Translating the MrBeast/Joe Rogan interview for my sentient audience
I listened so that you don't have to – here are my thoughts
(In the spirit of Easter, rather than doing a segmented subscriber post, I thought I would just bang out some thoughts and then make it free to all. Thank you to all the people who’ve taken out paid subscriptions so far – once a month I will enjoy an oat milk flat white and think of you!)
I mentioned to my partner last week that I had been listening to Joe Rogan’s interview with MrBeast. “Who’s MrBeast?” she, an adult woman, replied.
I’ve been in the weeds of digital media for long enough now that the idea of not knowing who MrBeast is feels quote utopian, like Rousseau’s noble savage. If you’ve been on YouTube at any point in the past few years, chances are you’ll have encountered Jimmy Donaldson a.k.a. MrBeast a.k.a.k.a. the biggest multi-channel broadcaster on YouTube. Whether it’s asking his friends to keep touching a car for as long as possible (last to move their hand wins the car) or trapping strangers on a desert island and then offering the aforementioned landmass as a prize to the victor, MrBeast has had a huge impact on the YouTube ecosystem. He has, essentially, brought the budgets and prize pools of top cable TV game shows to the YouTube format.
Anyhow, a few weeks ago, Donaldson was the guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Long term readers of my blogs and newsletters will know that I am more than a little skeptical of Rogan, though, unlike many people, I can just about tolerate his interviewing style. Anyhow, I listened to the two-and-a-half-hour episode because I felt like there must be some instructive nuggets of digital media wisdom to be extracted from this powwow between two titans of new media. First, on MrBeast:
Even though his parents called him Jimmy, and I’m loathe to disrespect the Donaldson clan, I’m going to call him, throughout this piece, MrBeast. It’s a name that he adopted as a kid playing Xbox, and it’s the brand that now runs through all his enterprises, from his YouTube channels to things like Beast Philanthrophy and the Beast Burger (a controversial ‘ghost kitchen’ exercise that he set-up during the pandemic). He’s 23 now, raised in North Carolina, where he still lives. His main channel has 94m subscribers, making it approximately the 5th biggest YouTube channel (and second only to PewDiePie as a solo enterprise). But he also runs at least 12 other channels that make him YouTube’s biggest brand.
You might expect there to be some monopolistic genius behind all this, but Donaldson (ok, I am going to call him by his real name; I just can’t handle the handle schtick) is little more than young and enthusiastic. His passion for YouTube comes across, quite terrifyingly, in this interview with Joe Rogan. He has a monomaniacal focus on the platform, telling Rogan that he has scarcely watched any movies or TV shows (he has never, for example, seen a minute of South Park) in favour of scrolling through YouTube. He sees it all as market research for his data driven approach to what works best. What length video, what camera set-up, what thumbnail info: all of this is his bread and butter.
It would be possible, post hoc, to say that Donaldson has a genius for YouTube. But I think that analysis only makes sense in hindsight. He’s a nice kid, not super charismatic (as some of his competitors, like PewDiePie and Ninja, are), who basically spent the time he should’ve been at school working on videos. He doesn’t come across as super curious about the world beyond YouTube, and I’ve had pieces of gravel stuck in the wheel of my car that seem more cultured. That’s all not the point, though. He has an evangelical belief in YouTube, as a platform, and on the abilities of himself and his team to create in that space. And who am I to be sniffy about some of his assertions? I struggle to convince people to subscribe to my blog or newsletter, where we’re talking hundreds or thousands, let alone millions. So if he says that he believes his YouTube subscriber base could rise exponentially (and that there are secrets he’s learnt in the past couple of years which, had he applied them a few years earlier, could’ve given his channel half a billion subs by now) it would be arrogant of me to disagree.
And yet… I do disagree.
The reason that I disagree is that self-analysis is hard, and especially hard if you are someone who has risen very quickly, a tiny boat on a rising tide. I suspect that Donaldson, and many young guys/girls who have achieved success on social media, feel like they have put in a huge grind to get where they have. The reality is that this is a less than decade-long project for Donaldson, and the space between him taking it on full time and enjoying enormous success was a couple of years at most. The fact of that explosive success suggests to me that there were forces involved beyond the control of the protagonists.
It’s clear that Donaldson is good at what he does. You just need to look at some of his videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In Solitary Confinement”, one proclaims. “Going Through The Same Drive-Thru 1000 Times”, declares another. His most successful video – “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life” cost $4m and has 243,000,000 views (a larger number to Netflix’s total subscribers). These are all good ideas, well-executed. And he has the added benefit of not trying to make money (though he has undoubtedly made some) which allows him to just re-invest his ad revenue in these insane prize pools. “Last To Leave The Circle Wins $500,000” or “Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It”. Simple yet extravagant, almost the definition of Gen Z.
Donaldson describes his team as geniuses, and the process of coming up with these ideas as the most important part of his process. He repeatedly makes the claim that an unsuccessful YouTuber would almost certainly become successful, simply by access to his ideas. It’s not about the execution, he thinks, but about the ideas. When Rogan puts his ideas-brain on the spot with the prompt ‘dogs’ he comes up with ideas like (I’m paraphrasing), “I Adopt 1000 Puppies” and “I Give My Friend 100 Dogs To Look After”. Is it true that any old idiot, with access to ideas like these, could become a YouTube millionaire?
What’s clear to me, and anyone who looks for more than a second, is that the formula to Donaldson’s YouTube success is not a complex genius, but a simple one. Almost all his ideas can be boiled down to this: subvert viewers’ expectations, via scale. “I Put 100 Million Orbeez In My Friend’s Backyard”, “I Ate a $70,000 Golden Pizza”, “I Bought The World’s Largest Firework ($600,000)”, “I Adopted EVERY Dog In A Dog Shelter” (he’s actually already done that one). All of these ideas are just a very basic formula. Normal thing + massive quantities. I eat a pizza, but it costs the average annual household income of a lower-middle class American family. I buy a firework, but it costs as much as a 5-bed home in North Carolina. I adopt a puppy, but… well, you get the idea.
These ideas are so simple that I just cannot believe they are not replicable by enterprising young YouTubers, and therefore there has to be some special alchemy to the MrBeast enterprise. It might be as simple as timing: he was there first, and is reaping the spoils of early adoption. It may be that he has a very non-threatening demeanour, which has made him successful with younger audiences as the demographics of YouTube viewership have shifted in that direction in the past couple of years. And it may be that he went ALL IN – devoted his life and every cent he’s made to the pursuit of stardom, giving him access to the best production as well as the most lavish projects. Or it may simply be that, at some point in the years of his YouTube journey, that inscrutable thing, the YouTube algorithm, for some reason began to push his content. And why not? It’s safe, it’s popular, it’s not far-right propaganda (even if it does push the cause of consumerism slightly beyond what I’m comfortable with).
As for Rogan: I’m always fascinated by his success. He’s a pretty good interviewer, very curious and open to new ideas, though he has a tendency to insert himself too frequently as an authority voice, especially on subjects that he demonstrably knows nothing about (I enjoyed, particularly, hearing him explain the Turing Test to a befuddled Donaldson, during which he referred to one ‘Arthur Turing’).
But Rogan is a good counter-example to Donaldson. He’s been on the grind for decades (as he says in the interview, he lost money on The Joe Rogan Experience for many years), first on the comedy circuit (a weird idea, given I’ve never heard him tell a joke) and then enjoying moderate success with Fear Factor and MMA presenting. Global superstardom and the related riches came late to him. He’s 54 now, with a daughter who’s obsessed with MrBeast and right in Donaldson’s target market. But they’ve both enjoyed that game-changing, paradigm-shifting level of success now: what MrBeast has accomplished in the past few years with YouTube, Rogan has achieved with podcasting. If you were to plot the paths, they would look so different, but the end point is pretty much the same.
Rogan has a tendency to be credulous (a tendency that has got him in some hot water with his bankrollers at Spotify) and so he never really pushes Donaldson on his vaguer assertions, preferring instead to get into his particular bugbears and fantasies about virtual reality, haptic feedback suits and the metaverse. I imagine that there would be few things as revelatory in digital media as a true, impartial audit of the MrBeast success story (complete with access to his accounts!), but that was never what we were going to get from Rogan. Instead, there’s a fatherly tone to the whole discussion: wow, son, you’ve done something really cool.
But while the interview reinforces – as if it needs reinforcing – that YouTube is somehow managing to be a growing force in digital media, despite being around since 2005, it’s hard to extract lessons, rather than anxieties. I suspect that if the mentorship that Donaldson offers to aspirant YouTubers (and the quick ideas and tips he throws out) were really true, YouTube would be a less wild, more manageable place. But the reality is more complicated. YouTube is still a swirling swamp; the primordial soup of the next phase of the media. And it might be hard to admit if your life’s work has emerged from there, like a fish gaining its legs, but luck – or RNG, as the gamers say – plays perhaps the most important role.
Oh, and if you want to listen to the episode here it is. Til next time!