get a giant ball. | ||
| And so then it's like just months of back and forth. | ||
| And this is where most people fall apart and why this wouldn't work in traditional media. | ||
| Because it's like you don't write a script and then just hand it to them, especially because it's non-scripted. | ||
| You know, so you can't just say like, here's what we need and they just do it and then it magically happens. | ||
| Because like, once they start working on it, there's like all these things like, oh, well, this is impossible. | ||
| This is impossible. | ||
| So it's like a back and forth for months. | ||
| And then it's like, usually it's like, well, since this didn't work, that means this doesn't work in the hypothetical thing. | ||
| Like, you know, you can't light a firework in the coffin or whatever. | ||
| Or, like, you can't light a fire. | ||
| If, like, one of the bits was me to cook food, well, because of the ventilation, you can't light a fire in there. | ||
| So then it's like you got to change it. | ||
| So it's like a lot of back and forth like that over the course of months and then you get a final product, which is why you need intelligent people working on it so they can, like, do that and they can occasionally make decisions on their own without having to push it all up to me because then I want to kill myself. | ||
| And this has been all just a trial and error sort of thing from the beginning of your first videos to now. | ||
| Do you ever stop and look at when you've got a video like that that has 224 million views and look at how insane your reach is and go, how the fuck? | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Well, and that's just in English. | ||
| You have the other channels, other languages as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't even know how to put it into words. | ||
| I mean, it is crazy. | ||
| It's like, obviously, it just feels like numbers on the screen. | ||
| But if I tried to visualize 100 million people, it's unfathomable. | ||
| Now, you're in an unusual situation, too, because YouTube is, you know, it's a weird place, because it's got these, you have like partnership deals, right? | ||
| So you get a piece of the ad revenue, but you essentially don't have a contract. | ||
| Like, YouTube can just go, you know what, fuck Mr. Beast. | ||
| Let's get rid of them. | ||
| Why would they? | ||
| Of course they shouldn't. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| But you're in this weird – like if they change the way they monetize things for any reason. | ||
| I know that has happened to certain people, right, where they used to have some sort of a deal with YouTube where they were making videos and for whatever reason YouTube demonetized them and they go into full-blown panic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, obviously— You're not controversial in the sense of— Yeah, we're not anywhere near the line. | ||
| And a lot of that isn't YouTube. | ||
| It's like the advertisers putting pressure on them, and they're just trying to— But my point was, have you been approached to be independent of something like that? | ||
| Because you're so big at this point. | ||
| You could have your own servers, your own website, your own deals with advertisers where you get 100% of the revenue rather than— I love YouTube. | ||
| You've got to think about it. | ||
| YouTube comes pre-installed on Android. | ||
| Obviously Google owns YouTube, or Alphabet, but also Google. | ||
| So people go there through Google. | ||
| All roads point to YouTube. | ||
| I love being the biggest creator on YouTube. | ||
| Fuck going and doing my own thing. | ||
| That sounds stupid. | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| I can have one of the largest audiences in the world. | ||
| Instead of thinking about building my own platform, I'd rather think about building businesses, leveraging my audience off of YouTube, like Beast Burger and our snack brand and other stuff like that. | ||
| I feel like that's a better use of time instead of just nuking my audience. | ||
| Well, I don't think it would nuke your audience. | ||
| My point is I think you're so big that you would just transfer anywhere. | ||
| Yeah, but you would take that, but then you don't have like, because we're constantly gaining new people. | ||
| Like last year we gained, on the main channel alone, we're the most subscribed to channel in the world. | ||
| We gained 36 million subscribers on the main channel. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, if I had my own platform, it'd be like one or two million. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And it's still going up. | ||
| Across all the channels, we're getting like seven million subscribers a month. | ||
| That would just plummet if I used my own platform. | ||
| Do you have an ultimate plan for all this? | ||
| I mean, I just love YouTube. | ||
| It's been my life's passion. | ||
| Do you ever meet them? | ||
| People at YouTube? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you ever go there and have a powwow? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I've talked to some people, but it's like, I don't really need anything. | ||
| Bro, they should massage your feet. | ||
| They really should. | ||
| They should sit you down, Jimmy, you're doing so well. | ||
| YouTube, if you're listening, I'll take the foot massage. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they should be doing with you. | ||
| You set up a throne, sit there with a crown on, and then they dunk your feet in the thing, and they do your nails. | ||
| And so I might have a different view than most people, but I didn't have much. | ||
| And it's all 100% of everything. | ||
| I've never worked a job. | ||
| I've never made anything. | ||
| It's all been from YouTube. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I used to make a dollar a day. | ||
| So I love this platform more than anything. | ||
| Listen, I love YouTube, too, with all the problems that they have. | ||
| I think it is absolutely amazing that they've created this thing where someone can make a living and an incredible living just creating content. | ||
| Anyone in the world can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you... | ||
| I don't know how to say this, it doesn't sound arrogant, but if you knew what I know about how to make a good video and go viral, even if you had zero subscribers, you could be making 100 grand a month in half a year. | ||
| Anyone in the world can be a successful YouTuber, and to me, that's the beauty of the platform. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| And it's very unique in that there's a lot of other platforms, but no one ever figured out a way where someone could be fully dedicated to it and make a living off it. | ||
| I guess maybe Twitch. | ||
| And then I guess there's a few other ones where people make money. | ||
| But not at the scale of YouTube. | ||
| No, not even close. | ||
| Not even close to scale. | ||
| You know, that was one of the most difficult things about... | ||
| Going to Spotify was leaving YouTube because I was like, man, our growth on YouTube is pretty crazy. | ||
| I don't know if that's a smart move to just leave. | ||
| And so the compromise was we could still put clips up on YouTube. | ||
| That was really the only way I was willing to do it. | ||
| I wasn't willing to just abandon. | ||
| It was a great idea because that's, like, I don't really use Spotify that much, but I, you know, all the time your clips occasionally pop up on my homepage, on my TV. And so if you, in my world, because, like, there are, like, these different worlds now. | ||
| Like, there are some people that only use TikTok. | ||
| So, like, if you're not on TikTok, you just don't exist in the world. | ||
| That's kind of how I view it. | ||
| In my world, it's pretty big YouTube. | ||
| So, like, if you just were not existing on YouTube, like, you wouldn't exist to me, you know, hypothetically in my world. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, I exist on TikTok, but it's not me. | ||
| Like, someone's just uploading my content on TikTok. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, at a certain point in time, I guess I should step in and do something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should. | |
| On TikTok, but TikTok is such a sketchy fucking application. | ||
| Have you ever seen, like, the breakdown that these software engineers have done of TikTok, of how intrusive it is? | ||
| No. | ||
| They said it's the single most disturbing piece of software they've ever had to back engineer. | ||
| Because the amount of cross-platform spying it does. | ||
| Well, I know if you travel to a different state, even now in Texas, my TikTok fee will be a lot more. | ||
| Texas content is definitely location-based. | ||
| And if you're... | ||
| I have had instances where I would say certain things in conversations and then later that night I would get into my feed something similar. | ||
| Like if I talked about dogs a lot and then I'd weirdly start getting TikToks about dogs. | ||
| I have noticed that type of stuff. | ||
| My friend told me that she was talking to this lady and they were just having a conversation and then she looked at her TikTok and TikTok suggested her. | ||
| Based on that conversation? | ||
| So TikTok knew that her and this lady were next to each other physically because their phones were next to each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So TikTok suggested that she follow that lady. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's spooky. | ||
| And TikTok can be pretty addicting. | ||
| I actually recently uninstalled it just because, even though my TikTok's mostly like gym and like actually finance stuff. | ||
| So it's like, I actually don't, I enjoy the content on it and I don't think it makes me a worse person. | ||
| But I found I was spending like two hours a day on TikTok and I was like, ah. | ||
| Just scrolling through videos? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was like. | ||
| That's a little much. | ||
| So I uninstalled it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a fine line between enjoyment, getting something out of the content, and then just this weird empty obsession. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you're just spending time staring at other people's stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think you can curate the feed, though, where it is beneficial, which is what I tried to do. | ||
| And I had it in a good place where, like, you know, when I opened TikTok, it would motivate me to work out. | ||
| And, like, it would motivate me to go work, so it's good. | ||
| But sometimes it'd take a little long curating. | ||
| Because you can see your time on app. | ||
| Usually, I try not to spend more than an hour and a half a day on social media. | ||
| So when I saw that two hours, I was like, fuck. | ||
| Do you know the difference between the way China does it versus the way America does it? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| China, first of all, between the hours of 10 a.m. | ||
| and 6 p.m., kids are not allowed on it. | ||
| They can't be on it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They won't let them on it. | ||
| Second of all, when you're on it... | ||
| The difference between TikTok in America is like dances and people doing pranks and people doing things to try to get viral reviews. | ||
| In China, it highlights scientific achievements, athletic achievements. | ||
| It highlights people doing things, accomplishing things. | ||
| So it's a lot more curated. | ||
| Yes, much more. | ||
| But curated by the CCP, where they're trying, or whatever, in conjunction with, where they're trying to elevate the quality of the lives of the kids that are addicted to this TikTok. | ||
| So instead of them being addicted to putting piss in the hand soap container, instead of doing something like that, like... | ||
| What they're doing is showing science experiments. | ||
| They're showing innovation. | ||
| They're showing kids accomplishing great athletic goals. | ||
| And it's motivating people to do good things and improve themselves, which is totally possible here. | ||
| But the problem is you would have to have some sort of overview, like some sort of Orwellian restrictions brought down from the governments to make sure that kids only see that kind of thing. | ||
| But here in America, if you did that, people just wouldn't use it. | ||
| They'd be like, oh, well, fine. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| I'm going to Instagram Reels or YouTube. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So do you put stuff on TikTok as well? | ||
| Yeah, we use TikTok. | ||
| So you have like a team that does all that kind of jazz? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I'd say like one or two percent of my time goes to TikTok. | ||
| Like 90 plus percent goes to YouTube. | ||
| At the end of the day, I can hire creative people to help come up with bits. | ||
| I can hire production people to help do the videos and editors. | ||
| The only thing I can't outsource is me actually filming. | ||
| At the end of the day, that's the only thing that I'm the only person that can do. | ||
| So in an ideal world, I spend as much of my time as possible filming and not doing other stuff because we have multiple different channels and stuff like that. | ||
| So peak performance would be me. | ||
| 90% of my work week is just filming shit and nothing else. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when you're in the middle of all this and you have all the stuff going on, whether it's the social media stuff and the filming stuff and the coming up with the new content and new ideas and then managing the fact that you have a hundred fucking people working for- Well, we haven't even gotten into the side companies or the side channels either. | ||
| No, the Beast Burgers and all that jazz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First of all, where's Mr. Beast Burger? | ||
| How many of them do you have? | ||
| So right now we don't have any physical. | ||
| We have 1,600 virtual restaurants. | ||
| Oh, so you order it online and then they deliver it? | ||
| Yeah, so like, let's say you own a mom-and-pop restaurant. | ||
| You literally just sign up, go through the course, you learn how to make all the stuff on a menu, and you just order our ingredients and our packaging, and then you just flick it on on Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and you can start taking orders, and we let you keep a majority of the revenue. | ||
| Basically, it's a win-win for restaurants. | ||
| Especially when COVID first hit, it was huge for a lot of restaurants because I was pushing it really hard back then. | ||
| And some restaurants, you were literally laying off people. | ||
| And then they started serving Beast Burger. | ||
| And some of them doing like 10 grand a week. | ||
| In total revenues, whatever. | ||
| Their cut was lower. | ||
| But it allowed them to not have to lay off part of the workforce or keep their employees and stuff like that. | ||
| And so, yeah. | ||
| And this idea came out of what? | ||
| We were approached by some company, and the more I thought about it, the more I just realized it was just a great idea. | ||
| So we have a partner, basically a guy who's been doing restaurants his whole life. | ||
| So actually, that's how we started, because he owned 300 restaurants. | ||
| So we launched with his 300 restaurants, and that first day, they all sold out. | ||
| They were having to run to local stores to buy ingredients to keep up with orders. | ||
| The Uber Eats delivery lines were out the door. | ||
| It was pretty bad. | ||
| So we had to quickly expand up, and we've just been adding 50 restaurants a week ever since. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Yeah, and so now we're about to start doing our first physical restaurants as well, and that should be fun. | ||
| Your mom must be so baffled. | ||
| A kid she thought wasn't doing jack shit at school, now he's creating virtual restaurants. | ||
| It's incredible, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually insane. | ||
| So we've been doing it for probably like 15 months now, and we're about to cross $100 million in top-line revenue across the restaurants. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that's one side business. | ||
| What other side businesses do you have? | ||
| So we just launched our snack brand. | ||
| Our first thing is a chocolate bar. | ||
| It's just basically like only four ingredients. | ||
| Just a slightly healthier version of a chocolate bar. | ||
| Problem is if you make things too healthy, which is what I've found with my restaurant, is that I would love to wean people off like super unhealthy stuff. | ||
| But if you, like we did lettuce wrap where you just replace the bun with lettuce, no one orders it. | ||
| If you go like too extreme on the healthy side, just no one cares. | ||
| So it's like I found like the best spot is just to make things like 20% healthier and then people still order it. | ||
| If not, then it's just useless. | ||
| So I wanted to do a snack brand, and I'm experimenting with that. | ||
| So it's just basically slightly better for your chocolate bar. | ||
| Just higher quality ingredients, a little bit less ingredients. | ||
| And what do you put in it? | ||
| Well, you can just pull it up. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Mr. Beast Bar. | ||
| I mean, like I said, it's not crazy healthy, but... | ||
| Yeah, it's got quinoa on it. | ||
| Yuck. | ||
| I love that one. | ||
| I have some out there. | ||
| I'll have you taste test that. | ||
| I'm sure it's good. | ||
| Quinoa mixed with chocolate. | ||
| Bro, they put chocolate on ants, and people eat it. | ||
| I mean, everything with chocolate is good. | ||
| Well, and so our big marketing stunt for this, because everything I do, it's got to have it be a spectacle, is 10 random people are going to get flown down to compete for a chocolate factory in a video. | ||
| So we're still working on building the chocolate factory. | ||
| That's what I was doing yesterday before I flew out here. | ||
| So when you say a chocolate factory, is it going to be a real place that makes chocolate? | ||
| No, it's going to be kind of like the Willy Wonka one where it's like decked out. | ||
| Most people I feel like are just going to take the money instead. | ||
| They can keep the chocolate factory or I'll just give them like half a million dollars. | ||
| 99% of people I feel like would rather just take the money. | ||
| Yeah, because then you'd have to sell the chocolate factory. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because in Willy Wonka it's not like it was a chocolate factory. | ||
| It was like, you know, they had the chocolate river and all that. | ||
| So that's what we're trying to figure out right now. | ||
| We're literally building a chocolate river and I'm trying to figure out how do you keep chocolate flowing and from going bad and being fucking disgusting and shit like that. | ||
| So you said you're trying to make your chocolate bars healthier. | ||
| Do you use, like, stevia for sweeteners, or is it just all sugar? | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| I mean, honestly, I'm still educating myself in this stuff, so I'd rather not go in-depth, because you could probably run circles around me on this type of stuff. | ||
| Nutrition stuff? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I think just, like, just getting the... | ||
| Here, I mean, just pull it up, and you just roast it here if you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Let's see the ingredients. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| Created by experts. | ||
| Organic ingredients. | ||
| Does it have an ingredients list? | ||
| About? | ||
| In about maybe? | ||
| Yeah, hit about. | ||
| I can also probably just pull it up. | ||
| On the about page. | ||
| There must be something I'm not clicking somewhere. | ||
| Here, if you want to just search for it and then pull it up once you find it. | ||
| So, other than that, are there other businesses you have that are like sidebands? | ||
| Yeah, so the dub channels I showed you, we're building a dub studio in Mexico and we're building dub studios across the world and we're actually doing that for other creators as well. | ||
| So to dub foreign languages onto English videos? | ||
| Yeah, so if you were a YouTuber and you wanted your videos in a bunch of other languages, just come to us. | ||
| We'll start up the channels, we'll translate the thumbnails, translate the content, do it all for you. | ||
| So you have like a whole business set up in Mexico? | ||
| Well, our business is Unilingo. | ||
| We're based... | ||
| Sugar cane, cocoa bean, cocoa powder, sunflower, lecithin. | ||
| So that's all that's in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Total sugar... | ||
| Where's that? | ||
| Okay, total sugar. | ||
| It's whatever. | ||
| Like I said, I wanted to take it extreme, but the problem is if you go too extreme, then no one will order it. | ||
| So that's where I'll admit, it's not the healthiest possible. | ||
| It's a snack, though. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's not supposed to be that healthy. | ||
| It's a fucking chocolate bar. | ||
| But eventually, if we could crack the coat, that's what I'd love. | ||
| Because most of the food we eat is fucking garbage for us. | ||
| And so I wish you could just be like, this is the perfect chocolate bar, and then we just magically get people to actually eat it. | ||
| You said you work out a lot? | ||
| I'm starting to get into it. | ||
| The problem is we just have so much shit going on. | ||
| One week I'm burying myself alive, the next week we're dealing with Squid Game. | ||
| When I'm not filming, it's so fucking easy to work out. | ||
| But it's hard to get a routine going. | ||
| We just went to South Africa and we were going to Antarctica for a couple of days. | ||
| That's a 12-day trip. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But I'm also being a pussy. | ||
| In an ideal world, I should be working out way more consistent than I am. | ||
| Listen, man, just relax on yourself. | ||
| Sounds like you're doing a lot. | ||
| You're getting a lot done. | ||
| I want to be the best. | ||
| Well, you obviously are trying to do that because you're amazingly accomplished at 23 years old. | ||
| It's super impressive. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So when you're going to South Africa, what did you do in South Africa? | ||
| Well, we just flew to South Africa as a stop to Antarctica, but annoyingly, when we were about to get on the plane to go to Antarctica, because we were going to spend 50 hours in Antarctica, we were going to climb a mountain that's never been climbed before in Antarctica, do all this cool shit. | ||
| The group that went before us gave the group in Antarctica COVID, everyone there COVID. So they had to leave. | ||
| And so there's no one there to clear the ice runway for us to land. | ||
| So we went to South Africa and literally just flew back because we couldn't go to Antarctica. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| And there's only a little window where you can go to Antarctica twice a year. | ||
| One's in February. | ||
| And because of that, the window was missed. | ||
| So now we can't go and... | ||
| They don't test the people before they fly to Antarctica? | ||
| I would think that's so isolated. | ||
| They have to test you if you're going to go to the Bahamas. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how it happened. | ||
| But yeah, so now we can't go again until November, which is annoying because we had already been working on that video for over a month. | ||
| We're going to go to this part and play with the penguins. | ||
| We're going to climb this mountain. | ||
| The content was like phenomenal. | ||
| And you're out there. | ||
| We have the team. | ||
| You're in Africa, ready to go there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then it's just like, nope. | ||
| And so it's like, it's also opportunity cost because we could have been filming a video that would have been uploaded, which that's why I haven't uploaded in a month because that fell through. | ||
| And so it's like, not only did that fall apart, but it's like the opportunity cost. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| Now that sounds a little dangerous. | ||
| Like you're climbing a mountain. | ||
| I mean, we have experts there. | ||
| They'll make sure we're safe. | ||
| Right, but you're climbing a mountain in Antarctica. | ||
| I mean, it seems just by nature. | ||
| I mean, the company we were working with does this stuff all the time. | ||
| And they assured us it was safe. | ||
| Have you ever seen that film, 12 Peaks? | ||
| My friend actually recommended it, but I haven't seen it yet. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's really wild. | ||
| But one of the more confusing moments is when you recognize how many people climb Mount Everest. | ||
| And there was one part where there was a window, a small window of good weather. | ||
| And so the queue of people trying to get to the top of Mount Everest was hundreds of people long. | ||
| I saw a picture on Twitter. | ||
| Near the peak, there's like 50 people waiting to go. | ||
| The star of the film, he took that photo. | ||
| That's one of them. | ||
| He took a photo of the people in front of him that were trying to get up to this mountain, the top of Everest. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird one because it's so... | ||
| It used to be this thing where it's like, you know, you would go to this far off land and you would climb this rugged mountain and there was no one out there and it was so hard to do. | ||
| But now, hundreds of people in a day. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I didn't see that one. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's the... | ||
| I mean, even crazier, you got like the free solo guy just climbing without anything. | ||
| Yeah, well, he doesn't do this stuff. | ||
| No, no, but yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but Alex Honnold, he's been on a couple of times. | ||
| He's a fascinating guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He scares the shit out of me. | ||
| I would love to speak to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just talking to him. | |
| My hands start sweating just talking to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just like what he does, because it's like he's up 1,500, 2,000 feet hanging on by his fingertips with a bag of chalk. | ||
| Just hearing you say it is making my hands literally sweat. | ||
| I know, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you watch videos of him do it, and he's just so kind of calm and chill about it, and he's very, in the nicest way, like almost innocent and childlike in the way he talks, like his eyebrows are... | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Fucking Jesus Christ, man! | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| I mean, he's hanging by his fingertips! | ||
| Fuck all that! | ||
| Gosh dang it. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| And you know, the real weird thing is experts are convinced that he's going to die. | ||
| Like, the real experts. | ||
| Like, how many of those images are there of him doing that, man? | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| He's basically hanging by his fingers. | ||
| There ultimately are probably variables occasionally out of his control. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Look at that photo. | ||
| Look at that photo. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus Christ. | |
| I mean, like, bro, if someone was like a billion dollars to do this and climb to the top of the mountain and gave me five years to train, I would say fuck no. | ||
| Fuck no. | ||
| And the thing is, he'll tell you he's not even the best climber in the world. | ||
| Which is really wild. | ||
| There's guys that are better at it than him. | ||
| He just has a knack for doing this and doing it without any ropes and he stays calm. | ||
| You know, he knows how to just find his way up and concentrate entirely on the task at hand. | ||
| And the guy loves... | ||
| Look at that fucking... | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Look at my hands. | ||
| Feel my hands. | ||
| Feel my hands. | ||
| I mean, mine are sweat. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| You don't trust me? | ||
| I don't want the Joe Rogan sweat on me. | ||
| It's good sweat. | ||
| It's very healthy. | ||
| It's got a lot of nutrients. | ||
| But that, I mean, that kind of stuff, you're not going to fuck around with, like, mountain climbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| Don't die, man. | ||
| You're too important. | ||
| You don't have to tell me. | ||
| But the Antarctica thing, when you said you're going to climb a mountain that's never been climbed before, I'm like, yikes. | ||
| So do you run the risk of, as you continue to do these things and you keep pushing the envelope and making more and more exciting content, Do you ever think like, because let me tell you something. | ||
| One of the things that happened with Fear Factor is we did Fear Factor for six years and then we came back and did it for a final season in 2011 and they were pushing it way too far. | ||
| It scared the shit out of me. | ||
| They were going, the stunts were way bigger and that was part of the appeal. | ||
| They were like, Bigger, badder, crazier fear factor. | ||
| And while they were filming it, I was like, man, I am fucking nervous. | ||
| Because these stunts are so much more chaotic. | ||
| The potential for injury is so much greater. | ||
| No one got injured, fortunately, nothing serious. | ||
| I mean, bumps and bruises. | ||
| Nothing serious. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Because it's like, you know, it's a lot of physical contact and stuff, but there was moments, like there was one where they had a guy, different people, there was a helicopter with a bungee cord, and you were attached to the side of this cliff with a tree, and you're trying to unlock yourself, and when you do unlock yourself, the bungee cord pulls you, snaps you out over a canyon, and you're attached to a fucking helicopter dangling over this canyon. | ||
| I'm like, what if something breaks, man? | ||
| It was so nuts. | ||
| This is it right here. | ||
| So these people would unlock this thing, and the moment they unlocked it, and then their partner is climbing on a ladder that's below the helicopter, and the moment they unlock themselves from the tree, the bungee cord yanks them. | ||
| Holy crap! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And while we were doing this, I would come home every day from filming, and I'd be like, We didn't kill anybody today. | ||
| I would just take a big drink of whiskey and just sit down. | ||
| Like, fuck, man. | ||
| So my point is, do you worry that as you continue to innovate and come up with new ideas, that eventually they're going to get a little dangerous? | ||
| No, because, A, whenever we do stuff, we always have experts, obviously. | ||
| So do we. | ||
| Also, I just don't push it that far. | ||
| The thing is, I'm not just known for doing things like that. | ||
| Some of our videos are philanthropic. | ||
| We'll go buy everything in a store and give it away. | ||
| Other videos, a lot of times, I just punish myself. | ||
| I bury myself alive. | ||
| I trap myself in solitary confinement, stuff like that. | ||
| And then we have other challenges, but when we put 50 people in a circle, it's not like the last one to leave gets half a million dollars. | ||
| So you have no interest in pushing the envelope. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There are different ways to push the envelope besides that, even though that's not even really one of the things we do that much. | ||
| So yeah, I can push by giving away more money. | ||
| I can push by torturing myself more. | ||
| I can push by walking a marathon in the world's largest shoes. | ||
| I'm not narrowed into that one vertical. | ||
| The world's largest? | ||
| Is that what you did? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here, pull it up so we can see it. | ||
| They're actually not as big as you would think. | ||
| The problem is they are heavy, and each shoe was five pounds, and so it was brutal. | ||
| And I had, like, these just ginormous blisters halfway through the marathon. | ||
| It was miserable. | ||
| When you say the world's largest shoes, like, what do you mean by large? | ||
| It's so much easier if you just pull them up. | ||
| They're, like, size 40 shoes. | ||
| Oh, oh, like the largest. | ||
| Yeah, like that. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| So, like, go back a little bit so you can see the start. | ||
| So it's just like a normal marathon, yeah. | ||
| And then we just have size 40 shoes. | ||
| These things are freaking heavy. | ||
| The problem is if you go any bigger, then they, it's like you can't walk because they don't, like, bend or whatever. | ||
| Like flippers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like if you were trying to walk with flippers on, like snorkeling flippers. | ||
| I haven't, but that's exactly what they told me. | ||
| So, like, we did, like, size 50, size 100, and, like, 50 and 100, you couldn't move. | ||
| So this was as big as they could go where you could still move. | ||
| And we did the marathon. | ||
| The marathon ended. | ||
| They shut things down. | ||
| And we were still only like, whatever, seven miles in. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Those shoes are fucking hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we basically walked it all. | ||
| How long did it take you guys? | ||
| Oh, I actually don't remember, weirdly enough. | ||
| Maybe like, so halfway through, we actually laid down and just slept. | ||
| So we like set up tents and stuff like that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So like, I guess technically probably like 15, 16 hours, but maybe only like nine or 10 of walking. | ||
| Were the shoes destroyed at the end? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| See the duct tape? | ||
| They're falling apart. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Why were they so destroyed? | ||
| Because those aren't real shoes. | ||
| We had to build them. | ||
| You know, this guy we hired to build these size 40 shoes that he's never built before. | ||
| Who would have thought? | ||
| Halfway through, they start falling apart. | ||
| Also, I took a knife and I started carving out some of mine because I physically couldn't move my calves. | ||
| They were so heavy. | ||
| So I had to carve out the middle to take some weight out because I wasn't going to be able to finish if they didn't get lighter. | ||
| So I carved this two-pound part out. | ||
| So going from five to three pounds made a world of a difference on that shoe. | ||
| Yeah, they say that every one pound on your feet is like 10 pounds on your back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's like a hiking rule. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| So someone had to make these for you. | ||
| These are not like a giant shoes you can buy in a store. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, where'd that idea come from? | ||
| That was years ago. | ||
| God, if I know. | ||
| Just being silly? | ||
| Literally, I've spent so many hours. | ||
| I've probably spent 10,000 hours of my life brainstorming ideas. | ||
| I don't know where any of this stuff comes from anymore. | ||
| I have a sheet with 1,000 ideas on it. | ||
| Probably 200 super ultra-viral video ideas that anyone could do, and they would instantly go viral just sitting on a Google Doc. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just waiting? | ||
| So you have no lack of content? | ||
| No, we have unlimited. | ||
| The bottleneck is more, can we do it? | ||
| Not really, like, do we have our ideas? | ||
| Which is backwards for most people. | ||
| Most people just don't have good ideas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So with the bottleneck, can you do it because is it physically possible? | ||
| Or is it... | ||
| They're just hard. | ||
| Like, that's back when my videos were easier. | ||
| But the videos, obviously, have gotten harder and harder. | ||
| So, like, the Squid Game video, it's just like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not, can we do it? | ||
| Can we do it while also doing other videos? | ||
| What's this, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you can carry a million dollars, you can keep it. | |
| Yeah, we got a million dollars, and we basically told people as much cash as they could carry, they could keep. | ||
| And we just gave them a bag. | ||
| How much does a million dollars weigh? | ||
| What's it in? | ||
| What's the denomination? | ||
| One dollars, obviously, because it looks better. | ||
| Is that a million dollars and one dollars in that room? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Holy shit. | |
| And that was just one part of it. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| So now, this is the, whatever, three-time Will Strongest Man. | ||
| If he can, like, deadlift his car, we let him keep it. | ||
| And it's just like, this is what we call Would You Rather. | ||
| We do, like, a bunch of super interesting bits. | ||
| And so, just skip ahead to where he actually deadlifts it. | ||
| So, if he can deadlift the car, you let him keep the car? | ||
| Yeah, which he could. | ||
| Oh, he deadlifted it easy. | ||
| Yeah, he actually did rest with it. | ||
| That's the size of that fucking gorilla. | ||
| I mean, like, that's... | ||
| Jesus Christ, he's so big. | ||
| He's doing 10 reps in the car! | ||
| That is fucking bananas. | ||
| Oh my God, look at the size of him. | ||
| He keeps skimming through. | ||
| Is there any other? | ||
| So you give him a car. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Barely fits in it. | ||
| Look at this... | ||
| That was the funny part. | ||
| It was easier for him to deadlift the car than sit in it. | ||
| Have you ever seen what Shaq does with his cars? | ||
| He takes out the back seats and he has a seat. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| I've seen custom cars they've made for him where the seat basically sits where the back seat should be because he's so big. | ||
| Have you seen the clip where he holds a water bottle and it looks tiny? | ||
| Yeah, dude, we did a video. | ||
| We showed a video the other day of me and him doing Fear Factor because he was a host on Fear Factor with me one day. | ||
| And it literally looks like a six-year-old standing next to his dad. | ||
| He's a gigantic human being. | ||
| So when you're doing these videos, do you ever have one that you do it and it just doesn't live up to what your expectations were? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Now, I know you're about to ask me, so let me think of some. | ||
| Probably back in the day, one out of every four videos we filmed just never got uploaded because they were just not good. | ||
| Especially when I was 19 and 20, I had no idea. | ||
| I'd come up with an idea, let's climb a building with plungers. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| So that's an example of one that failed. | ||
| But then other times, we spent 24 hours on a deserted island, and I don't know, the content wasn't really there. | ||
| It was kind of hot, and so we were a little miserable, and we weren't really in the funny mood. | ||
| So literally two days later, we just went back out and redid it, and re-spent 24 hours on a deserted island. | ||
| So sometimes, if I don't think the content's good enough, we'll just re-film it and stuff like that. | ||
| And so do you review it with your friends? | ||
| Do you review it personally? | ||
| How do you just make those decisions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Usually it's just me. | |
| So you just sit down and go, this is not up to my standards. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's one thing I've never struggled with. | ||
| If I don't think something's good and the best we can do and a revolutionary audience will love it, I have no problem killing a video, even if we spent a million dollars on it. | ||
| I think that's probably one of the main reasons for your success, other than your obsession and your dedication and discipline, is that you don't have to answer to anybody. | ||
| I don't know how many people could do what you do. | ||
| To get to your position is very unique, and one of the beautiful things about something like YouTube is that you can get there. | ||
| Because other than this, like, if you worked for, you know, if this was a show on NBC or something like that, you would have to run this by so many people. | ||
| I'd kill myself. | ||
| You'd have so many kitchen staff in there trying to put their ingredient in the soup. | ||
| There'd be so many chefs. | ||
| They'd want to standardize things, so it's replicable, and that's how you kill innovation. | ||
| Yeah, and then they would also say, like, what do you think about us doing another show similar to yours, maybe one of your friends hosting, and they would try to do branch-offs, yeah. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get that vibe. | ||
| It's funny you bring it up, because that's the world you came from. | ||
| I get that vibe sometimes when we work with production crews, and I kind of see a little bit of that world, how it's a lot more standardized. | ||
| When you work with production crews, do they come up with ideas? | ||
| You're like, hey, hey, hey. | ||
| It's not what you're here for. | ||
| What am I trying to say? | ||
| They're used to scripted stuff, and we're not scripted. | ||
| They're just like, you don't know. | ||
| Yeah, we're planning on it taking two hours. | ||
| The fucking thing could take 20 hours. | ||
| I don't fucking know whatever this hypothetical scene is. | ||
| The way we do things to them just seems so barbaric, but that's how you get that natural, authentic stuff that's not scripted. | ||
| And if you do work with a production company, then you have to deal with, I guess, unions and time. | ||
| They have a certain amount of time on set. | ||
| It seems like you work until you get it done. | ||
| Yeah, usually. | ||
| Actually, what we do is, and this is probably one of the smartest things we've done, is we have multiple different teams that we're working on building out, so they rotate videos. | ||
| Team A will do, hypothetically, Antarctica, and then Team B isn't on the Antarctica video and they're working on the next video, and then while I'm filming with Team B, Team A is working on their video, so they rotate. | ||
| I'm trying to build out full, fully-fledged production teams, creative teams, editing teams, all super independent. | ||
| So then I can do a video a month and each team is only responsible for one video. | ||
| Which that's plenty of time to get a video done and you have down time in between your videos and stuff like that. | ||
| Instead of most YouTubers, it's just one team and they're trying to have them do it all, which just honestly isn't sustainable. | ||
| Yeah, well, it seems like when you're looking at this business that you've built, it's so large. | ||
| There's no way you could just have one team. | ||
| They'd be dead. | ||
| Well, you'd be surprised. | ||
| That's how everyone else is building theirs. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, people who try to do what we do. | ||
| But, I mean, it's hard enough to build one team. | ||
| So, like, building multiple ones, it's a lot. | ||
| Do you have a lot of guys that are trying to copy the format that you've put together? | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| The thing is... | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't really affect me. | ||
| I don't like to waste energy worrying about that type of stuff. | ||
| At the end of the day, it doesn't hurt me, so go for it. | ||
| It actually probably helps you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because everyone gets compared to MrBeast. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of YouTubers get triggered when other people quote-unquote take their ideas or whatever. | ||
| Do they, though? | ||
| They really do. | ||
| I mean, that's like all the time. | ||
| Someone will do something. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| It's usually people who copy tons of other YouTubers, and they do one thing original, and then some other people take it, and they just throw a hissy fit. | ||
| Well, it's like they probably get attention from throwing the hissy fit, too. | ||
| Whenever we do something, usually thousands or at least hundreds of other people do it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, it's part of it. | ||
| Yeah, but when you do something like the Squid Games thing, there's no way anybody can. | ||
| Yeah, but see, technically, that's not an original idea. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I saw some really bitchy take on your Squid Game thing, copying other people's content, that he's profiting off of copying other people's content. | ||
| And it's from a comedian. | ||
| I was like, shut your mouth. | ||
| You think that's easy, what he's doing? | ||
| This is so crazy. | ||
| Also, the guy who wrote Squid Game said he loved people doing recreation of Squid Game. | ||
| Literally, he did an interview where he was like, I love it, and he encouraged it. | ||
| Well, it's just a haters take. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not even logical. | ||
| The actual creator of the show is like, hey, do this. | ||
| It's like, okay, if you insist. | ||
| Haters are never logical. | ||
| But my point was, when you get to the position where you're at, you must have a lot of haters. | ||
| I don't really pay attention to it. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| That's a great attitude. | ||
| That's what I like to hear. | ||
| It's kind of a waste of time. | ||
| It's 100% a waste of time. | ||
| It's so stupid, but it's so common for people to concentrate on that and make response videos. | ||
| I wouldn't be a fraction of... | ||
| But also, we don't really, to be honest. | ||
| And most people are positive about it. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, we help people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I reinvest everything. | ||
| I don't live in a mansion, and I just try to make the best videos I can. | ||
| And tell me about, you just touched on it earlier, your philanthropy channel. | ||
| How did that get started and what are you trying to do with that? | ||
| Yes, if you want to pull that up. | ||
| So basically, I don't know. | ||
| I enjoy helping people. | ||
| It's fun for me. | ||
| It's kind of like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how to put it into words, but I enjoy doing good. | ||
| Well, you're a good person. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanted to figure out, like, I have this ability to go viral and get views. | ||
| And so I wanted to figure out how to leverage it to, like, basically build a charity on the back. | ||
| So this is Beast Philanthropy, 100% of all the revenue on this channel goes towards our food pantry that we started. | ||
| So we basically started our own non-profit. | ||
| And so I make these videos. | ||
| I do brand deals. | ||
| We sell merch and stuff like that in the ad revenue. | ||
| And we use that money to buy food so we can feed people. | ||
| And you say food pantry, like there's a sign, so that's a physical location? | ||
| Yeah, so we have our own warehouse. | ||
| Can you hover over a different video to see... | ||
| And how does it work? | ||
| Like people could just go there and get food? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| So basically, so this is where I'll have to... | ||
| We... | ||
| We're in North Carolina. | ||
| There's actually not a lot of big cities, a lot of little cities. | ||
| So we actually have like in our city, we have the 14th largest hospital in America, even though we're like a tiny city, because there's a bunch of small communities around. | ||
| It makes sense to have people come from these little communities to a big hospital instead of building a bunch of little ones. | ||
| And so we kind of the same model with our food pantry, where instead of You know, supporting a big city, which most big cities already have food pantries there. | ||
| There's all these little communities that weren't big enough where people would actually give a fuck or help them because it just, you know, doesn't make sense. | ||
| A couple thousand people or whatever. | ||
| So we built a big food pantry in a central location and we're more of a logistics company. | ||
| You know, we'll take like, pick a certain community like Grimesland. | ||
| Every Saturday, we'll load up food. | ||
| We'll go there. | ||
| And then the people in need will do a food drive and basically give them three different boxes of food, a box of dairy products, pantry, and vegetables. | ||
| And then we come back two weeks later and give them food. | ||
| So basically, they can just live off the food we supply them. | ||
| And we do that to a bunch of little communities. | ||
| And we just crossed one year of operation, and we were able to give away over a million meals in our first year. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So in those boxes... | ||
| This one was a special episode. | ||
| Someone gave us 50,000 cookies. | ||
| Go back, though, where the boxes were. | ||
| Back one more. | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| So that's what we give to everyone that comes to the food drive completely for free. | ||
| We never charge the fucking person a dime for food. | ||
| That's enough to survive two weeks. | ||
| And it's good nutritious food. | ||
| We actually invested in, we got a really nice fridge too, which most food pantries don't have, so we can store a lot of cold goods like vegetables and dairy products. | ||
| Also, some of these places, the food pantries went under, and so we come in and we take over for the old food pantries, and people love when we do, because you go from a box of, I don't want a dumpster on them, but average stuff, to now you're getting fucking milk and dairy and yogurt and also all these vegetables. | ||
| They're like, what the fuck? | ||
| This is free? | ||
| It's over $100 worth of food. | ||
| And so, yeah, it's been great. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| So how does this work? | ||
| If someone wants to go to the food pantry to get food, how do You don't go to the food pantry. | ||
| We do distributions where we go to places in low-income places and do distributions. | ||
| And so you would just come to the distribution, and you just sit in your car, pop your trunk, we put food in, and you drive off. | ||
| So you just set up a shop, like a stand on the side of the room, like this unit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| So they're scheduled. | ||
| The communities are notified beforehand. | ||
| Was that line a bunch of people waiting for food? | ||
| Yeah, this was a special one we did for Thanksgiving where we gave away 10,000 turkeys for free. | ||
| That is so awesome, dude. | ||
| Yeah, well, this isn't our normal thing. | ||
| Basically, you go there. | ||
| It'll be in the church parking lot. | ||
| How do these people find out about this? | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| Your first food drive is not as many people, but word spreads as you do them, and you consistently show up at the same time every second week, and people just come and come, and eventually hundreds of families come. | ||
| Look at the line there. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This one, because it was a bigger thing, we actually bought ads and spread it out and stuff like that. | ||
| You got people in turkey outfits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a turkey holocaust right there. | ||
| Look at all those dead turkeys. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Hey, I mean, people ate. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's very cool that you did this. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| And you see these people where you're... | ||
| Oh, you even made a turkey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These people that are waiting in line for these turkeys. | ||
| But this isn't our normal thing. | ||
| So like I said, it's the distributions we do with the other food. | ||
| So essentially, I want to grow this channel really big, get it where it's pulling millions of dollars a month in revenue, and do tons of brand deals and stuff like that, and then just basically use that money to buy food and feed as many people as we can. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| I love it, man. | ||
| I just love that you do that. | ||
| And that turkey thing, when you're out there, how long does that take to get turkeys to that many people? | ||
| I mean, that was like a four or five hour food drive. | ||
| I mean, we're pretty efficient with the lines and getting through it. | ||
| Did you run out of turkeys? | ||
| No, actually, we had 10,000. | ||
| I don't remember the number, but we had a few thousand left over that we then went to other food pantries and we gave to them to give to their communities. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| And do you have someone who organizes that for you? | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Like a philanthropy manager or someone? | ||
| So his name's Darren, which also, shout out to Darren, he's literally the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. | ||
| This guy's a fucking lunatic. | ||
| He won't let me pay him for working on the charity. | ||
| He's like that in love with helping people. | ||
| Yeah, and he puts in like 10 hours a day every day. | ||
| He's a machine. | ||
| You can stop him if you wanted to. | ||
| He loves helping people. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| So he built it out. | ||
| So I met him. | ||
| I kind of stole him from a different nonprofit because I met him and I loved him. | ||
| I was like, fuck yeah, there's not another person in the world I'd rather have run Beast Philanthropy. | ||
| And so now, yeah, it's its own thing. | ||
| You know, we have people that work in the pantry, logistics people and stuff like that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And, like, how does one procure 10,000 turkeys? | ||
| Well, that one, again, this is why the beauty of Beast Fantasy, that was a sponsored video by Gineo, which is a company that sells turkeys, and so we got them to give us 10,000 turkeys plus money to feed people for free in exchange for a shout-out in the video. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| That's brilliant. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so you do all this, you have this food drive, and then, you know, then people know, okay, that this is a regular thing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then it builds up. | ||
| The turkey thing isn't. | ||
| That was a thing to be special. | ||
| But normally, yeah, exactly. | ||
| And the more you do it, the more people come. | ||
| And then we just guesstimate the numbers and average it out and usually bring a little extra just in case more people come this week than others. | ||
| And he just does that routinely. | ||
| And right now we're doing that for like 13 communities. | ||
| And then we're going to build another food pantry and scale that up and just keep scaling up. | ||
| Also, I don't want to just do North Carolina. | ||
| Our next food pantry is going to be in Atlanta and then hopefully get out of America and just keep scaling them up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So you just keep everything you're doing, you just keep expanding and scaling up. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because I'm not trying to make money, so it's easy. | ||
| That's so unusual, though. | ||
| Well, also, that's a charity, so all the money goes back into it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But it's so unusual that someone is so selfless, and then that you have the vision to just, I'm not trying to make money, I'm just trying to grow the company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in that particular one, I'd be fucked if I didn't have Darren. | ||
| He's, like, just a lunatic, and he's literally one of the smartest people I've ever met. | ||
| And the fact that he has such a philanthropic heart, like, the dude could probably make, like, five, ten million dollars a year working in a normal business, but he dedicates his life to charity. | ||
| I don't understand it, but I love him. | ||
| Well, obviously it means something to them. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| And so this charity that you do with the food bank, how many employees are involved in that? | ||
| He would know better, because I'm not in the weeds. | ||
| Because this is what you have to think about strategically. | ||
| The most optimal, like, you know, in a perfect world I could be on the front lines, going to the food drive, getting my food, but the most valuable use of my time is to make videos to generate revenue to buy food, right? | ||
| So I'm more doing high-level things like figuring out what's the next viral stunt for the charity so we can do a brand deal and get a couple hundred grand in and stuff like that. | ||
| I'm not really in the weeds of, like, how are we going to do this food distribution tomorrow or, like, this shipment's late, so blah, blah, this. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Probably somewhere around a dozen right now because we're only at one warehouse. | ||
| And you eventually plan on going worldwide? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Just scaling it up. | ||
| By watching those videos, you're essentially feeding people, literally, because all the revenue goes through it. | ||
| So I think we can get to the point where we're supporting a dozen of these and just keep going bigger and bigger. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| What other, like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is just what I do all day. | ||
| So I just... | ||
| Come up with these ideas. | ||
| No, I didn't come up with it. | ||
| It's just like, I mean, that's something I was passionate about. | ||
| Passionate about YouTube. | ||
| Essentially, but like, that's like a parallel thing, right? | ||
| Like, I've already put in the 100,000 hours and obsessed over YouTube. | ||
| So it's like building a channel that, like, we leverage to grow our charity, like, isn't as crazy. | ||
| Because, like, I already know all this stuff. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, how to go viral and that type of stuff. | ||
| That's so dope, dude. | ||
| I just love the vision that you have for this. | ||
| It's because it's so unusual for a young person to have such a clarity and focus. | ||
| Yeah, well, pull up MrBeast Gaming. | ||
| I want to show you some of the other stuff, too, because it's like the main channel isn't even all we do. | ||
| We've managed to—we have one of the largest gaming channels on YouTube and one of the largest reaction channels on YouTube as well. | ||
| So it's like I actually spend a fuckload of my time every week filming because we have five different channels. | ||
| So this is our gaming channel. | ||
| Just hit videos so you can see them. | ||
| These actually go really viral. | ||
| And so we basically apply what we do in real life to gaming. | ||
| We invited 1,000 v 1,000. | ||
| We invited 1,000 players to fight against another 1,000 players and the winner gets a bunch of money. | ||
| Whatever, right? | ||
| And so these do really well. | ||
| Actually we recreated Squid Game in Minecraft as well. | ||
| And so, you know, usually on Mondays I film for gaming, on Tuesdays I film for Reacts, and then I do World once we're uploading again, Wednesday through Fridays I film on the main channel, and then Saturdays when I do Beast Burger, Feastables, and like all my side businesses I take calls, and then I try not to work on Sunday. | ||
| How much energy do you have to do this? | ||
| Not enough. | ||
| I'm constantly losing my mind. | ||
| But it's all self implied. | ||
| And at any point I could stop. | ||
| So it's like no one's forcing me. | ||
| But it's just like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| If I don't, I get depressed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| This is what I live for. | ||
| I don't know how to put it in words. | ||
| Because of the fact that you've just generated such an immense audience. | ||
| And it's just become... | ||
| Yeah, and so I hit videos here. | ||
| So this is our reaction channel, which also averages over 10 million views a video. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So this is all just, look at that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So this is all just you looking at stuff online. | ||
| Yeah, whatever we think is interesting. | ||
| So like, you know, world's unluckiest people. | ||
| The eight minutes of us just reacted to people super unlucky and stuff like that. | ||
| And that's one of my best friends, Chris. | ||
| It's actually, I don't know how, but it's really funny when you just put us in a room and just let us roast and react to things. | ||
| And you do this one day a week? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so actually this day is also the same day I filmed Philanthropy, if you have a Philanthropy video that week as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot. | ||
| It's a lot and there's no... | ||
| Also, well the thing too is like, so these channels, like this channel specifically doesn't cost a lot of money to run. | ||
| So this is like Mostly just pure profit, which is what I ran into as my main channel because I kept taking the videos bigger and bigger and bigger. | ||
| They did get a point where they weren't really profitable. | ||
| I was losing money every video. | ||
| So I started this other channel so they would make money so I could lose money on my main channel, if that makes sense. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, so the gaming channel... | ||
| So the stuff like the Squid Games, it's so cross-prohibitive. | ||
| Well, that one, because it's getting so many views, might break even. | ||
| But yeah, other videos like buying that private island and giving it away and terraforming it, yeah, fuck no. | ||
| You lose money on that. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of videos. | ||
| We did a video where we sold houses for a dollar. | ||
| Usually it's like I think things are going to cost less than they do, but it ended up costing over a million dollars and it probably only made like 600 grand. | ||
| So that was like a $400,000 L. I take Ls like that all the time, but that's why I have these other things so I can afford to. | ||
| So I don't really care if a main channel video makes money or not. | ||
| It's just like, in general, does everything at least semi-supplement it so I can. | ||
| If that makes any sense. | ||
| It makes a lot of sense. | ||
| So you kind of have a safety net of sort of almost like backup revenue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Essentially, if I didn't have these, the main channel videos, I just wouldn't have been able to keep making them bigger. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would just be sad. | ||
| Then they'd have to be lamer, which is another reason why people don't do what I do because a lot of people just aren't profitable. | ||
| They don't make money. | ||
| Well, I just don't think people would be as obsessed as you are. | ||
| You've got a very unique vision with this stuff. | ||
| When I'm talking to you and I recognize the scale of it all, it's massive. | ||
| That's all I do. | ||
| I understand, but you must have some sort of a social life too, right? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| But it's not a problem. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And I wouldn't trade for anything. | ||
| Well, there's not a lot of human beings that ever get to a position like you're in. | ||
| It's a very rare place. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I mean, the question now is, like, can we keep it going? | ||
| Because, like, last year we were the highest earning YouTube channel in the world and the most subscribed to YouTube channel in the world, which is great. | ||
| And it's like, fuck yeah. | ||
| And then you realize, well, if we're going to do better this year, that's going to be pretty hard. | ||
| Because we got beat number one. | ||
| So just keep going, though. | ||
| Keep grinding. | ||
| Well, it seems like you could do it. | ||
| I mean, if anybody can do it, you could do it. | ||
| Do you have a grand vision? | ||
| I sort of asked you this before, but when you think of your future, do you have an idea in your head of where you would like all this to go to? | ||
| Because it seems like the world's your oyster. | ||
| You could kind of keep going and do whatever you want. | ||
| Do you have a vision that... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do in a way see it a little bit as like Elon's PayPal. | ||
| Like, you know, maybe when I'm 30 and if I'm not doing YouTube anymore, I'd take the money and move on to the next business like Tesla, SpaceX and stuff like that. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I mean, right now I've spent up to this point my entire life hyper obsessing over how to go viral, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, making videos, how to go viral. | ||
| So it's like, that's really it. | ||
| I just want to do this as long as I can. | ||
| And just keep growing it, though. | ||
| The thing is, if it gets to a much larger place, you are at, what is it, 90 what million on your main channel? | ||
| 91 on the main. | ||
| What happens when you hit 300 million? | ||
| It's like everyone in the country subscribes to you. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| I mean, I want to do YouTube for at least another 10 years because I don't think YouTube's going to slow down. | ||
| YouTube's still growing year over year. | ||
| No, I don't think it's slowing down. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, like, why would I not want to be the biggest YouTuber on the platform? | ||
| Like, why do I need to do anything else? | ||
| Like, I just want to keep growing, be at the top, and I think the platform's just going to get bigger with time. | ||
| But as you do more and more of these Squid Games type things, do you see yourself putting more and more time into production and more and more time to bigger it? | ||
| Because it seems like you want to ramp things up. | ||
| With each one, you want to make it grander than the one before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why I need the smartest people in the world around me. | ||
| Because I'm filming so much, I don't have time to be in the weeds. | ||
| Which I already have, like I told you before, some geniuses. | ||
| But I need more. | ||
| If you're out there and you know how to do production, hit me up. | ||
| But yeah, ideally you just build out the team so I'm not the one having to micromanage and do it. | ||
| Where do you think you would be if it wasn't for this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have a problem. | ||
| I'm so obsessed. | ||
| I devote my life to one thing and that's just all I live for. | ||
| That's not a problem, man. | ||
| No, I know, but that's... | ||
| That's an amazing gift. | ||
| True, true, but that's where... | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I mean, I could have devoted... | ||
| That laser-like focus, cocaine-like addiction could have been on painting bowling balls or something fucking dumb. | ||
| So I'm just grateful it was like at a young age it was something like this that has infinite upside and you can just I can just obsess and I can obsess forever you know? | ||
| Before YouTube was there another thing that you concentrated on with that kind of hyper focus? | ||
| I mean, a little bit of baseball. | ||
| I got Crohn's when I was 15, so I played baseball nonstop. | ||
| And then when I got Crohn's, I lost like 50 pounds. | ||
| I'm like, fuck that. | ||
| You got Crohn's? | ||
| Crohn's disease. | ||
| Right, but Crohn's is something that's a genetic disease, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it just manifests itself? | ||
| It started to emerge? | ||
| You're not born with it. | ||
| Are you not? | ||
| Yeah, most people get it when they're around 15 to 20. I mean, I guess you're born with the genetics thing, but I guess the inflammation doesn't occur until that age. | ||
| Go into the bathroom like 10 times a day. | ||
| And so I was a little obsessed with baseball. | ||
| I literally was playing like two or three hours a day. | ||
| There was a period where I actually kind of quit YouTube when I was like 13, 14, so I could just really focus on baseball. | ||
| But then once I got that, which was probably a blessing, I was like, fuck it. | ||
| I don't care anymore. | ||
| And I just went all in on YouTube. | ||
| So this Crohn's, do you have to seriously regulate your diet? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Very regulated diet. | ||
| I run out of energy very easily. | ||
| That doesn't make sense. | ||
| How's that possible? | ||
| You have so much energy. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I'm probably one of the least energetic people you'll ever meet. | ||
| But you do so much. | ||
| How is it possible that you have no energy? | ||
| I don't know, because my immune system attacks itself, so it's very draining. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, yeah, I get very tired easily. | ||
| I take a lot of naps and stuff like that. | ||
| I have a buddy of mine in Ohio that has it, and he can't eat bread. | ||
| Yeah, I can't eat a fuckload of stuff. | ||
| So you can't have one of your own burgers? | ||
| No, actually that's fine. | ||
| It doesn't flare me up. | ||
| Even when I eat burgers, I usually take off the buns and just eat meat. | ||
| I don't really like bread that much anyways. | ||
| But no, that's fine. | ||
| And the chocolate bar actually is good on my stomach too, which is why I'm pretty happy with that as well. | ||
| So what is it that really fucks with you? | ||
| Weirdly enough, corn, for whatever the fucking reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Corn? | |
| Corn, just like, if I want diarrhea tomorrow, just give me some fucking corn. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Corn, anything spicy, anything like overly, overly processed. | ||
| I'm trying to think. | ||
| What exactly is Crohn's? | ||
| What is the immune system doing? | ||
| I'm going to be honest, I've never fully understood it. | ||
| It's something about my intestines where the lining of it, the immune system attacks it, so my intestines are super inflamed, and so if it's not in remission, I basically just can't digest food because it's so inflamed, food just passes through and you just shit it out. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, so it's brutal, which is why when I first got it, I lost 40 pounds in a really quick time span. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's often with ulcerative colitis, too. | |
| A friend of mine has it. | ||
| Ulcerative colitis is a little bit more extreme version of Crohn's, so thankfully I got a little bit of the dulled down version. | ||
| But yeah, like sometimes I'll flare up and then I'm just like, I'm dead. | ||
| I just lay in bed all day and I can't really do anything. | ||
| Is there any medication that you can take that improves it? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm on what's called Remicade, and so every eight weeks they just do an IV with a huge bag, which essentially suppresses my immune system. | ||
| So that's why I get sick very easily, because the answer to my immune system attacking itself is just to fucking nuke my immune system. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So it's a little annoying. | ||
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| I'm stuck with it. | ||
| What can you do? | ||
| It blows my mind that there's no cure. | ||
| You can probably Google it. | ||
| Millions of people in America, I'm pretty sure, have it. | ||
| It's pretty fucked up. | ||
| It's annoying. | ||
| I don't understand why there's not a better way to treat it. | ||
| Are there any sort of dietary remedies that maybe people have tried? | ||
| I'm sure if I just like dropped everything and just spent my life laser focused, I could probably figure out some way to like 780,000. | ||
| 780,000 Americans currently have Crohn's. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And another 900,000 have ulcerative colitis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Honestly, I haven't really thought of it. | ||
| It's just one of those things like I'm so used to it. | ||
| It's just life. | ||
| But it seems like you're such a smart guy that dedicates yourself to things and find solutions. | ||
| Maybe this is something you could do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe after YouTube, I throw my life at that. | ||
| Take the money. | ||
| Have you tried an elimination diet? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So I don't know why I'm drawing a blank. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of things that aggravate it. | ||
| It's like chips, cookies, or things like that. | ||
| Chips that have corn. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So you have probably an allergy maybe even to corn. | ||
| Yeah, so like I've done it. | ||
| I know what to eat now where it's not like my diet isn't causing it, but for whatever reason, sometimes it just flares up. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Does it say anything, Jamie, about some sort of dietary solution for Crohn's disease? | ||
| I've talked to my friend about this. | ||
| He got around the same age as you. | ||
| His name is also Jimmy. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| He, though, went the other way. | ||
| He has had multiple inches of his colon removed. | ||
| Does he have the bag on his side? | ||
| He did for a while, but he's pretty healthy now. | ||
| That's my worst fear. | ||
| If they remove it, you then have to get the bag, and then you shit in the bag. | ||
| Yeah, I know an older guy who has one of those. | ||
| That's my worst fear. | ||
| That's fucking gross. | ||
| It's gross and it's scary. | ||
| Yeah, but I know people who have gotten it and they're just like, they're like, when they went from being tired and miserable and all that, and then they get that surgery and they feel like a normal human. | ||
| It completely changed their life. | ||
| I mean, they shit in a bag, but at least now they're happy. | ||
| Yeah, it's like six in one, half a dozen in the other. | ||
| Like, what's better? | ||
| I'd rather have shit in a bag and be happy. | ||
| Well, I know. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I think about a lot, because I could just have the part I have removed, and then I'd be fine, too. | ||
| Yeah, but man, what if you did that and then down the road they come up with some sort of a solution? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Because I was wondering if like stem cells or something along those lines. | ||
| I remember, because I've talked to them a long time, I just looked it up. | ||
| I've seen when CBD was getting big, there were some talks that it could help people, but I just checked and there was a study that said there wasn't anything conclusive on that. | ||
| Just the CBD part. | ||
| Yeah, anything that reduces inflammation. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So they don't know what causes it or why a person gets it versus... | ||
| I could speculate, but I don't think he knows. | ||
| No, I mean, not that I know. | ||
| Does exercise help it? | ||
| Does anything help it? | ||
| I mean, your immune system attacks itself is all I know. | ||
| Nothing's ever really... | ||
| It just feels so random. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Because I know people who've had it in time before. | ||
| The literal only answer that they could have was just to get that part of their body cut out, which is just unfathomable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyways, such is life. | ||
| Yeah, my friend's mom died from that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, back in the day when they did just used to cut chunks of your body out and she eventually passed away at a young age. | ||
| As a mom, she was 35. Oof. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| This is their motto. | ||
| No colon still rolling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No colon still rolling. | |
| But anyways, yeah, it's life. | ||
| I mean, I could have cancer. | ||
| There could be much worse stuff. | ||
| Well, you have a great attitude. | ||
| Now, when you look back at all the stuff that you've done and the fact that you've done all this while you're dealing with an autoimmune disease, that's a giant inspiration to other people that are struggling. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, yeah, if you have an autoimmune disease, just fucking push through it. | ||
| That's what I did, and it worked. | ||
| Well, you have a very happy attitude. | ||
| I mean, obviously you've been wildly successful in your young life, but you have a happy attitude towards things, and I think that also is very inspirational to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I wish if I had thought about this, I could probably have some, like, badass quote, but, I mean, the gist is, like, you know, if it's Crohn's, like, sitting there mourning over it, or, you know, all day, like, that doesn't do anything. | ||
| Like, if it's something that you can't, it's out of your control, like, worrying about it's just, it quite literally is a waste of time, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're very into time management, obviously. | ||
| You kind of have to be, because you have so many things on your plate. | ||
| I mean, essentially, yeah, the more I film or work directly correlates to the more money we bring in, so the bigger videos we can do. | ||
| So, yeah, it's essentially just a formula where my time goes optimally for videos. | ||
| Do you have a lot of guys coming to you for advice? | ||
| Like, hey, I want to be like Mr. Beast. | ||
| You know, actually, here, can you pull up my Twitter? | ||
| I have something cool I want to show them. | ||
| I mentor YouTubers a lot. | ||
| You'll probably find this cool. | ||
| One of the people I've been mentoring recently, he was doing $24,000 a month, and then he recently had a $400,000 a month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| On YouTube, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, so I tweeted out the before and after of his revenue. | ||
| And so, yeah, just click on that left image. | ||
| So this was before I started mentoring him. | ||
| He was doing 4.6 million views a month, 24 grand. | ||
| And then probably like seven, eight months into it, we got him up to 45 million views, and he had a $400,000 a month. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And what kind of advice are you giving someone like that that makes such an exponential change in the amount of interactions he had? | ||
| The biggest thing is, it's much easier, as weird as this sounds, it's much easier to get 5 million views on one video than 100,000 views on 50 videos. | ||
| Does that make sense a little bit? | ||
| Like, a lot of people, like, you could upload one great video a year and get more views than if you uploaded 100 mediocre videos. | ||
| It's very exponential. | ||
| Essentially, like... | ||
| Well, now I'm going to dial back. | ||
| To do on YouTube, you just need people to click your videos and watch them. | ||
| That's literally all YouTube wants. | ||
| And so if you get people to click your video 10% more and watch a video 10% longer than mine, you don't get 10% more views. | ||
| You get like four times the views, right? | ||
| So you have to think like an exponential, right? | ||
| Like a 10% better video is four times the views, not 10% more views. | ||
| And so, like, once you understand that and you, like, funnel your energy better, it, like, it makes a big difference. | ||
| So it's usually, like, just, like, don't make your video shit. | ||
| Put in effort. | ||
| You know, like, put in way more effort. | ||
| Like, really hyper-obsessed over these videos. | ||
| Like, triple the amount of time you're putting into that video. | ||
| Because you're not going to get triple the views. | ||
| You're going to get 10x views. | ||
| YouTube's trying to serve people the best content possible. | ||
| They don't want to serve you 100 lane videos, they just want to serve you one good one. | ||
| So it makes sense logically. | ||
| Your homepage is curated the best videos possible. | ||
| And so it's really just making these videos really, really good, helping them build out a little bit of a team, like an editor. | ||
| If you're doing five jobs, then you can only put 20% of your time to each. | ||
| Well, if you hire an editor, he can put 100% of his time into that. | ||
| So even if he's like 20% worse than you, he's still going to do a way better job just because that's where all his time is going and he's able to obsess over it. | ||
| You can't spend 10 hours a day editing, but he can. | ||
| Have you always had this logical, analytical approach to things like this? | ||
| Yeah, I love this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, this is what I live for. | ||
| So it's like kind of going through and doing that for everything. | ||
| And usually, like, in his case, he's uploading less. | ||
| And even though he's making over 10 times more, it's with less videos, ironically. | ||
| And the videos are just better. | ||
| And the fans are happier. | ||
| Everything about it is just better. | ||
| So you mentor this guy. | ||
| Did you know him previously? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I knew him a little bit. | ||
| He's always had great thumbnails, but he wasn't the best at making good videos, which is those are the easiest people to mentor. | ||
| They can get people to click, but they can't get people to stick around. | ||
| So then I've obsessed over how to make good videos. | ||
| So now I just teach them how to make a video good, and then boom, the channel just goes skyrocket. | ||
| But how do you have time to mentor people with all the things on your plate? | ||
| I find it fun. | ||
| For me, it's kind of therapeutic to go on a walk, call someone, and then just roast their channel. | ||
| Is that what you do? | ||
| You roast their channel? | ||
| Not meanly, but it's just like, yeah. | ||
| Just honestly. | ||
| Yeah, I can tell you're a little lazy here. | ||
| You could have put a little bit more effort. | ||
| The hook was a little weak. | ||
| Why didn't you do this or the payoff or whatever? | ||
| And you don't ask anything of them? | ||
| Him? | ||
| No, I don't own any of his channel. | ||
| I just did it for fun. | ||
| That's a wild thing to do, man. | ||
| That's so cool that you're doing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's going to kill it. | ||
| I think he could go on to make... | ||
| Who is this guy? | ||
| The thing is... | ||
| You want to say it? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because some people know who he is, and then they're going to be like, oh, you're really successful because of Mr. V's, which I don't like. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Well, look at you. | ||
| Good for you, man. | ||
| So you just look at that as an exercise. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun. | ||
| I do that for a lot of people. | ||
| It's just, I don't know. | ||
| How many is a lot? | ||
| Probably like six or seven. | ||
| It's always rotating. | ||
| It's also like me playing evil mad scientist. | ||
| I tell them things and I kind of see how the theories work on their channel and confirm what I know and it's like, oh... | ||
| Yeah, it is true. | ||
| His stats went up 10% and his views 5x or things like that. | ||
| So I also get a weird enjoyment of being able to... | ||
| Because it's nice because I don't have to do it. | ||
| I can say, oh, do this, this, and this, and then just hang up. | ||
| I don't have to go film the fucking video. | ||
| And then I just talk to them next week and I can just look at the numbers and be like, okay, this worked, this worked, and kind of see it. | ||
| Which I really enjoy getting to do that. | ||
| That's just so selfless of you. | ||
| Because... | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm getting data and I'm learning and it's helping me better understand what works. | ||
| But yeah, I guess theoretically I could bully these people into giving me half their channel if I wanted to. | ||
| No, no, I'm not saying that. | ||
| I mean, I would never expect that you would do that. | ||
| But the fact that you're willing to spend the time and give them what you've learned, that's really cool. | ||
| I've done podcasts where I've literally laid out exactly how to go viral, every little thing I know, and they're just sitting out there. | ||
| And it's funny because people will listen to them and then just explode on YouTube and make tons of money. | ||
| And it's just kind of funny because it's literally just out there. | ||
| And some people still pay hundreds of dollars for a YouTube course or anything. | ||
| Who teaches YouTube courses? | ||
| There's just ones all over the place. | ||
| Are there really? | ||
| Yeah, millions of people are trying to be YouTubers. | ||
| So the YouTube courses, are they taught by successful YouTubers? | ||
| I mean, you just Google it and we pick them. | ||
| I mean, like, there are tons of YouTube gurus. | ||
| I mean, what I know is Daryl Eves, who he... | ||
| Well, I don't even... | ||
| I don't know how public he is with his stats. | ||
| He's very intelligent. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| So, like, his will be legit. | ||
| But also, I don't want to trash people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There are other ones. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| So, like, you just get a satisfaction out of watching people improve and grow and knowing that you do really have a very comprehensive understanding of how this business works. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And I also, I'm just so fucking obsessed with this shit, I can't stop talking about it. | ||
| In an ideal world, I probably wouldn't tell everyone every fucking thing I know about going viral all the time. | ||
| But it's just like, that's me. | ||
| That's literally all I've ever done. | ||
| It's like, if you did the same thing every day for 10 years, how do you talk about anything else? | ||
| But it's just amazing that it's still an obsession of yours. | ||
| Even though you're number one, even though you just keep being more and more wildly successful, it seems like, if I'm guessing, you're more obsessed now than ever. | ||
| Yeah, if you took it away from me, I don't know what I would do. | ||
| I love YouTube more than anything. | ||
| Technically, you get the unlimited upside money-wise, influence-wise, power-wise, whatever. | ||
| Whatever sick thing you're chasing. | ||
| With YouTube, you can get it all. | ||
| I can't think of a more fulfilling job, and I'm completely in control, and I can do whatever the fuck I want. | ||
| Those are all positives, for sure. | ||
| But it's so unusual for someone to find a thing. | ||
| For a lot of people, people that I know, and even people that are deep into their 30s, they don't know what they want to do. | ||
| They don't have a thing. | ||
| And for whatever reason, they don't connect to a thing that gets their juices flowing, that gets their engine running. | ||
| It's the saddest thing in life. | ||
| It's the saddest thing in life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if you can find a thing that's an obsession that you can make your occupation. | ||
| I don't know who said that once. | ||
| Steve Jobs. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Wasn't it, if you can find what you love, there's no greater thing or something like that? | ||
| Well, it's like you'll never work a day in your life. | ||
| I think it's an older quote than that. | ||
| Search Steve Jobs if you find what you love, just on the background. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That really is one of the keys to a happy existence because I have so many people that I know that don't like what they do. | ||
| So many people that I know. | ||
| And they do it and maybe some of them are really successful at it, but they don't like it. | ||
| Yeah, the way you get that exponential growth is to obsess over things for decades, not years. | ||
| Since they don't truly love what they do, they never get that crazy, crazy success. | ||
| So for you, when you release a thing like the Squid Games video, you just get a wild rush Oh, gosh. | ||
| Yeah, especially that video. | ||
| You're on like fucking cloud nine for usually about a day. | ||
| You're just like punching the air. | ||
| You can't, you know, I can't sleep. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| Just because that was so big. | ||
| A normal video, not as much. | ||
| I'm so numb to it. | ||
| I've done it a thousand times. | ||
| Thousands of times now. | ||
| But you get that video, like, you know, I'm calling everyone. | ||
| I'm like, what'd you think? | ||
| Because that was our first time ever using CG in a video, too. | ||
| So I was just like, did you think this was cringe? | ||
| What'd you think? | ||
| And, you know, most people were stroking me off and telling me it was good. | ||
| So that felt great. | ||
| Yeah, that was good. | ||
| Probably one of the few days where I was genuinely happy. | ||
| Now, are you happy because... | ||
| What makes you more happy? | ||
| Like, numbers? | ||
| The grand scale of things? | ||
| Just seeing your vision come to fruition? | ||
| Kind of all of it. | ||
| Yeah, the vision, seeing people recognize the work we put in. | ||
| Like, because some videos, we put a fuckload of work in, and... | ||
| Well, that one, clearly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So that one, they see. | ||
| But other times, you know, sometimes, I also... | ||
| I have a lot of really critical people around me, which I want. | ||
| I don't want yes-men that just tell me everything's good. | ||
| Like, sometimes, I'll pour my heart and soul in a video, and then I'll get a call right after I upload, and someone just, like... | ||
| One of my friends, it was like a bounty hunter video and I thought it was one of our best videos. | ||
| And he's just like, honestly, I think this video is a little lazy. | ||
| And he's like, here's 10 things you could have done better. | ||
| And I agreed with like four of them. | ||
| But I remember that made my heart sink. | ||
| I was like, fuck this guy. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| And I was like, no. | ||
| No? | ||
| Like, this is what you want. | ||
| You want honest feedback. | ||
| And I was like, this is good. | ||
| You really do want honest feedback. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And when it hurts, it's probably better. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you've got to check yourself and realize, yeah, this makes you better. | ||
| So I have a lot of people like that. | ||
| And Squid Game was one of those videos where, like, none of them were, like, saying negative. | ||
| They were saying positive. | ||
| And that, to me, was what felt the best. | ||
| Because these are, like, the most critical motherfuckers ever. | ||
| And they were just like, this is good. | ||
| And they didn't say anything bad. | ||
| I saw the Bounty Hunter video. | ||
| That was one of the first ones my daughter introduced me to. | ||
| So what about the Bounty Hunter video do you think could have been better? | ||
| Which he said, which I agree, that the beginning felt a little fake when I threw the knife and they were tied up. | ||
| The rope wasn't as visible. | ||
| We were on an island for that. | ||
| I don't know why everything's on fucking islands, but we didn't have the best realistic looking rope, so it looked a little kiddy. | ||
| So I agree with that. | ||
| We could have made it look a little more real. | ||
| And then he had certain parts that were a little stretched out and could have been a little quicker. | ||
| And then also, he was like, this is something I suck at, because with YouTube, you're trying to hook people and keep them engaged, especially when you're in the tens of millions of views. | ||
| But part of the problem of moving so quick is sometimes you don't get as much depth in the person, because depth can be portrayed as boring. | ||
| So it's a constant balancing act of depth, but also keep moving quickly. | ||
| And so he was like, there wasn't much depth with the bounty hunter. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| He was like, I don't even know his name. | ||
| And I agree. | ||
| But it's hard. | ||
| In an ideal world, but again, it's not scripted, but in an ideal world, while he's doing action, because action's interesting, he gives death. | ||
| Like, if you're just driving, and you're telling the life story, that's fucking boring. | ||
| But if you're running after me, and somehow, I don't know if this makes sense, maybe a life story's not the right thing, and you tell it, while action's gone, now it's interesting, and I can kind of include it? | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| It does make sense. | ||
| So you're... | ||
| So that's really interesting, because what you were trying to do is you had an accomplishment. | ||
| You were trying to get the bounty hunter to chase you guys and all that jazz. | ||
| But even post-production or post-publication, you're still looking at ways you could have added more entertainment to it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Hooked people deeper, made it more complete. | ||
| Well, I mean, we're not looking at also how we could. | ||
| That's not scripted. | ||
| That is just a bounty hunter. | ||
| We didn't tell him what to say, so also we're trying to make a story out of him chasing me. | ||
| And those videos are the most fucking stressful videos on the planet, because we're setting that stuff up for forever. | ||
| And at any point, if he catches me, the video's over. | ||
| And everything else past that point was just for nothing. | ||
| How long did it take for him to catch you? | ||
| That one was probably like 10 hours, 11 hours. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like there's no room for error, right? | ||
| You fuck up at any point and he can't because you can't I can't just be super far away. | ||
| Then there's no tension. | ||
| It's a boring video. | ||
| I have to be close. | ||
| There has to be a possibility at all time that he could catch me or it's a boring video. | ||
| And so that means like at any point like the video could fuck up and then we just fucking everything's to shit all that work all that effort is just out the fucking window. | ||
| He catches me. | ||
| I give him 100 grand videos over. | ||
| It's not fake. | ||
| What would you do with that? | ||
| Would you just try again and have another bounty hunter? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| I'd just eat the hundred grand, you know, but like renting all this stuff, I mean, it would probably be like a quarter million dollar L because just everything's so expensive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then we'd probably just do it again next week, yeah, with a different one. | ||
| How do you pick a bounty hunter? | ||
| Just casting person. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's where a lot of them weren't the most entertaining. | ||
| And it's not like they're like hitmen. | ||
| They're like bounty hunters that would like, you know, people who bail on bail and they go bounty hunt and stuff like that. | ||
| I know they went through quite a few to like find one that actually had a little bit of a personality. | ||
| Because, you know, I don't want someone like super hardcore serious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, over the years, you've kind of perfected your method of creating these tasks and these games that you play. | ||
| They're all different, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Like, that video is completely different than the video where we put 50 people in a circle, which is different than where people competed for an island, you know? | ||
| Right, which is why, like, a production company would have a problem with it, because it's not a formula that you could just recreate. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's why I'm still not consistently uploading, you know, because then you have shit like the Antarctica thing happened or this thing happened. | ||
| Like, I just don't know. | ||
| How often do you upload to the main channel? | ||
| Right now, around twice a month. | ||
| Well, actually right now, once, because Antarctica fell through. | ||
| But ideally, we're going to get back up to starting this month twice, and then as we build up the other teams, hopefully by the end of the year, we're doing it every single week. | ||
| That's what I want in an ideal world every week. | ||
| One a week? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Well, actually, in an optimal world, speaking purely analytically, if I'm putting that brain on, I would be uploading twice a week. | ||
| I would upload every Thursday and Saturday. | ||
| That's what would be optimal, which is where I inevitably do want to get to. | ||
| But, I mean... | ||
| Then I'm spending like ungodly amounts of money, ungodly amounts of people. | ||
| I mean that's – I'm going to also be filming probably like 90 percent of my waking hours. | ||
| It would be like crazy – or working hours, which is what I eventually want to ramp up to because like I said, I don't spend most of my time filming. | ||
| I spend most of my time working on videos. | ||
| But in an ideal world, I spend most of my working hours filming because that's the only thing in the world I can do and no one else can't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you anticipate, like, how hard would it be to hand over the reins, the creative reins, to other people which would allow you to film? | ||
| I'm always going to have to have the final say and be pitched. | ||
| But, like, you can always narrow it down where, you know, the pitching takes less and less. | ||
| But I'm always... | ||
| I have a guy named Tyler who fucking crushes it, and I'd say out of anyone in the world, he understands how to write content better than anyone. | ||
| Any YouTuber could hire him, and he would just instantly probably triple their retention. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| He's really good. | ||
| But still, I'm always going to have to hear it before we film it and stuff like that, just to put my little spin on it. | ||
| Now, this Squid Games thing was the first time you used CG. Yeah. | ||
| Do you anticipate using that in the future? | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Because then you could really get crazy as the technology evolves, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, but we can't be cringed with it. | ||
| When I use CG, it's not like I'm trying to hide that it's CG. Right, right. | ||
| Because we're still like, at the end of the day, we are a YouTube channel, and it's my channel, and so I don't want it to make it feel like Hollywood, you know what I mean? | ||
| I see it as a way to enhance that. | ||
| There's never going to be a world where I'm just filming in front of a green screen, but if I have something cool and I just want to extend it, that's kind of where I see CG useful, if that makes any sense. | ||
| Do you upload to Facebook? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What are your thoughts on Meta? | ||
| I'm going to be honest. | ||
| I have no idea about anything. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can probably tell by talking to me. | ||
| I'm like 95% laser focused on YouTube. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So like Facebook is usually just our videos just shortened a little bit because their attention spans are a little bit shorter and we just make them vertical and put them over there. | ||
| I'm just fascinated by where augmented and virtual reality go and where it's going to take us in terms of, you know, most people, it's a big commitment to put the goggles on and to hold the controllers and to stand in a room. | ||
| And the engagement that those like VR, whether it's Oculus or what have you, that they have in comparison to like people playing with their phones, like people going on social media. | ||
| There's no comparison, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the people, but... | ||
| I'm wondering if there's going to be a tipping point. | ||
| Because, you know, I'm from an age where I grew up with no internet. | ||
| I'm like one of the last generations of people that grew up without an internet and didn't get the internet until I was in my 20s. | ||
| And that's when it all emerged in the world. | ||
| And I slowly watched it take over. | ||
| But no one ever would have anticipated that you'd have a device in your pocket that people would be addicted to. | ||
| And many people would be on it eight hours a day just staring at people's butts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get where you're going with this. | ||
| This virtual reality thing, there's a lot of people that are dismissing it and a lot of people think, but when I see Zuckerberg put so much emphasis on this and the fact that he's even changing the name of his company to Meta, and I see these commercials that they're doing with people staring into these art pieces that start dancing and moving, and I'm like, where is this going? | ||
| Do you think about it at all? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I honestly, I think the first step is definitely going to be augmented reality. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| Like the Google Glasses or Apple Glasses and stuff like that. | ||
| And then, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| It's hard to say because you're right. | ||
| Technology advances so much more rapidly. | ||
| I do believe within my lifetime I will be able to put on a full suit and just lay down and play like in virtual reality. | ||
| Maybe when I'm like 60, 70. And like play an actual game, have sensors hooked up, actually feel shit and just, you know, maybe with like Neuralink or some shit and control it with my mind and actually feel like I'm in a different world. | ||
| But it's weird because my gut's like, ah, that shit's like 20, 30 years away. | ||
| But in reality, like in 10 years, the VR is going to be more advanced than we could ever imagine. | ||
| And it's scary. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It's crazy to think about. | ||
| You saw Ready Player One, I'm sure, right? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| That kind of world is not outside the realm of possibility. | ||
| In my lifetime, yeah, 100%. | ||
| I don't think it's going to be that long, man. | ||
| Like you're saying, 10, 15 years. | ||
| Supply chain ramp up and stuff like that. | ||
| It's going to take many, many years. | ||
| 15 doesn't seem crazy. | ||
| Even 10 seems... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But our brains aren't good at thinking about how rapidly technology advances. | ||
| What is the most advanced haptic feedback suit now, Jamie? | ||
| Is there anything that's new on the horizon? | ||
| Because I know they were doing stuff that could... | ||
| Like if you got shot in a game, it could... | ||
| Have you ever done Sandbox? | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's fun, man. | ||
| You go to a warehouse. | ||
| They have one here in Austin. | ||
| And one of them is this thing called Deadwood Mansion. | ||
| So I've done it with my family a bunch of times. | ||
| You go to a warehouse. | ||
| You put the goggles on. | ||
| They give you a haptic feedback vest. | ||
| They give you plastic guns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have done that. | ||
| I did not know that was called Sandbox, though. | ||
| And you fight zombies. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Maybe we went to the same one. | ||
| Yeah, I went to one here two years ago. | ||
| Yeah, there's one in Austin, and then there's one... | ||
| I've been to the one in Woodland Hills, California, too. | ||
| Yeah, and did they have the lines on the ground and stuff, too? | ||
| There's some Call of Duty game they had, as well, where there's walls and stuff, and they're mapped on the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it didn't have lines, but you're just basically in a room. | ||
| And then as soon as they turn it on, that room becomes like this virtual world. | ||
| And all your friends, like you see them in front of you, and they're these avatars now, like they're a pirate or something like this. | ||
| And then you get to do this game on a pirate ship, and you can fight off these skeletons that are trying to kill you. | ||
| or you're in the zombie game and the zombies are running at you and you're blasting with a shotgun and blood splattering everywhere and they get a hold of you, you feel them touch your suit and you see like red in front of your eyes because they're tearing you apart and you're trying to shoot them and reload your gun. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| And it's really fun. | ||
| And my thought is, like, this is Pong. | ||
| It's really fun, it's really exciting, but it's going to come a time where as this technology continues to evolve and they continue to have new innovation, it'll be indistinguishable from a real experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know how far away that is. | ||
| I mean, I don't know either. | ||
| If I dedicated my life, I could probably figure it out, but yeah. | ||
| My thing is, I'm wondering if it's going to come to a point in time where your show is going to exist in a virtual reality world, where someone could not just watch it, but actually be in it and be a part of it. | ||
| Well, I mean, obviously, if virtual reality has mass adoption, of course. | ||
| It's really just when the tech gets here. | ||
| If everyone had a VR headset in their house, you probably would go to concerts in there, too. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How good is the haptic feedback suits now? | ||
| I'm trying to look at what they were showing at CES and see if anybody said, you've got to try this, one of those kinds of things. | ||
| I know they have things that affect your hands. | ||
| It seems like the best thing they showed were maybe some gloves, and they sound very expensive, and I can't tell that, like they said they were turning knobs, so I don't know how good that feels to make it seem like you're actually turning a knob or not. | ||
| And what is the best VR setup now? | ||
| Is it Oculus? | ||
| Is it HTC Vive? | ||
| It depends on what you want to do, honestly, because I've had it for a long time now. | ||
| So there's not, from what I've been looking, a new game that's come out recently that's like, oh my god, check this out. | ||
| I would have showed it to you. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I don't know that there is one. | ||
| Literally all I play with my Rift is just Beat Saber. | ||
| Yeah, that's been around for a while. | ||
| You can actually get a really good workout with that. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's so much fun. | ||
| You're swinging your arms around and another thing that's really great with the Oculus, there's a boxing game that you play. | ||
| So you got this, because the way Oculus is set up, the one we had back at our Woodland Hill studio, it's like just an iPad was controlling it, right? | ||
| So you have the headphones and they're pretty light and then you have these things on and you're in this virtual ring and you're boxing this character. | ||
| And every time he hits you, you see a flash of light in front of your eyes. | ||
| And so you're basically shadowboxing, but you're reacting to a thing, so you're moving, and you get a good cardio workout. | ||
| You can actually get a really solid workout. | ||
| I've never seen this. | ||
| This popped up on the thing. | ||
| I was like, this is a preview of an Iron Man VR game, which if this could get into... | ||
| AAA title game where they're spending a lot of money to make it. | ||
| Any game like this where you move in game but you're not moving in real life gives me severe motion sickness. | ||
| And I feel like it does for a lot of other people I know as well. | ||
| Obviously you're not flying in real life and you're not moving in real life, but you're moving in game. | ||
| That always fucks with me. | ||
| So it makes you want to throw up? | ||
| Yeah, or it just gives me like a giant headache. | ||
| I wonder if there's something they can give you for that, like a Dramamine or one of them little things they put on your wrist, like if you got on a boat, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know you didn't get into Ready Player 2, but that is part of what happens in the fictionalized world where the thing got too real and they've upgraded it. | ||
| If you spend more than 12 hours in it, your brain starts disconnecting and you can die. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| They work that into the physical. | ||
| I'm sure Zuck's taking that into account. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Well, that's probably going to be where they come up with a human-brain interface. | ||
| You know, the human-brain interface question. | ||
| It's like, how much time have you spent looking at what Elon said about Neuralink? | ||
| Outside of your podcast? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| It's very complicated because the first steps about it are really undeniably important because the first steps about it are reconnecting people's spinal cords. | ||
| The first way that it's going to be implemented is people that have severe spinal cord injuries. | ||
| So someone who has an injury like that, they'll be able to do something where this So this implant interfaces with the brain and somehow or another can control the nerves or activate parts of the body. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure how that's done, but it's going to allow people that are paralyzed to walk. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Which is an undeniably amazing thing. | ||
| There's no ethical questions about that. | ||
| The ethical questions arise when you realize that you're going to be putting this quarter-sized hole in someone's head, and then you're going to put wires into their brain, and it's going to change the way human beings interface with information. | ||
| He said it's basically going to increase—this is his words—it's going to increase your bandwidth, your access to information, and you're going to be able to talk without words. | ||
| Yeah, I remember he said that on your podcast as well. | ||
| I mean, fuck. | ||
| If anybody else said that, I'd be like, shut up, bitch. | ||
| But when Elon says it, I was like, shit. | ||
| He probably, I mean, he's not saying that wildly. | ||
| He's probably got a plan, you know, for coming up with something. | ||
| See, now you're making me wish I was more educated in this, because that's so fascinating. | ||
| There's so much cool shit going on, like VR, that, that I just, fuck. | ||
| There's so much cool shit, and my feeling is the way the internet sort of just changed life. | ||
| If you go back to pre-internet versus post-internet, there's a lot of problems that people have with the internet, right? | ||
| There's cyberbullying, there's a lot of people that are disconnected, a lot of kids in particular have a real problem with Social media FOMO and just with people bullying them and them comparing their lives to other people. | ||
| With girls in particular, there's a lot of serious psychological issues that have come with social media. | ||
| But it came out of nowhere, man. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about, like, the real implementation of social media, or mass scale, where it started affecting people's lives. | ||
| Early 2000s. | ||
| And now here we are... | ||
| Maybe, like, 2010. Yeah. | ||
| Really, it was phones. | ||
| So, iPhone 2007, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which took years to ramp up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, maybe even 2010's a little early. | ||
| Because I agree, it's not like we've had a hundred years to study how this shit affects us. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's all very recent. | ||
| And it changed lives so quickly. | ||
| It went from, you know, 1990, almost no one had a phone, a cell phone, to 2020, everyone has a cell phone, to what is it 20 years from now? | ||
| What is it 30 years from now? | ||
| I mean, when does this new technology get implemented and completely change the way human beings communicate with each other? | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I don't think it's going to be that far away, man. | ||
| I think once it gets going, the problem is, and the way Elon was explaining it, you're going to have such a competitive advantage if you have this chip, if you have this Neuralink, if you have this setup. | ||
| You could just get an infinite loan out to get it put in. | ||
| Well, not just that, but the, you know, we've always had this problem where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. | ||
| Like, what happens, you know, from the haves and the have-nots, once the haves have a fucking neural link, and now they have literally, like, an infinity pill that they're taking that gets, what is that movie with Bradley Cooper? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Limitless. | ||
| We got a limitless pill they're taking. | ||
| And then out of nowhere, they have incredible access to information. | ||
| Imagine literally learning everything I know, everything I've spent my whole life studying, just downloading your brain in a second. | ||
| And what if it gives you an energy, too? | ||
| Because you think about what are people taking when they're taking stimulants like Adderall. | ||
| Well, they're taking something that stimulates their brain. | ||
| I mean, it stimulates your central nervous system, but it gives your brain more information, or more energy, rather. | ||
| But if you could do that electronically, where you're not juicing yourself up with amphetamines, but instead you're enhancing all the capabilities of your entire neural network. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Bro, we're gonna be robots. | ||
| We're gonna be cyber people. | ||
| I don't know in our lives. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I think it's going to happen quick. | ||
| The big fear is AI, right? | ||
| What people are worried about is a sentient artificial intelligence that's far superior to ours that realizes that we're not just outdated, but we're kind of dangerous and we ruin the environment and just decides to get rid of us and take over as the new life form. | ||
| You accidentally write something that's like, help us solve climate change. | ||
| And it's like, the solution is just kill the humans. | ||
| Well, Marshall McLuhan wrote about this in the 1960s. | ||
| He said, human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. | ||
| Sex organs of the machine world. | ||
| Elaborate on that? | ||
| Well, we make the machines. | ||
| The machines need us to make them. | ||
| We are how they replicate. | ||
| So once the human being creates a machine that's better than it, why would the machine keep it around? | ||
| If they create an artificial life form that can make better... | ||
| We're incredibly advanced compared to most of the creatures on this planet. | ||
| But compared to what's possible, I mean, godlike powers, infinite powers are possible if you just scale up from what we can do now with nuclear power and video and 5G that you could send to Australia in a second. | ||
| It's wild shit you can do right now. | ||
| Imagine how far that keeps going. | ||
| And where it's going to go? | ||
| Well, if it eventually goes to an artificial creature, an artificial being that someone constructs, and it's not biologically based at all, so it doesn't have any of the pitfalls that we have in terms of our reliance on emotions and fear and our desire to breed and ego and all these different weird things that people have. | ||
| None of those. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero of those things. | ||
| We'll be obsolete. | ||
| I mean, in a hypothetical world, I agree. | ||
| But the hypothetical world is being worked on right now by the smartest fucking people in the world. | ||
| That's why it's sketchy. | ||
| See, and that's why I'd rather just live in my own little bubble. | ||
| Just do my own little thing. | ||
| You figured that out with them. | ||
| You guys handle it. | ||
| Here, just make sure I don't get killed by this AI. I'll be over here. | ||
| I'll make YouTube videos. | ||
| I'll do my thing. | ||
| I'll feed people. | ||
| Listen, I'm not figuring out shit. | ||
| I'm just talking. | ||
| I'm just talking and I get to talk to smart people. | ||
| But the thing that I'm worried is it's going to sneak up on us. | ||
| And I think one of the ways that we avoid artificial intelligence, I mean, if you look at the possible pitfalls, like how does this play out? | ||
| One of the ways we avoid being obsolete is we integrate. | ||
| And that's what I think Neuralink is. | ||
| I mean, I think Neuralink is a no-brainer at some point. | ||
| Or something like that, you know, because right now your rate of learning is just as fast as you can read. | ||
| I mean, it just makes sense to be able to download information if that is possible. | ||
| If that is something that can physically happen, then it's obviously going to happen eventually because it's a no-brainer. | ||
| Yeah, I had Coleman Hughes on the podcast and he disagrees. | ||
| He thinks it's going to be so much more difficult to sort of replicate the human mind because there's so little we know of the human mind. | ||
| But one of the things that I – I don't know if I've said this to him. | ||
| I forgot to say it to him. | ||
| But my position on that has always been we don't have to replicate the human mind. | ||
| We just have to replicate its ability. | ||
| The idea that you have to replicate the human mind, well, you have to understand the human mind and just the neurons and all the cells working together and the human neurochemistry and the neurotransmitters. | ||
| There's so much shit going on in the brain constantly. | ||
| It's an intensely complex process, but They don't have to recreate that. | ||
| Just make a new thing, rather, that does what the brain does, but does it better. | ||
| And we've essentially started doing that with artificial intelligence computers. | ||
| I mean, look what we've done with chess, right? | ||
| It used to be they thought the one thing that shows that human beings are more intelligent than computers is that computers can't beat them at chess. | ||
| Well, now they beat people at chess quick. | ||
| Not only do they beat people at chess, now computers get creative and they come up with their own moves. | ||
| What do you mean, own moves? | ||
| Their own moves. | ||
| They come up with their own openings. | ||
| Like, computers come up with different patterns of playing chess that haven't been established by grandmasters. | ||
| And not just chess. | ||
| It might be actually Go that I'm thinking of, which Go is apparently much more complex than chess. | ||
| I remember that, the AlphaGo documentary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so these computers, here it is, DeepMind's AI is helping to rewrite the rules of chess. | ||
| DeepMind's researchers are letting AlphaZero play with different rules to find out how to improve the game. | ||
| They're creative, at least in the context of the game of chess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, look, that didn't used to be the case 10 years ago, 30 years ago. | ||
| They're getting better at thinking. | ||
| Like, how long? | ||
| Did you see Ex Machina? | ||
| No. | ||
| You didn't? | ||
| No. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| What even is that? | ||
| You never saw that movie? | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I purely grew up on YouTube. | ||
| I haven't seen hardly any. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| It's incredible we can accomplish singular focus. | ||
| I said something to him earlier. | ||
| He's like, is that on YouTube? | ||
| No, it's popular. | ||
| I mean, that's how you get successful at a young age. | ||
| You just obsess and cut everything else out. | ||
| I'm not doubting that. | ||
| But you would love Ex Machina. | ||
| It's a fucking amazing movie. | ||
| It's one of my top ten favorite movies of all time. | ||
| And it's a movie about this guy who's a super genius. | ||
| The guy on the far right has been in Star Wars. | ||
| What's that dude's name, Jamie? | ||
| Oscar Isaac. | ||
| Oscar Isaac. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| And he creates... | ||
| And who's the girl? | ||
| I don't remember her name off the top of my head. | ||
| Well, let's give her some props to find out who it is. | ||
| But anyway, it's an amazing movie. | ||
| It's one of my top ten all-time favorite movies. | ||
| Someone listening to this, text me to watch it. | ||
| That Oscar guy is... | ||
| Alicia Vikander. | ||
| Alicia Vikander. | ||
| Oscar Isaac and then Domhanal Gleesom is the computer coder that this guy hires. | ||
| So Oscar, the Nathan guy, is this super genius who lives in this very remote location and he's been secretly working on an advanced, super complex version of artificial life. | ||
| And he has literal artificial humans in this compound that you realize are not human along the way. | ||
| And one that he has this guy do... | ||
| You know what the Turing test is? | ||
| No. | ||
| The Turing test is a test that was created by this guy... | ||
| Is it Arthur Turing? | ||
| Alan. | ||
| Alan Turing. | ||
| Alan Turing was a guy who devised a test to find out... | ||
| The idea was if you could interact with a computer and not know that it's a computer, then it would pass this test. | ||
| If you could interact with something and it would behave and think and communicate like a human being. | ||
| And so he was kind of brought on, the computer coder, to interact with this woman who was clearly a robot. | ||
| But she was so seductive and beautiful and the way she communicated was so enticing that it was essentially passing the Turing test even though he knew. | ||
| And Alan Turing, which is really crazy, Alan Turing existed, he was born in a barbaric time. | ||
| I believe he lived in the UK and he was gay and he was tried and prosecuted for being gay and they made him take drugs that I think they made him take like a chemical circumcision drug, not circumcision, castration drug, a chemical castration drug that killed his libido and he wound up committing suicide. | ||
| So one of the leading fathers in concepts of artificial intelligence was killed by the stupidity and ignorance of human beings, which is really wild. | ||
| 1952, he's convicted of gross indecency with another man and was forced to undergo so-called organotherapy, chemical castration. | ||
| It's crazy that that wasn't even 100 years ago. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 1952. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide at just 41 years old. | ||
| Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save. | ||
| It's an amazing story. | ||
| And it's so heartbreaking because it shows you the stupidity and the ignorance and the prejudice of human beings destroying a guy who had this vision to understand what possibly can be coming down the line in terms of artificial life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if he was 40 then, I mean, he would have lived to like 2000. He would have seen some wild shit. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I imagine what he would have came up with once computers actually fucking worked. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, who knows how much he would have advanced his ideas and concepts, but... | ||
| Yeah, with all that stuff, I wish I had more value to add, but it's like, honestly, this is like a lot of what you just said, probably like the first time I've ever thought of half that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't really spend too much time thinking about futuristic stuff. | ||
| I'm usually just like- But you work in computers. | ||
| You work on computers. | ||
| Yeah, your shit gets uploaded to computers. | ||
| Yeah, but I work in content, you know, and that's how you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting. | ||
| You're definitely like getting my gears turning. | ||
| I just, I wish I had more value to add. | ||
| Oh, you're great, man. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Ex Machina, though. | ||
| You must see it. | ||
| I'm going to watch it. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
| Do whatever the fuck you want. | ||
| Tell me to fuck myself. | ||
| Seeing how hard you vouched for it, I kind of have to watch it. | ||
| I've watched it like four or five times, at least. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Do you watch films? | ||
| Do you watch any films? | ||
| No. | ||
| When was the last time you saw a movie? | ||
| Well, I watched the Spider-Man No Way Home because I was cultured. | ||
| That just came out on Apple, didn't it? | ||
| Isn't it available now on Apple TV? My 11-year-old that's obsessed with you is also obsessed with Spider-Man. | ||
| Yeah, everyone is at the moment. | ||
| Tom Holland's crushing it. | ||
| But growing up, since YouTube's what I do, I should consume YouTube. | ||
| So if I consumed movies or other stuff, I always kind of saw it as a waste of time unless it was culture, so then it would make sense to watch it. | ||
| It makes sense to watch Spider-Man, so I know what's going on in the world. | ||
| But for the most part, for me, what's optimal is to just watch a bunch of YouTube so that I better understand what's trending and how to make better videos and pacing and stuff like that. | ||
| So you're constant YouTube? | ||
| Yeah, not as much anymore, but when I was growing up, hardcore, I would call it an information diet. | ||
| I would only watch YouTube, so I was constantly just ingesting how to make better videos. | ||
| That was your isolation diet, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you talk about Spider-Man, you can't not talk about the Into the Spider-Verse. | ||
| Have you seen that one, the animated one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No! | ||
| I've really only seen the newest one because it was so huge. | ||
| The best one is Enter the Spider-Verse. | ||
| Don't you think, Jamie? | ||
| Yeah, well, I've honestly... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That one's the shit. | |
| But I haven't seen this one either, and I've heard they could win Oscars and whatnot. | ||
| Which the other one did win an Oscar, but they're talking like this was such a good movie. | ||
| There wasn't a lot of movies that came out there. | ||
| The newest one? | ||
| Yeah, crushed it. | ||
| It was phenomenal. | ||
| And I didn't even watch the old Spider-Man's and I feel like I understood everything. | ||
| Well, I hope it wins an Oscar. | ||
| I think this, from what I even heard, this is almost like a real action version of that animated one. | ||
| Like there's verses that combine and I don't know how visually comparable it was. | ||
| I don't think it's in 3D like the other one was. | ||
| Well, the Enter the Spider-Verse, the fact that it's animated, you could just do so much more with animation because you can get away with stuff. | ||
| It doesn't have to be realistic. | ||
| You don't have to have stunt people or CGI. It's all animated. | ||
| And I feel like animation does a better job of portraying emotion. | ||
| I don't even know how to put it into words, but with movements and stuff like that because it doesn't have to be so realistic. | ||
| Yeah, I'm kind of amazed that they don't have more feature-length animated movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, when is that coming out? | |
| Probably this year, later this year, probably the summer. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It says October 7th. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| But that's probably more an American thing, because anime is exploding here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I am surprised that hasn't seeped over more into just the culture of what we consume here. | ||
| Yeah, it's exploding on YouTube, too. | ||
| I mean, there's so much anime content on YouTube. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| How is that happening? | ||
| Because that's another thing my kid's into. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love anime because the stories are so weird that it inspires me. | ||
| I feel like it's actually a really good way to develop creatively. | ||
| Like Death Note. | ||
| Have you ever heard of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's one of the biggest animes. | ||
| The story's about a book that fell from the sky, and you can write any name in it, and they die. | ||
| I watched that movie. | ||
| Yeah, well, the anime is obviously better. | ||
| The movie's good, though. | ||
| Well, the anime, if you'd like that, you'd like the anime. | ||
| It's 30 times better. | ||
| Anyone who's seen the anime is just shaking in their boots because it's a common thing. | ||
| Everyone hates the fucking movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Go to the movie, Jamie, because the movie is good. | ||
| These anime dorks need to get out of the fucking house. | ||
| I mean, you should try and watch a couple episodes of the anime and see it's like, it's the pacing in the anime, it's one of my favorite shows, is really good. | ||
| And just the, I don't know, I feel like it just moves so much better. | ||
| The movie kind of made me cringe at a few parts. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was silly, but it was... | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It was a little bit more silly, whereas, like, the anime is, like, very serious. | ||
| And it really gets you... | ||
| Because they essentially condensed, what is it, dozens of episodes down to a two-hour movie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what's his name? | ||
| William... | ||
| The fuck's his name is the voice of it. | ||
| The voice of the demon. | ||
| Willem Dafoe, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, he's in it. | ||
| He's the voice of the demon. | ||
| He's the guy that shows up when the dude starts putting names in the book and has people killed. | ||
| The dude meets him in a laboratory. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| It's a cool looking demon. | ||
| Does it show it? | ||
| Or did you skip ahead? | ||
| No, they'll show it. | ||
| They'll show it a little bit. | ||
| But I thought it was fun. | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| But the point is, the show is just something so different that you don't find here, right? | ||
| At least when I grew up and I was watching a little bit of TV, it felt like it was just all crime scene shows and different variations. | ||
| Or game shows. | ||
| It's all the same tried and true shit. | ||
| That's what I love about anime. | ||
| You get stuff like that, you'll never Ever, ever find anything like that over here. | ||
| For me, that extra creativity is so much more entertaining. | ||
| It is weird though. | ||
| I wonder what is it about Japanese culture where they tapped into that. | ||
| It's obviously very exciting to kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or to people of all ages, to be honest. | ||
| I mean, I don't know mass data, but just even the people I see, like everyone recently, even like a lot of YouTubers talking about to their audience, like, anime's exploding. | ||
| It's very graphic, too, man. | ||
| My kid, we were on vacation, and I always give her a hard time. | ||
| I was like, which one you watching now? | ||
| And she's like, this one's called Demon Slayer. | ||
| And she tries to explain to me, like, did you watch Demon Slayer? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I'm still working on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| Super graphic! | ||
| I watched it, I was like, Jesus! | ||
| They really kill people. | ||
| It's a wild, bloody mess. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean, that's what I love about anime, is that for a lot of them, they don't hold back. | ||
| I prefer that. | ||
| But I guess for you, in your stance as a father, it's a little different. | ||
| Well, I don't want to protect her from fake violence. | ||
| It's weird to me that she likes it. | ||
| When you have children, one of the weird things is what disturbs them and what doesn't, and why? | ||
| What freaks them out and what doesn't freak them out? | ||
| And what freaks her out, or used to freak her out, is realistic depictions of horror. | ||
| I feel like, honestly, I'm the same way. | ||
| You're saying that's not normal? | ||
| No, no, I think it is. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| But anime, because it's not realistic, because it's clearly a cartoon, seems to be... | ||
| It's like, who killed Kenny? | ||
| Like, you bastard. | ||
| Like, when South Park, when Kenny would die every... | ||
| Do you know fucking Kenny in South Park? | ||
| I mean, I've heard the name Kenny. | ||
| I've never watched South Park. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| James. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| Are we in an alternative universe? | ||
| What planet are you on? | ||
| You're talking to a YouTube baby. | ||
| What? | ||
| I saw South Park as a waste of time. | ||
| He is younger than South Park, I do believe. | ||
| Well, South Park's current. | ||
| I know, but I mean, just the... | ||
| It's still amazing right now. | ||
| So you've never seen the South Park movie? | ||
| I've never watched South Park. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| You've never seen when Saddam Hussein... | ||
| But you're a comedian, so I feel like that's more relevant in your world. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| I mean, before I was a comedian, I loved comedy. | ||
| You don't love, like... | ||
| Did you ever see Team America World Police? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| What? | ||
| You know, and you're not... | ||
| But basically, this is partly why I didn't have any friends growing up. | ||
| I'm serious. | ||
| You just YouTubed out. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's the problem. | ||
| Like, legit what you're experiencing, that's how I felt every day about every little thing throughout my teenage life. | ||
| And that's why, like, I felt like I was a fucking freak because I was like, I just... | ||
| Listen, man, I get it. | ||
| No, but now I'm confident. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| I find it funny. | ||
| But that's what's interesting, because when I was at a younger age, I didn't. | ||
| It confused me, and I felt like a weirdo. | ||
| And I say that for people who are hyper-obsessed listening, because there are people listening to this who are probably a little bit younger, that are hyper-obsessed over certain things and probably feel like that. | ||
| I just surround myself with YouTubers and people that care about YouTube, so I don't have that problem. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But you just got to find those people that have those same Whatever, obsessions. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No, listen, it's obviously paid off in a huge way for you. | ||
| I'm not in any way criticizing you. | ||
| No, I don't think you're criticizing. | ||
| I just think it's so unusual. | ||
| I just like bringing that up for people to hear, because I'm serious. | ||
| That was one of the things I just couldn't figure out growing up. | ||
| I just couldn't find anyone I related to. | ||
| I was miserable. | ||
| So fucking miserable. | ||
| But it paid off. | ||
| It did, and that's why I like saying that. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| It's like, and this is the thing that gets covered in Outliers and gets covered in when a lot of people try to study hyperachievers. | ||
| Like, what is it about these people that makes them so successful? | ||
| And with you, it's clearly this singular dedication to content creation. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| To the point where you don't even fucking watch South Park. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| You give up everything, even if it means you don't fit in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is what you have to do. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like it's a sacrifice for you. | ||
| That's the beauty of it. | ||
| The beauty of your story is that there's obviously discipline and obviously you work hard, but it's love. | ||
| It's a passion. | ||
| You're clearly obsessed with this. | ||
| Still, all these years in, top of the food chain, you're still guns blazing and constantly trying to add more to what you're doing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's pretty dope, dude. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| Genuinely just grateful that I found what I loved. | ||
| It's not like a broken record, but I mean... | ||
| That's the type of shit they should teach in school. | ||
| You should have classes helping you find what you love. | ||
| Because once you find what you love, you don't have to tell someone to study. | ||
| You don't have to force someone to do it. | ||
| They just do it because it's built in you. | ||
| It's part of who you are. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| But the problem is, like we were talking about earlier, that you have these... | ||
| They're underpaid teachers who are not really engaged with what they're teaching. | ||
| They're just kind of spitting it out in this large class. | ||
| They're not connecting to students. | ||
| But even then, what we're talking about here isn't even just supported in the curriculum. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| See, that's where I'd have to do research. | ||
| I don't know if everyone's like us, and if they found what they love, they'd go all in or figure it out. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like that's something that's just super, just in general in American culture, just that, helping people find their passion. | ||
| Because I feel like that's just what holds so many people back. | ||
| They're just doing shit they don't. | ||
| Love. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| But the question is, is there enough passion projects out there for everybody to do what you do or to do what I do? | ||
| Just to chase what they enjoy? | ||
| Because I did YouTube for no pay for years, and I did it making hardly anything. | ||
| I did this podcast for no money for years. | ||
| This podcast cost me money for the first five or six years that I was doing it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so even if I was making minimum wage doing YouTube, I'd still be way happier than if I was making like three or four times minimum wage doing something else. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so you also kind of have to factor that in. | ||
| Whereas if you do what you love, you don't necessarily need as much. | ||
| I think with a lot of people the problem is external pressures like obviously your mom wanted you to go to college and you know my parents didn't want me to do a lot of the things that I did but luckily for both of us we didn't listen and I think that's the thing it's like yeah but how do you transfer that to a child how do you tell a young kid coming up you've got to learn how to be stubborn and you got to learn how to know when you're right And you've got to learn how to chase down the things that actually excite you. | ||
| I mean, the flip side, we took some big risks. | ||
| I know, you know, I have a friend who actually, I support, similar thing, all in, $50,000 in debt, channel didn't take off, whatever. | ||
| And so he quit. | ||
| Ruined his life. | ||
| So it's not all sunshine and rainbows. | ||
| Not everyone's going to end up like us. | ||
| And so I pay him like 10 grand a month. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| He's not homeless anymore. | ||
| So it's like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know where the line is where we're not giving people advice that could potentially fuck him over. | ||
| Because obviously, even though you might be less happy, you have a higher chance of not being homeless by being a sheep and doing that stuff. | ||
| There's a thing like that with comedians too, right? | ||
| Because I have friends that I thought were really funny. | ||
| And, you know, going back a decade ago, like I remember hanging out with them at the Comedy Store going, 10 years from now, this person's gonna be killing it. | ||
| 10 years from now, they're no better off than they were then. | ||
| And I don't know why. | ||
| And I don't know what it is. | ||
| And they can be funny. | ||
| I've seen them have really good jokes on stage. | ||
| Pretty good stage presence. | ||
| But for whatever it is, they've never been able to get that real traction and then just build on it with the most... | ||
| Like, one of the things that I see with you is you have massive momentum And all this inertia that's going towards getting things done, and you keep building on it. | ||
| You keep adding to the machine. | ||
| Like, ah! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Some people don't do that for whatever reason. | ||
| And I don't know if that's a teachable thing. | ||
| Well, I mean, there's more to it. | ||
| It's like my first brand deal. | ||
| Everyone in the world is like, God, just... | ||
| You know, set the money aside. | ||
| Put this in an IRA. Do this thing. | ||
| And I'm like, no, I'm just going to go spend it on a video. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| People always want you to set aside money or de-risk things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like everything kind of points to you doing what's opposite of what's optimal. | ||
| You know what's optimal for growing a business is hella risky. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But also, there's no real precedent. | ||
| I mean, there is you now. | ||
| But in the world of this content creator on YouTube, it's not like there's decades of history that people could study. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's one of the hardest things. | ||
| If you're trying to become a great basketball player, Get a fucking mentor. | ||
| There's plenty of people who have spent their lives, like, you know, NBA players or college players at a high level. | ||
| Get a mentor. | ||
| Anything you're doing, if there's someone who, if you can get a mentor, get it. | ||
| It's like fucking cheat codes. | ||
| It's like that guy I took from 20 grand to 400 grand a month. | ||
| Like, that would take him like a decade on his own. | ||
| And I was just like, here you go. | ||
| Just do this. | ||
| You know, once a week for eight months. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| Yeah, for what I did, no one has done it. | ||
| And so I never, there's never any point where I could have a mentor that could help me. | ||
| And I don't even know what you were saying that inspired this, but it is something that's like a pet peeve of mine. | ||
| Like, bro, a mentor is a fucking cheat code. | ||
| If you're in an industry where you can get one, get one. | ||
| A lot of people enjoy, if they're really passionate about what they do, they enjoy talking about it. | ||
| They'll mentor you for free just because it's what they love. | ||
| But what's fascinating about a guy like you is you didn't have a mentor, and you became one. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, you figured the system out. | ||
| And my point would be, like, if I knew what I knew now, like, three years ago, I mean, I'd be on half a billion subscribers or whatever. | ||
| Like, my growth would have been so much more extreme. | ||
| It's like, knowledge is just so OP. And, like, that's, like, I don't know, just one of my things that I just really want to drill in your fucking heads is, like, if you're in an industry where there are other experts, like, just have them teach you what they just spent the The last 20 years studying. | ||
| You go on your own 20-year journey. | ||
| Just learn from them. | ||
| Then start your journey. | ||
| You can learn so much from people that have already accomplished things. | ||
| You can. | ||
| But at some point in time, you also have to learn how to be yourself. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Yeah, you leverage it. | ||
| You filter out the stuff you want to keep or whatever. | ||
| But it's like, I don't know. | ||
| There's nothing more valuable in life, in my opinion, at least entrepreneurial-wise, than having someone like that. | ||
| No, it's massive. | ||
| And it also creates a community. | ||
| Because, like, clearly, you've done an amazing service for these people that you helped, and they'll probably play it forward. | ||
| And if they pay it forward, and then they do it for other people, like, I do that with comics. | ||
| And I see other comics do the same thing, where they help other stand-ups, and mentor them, and take them on the road, and give them gigs, and give them advice, and you see it growing. | ||
| And there's, like, a community that comes out of that that's also very valuable. | ||
| Yeah, and fun. | ||
| Like, new friends, whatever. | ||
| Fun, friends, good times. | ||
| Like, that's one of the cool things about your videos. | ||
| It's like, it's not just you having fun. | ||
| You have this whole gang of friends, and everyone's laughing and having a great time, and you look down, it's like 50 million views. | ||
| Like, holy shit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Which is on purpose. | ||
| And that environment, that feel is so hard to get because, you know, most people want to, again, with these big projects, you want to script it because scripting gets budget down, gets filmed. | ||
| You can take a 50-hour shoot and reduce it to five minutes. | ||
| Sorry, not five, five hours if you script it. | ||
| You can also reduce your budget costs by like 60% if you script shit. | ||
| And so that's why you don't see a lot of stuff like what we do because no one wants to do it authentic and just like let shit happen and, you know, things can go wrong or take way longer. | ||
| They just want to script it and give you, you know, the boys lines and shit like that. | ||
| But part of the things going wrong in your videos is what makes it fun. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| And that's why I do it the way I do it, which is, now it's more normal, but when I was growing, especially as I'm, like, bringing people from LA, like, hey, can you help me? | ||
| Or other people try to help make this stuff happen. | ||
| It's, like, so unorthodox. | ||
| And, like, everyone, every person has an idea of how you can, like, make things more efficient. | ||
| And it always points back to, like, some form of scripting, and it's like, no! | ||
| Fuck no! | ||
| Go away! | ||
| Yeah, that's, I mean, look, you've got a formula. | ||
| And it's not even a formula, it's just authenticity. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, Chris, one of the guys in the videos, he was my first subscriber. | ||
| He's been my friend. | ||
| It's not like I went to LA and hired some actor. | ||
| He just literally, he's been day one. | ||
| And then the other guy, Carl, he was my editor, that Chris literally just became friends with. | ||
| And Chris was like, I don't want to film unless Carl's around. | ||
| I was like, well, fuck. | ||
| All right, call your part of the team. | ||
| And Chandler, the other guy, was my janitor. | ||
| And we had him in a video because someone backed out or something, so we were like, fuck it, you're here, just go in. | ||
| And then he said one line, it was a challenge where they couldn't leave a circle, or last to leave a circle wins 10 grand. | ||
| And he asked at one point, he was like, can I throw my poop at the other contestants to get him out? | ||
| I was like, no. | ||
| But people thought that was the funniest thing ever, that he would think about throwing his poop. | ||
| And everyone's like, we want the poop guy back. | ||
| And so my janitor ended up just, you know, and then he also became really good friends with Chris as well in that video. | ||
| And so now my janitor is one of our people. | ||
| And so it's like, we're all just friends. | ||
| And it's not like we're hand-selecting actors from LA or New York. | ||
| It's literally just like, you know, just random guys from North Carolina that get along well. | ||
| Well, I think that's why it works, because no one feels like an actor, and everyone feels like just a regular person having fun. | ||
| I guarantee you they're all hanging out right now, just doing some dumb shit, like watching anime or whatever. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm very grateful. | ||
| How we've gone this many years, this many videos, and they don't hate each other, and they still are friends, I don't know. | ||
| I feel like I've gotten a little lucky there. | ||
| They legit hang out and do stuff all the time. | ||
| I think it's a little bit of trickle down from the top, too, because you're so generous and you're so friendly and you have such a good time and you do enjoy this sort of camaraderie. | ||
| It always is like whoever is the head guy, it trickles down to everyone else in the environment. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| You set the tone. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| But it's like, again, I got a little lucky. | ||
| I didn't hand select or anything. | ||
| It's just like, oh, we're all friends. | ||
| And somehow here we are. | ||
| Now they all have millions of followers. | ||
| We're all still friends. | ||
| And they're not like divas or anything. | ||
| And it's been good. | ||
| Well, listen, man, it's awesome. | ||
| I'm happy for you. | ||
| I think it's cool as shit. | ||
| I think it's an amazing example for people. | ||
| And it's also for young people to realize that there is this path. | ||
| And it's not just a path of moderate success. | ||
| It's a path of massive success. | ||
| Gigantic 224 million view videos. | ||
| And it all is done by a regular guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just, you have to just, and you know, what is it? | ||
| It's like, if you don't find what you love, you're just not, you're going to quit before you get to that point. | ||
| You genuinely have to find what you love. | ||
| If you get any takeaway, sorry, it's like a habit to look at the camera. | ||
| Go ahead, look at the camera. | ||
| Like, you have to find what you love. | ||
| Because if you find what you love and you obsess over day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year for a decade, you're going to achieve some form of success. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you don't truly love it, you're going to quit way before you get that compound growth and you really get ultra-levels of success. | ||
| So in my opinion, the easiest way to be successful is just find something you truly love. | ||
| Wise words from Mr. Beast. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| Why Mr. Beast? | ||
| Where does that name come from? | ||
| Oh, you know Xbox Live? | ||
| Like Xbox? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I was like 11, I got, it was just like, it randomized, and it was like MrB6000. | ||
| And so my username used to be MrB6000 on Xbox, and that's what I used on my YouTube channel. | ||
| And then when I was like 14 or 15, I was like, why the fuck is there a 6,000 in this? | ||
| But I was like, fuck. | ||
| I don't know if it was 100 views a video, but I was like, fuck, it's part of my brand. | ||
| 100 views of video brand, whatever the fuck that is. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I removed the 6,000, then I put it back, and every month I'd add it back and remove it, but then I'd drop the 6,000, and it was just Mr. Beast. | ||
| Wise words from Mr. Beast, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Congratulations on everything you've done. | ||
| Now I don't have to keep listening to my fucking self. |
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