Colin and Samir Show: with MrBeast (Transcript)

All right, so I have a question for you. Can you describe to everyone watching where we are right now?

The $10 Million Studio Investment

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yes. So I got a mic on so I can move around. I just bought this brand new studio and 100 acres of land around it. And this is where we’re filming all our videos going forward. Not all, but all our indoor shoots going forward. I mean, ask me more questions. There’s so much to talk about.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: How much did this cost? And how long in the making has this been?

JIMMY DONALDSON: So the land around it, obviously the studio, the renovations and everything. And obviously we don’t pay it all up front, but in total, it’ll cost over $10 million. But it’s probably not a good way to start it because there’s so much explanation. People don’t… it seems excessive. Why would you just buy this? You know what I mean?

The reason we bought this is because, you know, I’ve spent the entire day explaining to you. We had an office and a bigger office, then a studio, then a bigger studio, then a third studio, and then… and now it’s consolidating. It’s a weird way to start it because now it just sounds like I’m being expensive and lavish for no reason when there’s a strategic reason why, you know what I mean?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, I mean, obviously, you started in your bedroom, right? At the cost of zero.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. But still, I’d love to work our way up, not just go, “Hey, look at this.” Because now I just seem like some dumb, rich YouTuber. You know what I mean?

Staying in His Hometown

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah. So not only are we here in your brand new studio, but we’re here in your hometown. And I think that’s been one of the most interesting things to experience is spending a day with you here, even spending time with your mom, even some of the places.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Context, that’s a fun sentence.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But even spending time here in your hometown. We’ve met people who grew up with you, which is really interesting. Everyone asks us, I think people know that we’re from out of town. So, okay, what are you guys doing here? And we’re like, oh, we’re filming some content. They’re like, oh, MrBeast, oh, I played baseball with him.

And it’s really interesting to meet people and recognize you are still in your hometown. And a lot of people who are from small towns in the US, they think, “I got to get out of this town to find success.” So why did you stay in this town and how do you think you found success staying here?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Honestly, it really was easier to just stay here. You know, as I started making the videos bigger and bigger and hiring people and I got warehouses and studios. You get so anchored down. Well, you’re just going to relocate all your employees to LA and buy a studio space there that costs ten times more.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Why?

JIMMY DONALDSON: You know, what are the negatives of being in a small town? I would argue with the Internet and things like Zoom, where you can talk to everyone and we’re so interconnected. There really is no need to pay 12% more tax because of… what is it? State tax in California. And then on top of that, pay three to five times more for rent and all this other stuff. It’s almost silly to be there for people in our position.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Did it ever cross your mind, though, that maybe you’re missing out on opportunity to collaborate?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Not really.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Never.

JIMMY DONALDSON: No. I mean, if you’re good enough friends with someone, they’ll come down like you guys came down here. If there’s someone I really want to hang out with, or I could just fly there when I need to. That bug’s going to annoy me. It’s dead now. Thank you. Thank you for getting rid of it.

But, you know, if I really want to hang out with someone, they just come down, you know what I mean? It’s a four hour flight.

The Power of Focus

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I actually think on the inverse, spending the day with you and shadowing what at least half a day looks like. I don’t even think we saw your full day. We met up with you in the middle of the day.

JIMMY DONALDSON: That’s true. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And it was boom, boom, boom. We were going thing to thing to thing. And I think what I realized was being somewhere like this, the positives actually outweigh the negative so much in that there’s so much focus. And you are really moving from thing to thing to thing. I think we watched you workshop about four videos in such a short amount of time.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And that I thought was one of the most interesting things. And just sitting there in those meetings, understanding how you’re thinking about what needs to happen and then additionally having the facilities and the team members who are ready to custom make things for the stories.

I don’t know if people realize. I didn’t realize. And I’ve been watching your videos. I’ve talked to you, we’ve interviewed you. I didn’t realize that every set is custom built for the video.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Based on… they have to come from somewhere. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But I mean, you would think that, okay, let’s reuse that or let’s, you know, we could… let’s see how many videos we can film in this set.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Gotcha.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But you know what I mean? It’s just part of the story. So you started in your bedroom?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yep.

Reinvesting Every Dollar

SAMIR CHAUDRY: At what point did you start investing into the videos at a different scale?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Great question. Literally the entire time. When I used to make a dollar a day, I saved up for months and I bought a microphone way worse than this microphone. And then I saved up for half a year and I bought a computer.

The whole time I was recording on my iPhone. So I was recording and editing on my iPhone when I first started. And then I got a microphone you could plug in. I got a computer to edit on. And then after two years of just filming on my phone, I had 100 plus thousand subscribers. But I still didn’t have a camera because those things cost 1,000 bucks. Or I was stupid. I didn’t realize you could buy a G7 for $400.

So then I bought a camera. And after that I bought monitors for my computer. I just kept going and reinvesting. And then I tipped pizza delivery people $100. And then I tipped a homeless man 10 grand. And then, you know, gave away cars, gave away houses, and “Last Hand to Take Hand Off, Million Dollars, Keeps It.”

And basically the entire time. So for the last eight or nine years, every dollar I’ve made, I just spent it the next month on content. And I just did that every single month. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. And here we are.

The First Big Giveaways

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You give away millions of dollars now, $500,000 at a time. Large sums of money. But when you first started giving away $5,000 or $10,000, it first started with $100.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Literally, even less than that. Donating 10 bucks to Twitch streamers and stuff like that. But the first real IRL one, I would order a pizza and I’d tip $100. I think I did three in that video. So it was $300.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But when it gets to $10,000, that’s when I think people… and I would imagine people around you, your mom, are probably like, “Jimmy, what?”

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Are you sure about that?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: What was her reaction to that?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, so I did my first brand deal. I’m sure you guys have heard the story, but for people that don’t know, I was offered $5,000 for a video. Well, this is when I was 19 and so much money. It’s like, “Mom, look, look.”

And I was like, “Double it, and I’ll walk outside, I’ll give it to a homeless person.” And they’re like, “No, you won’t.” I was like, “Double it.” And I was pacing around my neighborhood for three hours convincing this guy on the phone, “Just double the money. I promise the video will go viral and I’ll give it to a homeless person.” I was like, “$10,000 just looks better in a title. It’ll get more views. I promise your app will do better.”

And I ended up getting $10,000 and then gave it away. My mom’s like, “Why don’t you just give away $8,000, $9,000, keep $1,000?” I was like, “Mom, it’ll look better in the title, and it’s just better, you know?” And that’s basically that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah. How did you know that? You know, giving away $100, I guess it’s natural. But why does it make such good content? Why those things?

JIMMY DONALDSON: It’s something I’ve always enjoyed. Even when I was… I don’t say poor. I don’t over-dramaticize my story. You know, we weren’t ever poor, but I didn’t have as much money. If I saw a homeless person, I would open my wallet and give them almost all the money I had. It’s just fun, you know, because then you see the reaction, their face light up, stuff like that.

And so it kind of was just something I always enjoyed because there are so much easier ways to get views back then than having to give away money and less stressful stuff. But I just enjoyed it and I thought it was interesting to see people’s reactions and to try to… they’re expecting a dollar and you give them $100 and they’re like, “Oh my God,” you know?

So it’s kind of a mixture of what I thought was interesting, but also what I enjoy, if that makes sense.

Growing Up Obsessed with YouTube

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Were there other people when you were growing up making YouTube videos around you?

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, no, that was the biggest problem. I thought it was a freaking nightmare because people would tell me, “All you do is talk about YouTube. You’re too obsessed with YouTube. Get a life.” From 13 to 19, I never met anyone who cared about YouTube. Not even close.

And so I was so un-talkative. People thought there were problems with me because I just wouldn’t talk to anyone because all I would do is talk about YouTube. And after a while you realize no one cares. You just get labeled as the guy that just only likes YouTube. And so I kind of just didn’t talk at all.

And then when I was 19 and I had 10,000 subscribers, maybe it was 18. And that’s when I started meeting a few other YouTubers online. And I realized, “I’m not a freak. I’m just obsessed with YouTube and that’s okay,” you know? You just got to find other people that are like that.

Most people want to talk about stuff. South Park when you’re younger or when I was younger, cartoons or whatever. And I back then was figuring out how to dropship or how to better edit a video or stuff like that. Bring that up at a high school lunch table. Well, I guess now people care. Bring that up at a high school lunch table 10 years ago and see what they say. They’re like, “What the f* are you talking about?”

Early Content Analysis

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What’s interesting is I went back and I, you know, I did this a while ago, but I did it recently again where I go to oldest uploaded videos on your channel. You have some videos that are actually kind of similar to the videos we make, where you were talking about other creators and how they were…

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, back when I did Call of Duty Commentaries.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So you would play Call of Duty and then you would talk about other creators. I thought that was really interesting to watch.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Studied so hardcore. There’s, I don’t remember the YouTuber’s name, but some YouTuber’s ad revenue, he was hacked and it was leaked and it showed that he made like 300 grand over three years. And I made like two videos on that. And I was just so shocked. I was like, guys. And I remember telling everyone I know and they’re all like, who cares?

I was like, guys, YouTubers can make money. I thought it was just cool to be, did you know they can make money. I’m like a stupid teenager, really young. I was like, how is this possible? I was like, that’s so much money. That’s more than my mom makes, you know, in like so many years. And I was mind blown by it. And I would find stuff like that and just make videos on it because I thought it was cool.

Building an Early Community

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And some of those, you were uploading Minecraft videos, Call of Duty videos. Did you have a community when you first started uploading? Did you notice people in the comments that were the same people?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Not really.

JIMMY DONALDSON: There’s maybe like two or three people that would comment on each. And back then, which I think small YouTubers should do, is I would reply to every single comment. And so I think a few people caught on that I would always reply. And so some people would just be like, I wonder how long it’ll take for him to reply.

So that was a lot of my comments when I was smaller, but at least it kept them coming back. And it got to a point though, where I was getting hundreds a day and I was like, okay, maybe I shouldn’t spend an hour a day doing comments. And so I dialed it back.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What type of content did you start feeling like, okay, now there’s a consistent subscriber base coming back to watch these videos?

JIMMY DONALDSON: That’s a hard one. I honestly have no idea. It’s so long ago. It’s all like a blur. I just remember making videos and I remember being like, dang, everyone’s telling me, you’re stupid, you know, you’re very awkward. Why would you make it? There’s millions of people trying and I just remember being like, I don’t know. I just like it. I’m going to do this or I’m going to die trying.

Also, I was really a big pussy back then, but after just grinding year after year, there’s probably some blur between when I was 17, 18, 19, somewhere in there. It just started to get a little bit of views, you know what I mean?

Growing Up in North Carolina

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It seems like sports is probably the most accepted thing here.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It’s really the only thing, right?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s the accepted thing here. Everywhere you drive, it’s like a baseball field, there’s basketball court, soccer.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, we met someone today and they said they played baseball with you. And then they also said that Chandler was really good at basketball.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, that’s good. So maybe we’ll have to take him on next because I want him on tonight.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, I mean that looks good. We played basketball last night and I think they scored like two points.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Okay, okay, four.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: By the way, it finished 10-4.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It was me and Sapnap versus them and he scored like one basket. You saw me before this also.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I just want to say that I had a steal before the basket, so I had the assist.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Double highlight.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It’s interesting because it does seem like sports is the most accepted thing here, but you dedicated yourself to something completely different. And did you mind at all that feeling of everyone being like, what are you doing?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Of course. I mean, it’s weird. I think the problem is if you, I told this story years ago probably would have helped. It’s so much more acceptable now. Everyone wants to be a YouTuber. Everyone wants to be a TikToker. Growing up now, you can just tell by the people and the numbers and explosion of social media that it’s a lot more widely accepted. And also it might also be where I grew up in North Carolina, it’s different than LA.

But back then, it really just was a strange thing, you know what I mean? To want to dedicate your life to being a YouTuber and being that obsessed. And so for me, there’s probably zero people within a one hour radius of me that actually loved YouTube like I did and anything like that.

So it’s just if you wake up and every day you obsess over something and you live and breathe it and that’s what you think about, that’s what you do, that’s what you study on and off, that’s what you stay up every night grinding and no one else even gives a flying f* about it, it’s you just feel like a weirdo, you know, an outcast.

And I was also just dumb back then. I didn’t realize, oh, well, I just need to find different people. I thought, oh, my whole life I’ll just never enjoy talking to people. And then I met other YouTubers and then I started talking to them 10 hours a day. And then that’s when the channel really started taking off.

The Power of Community and Collaboration

SAMIR CHAUDRY: One thing you said to us yesterday, you sat and roasted some of our content, our videos, and it was so informational and educational for us. And it’s not stuff that you haven’t told us before, but being around it is so important, right? Sitting in your meetings and understanding. How important was that for you to develop a community online of friends?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, that’s just where you, imagine a world where it’s just you working solo and you work 12 hours a day, every day for a year, and you’re just grinding. You make a mistake, you learn from it, you grind, you make a mistake, you learn from it. And you do that for a year.

And then imagine a different world where you have four friends who are also equally grinding in something similar. Friend number one makes a mistake on Friday, he teaches the other four people. Friend number two makes a mistake the next week, teaches everyone. And then you’re all learning from each other’s mistakes. You’re all constantly studying 24/7 and downloading each other. After a year, you’re two years ahead of the guy who was just solo. It really does make a difference.

Especially my friend group when I was, I met a bunch of people and I had 10,000 subscribers and we all agreed not to drink, we didn’t do drugs, we didn’t date, we didn’t do anything. We just literally obsessed from the time we woke up to the time we went to bed. That’s literally all we did. It’s wild.

I’ve told this story before, but for people who didn’t listen to our other podcasts, one day I literally got up and we had an 18 hour Skype call and then I went to bed and that’s all I did. And we were just tearing apart YouTube videos, studying trends and stuff like that. I don’t even know how I got food. Pretty sure I was just ordering food so I didn’t have to leave my house so we could keep working. It was that level obsession. It was just dumb. It was so unhealthy.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you still talk to some of those people?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, I talked to all of them. Well, not all of them. I talked to most of them.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Are any of them here in person with you now?

JIMMY DONALDSON: No. One of them, his name’s Dylan.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Dylan, the guy I talked to? He was, yeah, I thought about him for the next week after that, after I chatted with him. Yeah, he’s super sharp. I told Colin about him too.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, he’s really sharp. Yeah, I like him a lot. And so he’s always been kind of my sounding board. And if I have a question, I’m like, I don’t know what to do, he’s usually pretty good at helping me think it out. I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours talking to him over the course of the last six years. It’s wild.

Building a Team

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I think what’s interesting is that, you know, you made all of these friends and you had to Skype them, right? No one was here with you in person. But when we were spending time with you yesterday, I mean, there’s people everywhere. Serious organization.

JIMMY DONALDSON: That was back when I edited my videos, set them all up, tore them all down, did literally everything all by myself. I didn’t have a single employee until four years ago.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Personally, for me, I’ve had a, it’s been tough for me to add employees because I have a hard time giving up control and I don’t understand. I don’t always know how to manage. I feel like that’s a really good strength of Samir’s. How did you go from even just making that decision to hire one person?

JIMMY DONALDSON: It was brutally hard for me, man. The first one was just an editor. And even then, it’s because I’m so particular in how I wanted it. And I also didn’t have office or anything when I first started. So I just set up a computer in my room and he would come over and edit the videos after I finished, and I would just watch him edit. And then I’d just be like, why’d you cut that? Why did you cut this?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s every editor’s dream, is to have someone sit there.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I know, I know. But I was like, well, you know, every YouTuber says it. It’s no one will ever be able to replicate my style. I got to edit it. But newsflash, someone can. It’s actually not as difficult as you think. But back then, you know, I’m a teenager, I didn’t understand that.

At the start, it was just a lot of micromanaging like that. But even then, it still freed up so much time because I just kind of got to the point where I was like, I can’t stand editing. I had edited probably a thousand plus videos in my life at that point. Between that channel and other things I had done, I was just like, I just don’t want to do this. I just want to make videos.

And so that first one, and then I just was like, oh, why don’t I bring, I think I did a video where we smashed 4,000 plates, dropped them to see how they break. And it’s like, well, I’m going to hire just someone to help me pick up these plates and, you know, hire someone to help with this. And then it just, you know, I started with two or three people, and then every month I just hire someone else as the videos got bigger. And here we are four years later.

Reinvesting Everything

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Almost every podcast I feel like you’ve been on or every time you talk about YouTube, you always talk about how you reinvest everything back into the channel.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Literally everything.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And I think spending time with you here, what I notice is that’s actually not just money, it’s time. You also reinvest all of your time.

JIMMY DONALDSON: You got to live and breathe. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You invest all of your time into it. And I think that’s something that is beneficial of being where you are, is that you have that ability. And then also the concept of hiring is just so that you have more time to invest.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

The Philosophy of Hiring and Growth

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. And that’s where a lot of people, again, the thing is, everyone has different priorities. You know, if you want to make a few hundred grand a year and just coast or whatever, like, not everyone has ambition and stuff like that. But if you really do want to be the best you can possibly be, be the biggest YouTuber, you should look at hiring as a way to free up your time so you can do more important things.

And even then, hyper optimize every little minute. And anything that isn’t work, you should outsource to someone else so you can recharge, so you can work again. You know what I mean?

From Bedroom to Studio Campus

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So we also went to multiple spaces while we were here. When did you start filming? Or when did you get your first space outside of your bedroom?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, that’s a hard one. I mean, the videos just kept getting so much bigger. I can’t tell you which video. But if you watch my videos, when I stopped filming in my room and I started filming outside, it gets so hot here. I don’t want to just film outside. And I burn so easily.

And so then we got, there’s like an old firefighter building or whatever. Like, the floor was yellow. It was hideous. There’s two garage doors, and a fire truck used to come in and out. That’s where we, our first ever studio. It was a really small warehouse.

I started off in my bedroom, like we talked about earlier. And then I got a little office building, like one room. Basically, it’s two rooms. They weren’t really that big. And then we all grew that in like three months. And, you know, my mom told you guys the story yesterday.

And then I got a bunch more office space, like four or five offices. And then I got like a little warehouse. Then I got a bigger warehouse, and then I got kind of like a campus, like two warehouses. Because the videos are getting so big, and you have to work on multiple videos at a time, because most of our videos take months to produce, and I don’t just upload two or three videos a year.

So if you’re working on like five videos at a time and one of the videos takes up an entire warehouse and another video takes up an entire warehouse, well, then you can’t work on the other three because two warehouses are full. So then that’s what led us to getting this big place, because it’s so huge, we can work on multiple videos here at the same time.

Just for you YouTubers that are wondering, how do you get to this point? It’s usually a slow snowball.

The Financial Philosophy: Make Money, Spend Money

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You know, when you’re first starting, you’re saying, okay, I’m now making X amount of money. I can spend X amount of money on my videos.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’m saying, I made money, I spend money.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yes.

JIMMY DONALDSON: All of it, forever.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: The thing that we not only realized from talking to you, but actually sitting with your mom and looking at—

JIMMY DONALDSON: I showed them my finances.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Jimmy sat us down and showed us his finances, which was amazing. It was so educational. But the thing that is—

JIMMY DONALDSON: I showed him how I lost half a million dollars on a video.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So you go from making money, spending money to making money, losing money on—

JIMMY DONALDSON: Some videos, on some videos to make money to make up for it. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So I guess I was going to ask you, when did you get that comfort level of saying, I’ll actually spend, I’m okay with that?

JIMMY DONALDSON: The entire time. The entire time. Ever since I was 13. I mean, even though I wasn’t monetized at 13, I don’t think I got monetized till I was like 15 or 16. But ever since I got my first YouTube paycheck, I just always spent it back on YouTube.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Was that because the belief was distribution is the most valuable thing?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I just wanted to be the biggest YouTuber I could be. Not like, I mean, I don’t know, I’m a dumb 15-year-old. All my friends play, what is it? Balloon Tower Defense class and talk about that. I don’t know. I just want to make better videos and then, and I just want to make better videos. And I mean, now I’m a lot more strategic. But back then it was just, I just want good videos, you know.

Growing Up and Money

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What was your relationship to money when you were growing up?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I mean, it’s hard because I don’t want to overplay it, you know. It’s not like I was worrying where my next meal would come from. But we weren’t the most well off. There, it was very quickly came to a point where I was making more on a single brand deal than my mom made an entire year. She was raising me and my brother and sister and stuff like that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But did you desire money when you were younger?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’ve only want money so I can make better videos and grow my channel. Yeah, but it’s, no, I mean, dude, the type of stuff I do now is would have been unfathomable to anyone back when I was younger. So unfathomable. It’s crazy.

If you told me when I was 15 that one day I’d make $100,000 a year, I would have been like, what the f*? Yeah, that kind of money. Right. I thought it was crazy that a YouTuber made like $300,000 over the course of a few years, you know. It was pretty brutal. A few hundred bucks was out of this world insane back then, you know? Yeah.

Losing Half a Million on a Video

COLIN ROSENBLUM: The video we talked about yesterday where you lost half a million dollars on that though, when you look at that number, does that worry you?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, no. I mean, at the end of the day, I could spend less for videos if I want to. I’m just focused on making the best videos possible, period. I don’t care about making money. I don’t care about time. I don’t care about anything. I just want to make the best videos on the planet.

But at any point, if I was, oh, I need to stop losing money, just, you know, don’t spend a million dollars on the next video. Just spend $100,000. Yeah.

The Modern Day Movie Studio

SAMIR CHAUDRY: One thing Colin and I were talking about yesterday after we left, we were like, this is, I think Colin mentioned to you that this feels like the modern day movie studio.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Right?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We’re going into creative meetings, we’re listening to development, we’re understanding production problems that you guys are trying to solve.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: U-Haul drove in here this morning.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And we didn’t even, we didn’t even feel like there was something in here. There was a huge truck in here and we just went about our, I guess.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, that’s normal. That’s normal here. That’s fine.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, that’s funny. Did they come to get stuff from movie? Yeah, they came to pick up stuff.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But it’s a modern day movie studio. But you’re actually even at spending $200,000 for what you’re making for the type of distribution you’re getting, it’s actually way less than what TV is spending.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, it’s interesting too, because if I go to them, I’m like, hey, just for fun, you know, I’ll ask, hey, you want to give me some money to produce a TV show? No. It’s like, oh, okay, I guess I’ll just, hey, I have no interest, that type of stuff. But it’s funny because sometimes I poke at them to see if they’ll give me money.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And no one is.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I guess they just don’t believe that I can do dope stuff with a million dollars. Even just something as simple as a million dollars an episode to just go give away money to people. Yeah, they’d be like, no. It’s like, I spend that most my YouTube videos at this point. And I know it would kill it for them. Yeah.

But I mean, at the end, I just want to be a YouTuber. I don’t really care to do that type of stuff. But, you know, it’s always fun to be like, hey, Netflix, how much would you pay me?

Building a Team

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I mean, part of seeing all the different spaces was we met all these different teams. It felt like there were so many different departments, so many different teams that we met. And everyone, first of all, is incredibly nice here. Everyone has been so nice to us. We feel incredibly taken care of. But outside of that, everyone is such, you’ve curated a team of people who are just so hardworking.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: It’s all about the work. Yeah, there’s no fluff.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’m blessed. I agree. We got a lot of great people here. And obviously, you know, the videos we do where now I’m drawing a blank, selling houses for a dollar, putting a million Orbeez in someone’s backyard or whatever the stupid things are doing, or filling a person’s house with slime. I can’t do that on my own. Obviously, I need help. So, yes.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So how did you go from hiring one editor to hiring the next person, the next person?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Literally, just, it’s not like I just woke up one day and I have dozens of employees. It was just, I’ve literally just been hiring a person a month for the last four years. You know, as the videos, because it’s also not like, you know, I gave a homeless guy $10,000 and then, you know, the next day I’m buying everything in five stores, you know, and needing 100 people to fill dozens of U-Hauls and stuff like that. It was just a slow progression up. And along the way, we just pick up a person and another person, another.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How do you find people? Because I think that’s something that YouTubers have a really hard time with.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t really know. I mean, I’ve been doing, like I said, four years. It’s a very, very, very slow grind hiring all these people. Honestly, there are way more qualified people for that. If someone knows how to find great talent, please reach out to me. I’ll pay you.

Creative Meetings and Retention

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, I personally loved the creative meetings. I thought those were the most interesting to be in. Just the way you guys are thinking and the way everything has to fit together and you’re thinking obviously very much in terms of retention, but your whole team is also thinking the exact same way.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

The Competitive Landscape of Digital Content

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And the problem solving you guys are doing is so specific to, you know what I mean? It’s not problem solving that if you walked into a movie studio that they’re thinking about. And I think actually that’s some of the problem with what’s happening in Hollywood is that they are thinking about the fact that something on Netflix is competing with one of your videos.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Do you know what I mean?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: When I’m watching an Internet video, whether it’s Netflix or YouTube, you’re on the same playing field, so you actually have to compete in the same.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, I mean, I’m sure they shoot for retention as well. We’re very, very serious about it, though. I don’t like using cinematic shots or, you know, unless, like, you have multiple cam setups here. If I’m talking to this camera and you’re not cutting it for too long, that’s boring. You’ll lose retention.

But if I talk and you cut to that angle I’m talking, I come back, you know, it helps it. And it’s not bad to be obsessed. If people aren’t clicking up, that means they’re entertained, you know? So I’m hyper obsessed with just making sure people actually like what they’re watching.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I think the thing is, though, Netflix sure cares about retention, but they’re grabbing content from all over from people who aren’t basing all of their data and analytics off 10 years of just uploading to Netflix.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Right, right.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: And that’s what’s entirely different about creating for YouTube, is that you’re taking the metrics from one place and have been for the last decade or more.

The Ten-Year Mindset

JIMMY DONALDSON: It just gets op when you just do it and you just study year after year after year after year and you learn from every mistake and you have other people doing it and you’re teaching each other. If you want to be a YouTuber, if you’re watching this, right, and you’re thinking the scale of 10 years, if you literally are grinding and you’re obsessed and you’re just every day studying and learning, you surround yourself with smart people and you just work like hell to be honest, for 10 years, there’s probably a good chance you’ll make it.

But if you do that over the course of six months or a year, I don’t know, you know. But that’s why I like to think over a span of a decade. A lot of people are very short term sighted. But you know, as long as you’re innovating, adapting, reinvesting, I think if you do it intelligently, you have a good odds of, I don’t know, killing it, you know?

Mastering the First 40 Seconds

SAMIR CHAUDRY: After we hung out yesterday, I went back and watched the FBI video again. And I watched the first 40 seconds and I was sitting with Colin showing him a lot of what we talked about I was seeing in those first 40 seconds and I was like, you really do all those things. And those first 40 seconds were so jam packed and you introduced so many new things, so much new stuff between both the visuals too.

I mean, even the concept that you say in the first 40 seconds, first of all, the visuals are already changing. But you also say there’s an NFL stadium, there’s a private jet, there’s a maze.

JIMMY DONALDSON: This is why you should watch the video. Yeah. See these things. And the thing people undervalue the most is literally the first 10 seconds of the video. I can almost, I think I can quote it. “I tied up an FBI agent. I have $100,000 in this bag. Here’s the knife, good luck.” And I just run away. It gives you everything you need. No wasted words. Short, concise, and then tension.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How much time do you spend on those openings?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’m a perfectionist. I really, it’s so important. That’s your first impression for everyone clicking on the video. So the whole time leading up to that, I’m just constantly obsessed with mostly the first minute. Just making sure, if I were to click on this video, I would like the first minute and that it would hook me, you know what I mean?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You had a video of ours that you said you were interested in. The thumbnail. You clicked on it. You were bored after five seconds.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Tell you it was the one about the Hype house. “Why everyone’s leaving the Hype house.” And I showed them on my phone. I was like, the title and thumbnail made me tap. And the red bar was like so tiny you could barely see it because I clicked off in eight seconds. I was like, this is me in my house four days ago before you came down. Clearly you just didn’t grab me.

The Importance of Honest Feedback

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That was really eye opening for us. And we now recognize, I think a lot of times you talk about obsessing over the content and really getting into it. And I think sometimes it’s hard to understand what that exactly means. And then when you said that, I was like, oh, that’s what it means. It literally means that there’s a, there was a big problem. And you predicted that about 40% of the people left in 12 seconds. It was exactly 40%.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I could tell. Yeah. And I told them the remedy for this is they need better friends. 100%. No offense to people that are their friends. I know that they like you, but the fact that no one’s calling you up after you uploading that and just roasting the hell out of and going like, “Dude, this isn’t the best you could do.”

And it’s not a knock on you guys. It’s actually them. Someone should say, “Hey, you guys are too smart for this. You’re better than this. You can make a video better than this,” which is what you should do.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And I think that that is what I was going to bring.

JIMMY DONALDSON: You have their phone number. Call them. Say that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Call us right now.

JIMMY DONALDSON: You watch a video and it’s not f*ing perfect. Call them and say, “Hey, this is garbage. Here’s why. Fix it.”

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You can also DM us.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: If you’re a friend and you’re watching, that’s on you. That’s not on us.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Even my FBI video. My team is working on that for months and whatever. We probably spent over half a million dollars between everything. And I uploaded, I’m like, this is a perfect video. It’s so good. We’re so perfected. And then, you know, I have two or three people that call me and they just s* on it. And I’m like, oh, that kind of hurt my feelings.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I’m like.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But he’s right, you know. This part was a little fake. This scene was a little drawn out. Could have done this a little bit better. And it’s like, that’s what you need. No matter. There’s no such thing as a perfect video. Someone should always call you and s* on your video because it could be better.

That’s because imagine if someone does that every video, and you upload hundreds, if not a thousand videos over the next 10 years. And every single time someone’s critiquing you and you’re applying what they’re critiquing. Imagine the compound effect over that time span. It’s invaluable. But if you upload 100 videos and very few people are s*ting on them, then you just lost so much compound effect.

The Power of Checklists and Accountability

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Something you told us yesterday is that we need to have a checklist of all the things that need to be checked off.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Because I talk to him quite frequently, and every time I give him the same advice, and he’ll apply some of it, and then he’ll revert back. And I’m like, God dang it. Put it on a checklist so I can tell you the things to do. And then going forward, just check them off before you upload a video. So you do it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, we talked about that today. Because one thing that we realized was everyone on your team also is holding you accountable for some of those checklist items. And that’s when we were like, oh, we need our team to hold us accountable.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Because sometimes I’m like, no, that’s, that doesn’t actually matter. That would be an extra two hours of work. And they’re like, yeah, that would help retention. Yeah. They’re like, who the f* are you? Well, you don’t want the perfect video. I’m like, you’re right. You’re right. Let’s do it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That was the thing that I think I was so excited about in those creative meetings was everyone was on the same page. It wasn’t just like, hey, whatever Jimmy says.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And I thought that was really cool.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Because I’m not an omnipotent being. I need pushback. I need people to, there are people with better ideas than me, you know. The op things about hiring people is, you know, if you’re editing a video, you can probably only devote 20% of your time to it or whatever, 30%, 40%. If someone else is editing it, and that’s their job, they can dedicate 100% of their work time to it.

So since they have three times the amount of time to edit that video, they should be able to edit it better than you, even if it’s only 20% better, because they have more time. Same with thinking creatively or building sets or doing anything. You have, as YouTubers, especially people who build side businesses and have side channels, there’s 50 things that need to be done, and if you split your time amongst it, they’re all only getting a few percentage of your time.

So someone should be able to do that job better than you because they’re giving it a hundred percent of their time. And that’s the op part about hiring people, which is obvious, you know?

The Evolution of Hiring

SAMIR CHAUDRY: When you first started hiring people, it sounds like you hired people for the execution. Right. I filmed the video. I need it edited so I can move on to the next thing.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And then I was like, I don’t like moving boxes.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Sure, yeah.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’d rather move videos, but I need.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I need this to move from here to here.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. One of our first people is literally just, he just did grunt work. He would just move boxes. He was happy as can be. Pick up a box, move it, or I need this thing or whatever.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: When did you then start hiring people for, to look forward to other videos.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Right.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So not just stuff that you’ve shot and needs to get done or production.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Slow progression. Slow. I mean, yeah, because I’m, I’m sure, just three years ago, we probably came up with what we were going to film the week before.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Got it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Planning months ahead and working on, because, you know, if I’m burying myself alive, I can’t do that next week. Right. Or I could now because I’ve done it. But when we first came up with the idea, that’s something that takes 100 days. You got to build the coffin, you got to carry it for 10 days to make sure it works. You got to figure out how to get air into it and the medic and all that type of stuff. Then make the area look nice so it’s pretty on film and figure out lighting.

So it’s just the videos just slowly got more, more complex. And obviously I just had to bring people on to figure it out.

Planning Ahead

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How far in advance are you planning?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Do you know, Tariq? Just how far out is the calendar? Isn’t it three months? Yeah. Right now it’s not too far out. Three to four months.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: So yesterday though, we went to three creative meetings back to back about three videos that are pretty much immediately in production.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, right. We’re going to spend, I’m going to spend 100 hours alone on island. It might change, I might pussy out. But as of right now, I’m going to spend 100 hours alone on island.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That one, it sounds crazy from the creative meeting we were in.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And then a different video for half a million dollars that I don’t want to spoil. And what was the third one we talked about?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: It’s the escape room.

The World’s Hardest Escape Room

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh yeah. And then I’m going to attempt the world’s hardest escape room.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And that one, that’s the one specifically where we were like, oh. Because it’s the world’s hardest escape room. Each room is part of the story. So each room needs to be custom built exactly based on retention.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Based on. We scouted all the best escape rooms. They’re pretty terrible. So we just decided to build our own so we can make it epic. And obviously since I’m building it, I’m not the one doing it. But when you guys see the video, well, you guys know. But it’s a pretty cool twist.

Retention Strategy: Introducing Side Stories

COLIN ROSENBLUM: When it comes to retention, obviously there’s things you can do in the first 30 seconds, the first minute. Are there checklist items you have to get people to 10 minutes to 15 to 20?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. I mean it’s very hard with a single storyline if you’re doing like a double digit minute video to just have that one thing drip their entire attention throughout the whole video and pay off at the end. So typically if you’re doing a longer video, you should introduce like a side story and like re, you should have some plan halfway through like to re-engage them so they don’t just get bored.

If I just said like if I hand you a camera, it’s like, okay, if he tags me, he gets $100,000 and then I just run and that’s it. It’s just me running through the woods and him just running through the woods after me. You can’t make a 15 minute video out of it. You know what I mean?

But if I do that and then like three minutes in I pull a lever and a bear comes out and starts chasing him and he has to get away from the bear. I don’t know. Obviously we wouldn’t do this, but kill the bear and then he starts chasing me. And then six minutes in I jump across the lake and as he goes to jump through, I press a button that shoots him to the moon, whatever. You know what I mean? Like now all of a sudden it’s interesting and you’re watching. Right. And that’s it. Right. One is just a single story and it’s boring. The other has side stories that re-engage people.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So that like introducing other narratives.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, actually, you know how we were talking about Dylan earlier? Yeah. He just said, “I’m getting close to 70%. I’m almost a decent YouTuber.” Did he send me a grab or. His new video had 65% retention.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Oh, wow.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I told him if he doesn’t get 70% retention on a video, then he didn’t do something right.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Well, I don’t even want to pull up our retention.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, 70%, that’s what you need. If it’s below that, figure out how to get higher.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We’re probably at like 40% right now. So we got some work to do.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: We were talking earlier. A lot of times our videos will be like, this video is about this, this, this and that. And we were like, well, what if we actually held one back? And at that four or five or six minute part we’re like, “And the one thing we didn’t tell you was this.”

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: And then all of a sudden it like takes another direction.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But I also think the thing you said that I think is important is that it’s not always just a bear that you have to bring in as a dual narrative. It also could be like you mentioned the visuals. Right. In a lot of our videos we have like really fast moving visuals, custom animations. That’s what makes it interesting.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Like if you’re not a creator who’s doing maybe bigger stunts or anything like that, and you are explaining things, your visuals can be bigger.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It can be as simple as an ant crawling on your skin and biting you. I don’t know, like, it doesn’t have to be big.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Or in the case that we were talking about, some of these shorts creators are gaining massive viewership by making subway sandwiches or making ice cream and telling stories.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Shout out to Milad.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Shout out to Milad and Dylan Lemay. They’re like, I mean, 82 million views, making ice cream and telling a story.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. So it’s like, there you go.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s visual. It’s interesting. And there’s another narrative where he’s telling a different story about.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I mean, you could probably paint a bowling ball and people would find it entertaining. Like there’s an audience for everything. You got a good personality, you’re passionate and like, you know, you present it in a way where it’s entertaining. Like people will watch it. I’ll watch anything. At this point, we’re all messed up in the head.

Multiple Narratives in React Videos

SAMIR CHAUDRY: One great example of adding other narratives is your reacts channel. I think it’s really interesting because you guys are. I watched your parkour reaction.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And you and Chris are reacting, but at the same time, Nolan is losing money when Chris says a word he can’t say. And so it’s like, already I just said something. That’s multiple narratives that are happening at once that are. There’s the visuals of the parkour which are already really interesting. There’s your reaction, then there’s Nolan losing money.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. And then the payoff at the end where you’re like, well, how much does Nolan make? Exactly. My favorite one is on the reaction. We do this thing where it’s the video started the video, it’s Chris and his grandma. And I go, “Every time Chris laughs, he lose $500.” And then we kick his grandma out of the room and I show a bunch of TikToks and then, you know, you watch to see how much his grandma makes.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Is reacts your most profitable channel?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Most profitable? Well, it depends how you quantify that and percentage like expenses revenue or by total revenue expenses to revenue expenses. Then yeah, reacts because it doesn’t cost much. And so anything we make off reacts, I put in the main channel, which is how we kind of got here.

Because I got to the point where the main channel would make hypothetically a few million dollars and I’d spend a few million dollars a month. And I was like, well, how can I get more money to burn? And so then we started gaming. And then gaming started making money. And I’d take that money and the next month throw it on the main channel and I’ll say, oh, this is working well.

And then we started react. So now we just take a few hundred grand a month from that would just throw it on the main channel. Yeah, I’m just like, these things exist just to pump money into the main channel.

The New Studio Space

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So pretty soon when this place is done, everyone will be in here and everything will be in here.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Not everything.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Not everything. Okay.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Even this place. Like, because we’re working on many videos on the main channel at the same time, we’ll be able to cap out at like 2 or 3. And so we’ll still have to use our other studios once, like I told you before, we’re going to build an expansion of this out back and have basically two of these. Then we’ll potentially be able to do them.

Because like, if we did World’s Hardest Escape Room, I mean, it’s probably going to take up all this space behind us. And then, you know, if we did like a would you rather style video, would you rather have a Lamborghini or a house? You know, like, and then we built sets that probably take up that side. And then if the third video after that’s like eating the world’s largest slice of pizza, well, this place is full. But at least, like, even just doing that though, is revolutionary for us.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Right, but who will be here? It will be now, like creative accounting, HR.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, exactly. All the people that helped me pull out these videos. Yeah, it’ll be beautiful.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What’s the, I guess, workplace culture that you hope to create when everyone’s in the same place?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, that’s a hard one. I don’t even know. I just want to make the best videos possible. A culture that helps get that. And I, you know, hopefully one day, you know, as we build up other companies and things go well, like make tons of money and everyone who helps me get there, I just want to make them rich as hell, to be honest. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Is there going to be a basketball court here?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Inside? No. Outback, probably.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I mean, there is a hoop.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Like half the boys that are here play basketball. It’s funny.

How Tariq Joined the Team

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How did you meet Tariq? Because he grew up in the area, right?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, that’s a funny story. Tariq, come on in. Come here. So here you go.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Tariq, Tariq, Tariq, Tariq. Welcome to the show.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Basically, this is before I had any employees. I was like, I need people to help me with just do these videos. I just need help. And I don’t know why my 19 year old peanut brain, I was like, or maybe I did have like two or three employees, but I was like, comedians are funny. Like, comedians would probably be like, they’d probably be fun to work with. They’d probably be very helpful. Maybe he’ll make me funnier. He’ll rub off on me.

And so I went to a comedy show and Tariq was doing comedy and like a bunch of other people were doing comedy there. And all the ones that made me laugh, I just was like writing down a notepad. And then after the comedy show, I just walked backstage and they’re just like. And I walked up to people and I was like, “Yo, you’re funny. You want a job?” And we’re like a YouTuber in North Carolina. They’re like, okay. And I was like, no, look, I’m a YouTuber. And then I somehow managed to drag him to my.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How many subscribers you have at that time?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Like a million? Yeah. Yeah, like 1.1 million. And so they came over, you know, I filmed a few videos with him and some of the other guys, and then he was like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I just got a job at the hospital. I went to college for this. I got a hospital job in a month.” And I’m like, “Tariq, be my cameraman. I swear to God, I will. Like, this channel will blow up. We’ll hit 10 million subscribers. I’ll make you rich.” And he’s like, yeah. And he’s like.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Hospital.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And so then Tariq left for a year. For him specifically, this is his story. And then a year later, like, you know, and this now I have quite a few employees for like, six, seven million subscribers. Tariq, maybe not that high. Maybe like three or four. And Tariq’s like, “Yo, I hate working at the hospital.” And he’s like, “I’m miserable.” And I’m like, “Well, you’re in luck. I still want you. Get your butt over here.”

And then he started, like, he’d go to the hospital and then work at night, and I was like, “Yo, I want all your time, like, quit.” And, and, you know, his family wasn’t the keenest on that, but I was like, “Ah, you’ll be fine.” And here you are. Yeah. And here you are. He was like, editing in my attic and stuff like that back in the day. Yeah, at the attic, the yellow floor, because the studio was for filming, and then there’s just an attic. It’s like, all right, we got an editor, babe. And we installed AC.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So how many years have you been here, Tariq?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Coming up on three. Three years. Two and a half years now. Yeah. Could have been three and a half.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What’s your perspective of the difference between when you first started to being in a space like this?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, man. Like, just experience. And seeing him grow, too. Like, I joined when Jimmy, I think, was 18 or 17 at the time. So that was. That was cool to just see. When I first reached out.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You.

The Early Days and Unwavering Belief

JIMMY DONALDSON: I was 19. Yeah. Because three years ago, I was 20. So that’s when I first started. Yeah. And just seeing him grow and seeing his motivation stay that motivated, at least me personally did, pushing so many people when I brought him on back then, they’re like, yeah. I was like, we’re going to be the biggest YouTube channel ever. I was like, I don’t care. I’ll die trying. I’m going to obsess and grind.

And they’re always like, you know, eventually you’ll get burnout. Eventually he’s going to slow down. He can’t just grow like this forever. I was like, no. And so there were a lot of good people back in the day, but it’s hard to put your bet, your entire life and everything on a 19-year-old that honestly is socially on YouTube. Yeah, on YouTube. And like yellow floor, stupid warehouse, just making it up every day.

But I mean the only thing that was consistent is I woke up every day and I grinded and I obsessed. And I was like, I’m going to die trying. If we don’t make it, I’m going to try until the day I die.

And to put this on record, he would tell us we would be the biggest in the world. Every week, I would pull him in our little room and I remember because even Chris, it’s hard to get him to quit his job all day. These people, they’re like, this is just a YouTube channel. What if we’re irrelevant in a year? This is years ago and I have 1 or 2 million subscribers.

I always have to pull my few employees in a room and write on a whiteboard. I was like, here’s what everyone’s doing, here’s what we will be doing. Okay, we’re going to make this money, I’m going to spend it all, I’m going to work, work, work. And I’ll circle and draw things. And I’d be concluding that we will have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year. And this one where I gone 2 in January and everyone’s like, you’re dumb.

Even I had friends with 3 or 4 million subscribers. They’re like, you’d be lucky if you even got close to me by the end of the year. And that one year we went from 2 million to 10, or actually it was 12 million subscribers. And everyone was just like, what?

And I was drawing three-year plans. It’s like, this will be here, this will be here and this will be here. And we killed all of it. But even then, when I showed it to all the boys acting, they’re like, nah, this is stupid. You’re out of your mind. We’re not going from 2 to 10 to 30 and whatever. And I’m like, nope, this is what we’re doing. We’re going to obsess, obsess, obsess, no one get a life. Grind, grind, grind. Here’s what we’re doing. And then it just happened.

Meeting Tariq: The Comedian Who Became a Cameraman

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I got one more question for Tariq. So you said that you saw him and he was a comedian. You thought that’d be fun to work with a comedian. Now Tariq is the one that helped us set up this entire setup. Knows more about cameras than most people I’ve met. Did you know how to use a camera?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, so I did cameras before I met Jimmy. But then I saw, I told you the story, I saw a video of him just on the road. And I was like, this is in my town.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I have to meet this guy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And so, you know, I reached out to him on Twitter and then, you know, from there he started coming to the comedy shows. And then, you know, all that kind of tied together.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So, yeah, it was cool.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It was really cool. I got lucky that I got a comedian that actually had experience. I just had never seen YouTube before. I mean, I was so dumb back then. I was just like, yo, that joke was funny about the dog. You want to get a job? You want to help me figure out how to bury myself alive? You’re funny.

The X Factor: Ideas and Obsession

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It does seem like the thing that the X factor in your growth and it feels like the reason why it can continue is because of the ideas and you.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, it’s because I’m obsessed and I’m crazy. I will spend every dollar back into the channel forever. I don’t care. I just want to be the biggest.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But it seems like you have an unlimited source of ideas somehow. Every time you put out a new video, even if it’s something similar to your other video, it’s something new. How do you keep new ideas coming? How are ideas?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, I feel like the ideas I have always been great, even when I was 17. And the videos, “Hi, me in five years.” Have you ever seen someone make a time capsule on YouTube? Even to this day, no one’s done one. I don’t know, back then I was, I feel like they’re pretty creative. Counting to 100,000, I don’t know. But it’s still different.

And obviously now I have a lot more help, you know, come up with ideas and stuff. But it’s just, when I was younger, I’m not as hardcore because we got hundreds of ideas now, you know, but when I was younger, I would train myself, like the lucid dream. So when I was dreaming, you do this thing where you stare at your hand 30 times in a day and you do something. And then in your dream, if you saw your hand, you’d realize you’re dreaming. You could control what you dream about.

And I tried to strategically brainstorm ideas while I would sleep. And I’d wake up in the middle of night and write down ideas.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Were you successfully able to lucid dream?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I haven’t done that stuff in years. I’m not as hardcore when it comes to that stuff. But yeah, there were some points where I would wake up and I’d have ideas, and it took so long to.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, that’s hard to do.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You have to actually work on.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I think part of the problem or not problem, but part of the advantage for me is all I did was obsess over it during the day. And typically, what you think about, what you dream about. Yeah. So even if I wasn’t lucid dreaming, I was just dreaming about videos and filming. And then I’d be like, oh, this is cool, and just wake up and write it down.

I had a problem. I would only watch things that inspired me. So I would try to watch a different show or different things or different genres for inspiration. I had what I would call an info diet. And I would always try to add new things. So I was so obsessed with how to. Because really, if I tell you to come up with that idea, you’re just going to. Whatever. You’ll be like Gatorade or water, whatever. Right.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: No one knows what.

JIMMY DONALDSON: They made me take the labels off. I thought it was the weirdest thing. I probably roasted them for it. But if we, I’ve told you guys this story a million times, but if I open a dictionary here and we just, you know, flip to a random page and we pick a word and the word’s flowers, right? Then we’ll be like, okay, I bought a flower. I gave my girlfriend a flower. I gave my girlfriend 100,000 flowers. I gave my girlfriend 100,000 flowers on Valentine’s Day. Right?

You just go like that. I gave Tariq 100,000 flowers. I put 100,000 flowers in the moon. You do that for a few minutes, and then you just flip to a new page and you’re like, what’s this word? And you just. So that’s the slowest form of doing it and the worst way to do it. But that’s intaking inspiration, getting inspired and seeing what comes out. And it’s really just doing that. And the more effectively you can take in inspiration and see what happens in your brain, the better ideas.

Obsession vs. Having a Life

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I think what’s interesting, though, is obviously you call yourself obsessed.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Other people, you said when you were younger.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Imagine spending 10 years of your life only thinking about one thing every waking hour of the day.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You mentioned earlier that people were like, you don’t have a life. Right. But we’ve been here. We spent all day with you yesterday. Behind the scenes. I feel like you do have a life. Your life is YouTube.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But you do have a life. Friends who were hanging out, playing basketball yesterday.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: There’s a lot more happening that people probably don’t understand because all they see is what happens within the box.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. Well, and that was one of the slower days. You know, typically, it’s a lot more extreme than.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yes, maybe that was an anomaly.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Jimmy’s cleared the schedule because we were in town.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Colin and Tremere come to town.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. We make sure to play basketball. But yeah, it’s the thing is, you’re an idiot until you’re successful, then you’re smart, whatever. You know what I mean? So it’s just at some point, you cross that tipping point and people go from judging you and feel like you’re too obsessed, you’re a freak, blah, blah, blah, to oh, whoa, congrats. You hire people and provide jobs, you’re cool. Good job, you know? Yeah. It’s kind of blurry where that line changes. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That is really interesting. Did you engage in your typical high school life? I guess, prom and, I don’t know, other stuff like that.

JIMMY DONALDSON: None of that stuff. I was so obsessed. I’m telling you, it is unhealthy. There’s not a single person on the planet that’s been more obsessed that same time span as me. Because it’s physically impossible. Yeah. Almost every hour of the day. That’s what I was doing in math class, in English class, in any class, any time of the day. I was thinking about YouTube nonstop the last 10 years.

Comparisons to PewDiePie

SAMIR CHAUDRY: One of our first videos about you was during your sub to PewDiePie campaign. And we were like, oh, Mr. Beast is kind of like the new PewDiePie. And we were talking about it this morning and we were like, that actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: The title is “Mr. Beast is the next PewDiePie.”

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: And we were like, actually, they are completely different.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But you guys do a video title. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It wasn’t exactly about how you were like PewDiePie. I was just saying you are the next person to reach that level. Interesting.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I remember the “Mr. Beast, the first YouTube billionaire,” and then.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: No, there was one before it.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: One before it that you’re. We did an interview for you.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, interesting.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We just made a video.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t think I ever saw that one. Yeah, I mean, it has.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Of the videos we’ve done with you, it has the least number of views.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It didn’t hit the number one spot.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I can’t put it in the number one spot at that time.

JIMMY DONALDSON: So we got number one on that, and then number one with the billionaire, and then number one with the losing, and then number one with this. Yo, we’re on a streak. We’re on a streak.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So, yeah, we did that video, but then we were thinking, wait, that is really far from the truth, because PewDiePie is a completely different type of creator. He’s.

JIMMY DONALDSON: He’s.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I mean, I think he still creates in a really similar way to when he first started out. Right. And you keep evolving and changing the.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Way that you’re creating.

The Admirable Nature of Success

JIMMY DONALDSON: Just different people, different aspirations. At the end of the day, with him, what’s admirable is 90% of creators, if they had that number one spot in that long, they would have been such egotistical pricks. They would have changed. And, you know, he never wears designer clothes or flexes on people or looks down on people.

A lot of his friends or the people he has in his videos aren’t super clouted out, you know, I mean, that is the thing that I would take away with him. It’s really respectable that he really didn’t change much, you know?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Obviously you know more about YouTube than anyone, and you’ve been following it for a really long time.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: When boxing came about, was that unexpected for you?

The Perfect Spectacle: Boxing on YouTube

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, the thing with boxing is it’s literally two people putting everything on the line. Right. You can knock down your meme. You know what I mean? You’re risking your reputation, your dignity, all that. So it kind of is the perfect thing to be a big spectacle and cause the world to stop.

Because if you get two titans or two big names that a lot of people know of, and they’re both like, “Hey, we’re willing to risk it all. One of us is walking away with a fat L on our face,” you know, of course, it’s the perfect formula to be a big spectacle.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Are you as captivated as everyone else by it?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I love it. It’s fun to watch. I mean, I don’t put a ton of thought into it, but when they happen, invite people, the boys over, get some popcorn, enjoy some dudes getting punched. It’s fun.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I’ve bought every fight. I find it to be so entertaining.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, I know. You started when you came up with ideas. You’d look at a dictionary and find a word. You have people just throw things at you, and then you try and come up with new ideas.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: When boxing, obviously was taking place on YouTube, did it throw a wrench in your head at all of, “Oh, well, maybe since that’s the ultimate spectacle, maybe if I combine it with something else and do this?”

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. The only problem with those is it’s so much time. I got so much going on, so many employees, so much that depends on this channel. I just can’t spend six months just training three times a day or two times a day.

So, I mean, tons of ideas popped in my head, but are they ever going to happen? No. Because obviously I got too many people that depend on me. I’ve had people ask me to box. I’m like, “Bro, if I just spend the next six months training, people lose their job.” I don’t care to do that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you think there’s another sport that has that much tension in it that YouTubers could do?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. I mean, every sport. Simon did with soccer. Well, minus baseball. I think baseball, there’s too much delay between action that will never pop. But basketball would be phenomenal. Soccer, boxing, I think will always be at the top because it’s just two people putting everything on the line. I don’t think it gets much better than that, to be honest.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, it really doesn’t. And I just feel the tension that when you put two unexpected people together. I thought that the Social Gloves event was the most interesting out of all of them.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But you know what’s fascinating is I talk to other people who aren’t as into social media as we are, and they’re just like, “Who are these people? I don’t care.”

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, I guess that’s true. I guess you care about them. You have to know who the people are.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. We’re just so entertained by TikTok and YouTube that we know all these smaller people or that know all of them, but, you know, you’ve kind of heard of them, but…

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And you’re just, “Wait, what’s going to…” I mean, okay, so let’s go to Logan Floyd. It’s just, “What the hell’s going to happen? This guy’s bigger than that guy, but that guy’s more experienced than this guy.”

JIMMY DONALDSON: That’s a good one.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: The questions are just…

JIMMY DONALDSON: So all the boxes on the undercard, you weren’t glued to the screen. You didn’t. No, I didn’t. Exactly. How you felt on those is how everyone felt on the Social Club one that aren’t super into social media. If you don’t know and you’ve never heard of them, it’s like, “Why do I care?” That’s why not just watch professional boxers, you know?

Building Backstory and Retention

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you do that a lot where, I feel like you do it sometimes in your videos where you build some of the backstory of the person before they win a little bit?

JIMMY DONALDSON: That’s one of the critiques I get that I could do better. It’s so hard to get people attached to someone while also keeping retention and keeping the tension and stuff like that. That’s one thing I got to learn a lot on. It’s how to let someone tell their backstory in a way where I don’t lose viewers.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I do feel like that’s something that TV does really well.

JIMMY DONALDSON: They tell backstory that also to me, 90% of times boring.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Right. But if there’s a way to do it in a condensed fashion where then the viewer all of a sudden cares about this person, and if they win or lose, then it creates a whole different, you know…

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Even then, take any TV show that does that, upload to YouTube. Let’s see the retention graph. I’m back to piss poor, to be honest.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So what entertains Mr. Beast? What else are you entertained by?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, boy. That’s definitely changed over the years. I mean, I watch a ton of anime. I love anime. It’s so creative and different, and I feel like that inspires me. So number one’s anime, and then number two is I just try to watch a bunch of different stuff.

So I’m just always learning because, you know, you can never learn enough. And there could be just one simple thing you learned through watching an educational video that just changes how you think and allows you to just make better decisions for the rest of your life.

The New Studio Investment

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What was the first video you filmed in here?

JIMMY DONALDSON: That, I don’t know. I don’t know. When you’re uploading, when does this…

SAMIR CHAUDRY: When does that one come out?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Probably a while, because there, I’ll tell you this, there’s 50 cameras to use and there’s a hundred people. We’ll put it there. When you see that video, you’ll know.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: And could that video have been shot in one of your other spaces or…

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, no, no. This place has eight different AC units because it gets so hot. And so this is the only building we can keep cool. And it rained three different times while we’re filming. And here we got padded roofs and specially designed to cancel out the rain noise.

But all our other places you just hear it the whole time and you can’t film during that. And just everything about this place is perfect for a long 10-day shoot.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So you started investing into, you know, you got that space with the yellow floor and then you got…

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, I started with an office. The bigger office then. Yellow floor space. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So the first space was the office building we saw with…

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, it was smaller. Oh, it was smaller than the one she said it was two buildings over.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Oh, right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So you had office building in that studio and the next studio. The next studio. Next studio. Now, you know, you have all these different studios. This investment is really significant.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. I think I walked into a spider web walking in here and I don’t think I got enough. You’re like, “This investment’s big.” I’m like, “Spider web.”

COLIN ROSENBLUM: It’s a good moment for retention, right?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

The Economics of Making the Best Videos

SAMIR CHAUDRY: This is a really significant investment. And then additionally, when we sat with your mom and looked at your financials, every video is a really significant investment. I don’t think I said this to you. When we got out of there, I was like, I don’t think there’s no way there’s someone else spending that kind of money on YouTube videos, right? There can’t be.

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, I would be best friends with them if they were. “Yo, teach me.”

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I think from, you know, you spending the most to even the next person, it’s probably a pretty serious gap.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, and on top of that, with how frequently we’re uploading too, I mean, yeah, most videos are over probably half a million dollars at this point.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So does your mom have the same, because she kind of looks over that part of the business, does she have the same relationship to money that you have? Of, “Hey, let’s just reinvest everything.”

JIMMY DONALDSON: She’s just gotten to the point where she just accepts it. I mean, we’ve ran out of money many times and had to get a loan to keep going or whatever. But she just knows I’m not going to stop. So years ago, she just gave that up. And obviously now that we’re this big, there’s not as much to worry about.

But, yeah, I mean, I’d make 50 grand a month, and then I’d film a $50,000 video that would end up costing $60,000. “Oh, we’re $10,000 negative.” And then she’ll be like, “Okay, once we make this back and we’re in, you know, green, let’s put some money aside.” I’m like, “Nah, let’s keep going. We made $60,000 this month. It’s on an uptrend,” and just keep going.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: One thing that was really interesting is we talked about that video. She literally printed out the financial statements for certain videos, and one of the videos was where you were giving away houses. And that obviously cost…

JIMMY DONALDSON: You know, we spent just shy of a million dollars.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Just shy of a million dollars. And you told us how much that video made on AdSense. How much did that video make on a million dollars?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Less than half a million dollars, I’ll tell you that. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So less than half a million dollars on something that cost…

JIMMY DONALDSON: And then there’s a brand deal on it. But even then, yeah, after everything’s said and done, because that’s not including the cost of the people to produce it and stuff like that. So it’s closer to 1.3 million to do the video. We’re definitely not going to make over a million dollars on that video.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So how does this place, how does this investment of 10 million plus dollars, how does it become profitable?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t know. I just want to make the best video possible. I’m not a businessman, I’m a creator. I just want to make the best videos possible. This helps. And I believe as long as we’re doing everything in our power to make the best videos possible, people watch them and, I don’t know, I’m a lunatic. I think it will work out.

Faith in YouTube’s Future

COLIN ROSENBLUM: It’s a lot of faith in YouTube.

JIMMY DONALDSON: A whole ton of it. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now. I’m not losing faith now. I think YouTube’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. It comes installed on every Android device, which is 85% of all operating systems and 90% of searches in the Western Google, which YouTube pops up on, I think.

You know, I’ve told you guys multiple times, gaming viewership in the last two years has doubled. You can throw up the tweet, the reports. That’s factual in the last two years. And two years ago, gaming was freaking huge and it’s doubled. I think YouTube in 10 years is going to be bigger than we all imagined. I have no freaking doubt in my mind.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So you’re expanding digitally now across the world, and you’re also expanding physically with MrBeast Burger.

MrBeast Burger and Business Strategy

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, dude, it’s so funny because we got so much stuff going on. I’m like, oh, that’s kind of everything. Yeah. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s right. We have MrBeast Burger.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I was sitting here earlier, before we started recording, and I got a note notification on my watch that was like, hey, here’s a promo for Beast Burger.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Was it at 4pm? Yes. Yes. Oh, perfect. Yeah, that’s when we sent out the notification today. Because that’s about, it’s the perfect time where if you’re ordering lunch around like five or six, like, it’s a reminder. But I was just like, our dinner.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Sorry, you say ordering. Okay.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I was about to say.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You said ordering.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I was like, what.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What time do you eat lunch?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, yeah. So like, the conversion’s best. Yeah. And it’s also like, if I tweet about it or do a post, like, yeah, at the start. I’m an idiot. I don’t know. I never ran a restaurant. Like, sometimes I do like swipe up at like 10pm for Beastburger.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Right, Right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Most of the restaurants are closed. And one day I was like, man, these swipe ups aren’t really doing much. And then I realized I’m doing it whenever all the restaurants are closed. And I started doing it like 4pm And I’m like, oh, I’m an idiot.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Beast Burger, obviously, that’s everywhere in the U.S.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Over a thousand locations.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Over a thousand locations. The fries are amazing.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Every time I talk to him, I love the fries. Did you know your fries are amazing?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I’m like, yeah, fries are really good.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I get it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: They’re good. Are really good.

Physical Restaurant Locations

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Talk to me about when does Beast Burger become a physical place I can walk into?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, what’s what we were talking about before the podcast for work on breaking ground in our first place, our first physical restaurant. I won’t spoil where.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Okay.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But yeah, we got the first one in progress and eventually I want to scale up and do other ones. I got some fun. I don’t know if it’s possible. Like, I’m going to say stuff. It might not be doable. So if this isn’t what ends up happening, like, it’s not on me. I’m going to push the boundaries, but I would love to. Well, it’s also different because the COVID world.

But you know how, like, McDonald’s used to always have the slides behind. Yeah, I want those back. I want to put those at Beast Borough locations. I want to. And now the other stuff, I’m not going to say because if I don’t do it, then people are going to be like, you should do this. But I have a bunch of ideas to, like, modernize the restaurant. But maybe there’s a reason restaurants don’t do it. So we’ll see. As we’re designing the first one currently.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Have you thought about how you keep customers coming back? Like, is there a retention strategy at the restaurant?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, well, hopefully it’s just the food’s amazing. You know what I mean? And I, I mean everything, whoever, obviously, at the end, I’m waking up and I’m obsessing over how to make the best YouTube videos possible. So as we build out the Beast Burger team, like, whoever it is, like, yeah, I know. I don’t want people to have to wait in a line at a fast food. I don’t want to, like, whatever other people are doing. I don’t care.

I want to be a modern restaurant that just on everyone somehow. I don’t know how. I don’t care. I don’t care if it makes money. Just, I want the best experience possible. Possible.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, that’s going to be really cool because do you think about those as, like, sets for your.

JIMMY DONALDSON: No. I mean, I think it’s just a independent business. Like, it’s, I mean, Beast Burger has kind of a good ring to it. Like, Five Guys, like, yeah, yeah, didn’t exist. I was like, hey, I’m going to go start a company named Five Guys. You’d be like, I mean, it’s not that crazy of a name. Like, I like the name Beast Burger. I think the menu is phenomenal.

Like, I think it has a chance, like, independent of me just to grow, you know? I mean, like, if Five Guys can be successful, like, why can’t be spur, you know, especially for obsessed innovating and adapting and just reinvesting everything. Just literally what I did on YouTube, I want to do at the restaurant. Like, it makes money, it’s profitable, and I’m just like, yeah, just keep it, like, grow, grow. Like, don’t give me the money, you.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Know, so keep growing. Eventually, take the money, put it into.

JIMMY DONALDSON: The main channel with that one. I just wanted to keep just reinvesting and just growing and growing and, oh, go build another restaurant. Go do whatever, you know.

Focus on the Main Channel

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Which business outside of the main channel and YouTube are you most excited about that you’re involved in?

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, I mean, at the end, I would give it all up for the main channel. I just want to be the biggest YouTuber I could possibly be and make the best videos possible. That you got to have laser, like, focus. If you lose focus and you get too scatterbrained, then you just, like, that’s how you just fall off.

Or, like, we see a lot of creators, they start doing too many things and, yeah, then, like, their content fades and what got them where they was isn’t there anymore. And, oh, when the channel dies, so do all those businesses and stuff like that. Like, yeah, laser like, focus. I just want to be the best YouTuber I can.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Why do you want to be the best YouTuber?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t f*ing know. I just, ever since I was 13, I just made the decision I was going to be YouTuber, I was going to die trying. Sounds different hearing me say now, but I had that type of, like, devotion when I was younger. Like, even when people would tell me it’s crazy when no odds in my favor with no equipment, no nothing, no social skills, no editing, no camera, no one to teach me, no one to help me, I just, I don’t care. I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to die trying.

And I, like, even in high school, like, you know, when I’m 17 and not making any money, well, I’m making money off YouTube, like 100 bucks a month, but nothing crazy. And I have horrible grades. And, like, you know, people are like, okay, what are you going to do after high school? And I’m like, I’m be a YouTuber. And they’d be like, how? And I’d be like, I don’t know, but I want to make it happen.

I just, it’s just, I feel like it was programmed in me. That sounds weird, but I just feel like I just have DNA that just, like, you’re going to be a YouTuber, like, not in a sense I was destined to make it, but that, like, that’s just how my brain has been. Like, I’m going to be a YouTuber or I’m going to be 80 with a thousand subscribers. Like, there’s no world where I wasn’t a YouTuber in my future. Like, that was it.

People thought it was crazy. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to me either. I was just like, I’m going to be a YouTuber. And people be like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m going to be one. I’m just going to figure it out. I don’t care. Like, if I never made it, you know, and I only had 5,000 subscribers, I would probably work at McDonald’s. Still just grinding YouTube every hour I’m not working and, like, just going hard as f* until I became a YouTuber.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Do you ever entertain the possibility that one day you won’t care about being the biggest YouTuber?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I guess that’s not my main focus, but the main goal, as it should be, is to make the best videos possible. Because if you’re making the best videos possible, you’ll get all the things you want. Like, I want to go beast fur. We’ll make the best videos possible. If I want to be the biggest YouTuber, make the best videos possible. So that is what I, I guess I might have misspoke earlier. That is what the laser focus should be. Making the best video possible.

And 99% of what a creator wants will happen if you do that. And, I mean, I’m going on 10 years, and I love it more than anything. You took my channel away from me. Like, I don’t know what I would do.

Strategy and Finding Other Creators

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah. One thing I think I’ve learned about you, just spending time with you here is that you love strategy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I do.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You love strategy. Like, first of all, we went into Jimmy’s kitchen, and there’s so many versions of Catan in there.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I like Catan more because Monopoly, I was telling you guys, is like, very dice and luck based, but Catan is so strategic and, like, data and stuff like that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Also, if you ever play poker with Jimmy, he’s got a lot of strategy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I love it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: He’s got a lot of strategy and.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Spatial strategy that I think Jimmy was like, you really need to be having strategy. You shouldn’t have done what you just did.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I was like, three times in a row. Like, every time the plop would happen it and he’d just fold. I’d be like, at least act like you have a good job helping me.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Have a better game against him.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What is, what does MrBeast do for fun? I don’t. If you’re not making videos, I mean.

JIMMY DONALDSON: In a perfect world, I’d love to go hang out with Elon Musk or stuff like that, but obviously that’s not possible. It’s like, there’s levels. Like, if I had, like, the perfect friend group, I’d go hang out with other entrepreneurs. I’d go hang out with people and just like, if right next door there’s another YouTuber, I just walk over there and be like, yo, teach me something. That at the end is what I love the most. But whatever, anime or stuff, I try to just work as much as I can because, I don’t know, I just enjoy it, you know? Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Is your dream that more creators come here?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. I mean, even just being friends with them, like, I call you like at least once a week, pretty religiously, you know, I have a rotation of that, but I just, I’d love to like, revamp the list of people I call every week. Like, I always just call people to people listening and just like, be like, yo, teach me something. That’s how you stay on, on, on your A game. And you’re always learning.

And I don’t know, I feel like it’s just run dry. Like, you know, I, I don’t, I haven’t, I haven’t met like a new YouTuber in like, months that I’m like, wow, like, this guy’s a genius. And I’m not saying there’s not one. I’m saying I haven’t found that person. Like, I’m actively, like, right now. Like, I would hire someone to just give, like, and pay serious money for someone just to give me a list of, like, up and coming YouTubers that I could like, talk to on a weekly basis and just learn from. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And I, I don’t know, it used to be so abundant before, but, you know, I’ve talked to probably 500 YouTubers at this point, so I’ve like, squeezed the list dry, you know what I mean? But, yeah, that I would, I would love more than anything just to talk to other smart YouTubers and learn from them.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Do you have any theories as to why that is? That it’s run dry?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t know. I mean, YouTube’s bigger than ever. More creators are coming up than ever. So I don’t know why. I mean, like, you know, obviously you got a rock and Tyler Oliver on. They come up and I’m sure there are tons of other people. I don’t, I don’t know why I’m struggling to find them. I mean, there’s probably so many people that went from like whatever, a hundred thousand subscribers to over a million in the last year. Probably 10,000 plus. You know what I mean? Yeah.

But I don’t know, where’s the master list? You know, I mean, someone give it to me, you know? But the hard thing is probably like 90% of them do it as a hobby, which is nothing wrong with that. But they’re not like laser focused, intense, you know, I mean, not like probably 99% of them, you know what I mean? Like, I need a list of that hundred that are like, living and breathing it and obsessed, you know, what do.

The MrBeast Hiring Philosophy

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You think that the archetype is of someone who comes and either works with you or works for you here. What type of person are you looking for?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I mean, the biggest thing is you got to be interested in the YouTube space. Even if you’re the best logistics person in the world, if you don’t love YouTube, you’re not interested in learning about it, you’re probably not going to have too much success because everything we do is from the standpoint of making the video as good as possible.

So if you’re not obsessed about that, it doesn’t matter if you can figure out how to get a truck on Mars. If you get it there and it’s not positioned the right way or it doesn’t have certain things inside of it that makes the content or whatever is best for content, then it doesn’t really do much for us. You know what I mean?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And if someone wants it, let’s say someone doesn’t want to be a YouTuber, but they’d love to work for a YouTuber. How do you learn to do that? How do you study that?

JIMMY DONALDSON: That’s a hard thing. I mean, for people we’re interested in, we just bring them down and just have them shadow us, follow our people, and we just dump our brain in them.

But for people that don’t have that opportunity, I mean, just study. Just study YouTube. Watch a ton of YouTube. I mean, people trash on internships. And we don’t really do them, but if I wanted to learn how to be a YouTuber, I would just find an internship with a smart YouTuber and just be like, “Yo, you don’t really have to pay me. I’ll work my butt off. Just let me learn. Just let me do this until I feel like I’ve learned enough.” And you would learn so much from people doing that.

Studying Retention and Scene Changes

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I actually think, though, that one thing that you can do, because like you said, everything relates back to the video. A lot of what you’re talking about relates back to retention, actually. And how to make someone…

JIMMY DONALDSON: What’s the point of making a video if you don’t watch it?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Exactly. So I feel like one strategy of studying, when you say study YouTube, is taking a YouTube video, whether it’s yours or another really popular video. Right. We were talking about Vox yesterday, because that’s the closest thing to what we’re trying to do.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Right.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Is Vox. And so I think one strategy is to take that video and actually take a notepad out and just write what’s happening in the video.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Literally write down the first 30 seconds, what is happening. And that’s what I did with your FBI video, because I was like, okay, let me just understand what was Jimmy talking about. What’s happening in this video? And then when you write it down, you’re like, wait a second. Forty seconds has gone by, this many scene changes have happened.

JIMMY DONALDSON: How many was it, like a dozen?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It was over 12.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Unbelievable.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, it was over 12 scene changes. There was introduction of new information at each, maybe, you know, six seconds. And you had added in a twist by 40 seconds where the telephone popped off.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And the entire time, there’s tension of him chasing it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yep, exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And the scene changes, actually, the first scene change, where it’s like a drone shot of you sprinting out, happens in probably four seconds.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, right.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And so then I was like, wait a second. Okay, so we aren’t going to do that exact thing. We don’t make videos like that. But we have to, in that amount of time, have that much happen.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So how do we do that? And I think just again, you’ve called me for a year. Everyone knows that you call me once a week for a year. But coming here every time…

The Coaching Process

JIMMY DONALDSON: Which, yeah, as weird as it sounds, that’s usually what it takes. I coached a guy who’s been doing YouTube for six or seven years. And he was making like $20,000 a month. Then I coached him up to the point where he’s making like $250,000 a month. Yeah.

And it was similar to you. Like a constant year, me just beating his head and being like, “No, you dingus, do this.” And he’d be like, “No. Here’s why I do this, this, this.” Like, that’s wrong. But whatever. There comes a point where you can’t force someone to do it. You just back up. And then eventually, usually people come around to it, and they try it, and then they try a few things.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So easy to convince yourself that you don’t make the type of content that could get that many views.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But you guys should be getting, in a perfect world, like 4 or 5 million views a video. Like, you should, right? You guys are smart enough. If it’s not, then it just wasn’t a good enough video, in my opinion.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I mean, even the videos we did that are your most viewed videos could be way better.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Right. What do you think gets us to a million subscribers?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, subscribers is an arbitrary number.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So million views.

Focus on Making the Best Videos Possible

JIMMY DONALDSON: No, you should ask me what helps us make the best views possible. That’s the only question you should ask me. Subscribers don’t matter. Views don’t matter. I mean, they do, but all that comes. Everything you f*ing want as a creator comes from making the best videos possible. And thumbnails. But it’s easier to make thumbnails. The video part’s the hard part.

And that’s the thing that you’re known for. No one’s known for having, no one’s the biggest YouTuber in the world because they have the best thumbnails. Right. It’s also because they have great, phenomenal content. You know what I mean? That’s the hard part that very few people do well, and that’s what people remember.

You’re not going to have some random dude, when you’re walking down the street of Paris, go, “Yo, that’s the guy with the great thumbnails.” You know, they’re going to be like, “No, that’s the guy with the phenomenal videos that whatever, held his breath for 40 minutes underwater or things like that.”

So that’s a tip for you guys. But also, you guys watching, ask how can I make my videos better? Do that every single day for years, and then you’ll probably get views.

Knowing When a Video is Good

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I feel a lot like if we put out a video and we’re frantically changing thumbnails afterwards, we’re already way too far gone.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Not that it doesn’t help to…

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Change your packaging, but I know when we have a really good video.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I know it’s really good and that the title and the thumbnail matters.

JIMMY DONALDSON: If you have a video and you’re not like, “This is a banger. This is going to bang. No doubt in my mind,” even though you’re going to be wrong 9% of the time, then it’s not a good enough video.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah, you still have to have that feeling. Even if you should have spent more time, let the audience tell you you’re wrong. Don’t put it out when you already know you’re wrong.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How do you know when you’re wrong? How do you know? Because you have some videos you haven’t uploaded.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Ten out of ten. Yeah. And it did worse than your other nine videos. And it’s like, okay…

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But you have videos you don’t even upload sometimes.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. I mean, you just… The thing is, it’s a lot harder for us because what we’re doing, our big productions over the span of months, things get distorted. I visualize the giant mountain of money and this and someone scooping it up in a tractor. And then you do it and it’s not as epic. You’re like, “Oh, this is kind of lame.”

So it’s just, I just watch it, honestly. And if there’s ever a moment where I’m even slightly bored, I’m like, cut it. And if there’s something where I’m not just like, “Wow,” you know, the whole time, then it’s like, don’t upload it. It’s not good.

The Cost of Perfection

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And does it weigh on you at all that you’re like, “Man, I’ve probably…”

JIMMY DONALDSON: Invested over 100 videos in my life, completely filmed. I’ve spent probably, I don’t even want to pull a number out of my butt, but ungodly amounts of money on videos in real life that don’t get uploaded. I don’t give a f*. Best video possible or get out of my face. I don’t care.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: What’s the last video you didn’t upload?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, this one is kind of on the fence. We’re re-editing it, but if you never see it, then we did a video where we built 10 sets and I built 10 replicas of banks. And it was, “Rob this bank, I’ll give you $100,000.”

And then so like Bank Vault number one, the boys had to break into the bank. And whoever broke into the bank first got what was inside. And the vault’s empty. And I’m like, “So this vault’s empty and some of the other vaults are empty, but one of these vaults, when you open it, will get $100,000.”

And so they had to break in. So they had to break into a bunch of banks and all of them were empty. And then after nine ones, the tenth one, which they’re like, “None of these banks have the money in,” they finally break in. I think, I don’t want to spoil it, but one of the boys broke in. And then they open it and there’s $100,000 in cash. It’s like, “Congratulations, you robbed the correct bank.”

And it’s cool. But the sets were a little bland and the bits weren’t as funny. And yeah, I didn’t think it was as good as it could be, but hopefully we’re on our 12th edit. Hopefully this one maybe fixes some of the problems I’m having.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: What’s the hardest video you’ve ever made? Whether it came out on the channel or not.

The Team Trees Campaign

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, boy. Well, let’s see. Oh, God. Tariq, you have any inspiration? Throw me. Yeah. I mean, Team Trees was. I mean, I enjoyed it, but that was a ton, man. I mean, me and Mark Rober worked on that for like eight months leading up to it. I don’t want to over exaggerate. Maybe it was seven or six.

And it started with me wanting to plant a million trees, and I was reaching out to all these YouTubers that do environmental stuff. And the gist was just like, you’re crazy. You’re like, this just is impossible. You just can’t plant a million trees. They’re like, it takes like hours to plant, like a hundred. And they’re like, what are you thinking?

And then I’m like, yo, Mark, can you build me something to plant trees? And so me and Mark are scheming how to plant a million trees. And then I was closing in on 20 million subscribers, and I did this thing where I gave my 3 million subscriber pennies, 4 million subscriber, like popcorn, 5 million, blah, blah.

And someone on Reddit was like, you should give your 20 million subscriber, or for 20 million subscribers, you should plant 20 million trees. I was like, Mark, I know a million is impossible, but get this. Let’s plant 20 million trees to celebrate me hitting 20 million subscribers. And he’s like, you’re an idiot. And I was like, let’s do it.

And then we’re like, you know, as we ran down the rabbit hole, we’re like, there’s no world where we’re doing this. And then we’re like, well, what if we gather all our fans and we do different events and plant them? And then we’re like, nope, that would still only plant like 100,000. That won’t work.

And then we’re like, okay, well, what if we pay people to do it? And then, or what if we do seed drives? What if we have our fans buy seeds? We sell seeds at cost. They buy it. They plant it in their yard, do research for a month. And we’re like, ah, it could be an invasive species. It could do more harm than good. I don’t know if I trust 14 year old Billy to understand whether or not they can plant that next to a pine tree.

So then we’re going on for months on months. We’re just figuring out how the hell do we plant 20 million trees every week. We’re having calls, and then I don’t remember how, but we got connected with the Arbor Day Foundation. They’ve planted, I don’t know the exact number, but I know it’s over 100 million trees. They’re experts. This is what they do.

And they’re just like, yeah, we can plant a tree. They told us their cost. And we were like, can you get it down to a dollar? And they’re like, I mean, yeah, at scale, we could plant a tree for a dollar. And I was like, boom, there you go.

And me and Mark were like, okay, all we need is $20 million, and they can plant the 20 million trees for my 20 million subscribers. I’m already past 20 million subscribers at this point, but I’m like, f* it, we’re in too deep.

And then now it’s like, okay, how do we get $20 million so we can plant 20 million trees? And then we just started figuring out slogans. There’s so much stuff that never even made the Internet, like, trick shot for trees. We were going to try to make a viral TikTok trend and get it where you did a trick shot, and if you missed, you had to donate $10 to plant 10 trees. And then you had to challenge someone else, ripping off ALS ice bucket challenge.

And so we’re developing this for a month. And then we’re literally testing it. And then I’m shooting a trick shot, donating trees. I’m challenging people in these fake videos. And we’re roasting. And we’re like, no, this isn’t going to go viral. No one cares. Right? We’re just workshopping all this.

And then I don’t know how we landed on it, but then we’re just like, no, we’re just going to get our audience to donate, and we’re just going to get every YouTuber we know to make videos on it. And we’re going to just magically pray we don’t only raise $500,000 and look like big idiots on the planet.

And so we somehow got a list, it wasn’t from YouTube. It was some company that does a lot of YouTube data they sell to media companies. And they just gave us a list of all the biggest YouTubers on an Excel sheet. And me and Mark just, it took forever, man. We were just going down the list and I’d be like, do they follow you on Twitter? No. Do they follow me on Twitter? No.

And we check our Instagram, we’d find some way to reach out to that creator or someone who follows us, that follows them. We’d be like, hey, get us in contact. And we’d be like, hey, doing this thing. Make a video about trees. Tell your fans every dollar they donate. Boom.

And we went down this list, DM’d over a thousand of the biggest creators, got hundreds of them to make videos on it. They all launched at the same time as our videos. And the first day we raised millions of dollars and we crushed our $20 million goal.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: The quote of the night is “all we needed was $20 million.”

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But that campaign, that wasn’t the problem.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It’s wild, man. There’s so many, literally it was six months of me just being so. And Mark, Mark more so than me. I’m of the kind of like, ah, let’s do it nature. But Mark’s like, every other day we’d have mental breakdowns. We were like, we’re not going to raise $20 million. What are we crazy? We should do $2 million.

And I’d just be like, nah, let’s do $20 million. I hit 20 million subscribers. Mark, it’s a funny story. And then I would convince him, I’d be like, and also it’s $20 million by 2020. See, it’s a good slogan. And he’s like, oh, well, if you put it that way, I guess we’ll just keep the unrealistic goal.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I mean, that was a big success though. That was huge success.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It is the biggest thing I’ve ever done. Yeah, I mean, literally, not all 20 million have been planted. I think like 13, 12, 13 somewhere in there has been planted. I think all of them, all 20 million will be planted by the end of next year.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And yeah, I think that’s a really good example of like, you make the best videos possible and then you can do anything. Like you can do such interesting things. Like if you want to plant 20 million trees, you could do that if you’re making good videos.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, but the thing is like 99% of people, even if you had that ideal, I mean that was so much time, man, so much time and so many, it started with a million and it’s like half a year of just non stop obsession and grinding and reaching out and learning and learning and learning and trick shot for trees and this and that all just culminating to that final endpoint.

And 99% of people would have gave up. They would have gone, I want to plant a million trees. If someone would have gone, you can only plant 100. And they would have been like, oh, well, guess we can’t do it. You know what I mean?

Attention as Currency

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you think attention is the most valuable currency in the world?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, of course. I mean, if you could post something and everyone in the world would watch it, you’d be the most powerful man on earth.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So of course, simple question. Yeah, I was just curious if you had that opinion.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I do, yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, I have the same opinion. That’s where that conversation ends. So what you did with Mark was really successful. Do you have plans to do something different with him?

JIMMY DONALDSON: So this year, it’s a few days after the two year anniversary of Team Trees we’re launching Team Seas. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, you know, $1 might get something out of the ocean. We’ll reveal it then.

But if you are a creator, which I know you guys have a lot of creators that watch you, hit me up or Mark Rober. Team Seas is happening this year. We’re going to try to raise more than $20 million, which is terrifying. I need your help. I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Going to raise $1 for every grain of sand on the beach.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yes. Yeah, sure, sure, yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Team Trees was definitely the biggest reaction that I remember. Like global headlines. Yeah, everywhere.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Elon Musk donated a million dollars. So we had this leaderboard. The more you donated, the higher up you got. So it would get like an ego match for people. Someone donated 100 grand and be number one. And so turn 101 and someone donate 200.

And Elon Musk donated a million dollars to be number one, which I thought was cool. And then Toby from Shopify, which I love, shout out to you, you’re super cool, donated like a million and one dollars. So he took the spot from Elon and just sat up there. And I thought that was funny.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s so cool.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yo, Toby, if you’re watching this when Team Seas happens, DM me. That’ll be fun.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: We expect over a million dollars.

JIMMY DONALDSON: We expect 1 million and 2. No, I’m kidding. Even if you don’t donate, it’d just be cool to get your thoughts on it.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But over a million and two would be nice.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, is that what we’re doing? Just peer pressuring billionaires? Every billionaire we write a billion, you don’t donate.

The Vlogging Format and Personality-Driven Content

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I’m curious, just if you, in terms of YouTube, I’m really curious, your perspective on the vlogging format. Creators like Emma Chamberlain, how do you think that plays into the concept of, I mean, her viewership is really significant. And sometimes she’s just at her house making coffee and making a peanut butter jelly sandwich.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Sure.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How do you think she captures that much attention?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, I mean, it is entertaining. She’s a naturally funny person. And that is a skill being. I couldn’t do that. Or if I did, it wouldn’t be so off the cuff. She’s just an absolutely witty and funny person.

Like Chris, in my videos, one of the wittiest people I’ve ever met my life. You could just drop this Gatorade bottle and he’d say something I just make you laugh like crazy.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And it’s like, how.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Where did that come from?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Right.

JIMMY DONALDSON: But at the same time, you’re limited by personality. She’s doing well. She’s, you know, top 1% of creators. But I mean, how many views a month? Like 40 or something. It’s great, it’s phenomenal. But it’s like there’s, she’s tied down to her personality. If you don’t like Emma, then you’re not going to watch her videos. You know what I mean?

And so there’s only so big that can take you. And even if you do get super big, it’s literally just all on your shoulders. It’s a lot of weight and a lot of pressure.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So that is a lot of pressure. Because the product of the video is your personality.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, yeah, because if you’re depressed or you’re going through stuff, you know, it’s harder to make videos. You know, I mean. But yeah, but at the same time, a lot of people just enjoy making that type of content. So. Yeah. Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I asked you yesterday, do you need to be in a good mood to film a video? And you kind of said, you said, I don’t really have a choice because if I don’t, then I just burned half a million dollars.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. On some videos.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But also, your format lends itself that you don’t always have to be in a good mood because it’s the story work that went in beforehand that ensures the reaction. Whereas for Emma, she probably does need to be in a good mood.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: She does have to be in a good place for her personality. It’s like two drastically different creators.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Mm.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah. It’s almost like, do you try and take out a lot of those variables when you’re planning a video?

The Best Video Possible

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t know. I just do whatever I think will make the best video possible. I mean, I hate to always fall back on it, but that’s the driver. Just whatever I think will make the best video possible.

Like, if I thought telling people more about myself or being more personal would make the video better, I would do it. But I think most people, for the most part, they want to see me run from an FBI agent. They don’t want to hear me go, “Oh, also, guys, tomorrow’s my mom’s birthday.” You know what I mean? They’re there to see me run from an FBI agent. You know what I mean?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But we did tweet about the Call Her Daddy podcast.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You replied to that tweet and you said, “I’m starting a podcast.” And there were a lot of people who were excited about that.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: People took it as a real headline. Yeah, there were some people that said Mr. Beast announces podcast.

JIMMY DONALDSON: The only reason I would do a podcast is to make money to be able to do bigger YouTube videos. So if I thought that I could make enough or make a difference, I’d be able to elevate my content 100%. I’d do it.

It’s just like that. Study big YouTubers. It happens time and time and time again. They get big, they start side projects, they lose focus, their channel falls off, and then all that stuff fades away with it. You know what I mean? You just gotta be focused. At the end of the day, that’s what matters. Main channel, Mr. Beast, and all this other stuff supports it. You know what I mean?

YouTube’s Dominance

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Right now, when you download the YouTube app, your picture is on there.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, on the Google Play Apple Store. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So on the Google Play Store, when you download YouTube, your picture is on there. How much do you interact with YouTube? Do you give them advice on YouTube?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Not really, no.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do they reach out to you at all?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I mean, at the end of the day, what am I going to tell the army of a hundred people or a thousand people that work on this part of the thing that my five second thought of opinions better than their analysis? You know what I mean? No, I think they do a good job. I think they take responsibility.

And I just, it’s crazy that if you have a hundred subscribers, you have five subscribers. If you upload a good enough video, it will get views. I don’t want to make such a definitive thing. Take this with a grain of salt. Majority of the time you’re just not making a good enough video if it’s not getting views. You know what I mean? If that’s your goal to get views. Obviously if your goal is not to get views, then who cares?

But you can get a million views on a video even if you have a hundred subscribers. If the video’s good enough, I promise. I’ve seen it happen a bunch.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So next to YouTube, right under it, is there a platform that you like the most next to YouTube?

JIMMY DONALDSON: No. I mean, I like them, but it’s YouTube. YouTube is what I live and breathe. Take them all away, I don’t care. I just want YouTube. YouTube’s the future, in my opinion, of television. It’s the biggest. It’s not going anywhere. It’s the most dominant. And I just, I love YouTube more than anything.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Why do you think it’s so dominant? What makes you…

JIMMY DONALDSON: I told you, Android, you know, on Android phones, Google. And it just has such a deep catalog and there’s so many people on it. Has the best monetization program. YouTube’s paid creators more than any other platform in history. Probably more than the other platforms combined. You know what I mean? It’s just, I love it. I love it so much.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I think the algorithm also promotes better storytelling. The barrier to entry of the title and the thumbnail. If you actually back up that title and thumbnail, it requires that you told a compelling story.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Agree.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: When it comes down to retention, if you actually keep someone from zero to 15 minutes, you’ve done a good job of telling a story.

JIMMY DONALDSON: My problem when I load up YouTube on my TV is that there’s too many videos I want to watch. It’s gotten too good at recommending me videos that I see four on the top row and the top half of another four. And I just, I want to watch all these. What do I do?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What type of videos are those? What are you watching?

JIMMY DONALDSON: It’ll probably be like, “How US Aircraft Carrier Gets Food and Delivers Mail,” you know, air flight patterns of planes. And then this one will be like, “How This Random Guy on Reddit Turned $1,000 into a Million,” and stuff like that. And then there’s the random, “What Aristocracy Taught People 10,000 Years Ago,” stuff like that.

But yeah, they’re always so interesting. And I know I’m going to watch most of these videos because I’ve watched thousands of videos on my account, so it knows what I’m going to watch. And it’s just, it’s so hard at this point for me. I don’t know if other people have this problem. The algorithm’s getting so good that I think they need to serve less videos because I don’t, it stresses me out. I’m like, which one do I pick? I want to watch them all.

Analytics and Data

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Is there an analytic that you wish you had?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I would love to be able to do A/B testing thumbnails. I think we all agree on that one. I’d love to see if someone watches “Selling Houses for a Dollar,” right? They watch this video. They watch all the way to the end. And I would love to be able to see if they went and watched another video and another one, right?

Or a better example would be, I did “Last to Leave Circle for $10,000,” right? I’d love to be able to see, okay, well, a lot of people who watch this one then went and watched “Last to Leave Slime,” and actually you can see that. I just wish there’s an easier way to show it. Follow viewers around, you mean?

Well, you can click on a video, suggest and see which video. I guess. Yeah. I guess I’m just too lazy to dig through that. It’d just be cool to be able to see the viewing patterns of a person. But the more I’m speaking it, the more I’m realizing there’d probably be privacy concerns if you could follow a user. Now I’m going to start backpedaling. Maybe that is…

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But you mean in aggregate?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Honestly…

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But it does kind of show you that people from this video are coming to your channel.

JIMMY DONALDSON: How about this? I’m an idiot. Just disregard everything I just said there. The more I think about it, the dumber that was.

Merchandise and Revenue

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So there was a couple things on your financial statements that I found really interesting. We’re back to that.

JIMMY DONALDSON: He loved the financial statement.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, I loved it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: That was my favorite one. They’re fun to talk about because no one’s ever seen them before.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So one of the parts of your financial statement was also merchandise. And I feel like it’s not something we hear about that often with you, unless it’s like you’re writing everyone’s name on the wall. How do you interact with that? Are you, does it interest you? I saw that it’s available in retailers.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. We’re in Zumiez. And that’s going well. I don’t know. I just, I’m so obsessed with making the best videos possible that I just…

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I hate promoting merch in videos because it drives people off the site, which hurts retention and you get promoted less. And then if someone’s going to watch that video, the next video, well, they watch this video, you send them to buy merch, they don’t watch that next video all around.

So it’s like I could make ungodly amounts of money if I promoted merch every video, but I just don’t want to. I just want to make the best videos possible, you know. So yeah, it’s not what it could be. Basically a fraction of what it could be if I, most videos, I don’t even mention merch. Imagine if I promoted merch every single video, you know, I would sell a bunch.

But I don’t know, I just want to make the best videos possible. And I don’t think promoting merch makes the video better. But let me backpedal a little bit. Sometimes I do need to promote it because some videos cost over a million dollars, and I don’t do a million dollars per video in ad revenue. So, you know, yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: All right, so we did a YouTube money calculator to see how much money your channel has made in total in its lifetime.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay, lifetime.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Lifetime. Okay. The main channel.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay. So that’s off of 12 billion views.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: 12 billion views.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So the number it gave us was $28 million.

JIMMY DONALDSON: So it’s assuming a $2.3. Interesting. I mean, obviously, I’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on my videos, so the money has to come from somewhere. I’ll leave it at that. You know what I mean?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Okay. Because you’ve spent more than that.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Of course, yeah. I mean, tens of millions of dollars have gone into my YouTube videos because I’ve taken all the money from the gaming channel, the reaction channel, all the other stuff I’m doing, all my merch, all the brand deals, everything. Gone right back into it.

Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, there’s probably going to be a day where I’ll spend over a billion dollars on just YouTube videos in the future.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s so crazy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Obviously, I’m nowhere near that, but I’m talking two decades from now or a decade. Yeah, yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: But in a year, you’re spending lots more than I just said.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Way more money than I said. I mean, some months we’re spending four or five million dollars on videos. Yeah, yeah. Crazy.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I saw it in the financial statement.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Try lighting a soccer field or something, right.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Renting an NFL stadium.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Or any of that type of stuff. It’s expensive, but let alone payroll videos. Yeah. I don’t want to get into that, man.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How many people work here?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I don’t know the exact number, you know, because some people hire, and we had a lot of, yeah, but I mean, it’s a lot, obviously. Dozens upon dozens of people. I’ll leave it open for interpretation. You guys speculate. Yeah.

Burnout and Dedication

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you ever feel, you talked about people always suggesting that maybe you would get burnt out on YouTube. Do you ever feel burnt out, other times where you feel like…

JIMMY DONALDSON: I think my definition might be different than others, you know. Some people are like, “I’m burnt out. Screw this. I’m done. I’m done. I’m done.” You know, never. Never at that point.

But yeah, if I’m going from the time I get up to the time I go to bed three days in a row, I’ll be like, okay, kind of want to take half a day off and chill. Or I’ll feel it coming and stuff like that. But this is what I’m doing to the day I die. I don’t care. I love this more than anything. Nothing’s ever brought me a fraction of the joy.

The Reality of Extreme Challenges

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What are the in between moments like for you when you’re buried alive for 50 hours? Because we don’t see all of it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, you do. In between each thing, we show time lapses. So you could see I was in there the whole time. But I mean, yeah, still you don’t see it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I’m saying I don’t see your reaction. I don’t see if you’re enjoying it in the middle of it.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I don’t have the point into enjoying that one.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Here, let me just put this out there. I did not enjoy being buried alive. So we’re all on the same page. My back hurts from laying on a wooden board for 50 hours. The thing is, sometimes I got a little claustrophobic and I’d be like, “Oh, God, I can’t stand up if I wanted to.”

But I’d just be like, you know, we did our research, we tested it, we buried the box for five, ten days beforehand. We did extensive research. So every time I’d be like, “Oh, God, I can’t move. There’s thousands of pounds of dirt on me. I could die,” I’m like, nope, did the research. Trust math. I’m not going to die. You know what I mean?

I had to just remind myself multiple times, nope, you’re good. Because it was a see-through coffin. So it’s different than just a normal one. Every time I look up, I just see dirt. And it’s just the only thing stopping that dirt from just suffocating me and collapsing on me is just this glass, like this thick, you know? And that’s the only thing standing between me and whatever, like, eight feet of dirt.

Managing Risk and Fear

COLIN ROSENBLUM: So we were in one of your meetings yesterday, and it’s for one of your upcoming videos, and they brought up that there are boa constrictors and that boa constrictors were a real threat.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: To this production, to you and that, you know, while they’re not poisonous.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: They can crush your body in a matter of, you know, minutes.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, exactly. So we’ll keep the medic within a minute.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: So the discussion was around where the medic should be. So how many medics we should have?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, we’re putting two medics stationed so they’re close enough that they can stop me from getting killed by a boa constrictor.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: So have you developed an appetite for pain? For managing fear and discomfort?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, I mean, we’re just strategic. We don’t ever do anything where I could die. Buried alive, there was a 0% chance anything would happen to me. We did our research, we hired consultants. We spent over a quarter million dollars filling that compound. There was no risk. I was probably safer down there than I was up above the ground. And genuinely, I mean that.

I was safer in that box than if driving the car home afterwards, if you really think about it. Just like when they say you’re safer in a plane than you are driving a car. And so, you know, we don’t leave anything up to chance. We’re very tactical, and we account for all that stuff.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: But opportunity to die is one thing, but just discomfort, like, feeling claustrophobic, getting really, really sunburned.

JIMMY DONALDSON: It’s weird. When I counted to 100,000, or even before that, cut a table in half with plastic knives, which took, God knows, like, days of just sawing because I was in math class when I was in high school, and I just had a plastic knife in my pocket from lunch. I don’t know why I put it there. And I just saw it a little bit. I was like, “Oh, wait, you can cut a table in half?” On my desk. You can cut a table in half with a plastic knife.

And then I just threw it away. And later that day, I was like, wait a minute. And then I just ran to the store late at night, and my mom’s like, “What the f* are you doing?” I’m like, “Just buying knives.” She didn’t know I was a YouTuber, like, doing videos back then, and I had no money or anything, but I just bought like $5 worth of plastic knives, and I just grabbed one of our tables, just started cutting it, and I hit record, and I was like, “Hey, guys, I’m going to cut this table in half with plastic knives.”

And then it’s just like I thought it would take like four hours, but it’s like a dozen go by, and I’m not even halfway done. I’m just cutting a table in half with plastic knives. I don’t know why it was so dumb.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I think if I was your mom and I was watching a video of you watching paint dry, I’d be like, what does Jimmy do?

JIMMY DONALDSON: What does Jimmy do? I came on the back end of counting to 100,000, right after I dropped out of college and had to move out. Good times. Yeah. She thought I was going crazy.

The College Dropout Story

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Wait, so you dropped out of college, and then you moved out of your…

JIMMY DONALDSON: Well, have we talked about that? Okay, well, let’s talk about college. Yeah. So I didn’t want to go to college, I don’t care. But I’m not saying it’s bad, blah, blah, but for me, I hate school. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I just want to make YouTube videos. It’s all I ever want to do. That’s all I ever wanted to do.

But I didn’t have the best grades in school, didn’t really have a job. I wasn’t making enough after I graduated high school. So my mom was just like, either you go to college or you move out. You’re not going to live here and not go to college.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Whatever.

JIMMY DONALDSON: She wants what’s best for me. She’s not being mean. Obviously she didn’t think this magical YouTube thing would work out. So she’s like, you got to have some type of future. You can’t just bet it all on the Internet forever till you die.

And yeah, so I just, I need to say the story in a way where it doesn’t make my mom sound mean. Because she did it because she loves me. But so I go to college. It’s community college, it’s not that expensive, whatever. And I just couldn’t stand it, man. It made me just so depressed. I just hate stuff. I just want to be a YouTuber. That’s it.

And so after two weeks, literally just two weeks, I just stopped going. But I didn’t have enough money to move out. I wasn’t making anything, so I just didn’t tell my mom. I would act like I was going to college and then I would just sit in my car in the college campus and just work on videos or edit or just work on a script or something. And I’d come home and I’d be like, “Hey, mom, college is great.” And then I’d keep working.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And that can’t last for that long.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, no, thankfully I don’t remember what happened. I remember sitting on the stairs in front of one of the college classrooms. I was talking to James, one of the people you met, and I was like, “Yo, I don’t know what the f*’s going on, but I’ve just been grinding, grinding every hour of the day. And I just made like $20,000 a month.” I was like, “I’m ready to tell mom I’m failing every class and I’ll move out tomorrow.” He’s like, “Okay.”

And I just picture that because it’s like 11pm and I’m just pacing and I’m like, “Yeah, Mom, I have zeros in everything. I haven’t been going. And I’ll move out tomorrow.” And then I moved out the next day. And she was so mad. But I was starting to finally make money, and so I could afford to move out. And there you go.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: How much longer after it was that your mom started working with you?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Probably then a year after that. Yeah. And then I quickly got to the point where I was making her whole salary every month, and it was like, why are you working? And people thought I was dumb. The first thing I did was retired my mom. And people were like, “Why would you do that? You should save money for yourself.” And I was like, I love my mom. She’s great. Factually the best mom on the planet. Your mom’s second, whoever’s watching this.

But yeah, I put her through a lot with poor grades, poor everything. And in a world where, you know, I fail college and nothing comes out of this YouTube thing, it’s just funny.

A Mother’s Pride

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I think what I could tell from meeting your mom was that your mom loves the story of you.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Becoming who you are today.

JIMMY DONALDSON: She loves it so much.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You go around all the other studios and offices, and there’s really no photos of you on the wall for the most part. There’s no pictures from videos, screenshots.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: There’s a lot of play buttons.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: There’s a lot of play buttons.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’ll say that. I’m sure they’re playing a clip of them.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: There’s a lot of play buttons. But it wasn’t until we went to the office where your mom works.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: We walk in, and it’s like a MrBeast museum. And I was like, okay. So she’s the one who’s nostalgic.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: About this entire journey.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Because I mean, before I did that thing, like, two weeks into college, I was trying to negotiate with my mom. I was like, “All right, here’s the deal. I’ll go to college if you do all my homework. You do all the homework.” She’s like, “No.” I was like, “I can’t do this. I have to make videos. This makes me sad. This makes me happy.” She’s like, “This doesn’t make money. This will make money.” And I’m like, “But this makes me happy.” And she’s like, “No.”

And that’s, I forgot that part. That’s when I stopped going. My mom wouldn’t agree to do all my homework for me. Another funny story is, and I don’t know why so early in the semester we had this, but we had to pair up with random people to do a project and I had a partner and I just never came back.

And I completely forgot about it, but we were supposed to be working on something and like two weeks later he was like, “Yo, we still doing this?” And I was like, “I’m never coming back to college.” And he’s like, “So do I tell the professor?” And then he messaged me like two months later. He was like, “Oh, yeah. They ended up going easy on me because my partner left.” And he called me and told me about it and it was like the running bit in the class because we got a project together assigned, and then I just never came back and he was just left with the whole thing and everyone else had a partner.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You may have gotten him a better grade through sympathy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. That’s what he said. And so I’m glad it worked out for him. But it was funny. I felt so bad.

The Turning Point

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It’s funny your mom told us that story too, about how when you started making more than her paycheck every month, that’s when she was like, oh, wow.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Which was a big deal for us. We didn’t have any money. Again, I don’t want to over dramaticize it, but we really didn’t have much. And so the second I could, she didn’t have to work twice on Wednesdays and maybe could take a little bit of time off and she could actually breathe for the first time in her life and stuff like that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How did she see that? Where was that money coming from? From AdSense or from brand deals or from everything?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I know at this point I wasn’t selling merch. Yeah, I mean, I was probably doing brand deals for… No, I didn’t even do my first brand deal until I moved out because that $10,000 brand deal was my first one and that was when I was living at my new house. So that was after I dropped out. So yeah, I was probably doing like $20,000, $30,000 a month in ad revenue.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So whoever gave you that first 10k brand deal got a lot of bang for their buck.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Adam from Quid.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, got it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Which he works at Current now and he’s really smart. Oh, that’s cool. He’s cool. We still work together to this day. It’s funny because he just does crazy for other companies.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s crazy.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You’ve had a lot of long term relationships with these.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Because I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here in 10 years.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah. That’s interesting. Like with Honey and with Current. Like, those are like now. It sounds like it’s even longer term with Adam. That’s cool.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly. I mean, hiring Adam is cheat codes for your company because he just knows so many creators and like, if he was just at some company that’s doing like a million dollars a year in revenue or whatever, I’d still probably work with him just because I like to do, you know? Yeah, it’s kind of funny.

The Biggest Investment Yet

SAMIR CHAUDRY: So this space now, this is now the official, like, biggest single investment you’ve made?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, of course. By 20 billion fold.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: As we, like you guys are only seeing the inside of this space, but there’s also a lot of space around.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah, I don’t even want to go too in depth. More acres than you could ever need. We’re going to build 20,000 square feet of office. We’re going to build a replica of this.

I mean, the problem is, like I talked about before, if you, you know, we have multiple warehouses, but if you, since the videos take months to do and, you know, and I want to upload an ideal world for a month, so, and if videos take nine days to do, you know, I mean, like, that’s 12 videos that in the next 90 days you got to do. And if you’re not working on them now, then they won’t happen in 90 days.

And so it’s the bottleneck space. You know what I mean? Like, I’ve told you guys this a million times, but this is for you guys. Like, if, you know, one video is taking up all of our studio, well, we have 11 other videos to work on. They can’t have until that. And so we just need tons of space to be able to work on videos months in advance, because if we don’t, they don’t happen. You know what I mean?

Dream Collaborations

SAMIR CHAUDRY: What do you think would be like a dream collaboration or dream video to do out of here? Do you have something like that?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Oh, dream collaboration or dream video?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Not Dream, but meaning. Yeah, like Dream would be my dream collab.

JIMMY DONALDSON: There you go. Yeah. I mean, if he did a face reveal, there’s no way he would let me get the clout for that. But if he did it, like in one of our videos, he’d just pull out. That would be epic.

Yeah, just all of them. If I can pick whatever I want, then craft the ultra viral video. It’d be like Corpse and Dream and all these people lined up and it’s just like one after another. Just take the mask off. Guaranteed 200 million views.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I know when we were playing basketball last night and Sapnap was like, yeah, live with Dream.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I was like, oh, wow, so you’ve seen the face. Hey, you want to sketch it out for us?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Ask you or do I, do I not asking.

JIMMY DONALDSON: What do I do? What colors desire. Yeah, that was funny.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, that would be a very viral video.

JIMMY DONALDSON: That would be wild. Of course. But obviously that would have.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You just don’t need all this space for that.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That’s true.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Or maybe you do. Maybe you do it in a way where you do need the space.

The Goal of Consistency

JIMMY DONALDSON: My dream is uploading consistently, which that is a bigger thing. Some months I don’t even upload videos. Some months we upload four videos, some months we upload one.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: It’s just like, what does consistently mean for you? Is that once a week or is that, or are you just saying any right now?

JIMMY DONALDSON: I just want to upload once a week. But long term in the future, like three plus years from now, I’d love to get to the point we’re doing two original giant spectacles, never before seen, better than everyone else. F*ing huge ginormous. Best video in world videos twice a week.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Do you think that any of your other videos are, sorry, do you think any of the other channels will pass your main channel? You don’t think so? I mean even like foreign language. Even like India, like could India, the Hindi one, could that pass the main one audience wise?

JIMMY DONALDSON: More people could watch it. But I doubt it would pass the main. Just because, you know, it’s dub. It will get up there though. A large percentage. Like that’s fun your channel. And I’m sure you’re showing it as we’re doing this. Like it’s getting 2 plus million views per video and you know, I mean it’s the same video stub. You know what I mean? Yeah. So which that already is wild for dub content.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Totally. But it’s like this, it’s actually a classic strategy in every other entertainer or.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I’m a huge fan of anime and like I saw this one video of Naruto where they like compare a really emotional scene in like 10 different languages and it’s just fun.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: I mean, when I used to go to India when I was a kid, I would watch Friends in Hindi. Like really, you know, I’d sit there.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: And like, do you speak Hindi? I understand it fluently. I don’t speak it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Hear a sentence in Hindi?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Sure, yeah.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: That means hi, how are you doing, Tariq?

JIMMY DONALDSON: You want to talk in Arabic?

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Let’s do it.

The Power of Language

JIMMY DONALDSON: What’s that word you always say? Habibi. Habibi? Yeah. Habibi is like for a friend or Salaam alaikum. It’s like, peace be upon you. It’s calming just to hear people talking about it. I don’t know why they’re watching. To learn more about YouTube. They’re taking notes. I’m just like, hey, Tariq, talk in Arabic. And they’re like, okay. Cameraman talks in Arabic.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Comedian cameraman speaks Arabic.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay, we got the formula.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: It’s interesting. Like, if you don’t know what someone else is saying and it’s a different language, you can sort of like surrender. The fact that you need to understand.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Exactly.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: That you need to, like, pay attention to comprehend. You’re just listening, as you say.

JIMMY DONALDSON: I kind of get that.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: You know, you’re just like, I don’t have to. I just get to enjoy that.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Just sit there and la la.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, but that’s why visual storytelling is so important. Like, just stuff that doesn’t need language. That’s like the stuff that at least I’ve seen goes to the most part.

JIMMY DONALDSON: And I know we’ve been going on for a while, but now it is the time to hit us with the most important question. Because you’re rehooking the viewers. You’re telling them this video is not over. What’s the big question? To keep them watching.

The Giveaway

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Last time you were on our channel, you told everyone that if they subscribed, you would pick one of them and give away a thousand dollars. Or actually, no, you guys, you told them that we would give away.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Did you do it? Yeah, we did it. We did it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We did it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: We did it.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: No, no, we did it and we filmed it too. Yeah.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: My question now for you is, if people are watching this video and they subscribe, how much money do they.

JIMMY DONALDSON: They get?

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Either we.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: How much money do we give?

JIMMY DONALDSON: Okay, how about this? If you subscribe, not you, but one random person that does, I’ll give you this Gatorade bottle. I’m going to give it to you, okay? And they’ll give you 500 bucks. Okay? Deal.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: You can get this unopened.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Actually.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Unopened.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Here, let me, let me make it less valuable. Okay. Here, we’ll just drink a sip. Clip this. Sell this on eBay with this clip. Someone pay $500 for this.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We are literally going to take this. So if you subscribe to the channel, you can win this and you can win 500 bucks. We’ll pick one random person.

JIMMY DONALDSON: All you got to do is hit that subscribe button. We’re closing in on a million subscribers. The second they just start getting 70% retention on a video.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: We’re closing in. This second they do the things I tell them to.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. Yeah.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Out. All right.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Can’t wait to find out who gets it.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Whoever gets it, don’t drink it.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Watch this. Gets like NFT.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Yeah, that’s going to get NFT.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Cool. Okay, cool. I’m happy with.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: I’m happy. That was awesome.

JIMMY DONALDSON: Yeah. That means we should abruptly end it for good retention.

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