Transcription
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 what 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.
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 it ended up working out. She's happy. The thing is, it's like, nobody saw this coming, right? So you can't, you can't blame her. Especially me in 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, "Oh, you talk about 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 7 AM 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, 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.
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, 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, 10,000 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 10,000 hours principle. It totally applies to what you did. A hundred percent. I mean, like, 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, 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 MrBeast. 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 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. MrBeast en Español. 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 MrBeast 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, man. What a great idea, man. Yeah. And so because, you know, uh, if you Google it, it's like only whatever, less than 10% of the world speaks English. So 90% of the world can't even enjoy your content. And when I realized that, I was like, wait a minute, okay, 90% 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 write 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 that. 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 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. A lot of 23-year-olds will be falling out of their [ __ ] mind. Zoom out. Well, yeah, I also have some stories about that too. But you do, uh, 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.