Joe Rogan Experience #1788 - Mr. Beast

0:05 [Music] okay here hold up just talk to me for like a minute okay this is so freaky too is it really you had 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 like freak out 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 [ __ ] my inflection or whatever isn't uh sounds fine okay no i know it sounds fine it's just [ __ ] whatever i'll suck it up you don't have like a butt you can press to kill him what the [ __ ] when you're playing video games you don't hear yourself right no yeah i don't either but yeah i hear it's

0:51 different sorry yeah well don't worry about it dude that's what you sound like now you know i 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 [ __ ] it but you're not you're speaking to me the 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 yeah just normal normal one-on-one yeah normal conversation people talk over each other accidentally you know like 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 they just everyone starts talking over each other and then when you're listening to it it's like unlistenable it's it's hard to that makes sense yeah

1:38 all right so so we're just rolling right now 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 your this what you've done on youtube is completely unique it's completely you like your personality comes through the way you've like crafted these these things that people have to do these tasks and these games and this fun [ __ ] you do and it's wildly popular and i didn't know about it until i guess about a year ago uh i told you my 11 year old is [ __ ] 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

2:23 then i watched it and i was like wow this is actually really entertaining fun stuff man thank you yeah it's it's it's been crazy because i've been doing it since i was 11. and really yeah so now i'm 23 and so it's just like basically every year 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 uh no money no nothing and i just basically just obsessed over youtube every day for a decade are your first episodes available the 11 when you're 11 years old uh no because i i had a friend when i was 13 that found my channel and so i deleted like all the videos i got

3:10 really self-conscious uh oh no no but so everything from 13 and up is there and yeah they're terrible so that's still cool yeah so what did you do when you first started like what was the first idea uh the very first video um weirdly enough i played this stupid game and some hacker like killed my bass when i was 11. and so i uploaded it and my first video got 20 000 views like instantly because it was like all the people that played the game was like oh [ __ ] you can hack in this game it's a game called battle parts it's a guarantee you know what is it called battle parts no one has ever heard of battle card battle pirates battle pirates yeah it's 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 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

3:56 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 uh essentially yeah it was that and then 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 you launch like 2006 or whatever yeah youtube was a thing but like the partner program wasn't really a thing no one was making money right it was definitely back before it was cool like when i was doing youtube when i was 14 and 15 like it now you know it's cool if you want to be a youtuber in high school or middle school back then like no one gave a [ __ ] you know what i mean it was like you're just worried they would try to play your videos in class or make funny or stuff like that for it so but it how did it evolve to what it is now was it a a

4:42 vision was it a slow sort of a gradual increase in numbers and yeah i mean it's about as slow as it gets uh i mean i can so like when i was a young teenager i was getting no views had no money had no equipment so for the most part it was just like i was just trying to scrounge money so i could buy equipment because i was using my brother's old laptop and so like my first couple hundred videos i didn't have a microphone like imagine just like crackly terrible voice um and so once i got monetized i saved up for a few months like i told you i bought a microphone i didn't just give you a mile high history and i saved up for like six months i mean i was just doing video game videos uh and they were terrible but i saved up i got a real computer so now i can actually record the video game at high quality i have a microphone i'm like 15 and i just kept going and going

5:28 um 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 like this is 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 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 that was the worst thing ever like that that made me hate life like borderline suicidal i just can't stand like 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

6:15 in my car and edit and stuff like that i had straight zeros and so now the clock had started because like once my mom found out i was screwed um were you aware of that like yeah you're running a risk yeah exactly and so i would act like i was going to college that whole time but i 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 [ __ ] 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 yeah 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 she didn't understand youtube or anything back then and she just like she was like man this guy's gonna work at mcdonald's i wasted all this time like i invested 18 years

7:00 and this is what i get where were you living what part of the country uh north carolina that's where i've lived almost my whole life and so how does she feel now oh she's great she's she like she's happy yeah she loves it you know put her in front of her friends she loves talking about it she obviously oh i always knew little jimmy was gonna be a success no she doesn't try to hide it we would fight all the time even in high school like you know i i never once studied i never i literally wouldn't even take my books home like i i legit don't think i studied once all of high school at my house um and so we would fight a lot i didn't have the best grades and so i would i would just make videos and she didn't understand it especially because back then it was just a whole different world like yeah there wasn't really a thing as a full-time youtuber and stuff and so there's a lot of a lot of arguments a lot of drama but

7:46 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 like the middle of north carolina in a small town i had like horrible acne i'm you know especially back then really awkward it's like no one like people would have bet a million dollars that i wouldn't be a youtuber you know it makes no sense um but i just like i have you know hyper obsession and i love this and you know you give it enough time anyone can solve it well there's a lesson in that for people really like to just if you do have a hyper obsession or something there's a lot of people that think that because they're bad at school or because they're not interested in school they're destined to be a loser yeah and that's not true you you can the problem is school is too rigid like regular public school system sit down underemploy

8:33 underpaid teacher disinterested not really connected with the work you're not connected with 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 like i i didn't talk to anyone i 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 uh just didn't even know how to speak like literally i i just couldn't hold a conversation with a single person because people 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 i

9:18 literally just didn't know how to but were you obsessed about were you obsessed about other channels your channel everything from like learning how to editing the pacing of the videos like ideas what's going viral what's trending what's hot especially back then i had no idea what worked i mean i had to like self teach myself everything even you know frame rate on cameras coloring of the video just stuff like that and how did you learn did you learn from youtube yeah well so like youtube videos and tutorials or something most of my growth came actually after uh i graduated high school basically what i did was i somehow found these other like four lunatics we were 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

10:04 makes a good thumbnail what what's good pacing like how to go viral and we would just call it like daily masterminds we would just get on skype every morning and like some days like i'd get on skype at 7am and i'd be in the call until like 10 pm and then i go to bed i wake up and i do it again and oh you know we do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if like there's uh correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail how many views it got or like you know like videos that get over 10 million views it's like how often do they cut the camera angles or like things like that really so you you micro analyzed everything yeah just i mean for like we were very religious about it and so that's that's where most of my knowledge came from is i just surround myself with these lunatics and just every day like we didn't do anything we had no life um but everybody had sort of a similar vision yeah exactly so we all had like

10:49 10 20 000 subscribers when we met and by the time we stopped talking we all had millions of subscribers and we we all hit a million subscribers like 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 [ __ ] up and learning from your mistakes also my mom told me not to curse sorry mom if someone could just like edit out the swear words and give it to me mom yeah so i could give it to my mom to listen to that would be great um but like you know you mess up you learn from your mistake you must have learned from mistake you in two years you know might have learned from 20 mistakes or if you have like four other people who are also messing up and when they uh learn from the mistake they teach you what they learn stuff like hypothetically you two years down the road have learned like five times more of the amount of stuff so it just like helps you grow exponentially way quicker if that makes any sense it does it does so but it's

11:35 interesting that you thought about it that way in sort of a systematic approach like exactly this is not dumb luck uh no i mean it was like like they say ten thousand hours of math or something probably put like forty fifty thousand 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 like it's it sounds like you were just all day every day and which makes sense and what do you have now 90 million subscribers uh well we across everything we're closing in on 200 million subscribers yeah because have you seen our our dub channels no uh can you pull that up just search mr beast and estimate so we actually

12:21 which i'm kind of curious why you don't do this we do our videos in other languages as well really yeah and so and what's i i can't wait to get to show you this because i actually have a really cool thing you're just going to be cool to the channel so you can watch who does this uh yeah we have voice actors and everything wow so these are the exact same videos on my main channel but we we pay voice actors to dub over them we translate the text in the video every mr beast and espanol yeah that was actually one of the fastest growing channels last year and it just started so smart okay now click on a video so we can kind of hear it so we can see the comments uh it's all

13:06 in uh spanish like that's dope yeah so that's uh now just i won't pull them all up but now the other countries yeah search mr beast brazil if we do it oh so you got a portuguese translator as well wow that's dope yeah same thing oh a man what a great idea man yeah and so because you know uh if you google it it's like only whatever less than ten percent of the world speaks english so ninety percent of the world can't even enjoy your content and when i realized that i was like wait a minute okay 90 percent of my the world can't even watch this stuff um 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 you'll like we just started doing this like six months ago and it's crazy like how viral some of these videos are not 51 million yeah

13:52 and the the problem with me is like i don't know if someone's gonna translate if they're gonna say exactly what i said well you have quality control so we have like before 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 we take the original transcript and then we have it dubbed and then after stuff we have like two different people right out and if it doesn't line up with the original then there's like uh 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 oh and the final point is in spanish the guy who does my dubs is the same guy who dubbed 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 v spider-man uh that's hilarious yeah and so what we do is when we go into these

14:37 markets we get celebrities to do my my voice so then like the local people in the language freak out so like all right japan's coming up and i can't say who but we secured like a giant voice actor from an anime to do my dubs and whenever we launch in japan i know they're gonna lose their freaking minds that's a brilliant idea that's so smart so you have how many employees then uh i mean across everything over a hundred 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 so like because to get to this level it takes you know a decade most people don't find what they love to their young 20s so they'd be wearing that in their 30s i just lucked out and found it when i was really young it's that but it's

15:23 also your vision the the fact 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 i don't i don't why do i need money so you don't like go crazy you don't have a ferrari or anything nuts no i i think living your life chasing like a nicer nicer car and a bigger and bigger box of living is kind of like a dumb way to go about life yeah yeah so i 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 uh below average homes because someone broke in stole everything i owned sandy i had to get a little nicer house for security reasons but before i was robbed i mean like my place is like a little duplex 700 a month you get a roommate's 360 split right yes and uh just drive a

16:10 normal car well now i drive a tesla just because of the you know getting off of gas and stuff like right but yeah so you don't go crazy at all with cash you know i really try not to i think that's like just a bad way to go about life also it is a little hypocritical because i run a non-profit and you know we uh 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 dollar mansion while i'm feeding people and trying to help people else in my eyes it's also a little hypocritical as well so in every area i just i feel like it's just better if i just live below you're just very wise for a young man because a lot of 23 year olds will be all in out of their [ __ ] mind right zoom out well yeah i also have some stories about that too but you do um

16:57 yeah because i did have a phase where i did ball out a little bit and then i just i realized like yeah this doesn't make me happy what did you do during the ball and out phase uh i bought i ate and i also bought some designer clothes like some thousand dollar shirts and stuff like that um ironically all of which was stolen when my house was broken into so it's 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 [ __ ] i was like perfect you set aside a bunch of [ __ ] 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 it alone really yeah but you've taken a loan multiple times you're making astounding amounts of money yeah but hypothetically if like uh you know you do a brand deal and a brand owes you a half a million dollars sometimes you don't pay for four months you know i already spent that half a million dollars when i gave it away in that video so it's like you know it's

17:43 like there's never been a point where i'm like negative technically money's inbound but sometimes you just have to wait but i gotta keep going and keep filming you know wow that's just it's very unusual that someone would spend that much money reinvesting in the show yeah that's which ironically is why we made more money last year than any other youtuber on the platform because it's i don't well the thing is like for youtube a lot of people are very young uh and so i think it's like 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 they don't understand a lot of these things right and so i 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 right it's it's not that crazy but i think just like i was saying like people are just so young and they don't understand

18:28 like you know the the opportunity you have here i mean if you have 50 million people that watch everything you do you can start business you can do anything you know what i mean um it's very valuable well the thing is though you're treating this like an established business and i think there's a lot of people that get into youtube and they're just 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 like you give a 23 year old the kind of money that you're making most of them are going to just go [ __ ] crazy oh it's think even younger because i started getting money was 1920. and so there's 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 uh there's a couple things first first off the to be like this successful as a

19:15 youtuber you kind of have to understand like there's like three different pillars that make like uh like get us where we are like you have to have the business sense reinvest higher scale up i mean the things we're doing are huge logistical nightmares have you ever tried to buy a private island and uh you know and you buy 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 uh did a video where leave island keeps it and then so we buy an island and it looks better on the internet and then you go see and there's no beach well [ __ ] now you gotta import five thousand pounds of sand where's the island uh somewhere in the bahamas uh so someone won it so the person someone won a [ __ ] island yeah we're actually about to do something similar again coming up um how much does an island cost that one was like 800 grand and then we put like 100 grand into like renovating it um and

20:00 then wow how big is the island uh 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 grand yeah in the bahamas that's kind of a shock how many islands are in the bahamas um i'm gonna be honest i have no idea but like that beach you see there we had to build that beach it was it's really yeah so that sand wasn't there we had to import it so it was just like rocky coastline exactly and 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 or like is it just denied the person who won it just sold it oh did they really yeah right away yeah he's like i don't [ __ ] want elsa then sell it and so these people how do you find them

20:46 uh this one the contestants uh it's different for every video this one i i'd have to see them all in particular like this one's a mix of random people and my boys um the hard thing is like sometimes i love pulling random people but if you grab a random people sometimes people just don't know how to act on camera they freeze up and they they're really not good for content and so like in an ideal world everyone in my videos are just purely random which is what i'm trying to get towards because i'm trying to get better at like 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 like people i knew because i knew they would make good content because i i would bring someone in a video and they'd win something 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 said oh thanks when you win a hundred grand this is fake mr beast is fake all

21:32 this is fake i'm like no it's real the fact that he's acting like that shows it's real but like the masses don't understand that so i have to be like very like strategic on how i pick people or everyone's just like oh this is fake they didn't 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 like get large amounts of people they filter through and we're just looking for like people hey do they need it like do they actually need this help would it benefit their life you know obviously they can't be super rich and then all 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 it i don't know it's just not content and it's 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

22:18 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 it really just depends on the video because like some videos like squid game there's 456 people um that one we dropped like 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 um you brought them in but did you vet them no that because there's so many people that's what i'm saying it's like different videos what's that did you see that sweet game video i saw part of it yeah yeah that was wild that that was the most expensive thing we've ever done how much did it cost a little over four million dollars jesus christ because we had cg recreated all the sets it's like and the thing is like there's not really room for error you

23:04 know i mean like this [ __ ] has to work you know um and so like you know engineering like the glass bridge we legit had to build the glass bridge where you 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 well if you're doing something where you drop people off how do you make sure that they don't die well there's there's phone below it and obviously it's safe uh everything you know we do we safety tests beyond belief that video we had over 100 different people working on so yeah you know i mean that i don't even know how many people we had working on that clash bridge thing that one was very stressful because it's also it's like you know you spot a trend squirt game's hot it's not like you have six months to pull it off it's like [ __ ] this is hot it's not gonna be hot in a couple months like we're doing it we gotta do it in the next month and so

23:50 it's like you know we've it's basically like three or four warehouses just filled with like these crazy like sets and and all this stuff has to move concurrently um yeah i mean it's it's hard without the visuals to even be again to explain it because like like the first set we had was like literally like the size of a football field and we need go to the very beginning uh yeah that's the glass bridge one but yeah look at this set like those are real walls we built those things are [ __ ] huge sorry mom for swearing um yeah oh well uh like that it's you can't even tell the scale of how big that room is uh in the shop but that's 456 people and look how tiny they are what are you hitting them with uh so again again this is like uh 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 uh

24:36 because in squid game you got shot when you got out right 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 uh and then we had like a hundred 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 script 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 uh the spotter would pop them out that's the thing like there's so much stuff that goes on behind the scenes to make this stuff happen that like people don't even realize that's why no one else does what we do because it's it's like it's stressful it's hard and it's brutal wow and where did you get the doll the

25:23 the doll that spins its head around i mean that one yeah some company and uh in europe they they built it for us so it's like 50 grand what do you do with that after you're done with it that's that's the problem because none of our videos are the same it's like usually we give stuff away or we just put in storage but like i know like where's that doll now uh i i don't want to lie to you i have no earthly idea i mean 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 [ __ ] wouldn't it a little doll head come on man that thing would be cool as [ __ ] to have that here and then so now skip to the next scene i mean because i 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 [ __ ] now it's two and a half oh [ __ ] it's three and i was like okay you can't get any more than three million and next thing you know

26:09 like you actualize the budget afterwards it's like [ __ ] four million dollars holy [ __ ] and this is did you have to take all this down once you were done yeah and then you just leased these warehouses no we own them we own them okay 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 could suggest to this that's kind of the problem for me is like we're reinvesting so much money in the videos and pushing him to the max but i also need space like right because like the videos are so big that so if you want to you can't just work on a video for a week you got to be working on months in advance and so you basically got to always be working on an ideal world six to ten videos well if one video takes up your entire warehouse how the [ __ ] do you work on the other five right so like space is a huge bottleneck and i'm in the middle of

26:55 nowhere in north carolina there's not tons of studio space and stuff like that so we have like three or four studios um that we uh the newest one is what i call our campus that we built it's a giant 10 million dollar studio and it's kind of like a money game because like i want every investor to go big on videos but i also need to build infrastructure so it's kind of like a bouncing act but we built this huge uh it's six seventy thousand square feet six or fifty five thousand of like studio space uh because also the problem is if you get like uh warehouses they always have beams and you can't film it there's beams so it's like uh it was easier just to uh renovate this place sorry i'm just going on random tan no it's good it's great i love it and so basically we have this ginormous warehouse soundproof uh i can do [ __ ] like blow up a car in it because there's like a thousand sprinklers that you'll drown before you you uh burn to death in there or like

27:41 light a fire or anything uh which is good so we can do dumb [ __ ] it's like the perfect wonderland but even then like even though this place is great and it's 10 million dollars 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 micro managing 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 that you like have to get someone who makes the cookies for you but make sure that you could still cut them out with it but that's one of the easiest things yeah but even that even that being easy it's like you got to make sure everything's right so 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 tests on tests on tests um leading up dude this one was crazy the

28:26 the tug of war scene look at that set isn't like freaking crazy that's amazing yeah and that's so they're over foam so they just drop down they're dropping a pile of foam yeah that's incredible dude that 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 look at this one too pause it there look at that [ __ ] it's crazy yeah i love it no it's really cool i 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 like universal studios is behind you and they're like mr beast this is what we planned and we've hired these people you're doing all this yourself taking all the risks coming with the ideas and you know every step now people it's like what's it

29:12 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 too people are throwing tomatoes and telling you you're stupid for reinvesting you know 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 gonna be irrelevant when it's only two years if you just don't do interesting [ __ ] you know yeah well i think it's two years if you don't continually push yourself exactly innovate continue if you're innovating adapting and like doing cool stuff i mean you can have a career as long as 10 years in my opinion that but that's in the same in everything i think i mean television shows how many television shows are really popular for a while and they drop off yeah exactly and because they don't innovate yeah yeah they get the cookie cutter formula also that that

29:57 video too looking at the view count reminded me um i think netflix and total has 220 million subscribers and and that video just crossed 220 million views wow so it was 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 it wouldn't people wouldn't be obsessed with it yeah because when squid games first came out i mean it was a phenomenon for like a couple of months exactly you got a small window to act in yeah and you got to design everything and build everything and i also want to put out there i have some amazing people on my team because that video without like i mean i've so arguably some of the smartest people in the world when it comes to just creating viral content in youtube and stuff like that without them that wouldn't be

30:44 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 we it's taken a long time but like i would literally without doubt my mind say we have the smartest people in the world when it comes to making viral content and like 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 building sweet game in real life the next you're bearing me alive for 50 hours you know it's like you have to it's like you don't find people that specialize in stuff it's like just people i don't know who just have a willing to learn and adapt and like you know keep because it's all different and how do you find these people how do you find these people that you work with uh i mean it's been hard a lot of them are just like lunatics that really love doing

31:29 interesting things because it is fulfilling because like it's 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 uh plan typically do better in our environment but like someone who worked like if you worked on wheel of fortune you would do horrible in our environment you you wouldn't even understand it's like because like you know we don't tell you what to do we kind of like give you a little bit of rain to make decisions and you got to pivot and it's like no no no we've never built squid game in real life before we don't know if it's possible to like build a 40-foot wall in this coliseum it's like they might cap you at 35 well then now you have to decide well does 35 still look good on

32:14 visual on the camera and stuff like that so it's like 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 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 um because we've just had some a lot of videos fall through because of cobin is it stressful to have like such a big staff uh yeah i mean my life is very stressful because we haven't even touched on like have you seen our gaming channel or reaction no i want to get to all that but i just 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 was calling the shots and it's your channel but it seems like you've got a whole ecosystem under you

33:00 of course and you're [ __ ] 23 years old i mean that's wild [ __ ] 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 it i 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 100 employee roster yeah well not all 100 are on the main channel right because like uh we have the gaming channel which probably has like 24 people like on our gaming channel we have like five 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 reaction channel the main shot i don't know where we're at but uh it's probably like half of it um and i don't know they're just like the people they just come from everywhere

33:47 i don't know how to explain because it's like i basically just hired one person a month every month for like the last five years essentially wow that's that's amazing so like what is a typical day for you like when you're trying to figure out like what you're gonna make a video of next do you get together with your friends and brainstorm do you do you have like an idea that you come up with while you're driving your car or something so that's where it gets interesting i've i so the difference between a video on youtube and this is where i can go infinitely in depth they haven't seen 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

34:32 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 have better ideas like no joke it's that extreme um and so once you realize how important ideas you just obsess over well how do i get more ideas how to get better ideas so i i used to just spend an hour every day brainstorming ideas i don't anymore um but like probably like four years that just every day i just spent an hour and i would just do something different one day i'd use a random word generator like uh i don't know just say a random word dog uh you know i adopted a hundred dogs i gave my friend 50 dogs or i i gave a dog a million dollars for dog troops whatever i saw i take in random words i see what pops in my head i write those

35:18 down and i take in another random word and like i i've i've studied it very intensely i've tried like lucid dreaming to see if i could trick myself to come up with ideas while i'm sleeping and stuff like that i 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 well so you 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 but then we you know the we can't start working on the video until we know what

36:03 it is right you know i i've a guy named tyler who i've known for years i went to high school with he's just phenomenal and so you know then we have to write the video and actually figure it out like so if i want to bury myself alive for 50 hours like what does that look 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 know you come up with it and then we have you know our people who basically make it happen but then the problem is it's like oh well you you wrote you wanted a a giant ball in a coffin but like they're like oh well you can't get a giant ball and so then it's like just months of back and forth like figure and this is where most people fall apart and why like this one 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 not scripted like you know so you can't just uh 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

36:49 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 uh 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 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 yeah do you ever stop and like look at when you got a video like that that is 224 million views and look at how insane

37:35 your reach is and go how the [ __ ] i know it's crazy well and that's just in english you read the other channels uh other languages as well yeah i mean i i don't know i don't even know how to put into words i mean it is crazy it's it's like they obviously just feels like numbers on the screen but if i try 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 you get a piece of the ad revenue but yeah you essentially don't have a contract like youtube can just go you know what [ __ ] 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

38:20 for any reason i know that has happened to certain people right where they used to have uh some sort of uh 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 yeah we're not anywhere near the line and like a lot of that like isn't youtube it's like the advertisers putting pressure on them and they're just trying to you know um but you have been 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 you know i love youtube i i mean like you got to think about it like youtube comes pre-installed on android you know obviously google uh owns youtube or

39:06 alphabet but also google and so people go there through google i mean like all all roads point to youtube yeah i love being the biggest creator on youtube i i [ __ ] going into my own thing that sounds stupid like hell no like i can have you know one of the largest audiences in the world and i can i instead of thinking about building my own platform i'd rather think about building businesses leveraging my audience off of youtube like you know 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 i think like anywhere yeah but you would take that but then you don't have like because we're constantly gaining new growth new and new people like last year we gained uh on the main show alone we're the most subscribed to channel in the world we gained 36 million subscribers on the main channel like really yeah if i had my own platform it'd be like one or two

39:52 million you know what i mean right like so it's like and it's it's still going up you know across all the channels we're getting like seven million subscribers a month like that would just plummet if i use my own platform do you have an ultimate plan for all this um i mean i just love youtube it's it's been my life's passion and so i ever meet them uh people youtube yeah you ever go there and have a pow wow uh no i mean i've talked to some people but it's like i don't really need anything brother you should massage your feet yeah they really should just 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 did you set up a throne just sit there with a crown on and and then they dunk your feet in a thing and they do your nails and and so i might have a different view than most people but you know i i didn't have much and it's all 100 of everything i've never worked a job i've never made like

40:39 anything it's all been from youtube it's incredible i used to make a dollar a day so i i love this platform more than anything listen i love you too too all the problems that they have i think it is absolutely amazing that they've created this thing where someone can make a living in an incredible living just creating anyone in the world can like yeah i i if you like i don't know how to say this doesn't sound arrogant but like if you knew what i know about like how to make a good video and go viral even if you had zero subscribers you could be making 100 a month in half a year right if you anyone in the world can be a successful youtuber and to me that's like the beauty of the platform yeah it really is it's 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 of it i guess maybe twitch and then i guess there's a few other ones where people make money but not at

41:25 the scale not even close not even closest scale you know that was one of the most difficult things about um going to spotify was leaving youtube because i was like man like our growth on youtube is pretty crazy like 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 yeah that was really the only way i was willing to do it i wasn't willing to just abandon it it was a great idea because that's like i i don't really use spotify that much but i you know all the time your your clips occasionally pop up i'm like on my homepage on my tv and so if you in my world because like you there are like these different worlds now like there are some people that only use tik tok so like if you're not in tik tok you just don't exist in the world right that's kind of how i view it in my world it's it's pretty big youtube so like if you just were not existing on youtube like

42:11 you wouldn't exist to me you know hypothetically in my world yeah well i i mean i exist on tick tock but it's not me like someone's just uploading my content on tick tock really yeah at a certain point in time i guess i should step in and do something you should on tick tock but tick tock is such a sketchy [ __ ] application have you ever seen like uh the breakdown that these software engineers have done of tick tock of how intrusive it is uh no they said it's the single most disturbing piece of software they've ever had to back engineer because the amount of like cross platform really spying it does well i know like if you're um and like if you travel to a different state like even now in texas like my tick tock fee will be a lot more texas content it's definitely location based and if you're i have had instances where i

42:56 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 tick tocks 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 tick tock and tick tock suggested her based on that tick tock knew that her and this lady were next to each other physically because their phones were next to each other wow so tic toc suggested that she follow that lady that's crazy that's and take note can be pretty addicting i actually recently uninstalled it just because even though my ticket is 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 tick tock and i was like ah just scrolling through videos

43:41 yeah that's what i was like that's a little much so i uninstalled it yeah it's it's a fine line between enjoyment getting something out of the content and then just this weird empty obsession yeah we're just spending time staring at people's stuff yeah yeah but i think you can curate the feed though where it is beneficial which is what i tried to do and i i had it in a good place where like you know when i opened tick tock it would motivate me to work out and like it would motivate me to go work so it's good but sometimes just it takes a little long because you can see your time on app and so usually i try to i try not to spend more than like an hour and a half a day on social media so when i saw that two hours i was like [ __ ] do you know the difference between the way china does it versus the way the american does it no it's really interesting china first of all between the the hours of 10 a.m and

44:26 6 p.m kids are not allowed on it they can't be on it they won't let them on second of all when you're on it the difference between like tick tock in america america's like dances and people doing pranks and people doing things to try to get viral views in china it highlights uh scientific achievements athletic achievements it highlights like people doing things accomplishing things wow and it's it's so it's a lot more curated yes much more but curated by the ccp where they're trying or or you know whatever in conjunction with where they're trying to elevate the quality of the lives of the kids that are addicted to this tick tock so instead of it them being addicted to like putting piss in the hand soap container instead of doing something like that like oh

45:12 what they're doing is like showing science experiments they're showing innovation they're showing kids accomplishing great athletic goals and it's 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 uh like overview like some sort of orwellian restrictions oh wait brought down from the governments to like make sure that kids only see that kind of thing but here in america if you did that like people just wouldn't use it they'd be like oh [ __ ] this i'm going to instagram reels or youtube exactly so do you put stuff on tick tock as well yeah we we use tick tock um so you have like a team that does all that exactly i'd say like one or two percent of my time go to tick tock like 90 plus percent goes to youtube because essentially like i think they like the

45:58 most the i can i can hire like creative people to to help come up with like bits i can hire production people to help do the the videos and editors the only thing i can't outsource is like me actually filming you know at the end that's like the only thing that like i'm the only person that can do so in an ideal world i spend as much time as my or much of my time as possible filming and not doing other stuff because we have multiple different channels and stuff like that so like peak performance would be me like 90 of my work week is just filming [ __ ] and and nothing else yeah i mean when you're in the middle of all this and you have all this stuff going on whether it's the social media stuff and the filming stuff and the coming up with the new content new ideas and then managing the fact you have a hundred [ __ ] people well we haven't even gotten into the side companies or the side channels either no the the beast burgers and all that jazz yeah

46:44 first of all where's mr beast burger how many of them do you have uh so right now we don't have any physical we have 1600 virtual restaurants oh so you order it online and then they deliver it yeah so like uh let's say you own a mom and pop restaurant you you literally just sign up um go through the course you learn how to make all this stuff in a menu and you just order our ingredients in our packaging and then you just flick it on on uber's door dash grubhub and you can start taking orders and we let you keep a majority of the revenue so it's basically like it's a win-win for restaurants especially when covet first hit it was like huge for a lot of restaurants because i was pushing it really hard back then and like some restaurants were literally laying off people and then they started uh serving beast burger and some of them doing like 10 grand a week not like in total revenues whatever their cut was lower but it allowed them to not have to like lay off part of the workforce or keep their employees and

47:30 stuff like that um and and so yeah and this idea came out of what uh we were approached by some company and the more i thought about the more i just realized it was just a great idea so we have a partner a guy basically a guy who's been doing restaurants his whole life he so actually that's how we started because he owned 300 restaurants so he launched with three his 300 restaurants and like that first day they all sold out they were having like run to local stores to buy ingredients to keep up with orders like the ubereats like delivery lines were like out the door it was it's pretty bad so we had to like quickly expand up um and we've just been adding like 50 restaurants a week ever since 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 shirts he's creating virtual restaurants

48:17 it's incredible man that's yeah it's actually insane and so we've been doing it for like probably like 15 months now and we're about to cross a 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 um just our first thing is a chocolate bar it's uh just basically like only four ingredients just a slightly healthier version of chocolate problems if you make things too healthy which is what i've found with my restaurant is i i would love to wean people off like super unhealthy stuff but if you like we did lettuce wrap like where you just replace the bun with lettuce no one orders it if you go like too extreme in the healthy side just no one cares um 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

49:03 um 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 what do you put in it um well you just pull it up there it is mr beast bar i mean like i said it's not crazy healthy but um and yeah it's got quinoa on it yeah um i love that one i know i have some out there i'll have you a taste test i think i'm sure it's good quinoa mixed with chocolate bro they put chocolate on ants and people eat it you know i mean everything with chocolate is good well and so our our big marketing stuff for this because everything i do it's gotta you know have the spectacle is 10 random people are going to get flown down to compete for a chocolate factory in a video um yeah 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

49:48 chocolate no it's going to be kind of like the willy wonka one where it's like decked out i most people i feel like are just going to take the money instead i'm going to 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 have to sell the chocolate factory exactly because it's yeah like 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 like that's what we're trying to figure out right now like we're literally building like a chocolate river and i'm trying to figure out like how do you keep chocolate flowing and from going bad and like being [ __ ] disgusting and [ __ ] like that so does your you 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 uh i mean honestly i'm still educating myself in this stuff so i'd

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