How MrBeast Learns

When Lex Fridman, jokingly, asks him for advice about how to grow a YouTube channel, he says he won’t answer that. Not because he’s not generous — he is known to have mentored a large number of successful YouTubers, sharing his insights — but, he says,  he does not know Lex and his audience well enoughhe does not know 

When MrBeast, in his teens, wanted to figure out how to make viral videos, he did it by consuming every video that went viral on YouTube.

Considering how rapidly MrBeast, now 24, has mastered new skills over the last few years, growing his channel to 221 million subscribers, scaling a team to a few hundred members, building a 50,000 square foot studio, starting a hamburger brand, negotiating deals with Walmart, scaling the logistics needed to ship chocolate bars to 10,000s of stores

Lex Fridman: What are you studying now? Are you studying videos?

MrBeast:

Recently, not as much. To get to the videos I want, I have to build this business and scale up and hire. My teenage years were spent studying virality and content creation. Now I’m studying how to build a content company so I can actually produce the crazy ideas I want to pr

What we are trying to do influences what becomes salient to us. If you are looking for a friend in a crowd, faces become salient to you, faces that would have otherwise passed you by. If you are making videos, you will notice patterns in the videos you watch. If you’re not, you can watch a thousand videos and have them pass through your head clean