Casey Neistat was standing in the African bush, watching a man who had flown 20 people to the other side of the world, scrapped his entire shoot after a COVID case in Antarctica, pivoted to building a steel lion cage in five days, and was now sitting inside it sick with a Crohn’s disease flare-up while actual lions circled outside, and he still was not sure whether to be inspired or terrified. The story Neistat tells around that moment is not about MrBeast‘s success. It is about what happened before any of it worked, and why those failures are the part nobody talks about. How MrBeast manifested becoming the biggest youtuber and how they push through a NO and how his crew is prepared to make anything happen. This is the story…
A week in Cape Town waiting for Antarctica that never came
The original plan was to film Jimmy Donaldson surviving 48 hours in Antarctica. Neistat was brought along because Donaldson wanted an expert mountaineer on the trip. Neistat’s own assessment of that credential: ‘Not an expert mountaineer.’ It was 2022, deep into COVID protocols, and the expedition team had been explicit. One positive test from anyone in the group and the entire project was cancelled. The crew quarantined in Cape Town for a week, went to the beach, went for hikes, and sat in the house waiting. On the last day of quarantine, every member of the traveling group had tested clean. Then the expedition team delivered the news: a member of the advance team already in Antarctica had tested positive. The shoot was dead.
Neistat turned to Donaldson to offer some kind of sympathy for the sheer scale of the loss, the flights, the expedition contracts, the advance team, all of it gone. Donaldson’s response was immediate and flat. ‘It’s fine. We’re going to do something else.’ That night, the production team had a new plan. Same resources, entirely different shoot. They were going to find a location in the African bush, commission the construction of a giant steel cage, and have Donaldson and Logan sleep inside it while wild lions tried to break in. The director who worked alongside Donaldson on the project later described the timeline plainly: ‘We did this in 5 days. Probably top five hardest videos we’ll ever do.’
The hiring philosophy that made a cage appear in five days
Neistat asked Donaldson directly how he found producers capable of executing something like that. The answer shaped the rest of Neistat’s understanding of everything MrBeast had built. Donaldson told him: ‘I only hire people that are capable of pushing through a no.’ Every impossible production starts with a wall of nos. No, you cannot build a custom steel cage. No, you cannot house a crew in the middle of the African bush with apex predators on the perimeter. The cage materialized in two or three days. The camp that followed had air conditioning, refrigerators, hot showers, and a his-and-hers toilet arrangement that Neistat described, without irony, as ‘heaven.’
The brightest moment of the trip came during a day off while cameras were being rigged. Veterinarians invited the group along on a safari helicopter run to dart a bull elephant, check its blood, and release it. Neistat’s reaction on the ground as the animal went down captured exactly what the week had already been: ‘Yo. What is happening right now?’
Then came the darkest part. Just before the cage shoot, Donaldson had a severe Crohn’s flare-up. He was visibly sick. A producer asked if he was nervous about the shoot. He answered: ‘I’m not, I just I’m sick and I’m just.’ He lasted four hours in the cage before he had to be carried out and was hospitalized. Neistat flew home the next day and spent the flight and the following months thinking about what an epic failure the whole trip had been: two major productions, two complete collapses.
Months later, Neistat called Donaldson to talk through it. Donaldson explained that from the hospital bed he had already started planning his next shoot. He told Neistat he had not once looked back on the failure. As for the Antarctic video that started everything, Neistat eventually had to decline when Donaldson asked him to try again. Family commitments meant he could not take two more weeks away. Donaldson’s solution was to simply go without him.
The man who planned his next video from a hospital bed
Donaldson, speaking to Neistat during their later call, was direct about the moment he finally called off the cage shoot: ‘It physically hurt to swallow and that’s when that really clicked in my head like oh I don’t know what’s going on but it might be really serious.’ He was equally direct about his overall approach: ‘And so that’s my philosophy. Whether or not it works, we’ll see.’
Back in Jimmy’s billion-dollar production facility four years later, filming the larger group challenge where Neistat was eliminated and did not win the million dollars, Neistat found himself looking around not with admiration for the scale of it but with a more specific question. How many nos did it take to get here?
The lion cage is still out there somewhere, a piece of steel that got built in three days in the African bush because someone asked a team that only hired people who could push through a no.
Wake up to Only Happy News!
