Mr. Beast reveals his YouTube origins—starting at 11 with Battle Pirates, deleting early videos at 13, and reinvesting every dollar into growth—while Joe Rogan highlights his $4M Squid Game recreation and 1,600 virtual MrBeast Burger locations. His philanthropy, led by unpaid employee Darren, contrasts with AI skepticism despite Rogan’s warnings about superintelligence. Success stems from obsession over conventional advice, like paying collaborators (e.g., $10K/month) to escape struggles, and spontaneous team chemistry, like janitor Chandler’s viral rise. Ultimately, passion—not shortcuts—drives compounding success in unconventional fields. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.