How MrBeast Learns

Metadata

• Author: Henrik Karlsson
• Full Title: How MrBeast Learns
• Category:#articles
• URL: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/mrbeast?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=313411&post_id=106050880&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Highlights

• You need goals to learn well because our goals make things salient to us I should point out that not everyone who looks at viral videos — or any other raw input — will develop a feel for the landscape. I would guess hundreds of thousands of people have watched as many YouTube videos as MrBeast. They didn’t learn what he did. Why not? 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 cleanly, without leaving a mark. Your memory will have little use for the information, and so discards it. You can’t just feed your brain information if you want to learn effectively; you also need a serious project. (View Highlight)
• This is likely one of the reasons why genius tends to be clustered. Painters in Renaissance Florence. Playwrights in Elizabethan London. Pop producers in 90s Stockholm. When a group of obsessed people is exploring something together, they can go much faster than you can on your own — they get to learn from each other’s mistakes, and they can share know-how at a very high resolution. Peers like this seem to be a good thing to have if you want to do something great. But what if you grow up in an intellectual nowhere place? What if, like MrBeast, you grow up in a small city in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, where the main attraction is a river called Tar, which was once “a navigable waterway” — what do you do, then? How do you find a thriving creative scene there? The answer, these days, is: by working in public. Which is what he had been doing. (View Highlight)
• When you work in public, when you share your insights on Twitter or a blog, or by uploading your videos, your code, your art — people find you. If you do it consistently for years, the internet will rearrange itself around you until it resembles Renaissance Florence, if Renaissance Florence was filled with lunatics that like what you do. And MrBeast had put in years of work. This had given him time to circulate into the orbit of other people who shared his obsession with YouTube. And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
  • Note: the cost of earnesty
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him (View Highlight)

• MrBeast: I somehow found these other four lunatics. Three of us were college dropouts. One was a high school dropout. And one, he just like quit his job. We were all super small YouTubers.

  And we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but hyper-study what makes a good video. […] Some days I’d get on Skype at 7 am and I’d be in the call until 10 pm and then I’d go to bed. I wake up and I do it again. He had summoned a scene. MrBeast: We all had like 10-20,000 subscribers when we met. And by the time we stopped talking, we all had millions of subscribers. We all hit a million subscribers within a month of each other. (View Highlight)

• He tried hiring people from traditional production companies in Hollywood. They couldn’t do it. Their way of thinking was shaped by another context, another type of input, and they were not willing to unlearn what they knew. Instead, he decided to hire people who shared his vision — childhood friends, people he found in the comments, other YouTubers — people who felt like YouTube was not a stepping stone to a ”real career” in Hollywood but a platform where you could do something that has never been done before. He would train them. (View Highlight)
• For the core team, this took the form of “cloning”.

  MrBeast: My CEO, James, he literally lived with me for a couple of years. I’m a big fan of finding people who are super obsessed and all-in and A players and then just dumping everything I have in them.

  Lex Fridman: You’re saying you’re basically for a long time just said everything you were thinking to them?

  MrBeast: Exactly. Like James, the guy who’s basically my right-hand man right now, two years he lived with me. And we probably talked on average those two years, seven hours a day. Anytime I had a phone call, I’d throw it on speaker and I’d let him listen. Anything I was reading, any content I was consuming — like really training his brain to think like me.

  For the first six months, he didn’t do anything. He just studied me and studied everything I cared about and how I spoke and blah, blah. And then the next six months he started taking on some responsibilities and now he can just run the company. And I don’t ever really have to check in on him. Like most of the decisions he makes are exactly what I would do. And so I call that cloning. It’s just finding people that are really obsessed and … giving them an avenue to get it. (View Highlight)

• Every step of the way, he uses all of the resources he gets to improve his capacity. From ages 12 to 18, he fed himself on viral videos until they came out the other end. Then he leveraged the credibility of having 10,000 subscribers to attract the lunatics. Then he leveraged them to grow to millions of subscribers. Then he reinvested all of the profits from the videos to hire the most talented and obsessed people he could find, so they could help him push further. He made his team contact all successful YouTubers, asking for their private data, so he had more data to train his mind on. As he rose to fame, he could attract successful people in other industries to mentor him or be his peers in learning, as he branched out into computer games and an audio dubbing service and hamburgers … and he’s just twenty-four. Whenever you see someone who manages to achieve more in a month than you do in a lifetime, you can trust that this type of feedback loop is working in the background. They carefully curate what data they let into their minds. They attract mentors and peers. And as they grow more skilled, they continually refine their environment to further accelerate their growth. They seek access to even more data. They find even better mentors and more obsessed peers. Repeat, repeat, repeat. (View Highlight)

New highlights added March 21, 2023 at 6:06 PM

• MrBeast: There are ways you can see the most viewed videos on YouTube every day and stuff like that. And I just consume those every single day. And I’ve been doing that for way too many years. And you just start to notice patterns. Like the thumbnails on the most viewed videos, or videos that go super viral, tend to be clear, tend to not have much clutter, tend to be pretty simple. Titles tend to be less than 50 characters. Intros tend to be this. Stories tend to be this. After you see those thousands and then tens of thousands of times, it just starts to click in your head. This is what it looks like. (View Highlight)

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title: “How MrBeast Learns” author: “Henrik Karlsson” url: ”https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/mrbeast?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=313411&post_id=106050880&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

How MrBeast Learns

Metadata

• Author: Henrik Karlsson
• Full Title: How MrBeast Learns
• Category:#articles
• URL: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/mrbeast?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=313411&post_id=106050880&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Highlights

• MrBeast: There are ways you can see the most viewed videos on YouTube every day and stuff like that. And I just consume those every single day. And I’ve been doing that for way too many years. And you just start to notice patterns. Like the thumbnails on the most viewed videos, or videos that go super viral, tend to be clear, tend to not have much clutter, tend to be pretty simple. Titles tend to be less than 50 characters. Intros tend to be this. Stories tend to be this. After you see those thousands and then tens of thousands of times, it just starts to click in your head. This is what it looks like. (View Highlight)
• You need goals to learn well because our goals make things salient to us I should point out that not everyone who looks at viral videos — or any other raw input — will develop a feel for the landscape. I would guess hundreds of thousands of people have watched as many YouTube videos as MrBeast. They didn’t learn what he did. Why not? 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 cleanly, without leaving a mark. Your memory will have little use for the information, and so discards it. You can’t just feed your brain information if you want to learn effectively; you also need a serious project. (View Highlight)
• This is likely one of the reasons why genius tends to be clustered. Painters in Renaissance Florence. Playwrights in Elizabethan London. Pop producers in 90s Stockholm. When a group of obsessed people is exploring something together, they can go much faster than you can on your own — they get to learn from each other’s mistakes, and they can share know-how at a very high resolution. Peers like this seem to be a good thing to have if you want to do something great. But what if you grow up in an intellectual nowhere place? What if, like MrBeast, you grow up in a small city in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, where the main attraction is a river called Tar, which was once “a navigable waterway” — what do you do, then? How do you find a thriving creative scene there? The answer, these days, is: by working in public. Which is what he had been doing. (View Highlight)
• When you work in public, when you share your insights on Twitter or a blog, or by uploading your videos, your code, your art — people find you. If you do it consistently for years, the internet will rearrange itself around you until it resembles Renaissance Florence, if Renaissance Florence was filled with lunatics that like what you do. And MrBeast had put in years of work. This had given him time to circulate into the orbit of other people who shared his obsession with YouTube. And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
  • Note: the cost of earnesty
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him. (View Highlight)
• And the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were a costly signal that he was earnest about it. So they trusted him (View Highlight)

• MrBeast: I somehow found these other four lunatics. Three of us were college dropouts. One was a high school dropout. And one, he just like quit his job. We were all super small YouTubers.

  And we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but hyper-study what makes a good video. […] Some days I’d get on Skype at 7 am and I’d be in the call until 10 pm and then I’d go to bed. I wake up and I do it again. He had summoned a scene. MrBeast: We all had like 10-20,000 subscribers when we met. And by the time we stopped talking, we all had millions of subscribers. We all hit a million subscribers within a month of each other. (View Highlight)

• He tried hiring people from traditional production companies in Hollywood. They couldn’t do it. Their way of thinking was shaped by another context, another type of input, and they were not willing to unlearn what they knew. Instead, he decided to hire people who shared his vision — childhood friends, people he found in the comments, other YouTubers — people who felt like YouTube was not a stepping stone to a ”real career” in Hollywood but a platform where you could do something that has never been done before. He would train them. (View Highlight)
• For the core team, this took the form of “cloning”.

  MrBeast: My CEO, James, he literally lived with me for a couple of years. I’m a big fan of finding people who are super obsessed and all-in and A players and then just dumping everything I have in them.

  Lex Fridman: You’re saying you’re basically for a long time just said everything you were thinking to them?

  MrBeast: Exactly. Like James, the guy who’s basically my right-hand man right now, two years he lived with me. And we probably talked on average those two years, seven hours a day. Anytime I had a phone call, I’d throw it on speaker and I’d let him listen. Anything I was reading, any content I was consuming — like really training his brain to think like me.

  For the first six months, he didn’t do anything. He just studied me and studied everything I cared about and how I spoke and blah, blah. And then the next six months he started taking on some responsibilities and now he can just run the company. And I don’t ever really have to check in on him. Like most of the decisions he makes are exactly what I would do. And so I call that cloning. It’s just finding people that are really obsessed and … giving them an avenue to get it. (View Highlight)

• Every step of the way, he uses all of the resources he gets to improve his capacity. From ages 12 to 18, he fed himself on viral videos until they came out the other end. Then he leveraged the credibility of having 10,000 subscribers to attract the lunatics. Then he leveraged them to grow to millions of subscribers. Then he reinvested all of the profits from the videos to hire the most talented and obsessed people he could find, so they could help him push further. He made his team contact all successful YouTubers, asking for their private data, so he had more data to train his mind on. As he rose to fame, he could attract successful people in other industries to mentor him or be his peers in learning, as he branched out into computer games and an audio dubbing service and hamburgers … and he’s just twenty-four. Whenever you see someone who manages to achieve more in a month than you do in a lifetime, you can trust that this type of feedback loop is working in the background. They carefully curate what data they let into their minds. They attract mentors and peers. And as they grow more skilled, they continually refine their environment to further accelerate their growth. They seek access to even more data. They find even better mentors and more obsessed peers. Repeat, repeat, repeat. (View Highlight)