Where this was said
The Creator Economy as the New Hollywood
At 2:06:09 · chapter starts 2:00:00
The conversation broadens from MrBeast's specific career to a cultural diagnosis: the creator economy has definitively beaten traditional Hollywood, but most people inside traditional media still haven't accepted it. MrBeast's main YouTube channel hit 850 million unique viewers and 12 billion views in a single quarter — a number that would have been literally inconceivable on any single platform 20 years ago. Joe Rogan describes watching early YouTube content creators be looked at with pity by people at cocktail parties ('oh, poor guy, you used to be on TV'), and how both podcasting and YouTube have now flipped into prestige careers. They debate what the equivalent invisible opportunity might be today — the way YouTube was in 2009 — and struggle to name it, concluding it probably involves AI but is too nascent to predict. MrBeast notes that YouTube alone is approaching 3.2 billion monthly active users and shows no signs of slowing.
Hollywood took decades to notice what was obvious: the most exciting new films are being made by YouTubers and TikTokers. Obsession grossed $400M. The Backrooms director is 20. These aren't flukes — they're the result of years of making hundreds of micro-productions that served as training for a feature film.
