‘Wow! That’s Dope!’: Joe Rogan Blown Away By MrBeast’s ‘Brilliant’ YouTube Idea; Both Personalities Suspect TikTok Is Spying On Them

Joe Rogan blown away by YouTube idea by MrBeast and suspect TikTok of spying on people.

Getty Image / Cindy Ord / Staff


During a recent interview, Joe Rogan was absolutely blown away by the accomplishments of YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson – better known as MrBeast.

MrBeast – who has been creating online content since he was 11-years-old – was the top-earning YouTube creator in 2021 with more than 10 billion views on the video platform that paid him an estimated $54 million, according to Forbes. MrBeast has made himself into a social media leviathan with his elaborate stunts such as the his real-life Squid Game recreation and the $800,000 island giveaway.

MrBeast shared how he vastly expanded his YouTube viewership by dubbing his videos in foreign languages so the rest of the world can enjoy his videos.

“Less than 10% the world speaks English, so 90% of the world can’t even enjoy your content,” Donaldson told Rogan. “And when I realized that I was like, ‘Wait a minute 90% of the world can’t watch this stuff.”

Rogan reacted by saying, “That’s a brilliant idea. That’s so smart.”

He continued to be blown away, “Wow! That’s dope. I love it. Oh, what a great idea, man.”

MrBeast said he only made a “dollar a day” in the first two years of his online career. Then he devoted all of his time creating content and dissecting what it takes to make a viral video.

“I would act like I was going to community college but I would just work on videos in my car and edit and stuff like that, I had straight zeroes,” he said. “Once my mom found out, I was screwed.”

He met “four lunatics” who also had a passion for being YouTube creators.

“We were all super small YouTubers and basically we talked every day for 1000 days in a row and did nothing but just like hyper study like what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, like how to go viral and we would just call it like ‘daily masterminds,'” he explained. “We would just get on Skype every morning and like some days like I’d get on Skype at 7:00 am and I’d be on call until 10:00 pm and then I go to bed and I wake up and do it again.”

“Like literally nothing else,” he added. “We had no friends outside the group, that was your life.”

“I think I just had the blessing of finding what I love at a young age,” Donaldson noted. “Most people don’t find what they love till their young 20s.”

Rogan asked MrBeast if he balled out with his early success.

“I think living your life chasing like a nicer and nicer car and a bigger and bigger box to live in is kind of like a dumb way to go about life,” the prolific content creator responded.

Donaldson said he lived in a “super below average home” up until someone broke into his house and stole all his stuff.

Rogan was also in awe of what Donaldson had accomplished despite only being 23-years-old.

“You’re just very wise for a young man because a lot of 23-year-olds would ball out of their f—ing mind,” Rogan said on The Joe Rogan Experience.

MrBeast said he reinvests nearly all of his profits back into making videos, and even had to take out loans in the past.

“And so I think that’s like, it shouldn’t be revolutionary that I reinvest all my money; like that’s something businesses have been doing for centuries,” Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson stated.

Rogan pivoted to TikTok, which he called a “sketchy f—ing application.”

Rogan asked, “You ever seen the breakdown these software engineers have done on TikTok? Of how intrusive it is?” Then he called the video-sharing platform “the single most disturbing piece of software they’ve ever had to engineer, the amount of cross-platform spying it does.”

MrBeast tacked on, “I have had instances where I would say certain things in conversations and then later that night I would get in my feed something similar. Like if I talk about dogs a lot and then weirdly start getting TikToks about dogs. I have noticed that kind of stuff.”

Donaldson admitted that he deleted the TikTok app because it took up too much of his time.

“TikTok can be pretty addicting, I actually recently uninstalled it,” he said. “Even though my TikTok is mostly like gym and, actually, finance stuff. I found I was spending two hours a day on TikTok, that’s when I uninstalled it.”