How Mr. Beast Became Successful on YouTube

the joe rogan experience 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 yeah 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 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 i played this stupid game and some hacker like killed my base 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 i guarantee you no one what's it called battle parts no one here 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 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 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 i mean it's 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 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 um trying to figure out like what are some of like the the hot spots like i 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 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 you know 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 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 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 systems sit

down underemploy underpaid teacher disinterested not really connected with the work you're not connected with there 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 aren't then you're even

it's more exacerbated that it's like you know i i didn't talk to anyone i heard they 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 literally just didn't know how to but

what 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 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 you know we do things like just take a thousand thumbnails and see if like there's a correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to 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 they're like things like that really so you you micro analyze

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 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 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 40 50 000 hours we're talking like every day all day like literally nothing we had no friends outside of the group that was your life i'm actually rereading that book right now that malcolm gladwell book outliers that talks about that ten thousand hours principle it totally applies to what you did a hundred percent 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 uh have you seen our dub channels no uh can you pull that up just search mr beast and estimate so we actually 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 show you this because i actually have a really cool stuff they're just going to be cool to the channel so you can watch who does this uh we do all your positions his videos 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 and the video everything 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 boy miss amigos it's all in 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 yeah wow that's dope yeah same thing i love it 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 ninety 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 the 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 about 51 million yeah and the problem with me is like i don't know if someone's going to translate if they're going to say exactly what i said well you have quality control so we have like before 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 uh 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 that's hilarious yeah and so what we do is when we go into these 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 going to 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 100 i don't know wow and what are you 23 yeah that's crazy yeah it's wild i 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 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 and it's 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 and 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 was like a little duplex 700 a month you get a roommate's 360 split right yes and uh just drive a 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 don't 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 that's you're just very wise for a young man because a lot of 23 year olds will be falling out of their [ __ ] mind right zoom out well yeah i also have some stories about that too but you do um 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 uh ironically all of which was stolen when my house was broken into so it's kind of perfect so 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