SPEAKER_01: Let's bring him out. Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast. What's up, everybody?

SPEAKER_19: Look at the phone. Guys, no selfies, no selfies. I mean, everybody's sending it to their kids as we speak.

David Sacks: Yeah. Do your fans have like a name, like Beasties or something? No.

SPEAKER_23: Beasties, Besties, Beasties. That's Taylor Swift. Beasties is pretty good.

SPEAKER_25: So I think everybody, all of you guys know Jimmy, but let me just tell you the quick story. I hate when people describe me in front of me, but go for it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Jimmy started YouTubing when he was 13 years old. And this is an incredible example. I mean, Jimmy's basically an athlete. So if you take a guy who basically spends 10,000 hours at something and he, you know, there's a Steph Curry outcome, there's a LeBron James outcome, and there's a Jimmy Donaldson outcome. So what does this one look like? He starts posting videos online. He starts iterating, iterating, iterating at 16. I think he had like, I don't know, 2016 or so, he had like 30,000 followers, some nominal number. Kept tweaking, putting in the thousands and thousands of hours, stumbled into college for two weeks, stumbled out. And then fast forward now, a decade since he started this, he's basically the most followed human on earth after Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Although in terms of content creation, he's basically the top two or three most followed people on YouTube, Twitter, Tik Tok, sorry, not Twitter. X, yeah. X. Billions of views, event-based viewing. So, you know, when he launches videos, noon Eastern time on Saturdays, every two weeks, if you're not watching them, probably people you know, definitely, you know, your kids, their friends, it's just a spectacle. And so that's how, you know, you've become you. So, let's start at the beginning. How did your mom react? Because, you know, because Sue seems like a, she's like a, and she works for Jimmy. She's like a head of compliance, okay?

SPEAKER_36: She just makes sure no one steals money. It's a nice fun run.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So, what happened when you showed up and you're like, hey, mom, I've been streaming secretly and I have these followers?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, you know what's interesting actually is you should encourage, encourage your kids to have hobbies and want to do these things. My mom thought it was crazy that I was talking to people on the internet. So, I ended up just lying and be like, oh, this is a joke. I just have a friend I'm talking to every night online or on Skype or whatever. And then once I hit 10,000 subscribers, I told her, yeah, that was a lie. I don't have any friends. I'm just making videos. And she just didn't understand it.

SPEAKER_42: She was just like, what does this mean? Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Where did the idea for all these spectacles originate from? The first few that really broke through, how did you guys come up with them or how did you come up with them?

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. Well, the thing is like for people, if you want to get like hypothetically 100 million

SPEAKER_40: views on a video, the easiest way is to like do something cool no one's done before. And one of the first ones was I saw no one had ever counted 100,000 in a row. So, I was just like, I'll just count to 100,000.

SPEAKER_46: I watched that video for about five minutes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: It's pretty great. It's more than normal. It's 40 hours long, but the retention's two minutes. So.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah. I was like, and you look like, how old are you at that? 15 years old or something?

SPEAKER_40: I was like 18.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: It's hilarious. So, I just started, because I didn't have money, so I just started with- How many views does that have? I think, that one's like 30 million.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Just me counting. But it's like, it's funny, because it's like, look at this idiot. He counted to 100,000. How much money has it made? That one? I don't know. Ballpark. What do you think?

SPEAKER_55: I mean, most videos probably have like $5 RPM, so 150 grand. Okay. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Great. So, you know, this thing, and then it starts to go, and then how do you scale the ideas? Because it does become a bit of a hamster wheel.

SPEAKER_25: Like, how do I one-up myself, and do you always feel this pressure to have to one-up yourself from the last video, literally? Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: It's, well, essentially, obviously, I've just been doing this for 14 years. And also, you said 10,000 hours. I think people should change that saying to 10,000 days, and I'm almost at my halfway point to 10,000 days. I think that's how people should start looking at things. Because to be honest, 10,000 hours is pretty easy. What is that, like 10 hours a day for three years? It's just a random thing. But, yeah, it's just, I don't know, we would get 100,000 views on a video, take the money, do another video, get 150,000, and I've just kind of reinvested the money for 14 years. And even to this day, whatever I make, I just spend it the next month on content, and the videos have just progressively gotten bigger and bigger. And it's gone from me counting to 100,000 to seeing what happens if you put a Lamborghini in the world's largest shredder, you know, just random things, you know.

SPEAKER_60: Well, you also seem to have some pretty good judgment where maybe some of your contemporaries don't. We've seen that need to get the next view lead to people doing increasingly dangerous stunts, like taking a Model X over some hill. I think Dobrik did that. Some other person was swinging somebody on a crane. Maybe you could talk a little bit about restraint and understanding, like, hey, even though this is going to get a lot of views and maybe some of your contemporaries, I won't give the specific names of people, but they've done some really idiotic things and gotten hurt. Yeah.

SPEAKER_63: So, how do you know when a conversation, you know, and some of these ideas kind of maybe go over the line?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, I mean, the obvious answer is common sense. Great. Okay. Next question. No, no, no. The thing is, like, obviously, if it's, there's a lot of things people do that they know will get views because of outrage and it's just easy to do. Yes. But, you know, if you're trying to build a long-term brand, you don't want to just constantly piss people off just to get attention, like, eventually it stops working. So, the real answer is you just got to not go, what is the easiest way to get views? What is, you know, what do people actually want to watch that, you know, isn't just going to get views because they're angry, essentially.

SPEAKER_68: Got it. You have, if you, in Greenville, North Carolina, you basically have your own college campus. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You know, it's like buildings, lots, studios, all these young people dynamically running around doing all this stuff. I mean, when I saw it, I was like, this is a tech startup. It felt like Facebook, circa 2006, they accepted it in Greenville. Why did you think you could pull this off there?

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, well, the thing is, you know, as you scale up, you're not really, especially when

SPEAKER_40: you're in your young 20s, you're just kind of doing whatever you got to do to keep up with growing and making the videos. So, you just kind of blink and 10 goes to 20 employees to 50 to 100. How do you get people to go there?

SPEAKER_58: Like, what is it that you're giving them where they would leave New York or LA and whatever

SPEAKER_34: their job is to try to do this with you?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, that's the hard part. I'm still trying to figure it out. Most people, it's a lot of convincing, to be honest. I would highly recommend you don't build a company in the middle of nowhere woods in North Carolina city like ours. Most people don't want to live there. So, usually it's just like people who, you know, their job is kind of their life and they're very passionate about what they do. So, it's like, we provide you a cool job where one day you get to bury me alive. The next you get to, you know, figure out how to send me to space or whatever. But the real answer is you just got to find people where work is their life and so they don't care. But anyone who does, they hate it.

SPEAKER_72: Well, that's actually a feature in some ways, right? Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Which is how Silicon Valley used to work, by the way. This is what I was going to say. How do you recruit for that? And what do you do when you find out that there are people that, you know, want work-life balance and don't want to do the level, aren't willing to commit the way you're willing to commit? Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: I mean, like I said, that's the part I'm still trying to figure out to be 100% honest. I think at some point I just got to move out of the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. Don't recommend it. Building a big company in a small city. How many employees do you have now? They're around 250.

SPEAKER_60: So, you consider maybe moving into Los Angeles or something to be closer to Hollywood?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, but just like somewhere where it's like a decent-sized city would probably be more optimal. One that has an airport would be nice. Sure.

SPEAKER_80: Jimmy, one of the things you say a lot is I'm still trying to figure it out. I think that's the key to your success. Having spoken to you a bunch, I get the sense that you're on this kind of insatiable journey. Like, I mean, you speak in a very grandiose way about what you're trying to do. There's no friggin' limit. And you see it in your videos, but you also see it in how you've kind of iterated. I tell people, like, there's no one else on earth, no entrepreneur in history, where you can go track them longitudinally from the first thing they did all the way through to today. If you want to understand this entrepreneur, it's all in the open. Go check it out. You're trying to see the grind, and you'll see what it took to get here. And it doesn't stop. Every week you've got some new record-breaking 24-hour video coming out, and it's fucking nuts. What's the mission? Where's it all going? And help just frame for the audience, for everyone, like, how do you think about where you're going?

SPEAKER_40: The beauty is there's, well, YouTube, that's my main platform. You know, obviously if you buy an Android phone, YouTube's pre-installed, and Alphabet owns it. So when you search things on Google, it takes you to YouTube a lot of times. So YouTube is just massive. I mean, billions of people use it on a monthly basis. And so being big on YouTube, you know, we get 100 million views on a video in the first seven days, which, you know, before the last couple of years, that's never been possible in history. So it's definitely a very interesting time where you can get, you know, just unfiltered access to basically unlimited people. And then, you know, we just, weirdly enough, it's not why I got into it, but it ended up just working out that way, that I spent 14 years of my life just studying how to make the most optimal videos, what type of content people want, and we just kind of mastered the art of going viral. And YouTube just so happens to be such a big platform. And so it's pretty nice because now, like they've been saying, we're getting around a billion views a month. And yeah, we can just...

SPEAKER_84: But where do you want to take it?

SPEAKER_40: Well, recently we started getting into selling... Long term, yeah. Long term, yeah. Yeah. Well, we started getting into selling some CPG products. So we started with chocolate. And it's nice because the same people who I would take pictures with in Walmart, when they see our product there, they're like, oh, it's the guy from YouTube and they'll buy it. And so just kind of right now, just anything in retail is great because, you know, you just put things on a shelf and people buy it. And, you know, it's like, it's much easier than like doing something complicated.

SPEAKER_80: I tell people, it's almost as if you think your job is to make people happy. Is that a good way to frame like how you think about your job? Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah.

SPEAKER_97: The other thing that I find just extraordinary about your business is you're essentially built Walmart without any of the cost structure. Any brand you decide to build will immediately have the first 10 million customers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: Well, the beauty is we don't have like essentially don't have to do marketing.

SPEAKER_60: Zero marketing costs, but also zero distribution costs. That can go one of two ways with the Mr. Beast Burger. Yeah. You learned a lot of lessons there. Maybe went too fast. You didn't expect it to be so popular and you lost control of that. And then with Mr. With the Feastables stuff, you nailed it.

SPEAKER_63: So maybe you could tell us the lessons from each of those projects.

SPEAKER_106: Well, yeah, the beauty of Feastables is, I mean, kind of like I said, you just put on a shelf and people go there and buy it.

SPEAKER_40: I mean, you want to ask me something more specific?

SPEAKER_80: No, but be honest. Mr. Beast Burger. Hold on. Be honest about the insane amount of product development work you personally do and how deeply you care about making it work.

SPEAKER_111: Because I think that's what's missing for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_60: Well, no, and then my point was Mr. Beast Burger, you kind of loaned your name to it and it didn't have the same quality control.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, that one I can't talk about, but...

SPEAKER_60: Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_112: No problem.

SPEAKER_60: I was wondering.

SPEAKER_112: Yeah.

SPEAKER_25: No problem. Yeah, well... Okay, let's just admit these last few questions were shitty. Let's reset. No, I think it's a great question. You just can't talk about it. Let's bring it back to the... All right, let's go back to the two smarter people here. Okay. David, do you have a question?

SPEAKER_124: I want to ask about...

SPEAKER_122: I better go onto a new topic here real quick.

David Sacks: The thing I've been really blown away by is just how elaborate your productions are. I mean, some of these videos are incredibly elaborate in the production values and in the storytelling. The one that comes to mind for me is the Squid Game series, which, I mean, that looked like monumental logistically to pull off in terms of set design and every other way. I mean, I guess tell us more about what goes into that and, you know, what I'm kind of hearing from you with the 250 people you have working and you've built this whole town. It sounds like the old studio system, you know, like back in Hollywood, like Warner Brothers back in the 1930s, where they had their own lots, their own actors, their own everything. And it was very different back then. Like we heard Gwyneth saying that like most of her time on a set is like waiting around. It doesn't sound like that's what's going on with you. So you're back to kind of the original studio system.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like I said, the beauty is we don't have a studio that tells us what we can or can't do or, you know, the distribution or anything. It's just we own it all. So we just make whatever videos we think will be viral. And, you know, obviously we have the direct connection. And so the big thing is like obviously YouTube, you know, at the moment, you don't make that much from ad revenue. So to do these big multimillion dollar videos, it's just not really possible, which is why doing things like festivals and other products to generate revenue on the back end, is why we're able to do that and other people aren't. Because it's like, you know, if you get even if you get 100 million views on a video, the RPM is $5. It's only 500 grand. You know what I mean? So it's not that crazy, which is why people aren't able to do these big budget spectacles like we are. Because most people don't even get anywhere near that kind of viewership. And so it's like the beauty is creating the model where we turn around and we use that to sell products. So a couple hundred million of that a year and then we use that to put it back into the content.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Is there pressure to tone down like the consumerism or the giving away money? Like do some I'm sure there's a faction of people that either find that offensive or they think it's exploitative. How do you deal with that? No, no, not really, to be honest.

SPEAKER_40: Most people think it's cool because it's like it's kind of fun to watch someone receive, you know, $10,000 or Lamborghini or a house. Or I think like the last thing we did is I ordered pizza and tipped the guy a house.

SPEAKER_133: And like I thought it was cool. Not bad.

SPEAKER_40: I actually ordered two pizzas, one from Domino's and one from Pizza Hut. And the guy who got there first got the house. I mean there was. So the Domino's guy got it.

SPEAKER_138: So I ordered Domino's.

David Friedberg: I think like, no, but didn't you do something? It was curing blindness? Yeah.

SPEAKER_140: There was like 10 Karen's who got upset and people were like. But there were people, right? Like 10 Karen's got upset and everyone was like.

SPEAKER_40: At the end of the day, as long as I think what I'm doing is good and right and helping people. Like obviously at the scale of our views, you know, that video got 200 million views. Of course, some subsection is going to be mad. It's just kind of at that number.

SPEAKER_27: It's just inevitable that people are unhappy.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There's a piece of your business that actually many people probably don't know about outside the commercial part, which is Beast Philanthropy. Yeah. You want to tell people about the size of the food bank you've built and how that works?

SPEAKER_40: Sure. So I just feel we're talking about it myself. But we essentially just started a charity and then made a YouTube channel where, you know, whatever we do with the money from the charity, we film it. So that generates revenue on the back end. And obviously those videos go on to raise a lot of money for donations. And so it's just kind of a cycle where we upload a video a week and we were able to build a couple of food banks and feed a couple hundred thousand people. That kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_68: You want to talk about the business model in the future? So you have basically this YouTube business. Yep.

SPEAKER_27: And that goal is essentially just maximize growth. Yeah. Just make content people want and get as many views as possible. And as J. Cal said, build distribution and direct it at these old legacy companies.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Are there things, but you said you wanted to do things that were just like, it seemed less offline, right? So I'm sure you've looked at online things.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. I mean, right now it's just like the reason we started with chocolate is obviously like in the last 50 years, there hasn't been any like major chocolate company that has spawned up. Like Hershey's, Lamp, Mars, they're all like a hundred years old. And so it's kind of just a sleepy space where they don't really innovate and it's kind of boring and no one really cares. And so obviously eventually we'll do online because it's much easier to get people to download an app to buy a physical product. But it's just kind of perfect because the shelf space never changed and people want something new. And so, you know, it was easy to take over, you know.

SPEAKER_152: How big is that business for you, can you say?

SPEAKER_153: This is our second year. We'll do a couple hundred million. Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_127: Okay, wait. So let me just, let me just guess about the math here. Chocolate bars. You said a billion views a month at $5 CPM. So it's 5 million a month for the video. So 60 million a year. And the chocolate bars will do 200?

SPEAKER_154: I mean, we're not really public about it, but it'll do a lot of revenue. I figured it out. They'll do something.

SPEAKER_156: More than a penny.

SPEAKER_83: What do you think about the success of Prime? You know, how do you look at that?

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, they're killing it. I mean, yeah, that's a great case study. It's just, you know, I, you never like two years ago.

SPEAKER_160: Revenue, right?

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, I don't know about that, but, or at least I can't say publicly, but I can say like, you never would have thought like, you know, tens of millions of kids or at least millions of kids would be so enthusiastic about a sports drink. You know what I mean? It's crazy. The kind of demand they've created, like kids literally collect prime bottles and then TikToks go viral showing off their collection of drink bottles that are like $3 or whatever.

SPEAKER_162: I can't if you got kids that do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: It's, it's wild. I mean, so prime was, was great because obviously it's a beverage and the more shelf space you get just naturally, the more sales, but they, it was more a lifestyle brand they created where just kids felt cool drinking it. And to the point where they would buy a 12 pack for like 15 bucks and then sell them for like $6, you know, a bottle at their school, which is like something that happens in almost every school in America. It's crazy. Still to this day after like a year and a half.

SPEAKER_68: One of the, one of the things that I think if you taste prime that it has is a ton of sucralose, right? So tastes super like bam, big mouth feel. Um, where's your thinking on like the line between nutrition versus just tastes good for

SPEAKER_25: the products you have and the products you want to build. Yeah. And where do you want to take that?

SPEAKER_40: Oh, great. Very important. That's why our chocolate, we only use four ingredients. Whereas Hershey's uses nine because obviously since we have this much influence, we don't want to just, you know, make people, whatever we sell needs to be better than what's currently on the shelf or then it's just a net negative. You know what I mean? Better for you, higher quality ingredients, et cetera.

SPEAKER_27: So, um, yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, that's kind of how I view it. And so what are these other areas and that just make maybe obvious sense if you could snap

SPEAKER_34: your fingers and just.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, I think the simplest thing, the more I like studied chocolate and see it, like we started with, well funny enough, we started selling dark chocolate, which 65% of kids in America don't even like. So that was kind of dumb, but I didn't know any better. So, I mean, the simplest thing is do milk chocolate, which is what we're getting into. And, um, you know, then just going down and maximizing chocolate, like doing Reese's cups and that kind of stuff. Um, so I, I, past chocolate, I haven't really thought about it because that's basically all I'm thinking about for next year.

SPEAKER_168: Okay. Do you think the candy business can be a billion dollar revenue business?

SPEAKER_40: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, look at Hershey's, what are they doing? 12 billion a year, Mars, tens of billions. I mean, in America alone, I think people spend $25 billion a year on chocolate.

SPEAKER_80: And there's no one in those companies building a Mr. Beast competitor.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's no one in those companies that build the companies.

SPEAKER_40: They're like a hundred years old. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: They're all dead.

SPEAKER_172: But yeah. Um, how do you, you must have a ton of inbound to do things outside of the Mr. Beast realm,

SPEAKER_97: Hollywood, et cetera. Yeah. How do you sort through all the inbound opportunities and then organize?

SPEAKER_63: Cause you could, I would suspect to be drowning in opportunity at this point with this level of notoriety.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Well, that's why we are where we are. It's because we just laser like focus on one thing for essentially my entire life. And so it's pretty easy. I just say no. Everything. And then, uh, yeah, cause it's like, you know, obviously for to make the view, the videos of the caliber we need, it's just like, that's been my obsession for the last 14 years, almost every waking hour of the day, just, you know, obsessing over, you know, every little thing. Like if even simple, like simple things, like when you click on a video, the brightness in the video matters. Like if it's a little too dark, people are more apt to click off and not watch it, you know, because not everyone has their phone screen brightness.

SPEAKER_178: You did something with your mouth being open or closed in the thumbnail and it changed click through.

SPEAKER_40: That was a new AB test. Well, the problem is whatever I do, a bunch of other people do. And I started opening my mouth and my thumbnails and it's kind of annoying. And then a bunch of other creators did it. And I was like, okay, we're not doing this anymore. So I switched them back.

SPEAKER_97: What's the budget on each video now? So every two weeks, how much money goes into that video?

SPEAKER_40: Um, I think right now it's around two and a half million per video. Okay.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah. That's like making an independent film every two weeks.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. But I mean, they, yeah, I don't think it's that crazy though. Cause they, they're getting like a hundred million views in seven days.

SPEAKER_40: So if anything, any other like median outside of social media that got that kind of viewership, their budget would be like 50 X, you know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_25: Do you think that you're building a library?

SPEAKER_68: Like, do you expect that the video that you created, you know, the Olympic games thing you did a few weeks ago in five years, that that'll still be, that'll have some value

SPEAKER_42: 15 years from now? Well, 15, I don't know, but five. Yes.

SPEAKER_40: Usually whenever we upload a piece of content, we'll get a couple million views a month for as of right now forever. But obviously eventually it'll probably die off. But they, they're usually pretty evergreen because right now, because we have the model where we're making money outside of YouTube so I can spend more. It's like you have this video, that's two and a half million dollar budget or like another video that's two and a half thousand dollar budget. And so right now it usually people end up just clicking on the cooler stuff.

SPEAKER_68: And then how do you think about the, just the axis of going outside the United States? So different languages, different countries, how do you, how do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_40: That's, that's the best part. So, I mean, as, as you know, we, we hired voice actors to dub our videos in every language. And I, I assume a lot of you guys here are content creators and the crazy part is only 10% of the world speaks English. So if your content is only in English, it's pretty hard to obviously reach most of the world, even subtitles, most people don't prefer it. But, um, so if you dub your videos, hire voice actors or whatever, um, your viewership will skyrocket. And so right now over half the people that watch my videos don't even speak English, which is pretty crazy. Um, and.

SPEAKER_97: Tell me about the relationship with YouTube and how that's evolved over the years,

SPEAKER_60: because I, I don't know they anticipated that, you know, the footprint of the top creators on YouTube would get so large. Yeah. Are, are they deeply involved in communicating with you or are they just like, Hey, we're a platform, post a video if you like it.

SPEAKER_40: It's that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_60: That's extraordinary to me.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. I mean, I kind of like it because then no one can say there's favoritism or they're helping us in any way. Um, but agree, like even when I was coming up, like, you know, people were getting 10 million views a video and that was like mind blowing and in their life cycle would be like a year and they fall off. So I don't, it's kind of crazy. I don't really know how we ended up getting this big.

SPEAKER_97: I mean, was there ever a thought to tell them I need to make, you know, a higher minimum per RPM and I'd like to cut a deal with you to hit these numbers and be treated differently?

SPEAKER_40: They'd be like, well, then everyone's going to want that. Cause if they do it with me, then they would open the floodgates. They would just tell me to spend less money. Got it. Interesting. Cause no one's forcing me to spend this much money.

SPEAKER_196: It's kind of the problem. Technically most people don't spend hardly any money.

SPEAKER_60: I mean, but there was a moment in time where Microsoft started stealing away some YouTubers and folks were their Twitch competitor. Did you get those kinds of offers? And then how did you evaluate them?

SPEAKER_40: Well, the problem is like, like I said at the start, you know, YouTube's where all the viewers are. So it's like, sure you can get a little bit of money, but ultimately the real game is if you can get a billion views a month for 10 years, you know, whatever, the amount of brands we could build is, you know, insane. Yeah.

SPEAKER_203: It is the great success of YouTube that they've hit this level of scale. Exactly.

SPEAKER_40: And the features and stuff on that, like YouTube is the only platform right now where you can upload a video in different languages. So if someone clicks my video in Mexico, I'll speak Spanish. Whereas if you click it in America, I'll speak English.

SPEAKER_193: That feature is in beta right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: Well, they rolled it out to other people, but on TikTok, Facebook, no other platform can you do that. So YouTube is the only place right now where you can actually have a global audience.

SPEAKER_63: Do you provide the voiceover person or is that done automatically? Yeah. Because they're working on an automatic version, I was told.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. For the first or the next two years, it'll probably sound terrible. But it's, of course, at some time in the near future, AI dubbing will, you know.

SPEAKER_204: We get hit up about that all the time for the all-in podcast.

SPEAKER_40: Right now, I've trained a ton of different voice models. They all sound terrible. But it is, you know, obviously getting better.

SPEAKER_205: Have you published any to see what the viewership looks like? Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: AI me versus like real voice actors. Yeah. We have. And it's usually like, so if it's a one-minute video and the retention with normal voice actors 45 seconds, it'll be like 42. But it'll also be a lot of comments like, why does he sound slightly off? So the retention isn't as bad as you would think, but it's still like- You can tell the quality score is lower. Yeah, exactly. Like to, if, the thing is like when you're using dubs, you're already at a disadvantage. Cause they can choose to watch someone in their native language or watch you with a guy speaking over your lips. And so if it's not as good as like, you're already down here a little bit worse. And then if you use AI dubbing, it's even worse. Like, so you know.

SPEAKER_80: I think video games are six times the revenue for movies today. Have you thought about video games?

SPEAKER_210: Have folks, I've got to assume folks have approached you. And how do you think about the video game industry? Cause you're, you have a lot of audience overlap, I've got to imagine.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. To be honest, I tried to build one. And then like six months in, I was like, oh, these things take years. And then I was like, I'd rather sell chocolate. So yeah, that was kind of the extent of it. I mean, obviously it's a no-brainer because it's much easier just to tell people to download it. Just click the link in the description and download it. But I've just found that, I don't know, it's like, I just keep going back to it. Making, you know, confectionery products is just so much more fun. And, you know, a hundred million people are walking to Walmart every month. And if you don't have a product there, there's nothing for them to buy. And so like, I just want to maximize that, getting something in every retailer in America first.

SPEAKER_68: One of the, one of the things that you've done is you've mentored younger content creators coming up. Who are people that you look at that are creating things that you think are interesting, whether it's formats or...

SPEAKER_40: I'm curious, how many of you guys make content out there? Like anything? Like anything? Okay. I mean, we do. Yeah. A little bit. I guess so.

SPEAKER_43: Actually, do you have any tips for us?

SPEAKER_127: Yeah. I mean, our viewership on YouTube is embarrassingly small compared to yours.

SPEAKER_43: No, one of the things he did first was he ripped apart our thumbnails. Oh yeah? He said our thumbnails were total shit. I mean, that... Remember? And we gave that to Nick.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. I mean, clearly it's working. I think that no one cares about you guys.

SPEAKER_42: Sometimes I think the big thing is like the value you guys provide and like that it's a... But should we not close our mouths now and thumbnails? Oh, you should.

SPEAKER_37: Are the mouths open? Yeah, the mouths are open.

SPEAKER_228: Oh yeah, I would close them. I mean, there's something different about each week of...

SPEAKER_78: Especially for this age group, definitely close them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_228: Well, no.

SPEAKER_232: I mean, there's... No one wants to see a... There's something distinctly different about what you do.

SPEAKER_228: Every week, it's something new. It's something original.

SPEAKER_60: We're trying to have a conversation, McLaughlin group kind of format. Of course. So I think some of those tips don't work. But our audience on YouTube I think now will exceed what we're doing in podcasting ultimately because it does seem that people like to watch us and put it on in the background. So we're seeing that. I think we have 380,000.

SPEAKER_40: You guys are doing great. To be honest, I remember when you first started it and I was like, oh, this is an interesting combo. But it works. And like, whenever something weird in the world happens, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go see what they think of it. It's like, it's cool.

SPEAKER_60: Where do you see this?

SPEAKER_40: We met Jimmy at Poker, by the way.

SPEAKER_64: Let's...

SPEAKER_40: Do you think we could...

SPEAKER_60: No, where do you think this is gonna be in 20 years? What, your podcast? You.

SPEAKER_239: No, I mean, we have an idea where this is going. I don't know where this will be in 20 days, I'll tell you.

SPEAKER_240: Actually, to be honest, the only thing in front of us right now are the Daily from the

SPEAKER_97: New York Times, a priest reading the Bible, and serial killer podcasts.

SPEAKER_245: Serial killer podcasts.

SPEAKER_97: I mean, it's really not much ahead of us.

SPEAKER_245: In all the podcasts or in news?

SPEAKER_246: In all the podcasting, those are the three ahead of us. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And just to build on J. Cal's question, like, are you being... Do you feel pressured to, like, elongate the content? Like... Yeah. Or have you... You feel like you've optimized now the amount of time where you maximize viewership?

SPEAKER_42: Well, yeah. I mean, that's actually something we've been focused on a lot recently.

SPEAKER_40: I think the problem is people are like, we waited two weeks, and it was just 15 minutes of content. They actually get annoyed when it's too short. So, we're working on elongating it, but not because of, like, algorithms or anything. It's just, like, people just actually don't like waiting two weeks for just 15 minutes of content. Like, they want more or more frequent videos. And the problem is the spectacles are so big, it's much easier just to make it longer than do a whole new one to, like, upload more. So, yeah. They're naturally getting longer and longer right now.

SPEAKER_60: I wonder if you did a behind the scenes on the off week... Yeah. ...and just had another group? Because I was watching the one you did where you were all on a, like, a raft. Yeah. And you decided to torture your team.

SPEAKER_36: We spent seven days on a raft in the ocean. I don't recommend it.

SPEAKER_60: I mean, it was torture.

SPEAKER_178: But a behind the scenes of that done by another group of video editors on the off week, I bet you would do as many views.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. The thing is, though, like, the mystery is part of what's cool. Like, how does this random YouTuber give a million dollars away to someone on the street or, like, things like that. So, part of it is, like, them not knowing how it's even possible is why it's so interesting and they click on it, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_80: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the point of view where folks say content creators on YouTube have an audience and that audience ages out, you lose that audience and how you've continued to be able to grow your audience? Yeah.

SPEAKER_210: Well, everything is... Even though some of the folks you started with have gotten older.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. It's just, like, the problem is, like, every... Advice is all... It's...

SPEAKER_40: There's no, like, one-size-fits-all advice. And so, like, obviously, if we're talking to someone who unboxes toys, you know, their audience is going to grow and there's nothing they can do about it.

SPEAKER_44: But, you know, for us, we ideally, you know, one day you guys aren't going to be like, oh, my kid loves you.

SPEAKER_40: You'll be like, I also like your content. But we try to make content that, you know, no matter what age you are, you'll enjoy it. So, usually they don't... Who you personally watch is Beast? Yeah. Oh.

SPEAKER_260: More than I ever thought. Oh, yeah. That's true. All right, everybody.

SPEAKER_102: Jimmy Donaldson. Mr. Beast. The timer is 25 seconds.

SPEAKER_264: Oh, we went over. We went over. We gave you extra.

SPEAKER_266: We're going to take questions from the audience. I'll take a question from the audience. All right. I flew out here for this.

SPEAKER_257: Let's do some more. Okay. I'm going to moderate the question.

SPEAKER_268: Raise your hand. How do you stay consistent?

SPEAKER_272: I'll repeat. I'll repeat it.

SPEAKER_106: I'll repeat it. Yeah, so he asked, how do you stay so consistent with what? With your execution.

SPEAKER_274: Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: He said, how do you be so consistent with execution spot on all the time? So, the thing is, you just have to obviously just train great people. Because, you know, if you're doing everything yourself, eventually you're going to burn out, get different interests, blah, blah, blah. And so, I actually, my top people, I bought a house and we all lived together for years. I just kind of trained them to think like me and, you know, see the world like me. And so, my top probably 12 people, 95% of the time, you know, if you ask them something and ask me in different rooms, we'll give the exact same answer. And the other 5% of the time will just be, like, very slightly different.

SPEAKER_276: How did you just throw away a video because you were unsatisfied with it? Oh, of course.

SPEAKER_181: All the time. That happens all the time. Yeah. So, out of 10 videos, how many would be cost?

SPEAKER_40: Well, the thing is, like, if you want to build viewership over time, if you want to go from 10 million to 20 million views a video to 30 million views a video, you just have to get it where every time they show up, they're happy. They feel like they got value out of it. It's like, it was worth their time and investment. So, yeah, if something's not good and they click on it, then they're less likely to click on future videos. So, you can only, yeah, to grow viewership like that, it has to be- Want to take a second one? Yeah, take one.

SPEAKER_279: Go right here.

SPEAKER_286: Thank you. Here, you repeat the question. I don't know how to repeat that one. It's not as easy as it looks, huh? That's how he does it.

SPEAKER_289: He would like to know how you're a normal person and you stay so authentic given this incredible-

SPEAKER_176: Keep your humility. Yeah, how do you keep your humility?

SPEAKER_40: And stay humble, yeah. Well, I think the beauty of it is I usually spend 99% of my time in my studio, so I don't really- Like, the 100 million number on the video just looks like pixels on a screen. Like, I don't really experience it that much, so I think that's kind of the best part.

SPEAKER_178: How do you walk through an airport these days or walk, you know, through a city? It is pretty crazy, huh?

SPEAKER_80: I was really worried about getting you here. I kept asking them, how are we going to get him through LAX? I don't understand how this is going to happen. Well, that's-

SPEAKER_44: The thing is, you throw a hood on and wear some glasses, and you're pretty good. You're pretty good, yeah. And you just don't talk on, like, talk out loud or anything like that. Yeah, I know. So- Same thing.

SPEAKER_40: All right, everybody, give it up for Jimmy Donaldson. Thank you. It was fun. That was awesome. Peace.