On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days
coldhealing.substack.com
coldhealing.substack.com
From watching a couple of interviews, things I've picked up - when his youtube videos were grossing $20-30k a month he started hiring people and said he hires about 1 person per month since then. He has a teams of accountants, editors, producers, etc. He decided early on to have videos translated but would hire premier voice actors in countries, like someone that voice acted Batman to do his voice. He has an obsessed culture of making the best videos. He built a huge studio and lives there.
I see many similarities to what I've read about startup founders and a growth mindset. If anything, there are some huge marketing lessons to be learned from how he runs his business. I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.
MrBeast was just on Flagrant with Andrew Schulz for 4 hours, a day or so ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo
This was also an interesting and fun interview which I expected to skip over fairly quickly but ended up listening to in the entirety. Some discussion over how you would lose something like 3% of viewers if somebody sneezed, went to the toilet, and so on.. Other things to avoid, like any signalling that the video is winding down will lose you a huge chunk of viewers instantly.
I watch woodworking youtubers and a couple of them had a behind the scenes discussion about their channels and also came to the conclusion that any wind-down loses viewers and this affects a channel. The algorithms use metrics of how long someone watches so it makes sense to end abruptly rather than have 30-60s of wind down.
Mr Beast's team must have second by second analytics on every video to know what works, what doesn't for the types of videos they produce.
The reason YT doesn’t want show to wind down is because it provides people with a nice and natural place to stop watching which is nice. The race towards shorter, easier, more catchy and relentless content is a race to the bottom making everyone dumber.
Watching TikTok for an hour is probably the most depressing experience I ever had when it comes to my general opinion of humanity. Yet I’m here commenting and I’m not convinced that it is a better use of my time than TikTok. Sometimes I wonder if what the internet has actually done to us was worth it.
It's a little muddy.
On the other hand, think about what benefits the platform. Executing a sudden ending that leaves people engaged and ready to continue to watch, rather than a friendly sign-off that gives people permission to go about their day like a healthy human being?
YouTube inherently will be strongly motivated to keep people connected and watching, rather than happy or healthy. So it's got me wondering about sign-offs that might invoke this reality. I'll have other videos, the viewer is not guaranteed to go from mine to a MrBeast video. If I wanted to be cagey about it I could try to connect to another video of mine: I've seen this done by others.
It makes sense if you assume that YouTube will reward you for keeping the viewer from switching off, through and beyond the end of your video. You become complicit in an attention engine, with some known parameters: you are there to keep people watching. What you do isn't relevant. You could be helping or hurting them, whatever you like, so long as you keep people on YouTube, and whatever YouTube does for metrics or algorithms, you can be sure that keeping people tuned in is an existential need of theirs and you'll always be rewarded for directing people to more YouTube. of ANY kind. Doesn't have to be the latest MrBeast. If you can successfully direct people to any other video of your choice, yours or otherwise, that still counts.
It doesn't fully match your requirements but Mr. Beast was on Joe Rogan a few months ago. A fantastic interview and they talk a lot about the stuff you mention (voice actors, hiring people, etc.)
That's it, isn't it? It's the exact opposite of dignity of labour: it's compensation for degradation. The "voluntary" part is just highlighting how willing people are to trade in unnecessary misery for the entertainment of the comfortable.
Granted, Mr. Beast is not giving us the story of Luke Skywalker, but I can understand the rational of the person taking the challenge.
For most people watching, it's just torture porn, but content providers have to give the people what they want to make a buck....
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?"
Perhaps we've conquered all the naturally "hard" things and are left only with artificial challenges to inflict on ourselves and others. Climbing the highest mountain for the first time has a kind of natural "because it's there" dignity to it. But it's become a littered tourist spot now.
> torture porn, but content providers have to give the people what they want to make a buck
Someone could quite easily write 1k words on what the word "porn" is doing in that sentence and how it relates to desire, suffering and spectacle.
Maybe we could say “all human desire is ok, but behaviors can be good or bad”
Modern entertainment really is a blight. At least when I was a kid public TV was making shows which were both entertaining and trying to uplift people. There is something slightly despicable about this race to the bottom mentality if that’s what people want, we are not guilty of feeding them garbage.
So it's not certain this is the "exact opposite" of labor; maybe it's its ulterior incarnation.
Far too often the idea of dignity is used to repress people who are simply busting their ass for someone else to afford a meager lifestyle.
The internet wasn't laughing at that dude.
I assume most people here are too good to watch Mr Beast /this video and are simply inserting into it whatever is most convenient to their argument.
The dude is amazing. It was a fun enough video. His family is beautiful and watching how he "survived" based on the strength of his love of family was great.
Better than 95% of the garbage on youtube.
I disagree with this intrinsically.
Certainly, some labor is suffering, but what it actually means is to put forth effort. To some people, any effort put forth is suffering, but that's certainly not always the case. Laboring on behalf of something you believe in deeply can be joyful. If you really have never experienced this, I urge you to change your habits and try to find a way to do things that you can take joy in.
You're not wrong, but it's not that new - see 1930s dance marathons https://www.historylink.org/file/5534#
Aye comrade, aye.
You say Mr Beast, I say Capitalism.
Edit: Seeing as they mention Joe Rogan, Fear Factor is another great example of a reality TV version of basically the same thing.
There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi#Denpa_Sh%C5%8Dnen_teki_...
Although I guess Japan has always sort of been in a league on its own when it comes to questionable TV show premises.
What a truly tragic story...
Mr Beast isn't exactly "bum fights".
If you want to watch an episode, check this out on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_FiahUZsxs
If you want to watch an episode, check this out on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_FiahUZsxs
I think a high payout could push some people to significant psychological harm.
You had to answer trivia questions under extreme cold/hot conditions, with electroshock and wind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_FiahUZsxs&t=1667s
This isn't terrifying. People do much worse for 100x less. Prostitution and porn, for example, many times drive people to suicide. People stay on ships for months at a time without seeing their family, not too long ago, sailors would go years on ships. Why? For money. The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.
Why is it childish to want a life in which you don’t need to labor to have everything you need to be happy? It’s childish to think that human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life? Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?
But we’re still culturally in the mindset you’re describing: that we must each individually wrest life out of the wilderness day by day.
As a result we seem to be inventing more and more complex and bizarre ways of forcing that reality to still exist. Like pointless YouTube challenge videos done solely to provide ad inventory so well-off people can sell things to other well-off people.
This should come with a footnote that it's only possible due to slave labor in third world countries. A much smaller subset of people would be buying iPhones if they were $5000.
But that's only true with incentive to work.
Their point wasn't anything to do with wilderness. It was if you had your needs met without the requirement of work, that a significant portion of people would not work. Without those workers, we would no long have enough production.
This is only happening because more women are working. Guess what happens when all men and women are free all day long? It comes from the very essence of evolution that when the carrying capacity increases the population rises until it reaches the new one. Any "utopia" would revolve around sex as it is the principal object of human existence and reality.
That's just, like, your opinion, man. But, IRL there are plenty of people that require care-taking, who we never expect any labor from.
It seems there's a capacity limit to the safety net and if you go over it, starvation ensues.
the “world” may not owe anyone anything, but do we as individuals, groups, tribes, governments, and a species owe each other some attempt at that?
how does this view extend into discussions about marginalized, disabled, the idea of social safety nets?
If we used the money we spend on, say, entertainment or high-end mobile phone industry on R&D regarding farms and food yield and distribution we might see lots more advancements in this area. But that's not really something that is desirable in our modern economies; for people in the USA and most of the developed world we don't really need to invest any more in solving hunger because we are really not hungry anymore. And the ones that are hungry we don't really acknowledge as a big problem, although they exist.
Housing on the other hand, it's really interesting to think of this problem because acquiring a house has gotten much more difficult even though our capabilities to build houses have increased so much. This seems to be a problem in how we are deciding the prices of houses rather than a pure "we need to pay for materials and construction costs".
So although these people deserve to be compensated, we are in no way paying the "right" prices. I reckon for food we are actually paying less money than we should be paying for some products (counting externalities that are derived from our current methods of production) and for housing we are paying more than the actual material and labour cost of the construction. All in all, it seems prices and cost of living is kind of whacky in modern societies.
There are massive sums invested in agricultural R&D. Some of this does include a focus on poorer markets. We also heavily subsidize many crops to be competitive on the global market, thus exporting to poorer nations (overall that might be a bad thing, stunting their economic growth).
This is the issue. No one needs to do anything to deserve access to food, shelter, clothing, etc.
I think you're framing it something like lazy people vs. people who work hard, which I don't think we need to do. If we ever lived in world where we could all access unlimited food, shelter, etc. then do you think people would still have to do stuff to actually "earn" access to it? Why or why not?
The issue I had in my original comment was that the OP suggested merely _wanting_ to live in that world, where we are all handed the ingredients for a happy life at 0 cost, is childish. I can't fathom thinking that someone wanting to live a happy life without needing to toil is _childish_
We do not live in a world with unlimited food and shelter.
The entire fields of early childhood development and mental health counseling firmly disagree with you.
The same way it’s childish to want my parents to provide for all my needs. Or to want dragons to be real.
It’s not realistic and is counterproductive to being creative and providing for myself.
We can’t all be trust fund kids, thankfully as all the ones I’ve known have been insufferable.
But you also ask:
> Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?
And if I'm understanding correctly, the reason we need to earn these things is because right now, we're not living in a world in which we can stop working. The world doesn't just hand us what we need without toil, unfortunately.
We are all born worthy of a life free of struggle. If we can ever obtain that, we deserve it, regardless of how hard we worked for it. I don't understand this mindset of "you gotta _earn_ happiness/safety/security, etc."
The author seemed to deliberately avoid making value judgements of this sort until it compared to traditional reality media where there are more guardrails built in. Otherwise Just about the only editorializing there is the author’s speculation about Mr. Beat’s motives, that they are driven by a an extreme focus on creating desirably content for his audience.
Most people aren't even lucky enough to have this much consistency, and for even less money.
Prostitution may be grueling but people generally do it to pay the bills in a trivial sense. Being put into some sort of alternate reality where you are being treated and experimented on like a video game character, to an audience who also probably perceives you as a virtual source of entertainment deserves to be looked at through a different lens than just bucks/hour made. It's a sort of low stakes hunger games where rich patrons throw people into an arena for their fun and benefit. The Mr Beast content could be its own Black Mirror episode.
And it's terrifying not despite but because the money isn't even that relevant. There's probably people who would do that stuff for free just to meet Mr Beast or get five minutes of online attention.
There's a really good essay titled The Copenhagen Interpretations of Ethics[0], which makes an argument that the moment you interact with a problem you become responsible for it in the eyes of the world, even if you strictly improved it in a utilitarian sense, and even if the people judging you have done exactly nothing to fix the problem. Reminds me a bit of this.
[0] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Stop repurposing real words and making a joke of real experiences to satisfy for your own emotional position.
Don't bother quoting the definition here and bending around the truth to further your distortion.
I think you're getting offended on behalf of other people, when most of the world would think it was a sweet deal. This is just reality TV for people who were born after 2000, except the prize is better, the format is shorter, and it's less cut-throat. Nobody's kidnapped, there are no victims, and "sick games" is a bit of a stretch.
No he literally is not kidnapping anyone. Shawn could have walked out of the circle at any time. I don't understand why you think more choices is a bad thing. Let people labor however they want. If that means "humiliating" themselves for 100 days for millions on youtube so be it.
> If it was just about giving money to poor people there would be no need for the sick games he plays with them
No one would watch the video if he was just giving away money and therefore he wouldn't be giving away the money.
> is to imagine he’d given them the money up front and told them that to leave his enter-torture-ment they have to pay up a ransom matching the initial gift.
People enter those challenges fully knowing how they're going to go. It's random, rules don't matter, you might get money you don't expect or not get money you expected. The point at which they get the money doesn't really matter, I don't find it a different situation.
> That’s what he’s subjecting poor people too, for fun and profit, because he knows the money is worth that much to them
Well, he gives amounts of money that are worth very much for a lot of people. I doubt there's a lot of people that can make $500k in 100 days, for example. I watched the one where there's 100 people in a circle, and people got quite a lot of money for the most random things (I think one gets several thousand dollars for being the first to go, for example). I'd get this criticism if the amounts of money were lower, but I don't think it's really the case. A lot of non-poor people would consider those challenges very much worth the money.
> And of cause because he’s making a fortune doing this.
He says that a lot of his videos lose money and I honestly believe it. Between the money he gives and the amounts he spends to make the videos (like renting entire stadiums) his costs must be incredibly high, even with as many subscribers as he has I imagine some videos might not break even. And he could very easily break even on all of them just by lowering the amounts of money and toning it down a little.
Personally I don’t think this is good in any meaningful way. You could only rationalise such behaviour with the same arguments that other forms of exploitation are explained.
Another counterpoint is that they do good as well - 30+ million pounds of trash cleaned out the ocean with TeamSeas. Go see the one where they take over a bank in his hometown, no game show antics just handing out money in an entertaining way.
It's not that it's inherently morally wrong to clean up the ocean, open a free bank or handing someone 500k for staying 100 days in a 100ft circle. It's the manifest obliviousness of not challenging the system and the premises that allow him to make his videos that's - industries generating single-use plastics, people not able to take out a mortgage,... - which is the issue.
His videos aren't in any way a social commentary. They are nothing more then entertainment, and they don't pretend to be anything else. That's what makes all of this morally questionable.
Why should he?
Littering is often a criminal offense in many places and/or you have to pay a fine so you are comparing apples and oranges here.
Why though?
You do, but on different ones. On shows that make them look good.
I'd agree it's unethical only if their cognition was compromised (meaning he wasn't capable of analyzing the costs and benefits and deciding if it was in his interest) or if there were surprises hidden (meaning he didn't really agree to what happened) or if it's a particular type of decision where people are known to not be capable of factoring in long-term costs properly into their decision making. But we don't know if any of this is true, do we?
An argument I would be sympathetic to would be that it's unethical not because of what happened to the subject in particular (after all, he net benefited if the above assumptions are met), but because of the negative flow-on impacts to culture and the social fabric.
It's unethical to ask people to perform an action which you know they would never agree to if it wasn't for an imbalance of power or financial pressure/incentives.
Otherwise you could say why did Harvey Weinstein get prosecuted. When he asked women to suck him off and they did it voluntarily then it's not wrong is it? I mean they could have just walked away and not get hired for his next film.
"It's unethical to ask people to perform an action which you know they would never agree to if it wasn't for an imbalance of power or financial pressure/incentives."
Consider the reductio ad absurdum. Almost everyone has a job because of financial pressures. Even upper middle class people feel pressure to secure themselves for old age and unforeseen circumstances. Is almost every job unethical? If yes, then you're saying that our species functioning is unethical, which is an absurdity. If no, then you don't believe it yourself.
"Harvey Weinstein"
A third thing: the attempts themselves were a sort of menacing assault which subtracted utility from the person, which they didn't agree to be subjected to upfront.
Because it's inherently degrading and dehumanizing. Ethics is more than just benefit vs cost.
Is that ethical, because it's a rational cost-benefit analysis?
There are few people in the US who don't have enough to eat to fuel their bodies, but in other countries there are more. I am not trying to describe the particular people in "bumfights", who I don't know, but hypothetically working the boundaries of this analysis.
I also don't in fact think that people can be divided, in binary fashion, into those who are "rational" and "not rational".
It seems pretty clear to me that enticing desperate people to fight each other, for the entertainment of others who find their desperation emotionally engaging, and for the profit of the promoters -- is unkind and disrespectful and an attack on their dignity. Even if they are not "mentally ill." It seems hard to argue otherwise. Is it how you would treat a relative or friend? To hypothetically say, well, sure it's unkind and disrespectful and an assault on their dignity, and I wouldn't do it to someone I loved, but it's not unethical to do to make a buck or a laugh -- what is the point of "ethics", then, exactly?
But is it unkind? You're giving them a benefit (+$) and taking a cost (-dignity), and they've calculated that $ > dignity. Assuming their calculation was accurate, aren't you actually being kind? You are increasing their utility.
> I also don't in fact think that people can be divided, in binary fashion, into those who are "rational" and "not rational".
Yes, there isn't a clear dividing line between those who are capable of rationally calculating what's in their true best interest, and those who aren't. A dose of pragmatism is obviously needed. Homeless people are statistically much more likely to suffer from a mental illness which erodes their ability to rationally calculate costs and benefits more than others.
But, yes, I think intentionally subjecting strangers to something that you wouldn't subject your loved ones to because it would make you sad, is at least a signal that something is likely to be unethical.
In general, I'd say profiting off of desperate people trading their dignity for money is probably unethical. Yes, I'm aware this can apply to other parts of society.
Is your opinion basically that there is no such thing as unethical employment of someone? That if someone is of sound mind, any employment conditions are always ethnical, there is basically no way for an employer to behave unethically with regard to their employees? No matter how degrading, how awful their experience is, it isn't actually possible to consider any such conditions unethical, because the desperate employee chose to engage in the employment?
Correct, as long as my above assumptions are not violated. That is, no surprises post-contract signing, and so on[1].
Your actions are a net benefit to them. It can't be unethical to benefit someone, unless we're operating under a non-utilitarian moral framework.
I'd argue it's unethical to not provide them that terrible job, if the only alternative is for you to not engage with them whatsoever. You are leaving them worse off by choosing this so-called moral high ground. Society may pat you on the back for your upstanding choice, but you are leaving them worse off, so I believe it to be immoral to not provide them that job.
[1] In practice, this is fraught because of the power asymmetry -- the employer can easily introduce new conditions post-signing. But I'm assuming that the employer doesn't abuse that asymmetry. It's also fraught because people aren't rational creatures that are capable of perfectly evaluating costs and benefits. So we'd have to evaluate each situation on a case by case basis.
> You wouldn't consider it either unkind or unethical to arrange for a needy family member to fight for money
I would consider it less unethical to do that, compared to withholding the money. There's a rank order here. It's more ethical to pay them to fight (under my above assumptions) than it is to withhold the money, because you are maximizing their utility by doing so, i.e. you're helping them the most by doing that, relative to that alternative.
Of course it would be maximally good to just give them the money with no strings attached. But that doesn't imply that it's unethical to pay them to fight.
> make you sad, is at least a signal
I am highly skeptical of such evolved responses that are there because of kin selection, reciprocal altruisim, etc. If I feel bad, it means that I'm doing something that's correlated with a reduction in genetic fitness, that's it. Moral certainty based on feelings has motivated genocides, anti-sodomy laws and many other terrible things.
Then why would it make you sad to provide a family member or loved one with that terrible job, say fighting homeless people for the entertainment of those who find their pathos entertaining? Why wouldn't you feel great, providing them with that job that is a net benefit to them? I mean, maybe not as good as if you were able to just give them a gift, but there's no reason to feel sad, right, you've given them a net gain, setting them up to fight homeless people on youtube?
I think if everyone acted according to your principles, there would be a net gain in human misery. Speaking of utilitarian frameworks. Human dignity benefits from, well, valuing human dignity and feeling a responsibility for it.
But ok, this conversation is going as far as it's going to.
If I had realized you thought it was literally impossible for any employer to behave unethically toward an employee, I wouldn't have gone this far with it. Now I'm curious if you are the same Ayn Randian I had a similar conversation with a few weeks ago, looking through my history... nope, that was someone else! It is very convenient for those who profit from taking advantage of desperate people to believe it is literally impossible for this to be unethical; less convenient for the desperate people being taken advantage of.
"Then why would it make you sad to provide a family member or loved one with that terrible job"
If they needed the money, I would feel better getting them to fight for it (because after all, that's better than them dying of cancer or whatever the money is for!) than I would not giving them the money, but I'd feel bad in both situations, because all I'd want to do is maximally help them, and either of these options isn't that.
"I think if everyone acted according to your principles, there would be a net gain in human misery."
"If I had realized you thought it was literally impossible for any employer to behave unethically toward an employee"
Unless you want to consider 99% of paid work as unethical, monetary need cannot be the only factor in considering whether something is ethical or not.
Also, until now, the most questionable thing would be the 100 days in a circle one, and the reward is $500k. I think most people, even if not in dire need, would happily go and do that. Here in the comments you already see examples of that.
And, most importantly, I don't see the "coercion" anywhere. Most of the people participating are subscribers to him, he's not just searching for poor people out of the street.
Then again, if you keep scaling down like that, in what way is regular work any better?
I’m currently doing tech support for mr cooks phone company and the abuse I’ve endured this week has been insane.
People who have financial need aren’t able to clearly decline and have agency over their decision. Asking someone who supports a family if they will degrade themselves for $500k if not really a fair question and people will say yes.
It’s like saying that people who blow their boss do it knowing fully well what they’re getting into. There is a power imbalance so even perceived consent isn’t really consent because of the leverage and greater power of one party.
Except that this isn't targeting people who have financial need. At the prices we're talking about, quite a lot of people will find it a good deal. And "degrading" might be a strong word, maybe the being alone in a circle for 100 days is pushing it, but from what I've seen (which is not too much) it's mostly games and small challenges.
> It’s like saying that people who blow their boss do it knowing fully well what they’re getting into. There is a power imbalance so even perceived consent isn’t really consent because of the leverage and greater power of one party.
Well, applying that strict line of thought, you can argue that people can't really consent to having a job, or playing the lottery, or betting on a game because there is a power imbalance and greater power of one party.
For a more practical approach, the useful thing is to look at how many people can realistically reject the offer if they don't want to do it. In the case of "blowing your boss", rejecting the offer means losing a job you might need to survive. In the videos case, rejecting means just not getting the money, it'd be similar as offering lottery tickets specially given how the participants seem to be random subscribers.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that. The person who “won” the chance has two young kids and a spouse. I’m fairly sure he really needs $500k. If he’s like a typical person he has student loans, bills and lots of debt.
It would be kind of perverse to have someone compete who didn’t really need the money.
If you ask a random human to degrade themself for $500k there’s a power imbalance as most people don’t lead a zen existence where that’s not a life changing amount of money.
The issue with your line of thought is that it leads to concluding that most jobs are unethical.
Lot of big Youtubers say that the videos themselves dont make lot of money but the more views a video has the more merch they sell, that brings in the profits.
Yes Mr. Beast is just following incentives that youtube + attention economy + other factors created for him.
But also: he chose to do that. I've personally walked away from good gigs when I was eating rice and beans because they didn't align with my values. He doesn't seem to realise or care. And maybe that's because of his situation, which should the also be addressed. But there still remains some personal responsibility for choosing to make money (lots of money) this way
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire%...
First, what was also mentioned in the linked blog post, Mr Beast's videos lack a certain level of fairness, winners of his competitions are often decided by luck, not merit.
Second, maybe there's an added benefit for both competitors and audience when watching Who Wants To Be a Millionare. I'm not sure if that's measurable metric, but it's definitely present. I can learn something new, or test my own knowledge, maybe even decide to sign up.
So just like real life?
There are, in fact, quiz shows that add torture elements. Rob Lowe hosts Mental Samurai, which is a quiz show where participants are put through physical disorientation[0]. This might be a closer parallel to what you are highlighting, but even still there are coherent and easily articulated ways in which this is not torture.
There are a great many reality programs that do actually involve a sort of physical depravation which is closer to torture. Big Brother and Survivor both involve not just physical challenges, but also punishments that are centered around depriving people of the sorts of creature comforts they are accustomed to in normal life. Even then you don't have torture, because again the vast majority of the experience involves being treated with comfort and dignity, the punishments that are small in scale and support systems in place to ensure they do not present real threat. So, for instance, you might have someone being awoken in the middle of the night as a part of a challenge, but they will be informed of that in advance, given additional time to sleep later, and the disruption will be minimal.
Mr. Beast's stuff has more in common with challenges like the Hands on a Hardbody challenge[1], where poor people go to a car dealership and have to touch a truck for an extended period of time to win the truck.[1] The contestant pool are mostly people who are quite poor, some of whom seem to be mentally ill, the willingness to do it for the prize almost surely implies they have inadequate access to transportation, and it's extremely undignified. But even this has hourly breaks.
It seems like a bit of feigned ignorance to respond to someone criticizing the Mr. Beast stuff by suggesting it is difficult or impossible to draw a coherent line in the sand, and then offering such a patently absurd example as something you think would have to be definitionally included. It comes off as playing language games rather than seriously engaging the substance of the criticism.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3gglCEsvGg [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_on_a_Hardbody:_The_Docum...
That's a lazy analysis. His creation is expanding a small audience into a larger one.
Let’s look at it from another angle to bring my point home. If a person gets assaulted and the assault gets recorded by CCTV cameras and then shown on BBC news then lots of people click the article and view the video, but nobody (or mostly nobody) would pay the BBC to assault another person and film it and then stream it. Do you see the difference?
but the kids are not the ones paying. if we had to start paying for it, the result would be an argument between parents and kids.
Not sure who "we" you are talking but his fans buy lot of merch from his store which brings in lot of profit.
But overall i disagree that anyone is monster here. No one forces these people to be a part of these challenges.
Most of his videos are basically excuses to give people money and you rarely see participants not having a good time. Having the guy sit around for 100d is the most 'exploitative' video I've seen, but that really doesn't seem like the goal.
If he starts making real-life Hunger Games videos I'd be worried, but it doesn't feel like he's heading in that direction at all. More like a new version of game shows, except it's way less forced, more varied and very lighthearted.
I dont think this is true. He either doesn’t understand his revenue and costs or is misleading and spinning BS to seem more relatable.
He’s the 5th most subscribed YouTube channel. He’s making gobs of money off all his videos. That’s why he’s quite wealthy now.
He seems totally full of horse apples and is the closest we’ve gotten to “Ass: the Movie” in my lifetime.
I don’t want to be an old person yelling at clouds so if people like watching him then I leave it alone. I suppose there are worse things to watch. But it all seems too contrived for me to enjoy it.
In this case it was a simple, boring task and 100/100 anyone dropped into that circle would stay for 100 days to get $500k.
Well this is an odd way to measure profitable. What’s the benefit to this method?
Imagine if Google said “we lose money on every search run. Unless you count the advertising, then we make billions. But we lose money on most of our activities.”
This just seems naively stupid. Because “most videos” is a dumb metric. Imagine if your VC answered the question “Are you rich from your fund?” with “Well we lost money on most of our investments.”
This is either a dodge or just a lucky fool. Mr Beast doesn’t seem like an imbecile so I assume he’s just trying to be humble or deflective.
Just from doing the YouTube napkin math if you saw his balance sheet he would have hundreds of millions.
Because trust me, the world would know if he donated to charity.
He’s making lots of money from YouTube views alone. Not to mention other markets, sponsorships, etc.
That’s nothing special at all, he simply rediscovered the concept of “loss leader”. He not doing those videos despite their lack of profit, he’s doing the because they’re the reason he has profitable content to begin with. It would be like a shaving company saying “I know it seems crazy, but we lose so much money on these shaving handles, but we do it anyway!” Everyone knows what’s really going on there, what the business model really is.
If he beats them, he gets more money, which he blows in order to beat them again, and so on. The winner isn't him, it's YouTube hosting him. He's lowbrow 'Ow My Balls' guy, but in reality.
It's always been like that. If somebody has a platform and they are able to benefit from somebody beating themselves into the ground for attention, they're going to subsidize that behavior, design their system to reward the guy who's willing to win at any cost. He then gets to be the attention winner and be constantly striving to be attention-getting, by any means necessary, and the PLATFORM wins and earns the actual profit.
The guy's being rewarded for exactly that behavior.
>In this case it was a simple, boring task and 100/100 anyone dropped into that circle would stay for 100 days to get $500k
Crazy how the video of this simple, boring task has 32M views. Mr Beast manages to make this kind of stuff very engaging.
The Kardasians tv show gets bizarre (to me) views as well. People find it engaging.
That’s ok, people can like their thing. But that doesn’t make it bullshit. Lots of people read The Secret and like it. It doesn’t stop the book from being absolute poppycock.
Not sure that anyone could do it. He made the job easier by forking with the guy and providing human contact. Should have left the guy alone. 100 days of solitary confinement can literally drive you nuts.
I only know what the name is because a picture of him showed up in some other video-- and because I'm constantly reminded by how often I need to block new stuff because more of it keeps showing, even though I always block it.
I'm kinda surprised to read this article and hear how awful the content is-- esp given that many other YT channels have spoken highly of him. The face just seemed to non-genuine and engineered to overstimulate some neural network (artificial or organic) and left me feeling that watching even one would be contributing to the downfall of civilization. It's interesting to see that my initial highly negative impression may have had some basis: it certainly doesn't sound like content I would find worthwhile.
It's... weird and a tad scary.
Literally hundreds of good channels worth consuming have thumbnails like that. I find it off-putting too, but videos are severely punished for not having them.
This is the channel mentioned in the sibling comment (Linus Tech Tips) - https://youtu.be/DzRGBAUz5mA
Glad to hear I'm not the only one put off by whatever that look is (interestingly worded too). For me it's something in the eyelids giving him a sort of watery look that triggers a deep-seated automatic feeling of disgust (and then there is the topic of the content itself which makes it a rational disgust).
www.youtube.com##div.ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(ytd-channel-name a[href="/c/SOME_CHANNEL_HERE"])Is it different for you?
If you really want to nuke them from your feed the easiest way is to report them. Might be ethical questionable but the 99,9X% of reports get ignored anyway so why not use it as feature.
The contestants have to play by Mr Beast's rules, Mr Beast has to play by Youtube's algorithm rules. The algorithm recommends videos with clickbait thumbnails and titles.
> The contestants have to play by Mr Beast's rules, Mr Beast has to play by Youtube's algorithm rules. The algorithm recommends videos with clickbait thumbnails and titles.
And, if we choose, youtube has to play by our rules. I'm trying to do my part, you can join me.
He lives in his office, doesn't care about personal wealth and is absolutely dedicated to making YouTube videos. He's definitely an odd fellow.
That doesn’t really make the human suffering aspect any better.
(Side note: I want to be clear that I don’t think what Mr. Beast does can compare to the worst things that some corporations do, not at all. It’s just an apt comparison to explore the extent to which motives matter or not in things like this)
He’s not odd, he’s just a YouTuber who is really good at SEOing youtube and getting billions of views.
You obviously have no idea what are you talking about. He not only donates to charity, he actually set up a charity by himself called Beast Philanthropy where he supplies people in need with food, schools with supplies, etc.
He also spearheaded two huge ecological campaigns - Team Trees (to plant millions of trees around the globe) and Team Seas (to clean up tonnes of garbage from the sea).
I don’t see it on CharityNavigator.org so not sure how it’s audited and how effective it is but at least he seems to have filed the proper paperwork.
MrBeast's videos I find particularly damaging to culture, since it's incredibly dehumanizing and stripped of any nuance of the labor/value/money dynamic.
It's sad that I've become less and less confident that people can be trusted with what they consume -- food, content, anything.
Can you elaborate more on what you mean by this?
In the end, I think that gatekeeping of some kind can increase both quality and the tastes of the average consumer. The fact that it's hard has led us to abandon it completely though, similarly to how people say now "the government can't make anything".
I also know that I'm a weak creature, and could use some external help to not deliver me constant temptations. If you see content as food for your mind, I find it easy to binge junk, only to be left with a feeling of emptiness after a while.
I had never heard of him or watched any of his videos. And now I have, and I'm afraid YT will recommend more. Not that I would ever watch one again except by accident, but still. I feel dirty.
Also, about this:
> t’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field. It’s even more terrifying that this is solely at the whims of a single former Minecraft YouTube creator (...) But there’s no standards, no compliance department telling Mr. Beast that this video maybe isn’t the best idea
Apparently the author has never heard of Tomoaki Hamatsu (Nasubi), a Japanese guy who was tricked into surviving off sweepstakes, fully naked, not for 100 days but for 15 months, while filmed and broadcasted 24/7 (without him even knowing it).
This stunt was organized by Nippon TV in 2000. It fascinated the whole country of Japan for as long as it ran, and some time after that.
I suspect that early on much of it was carried on the back of personal and business debt, but once the fast food division took off it all made more sense.
I also don't like where this is heading culturally, and while I find him odd, his crew or whatever the other members are seem incredibly annoying and vapid. It's also through watching Mr Beast videos, that every Westerner should immediately be able to understand why so much of the world has varying degrees of hate towards the West.
It's basically an endgame for capitalism. When you lower the friction of engagement and globalize everything so it becomes possible to try and be the winner of 'the market' as in the WORLD, there will be people in control who insist on being THE winner even if it costs them.
It makes perfect sense that MrBeast dumps all his money back into YouTube attention, and it makes perfect sense that he conducts money give-aways to immunize himself against criticism, and everything that he makes (and re-gives) also makes YouTube money, so they are deeply invested in aligning with him and his approach.
He is not ABOUT bringing a return on his investments (or indeed, fairly paying or treating his own employees). He is about beating the market, about winning, and anything else is disposable externalities. He paid off his mom's house when it became trivial for him to do so.
When he dies, it all collapses. He's not building anything except that he's cementing YouTube dominance.
> In interviews, he explains that many of his videos lose money, and he invests almost all of his earnings from You back into more videos.
How can I tell Youtube:
* I will never watch a Mr. Beast video
* I will never watch a music video
* I will never watch a sports video
* I will never watch a video about cars
* I will never watch a video about Minecraft, or any video game at all
Maybe it's because I pay for Premium? I also don't use Youtube that much.
Sure, it stops recommending that Minecraft channel. So that it can recommend 3 other Minecraft channels.
I block a Minecraft channel and YouTube shows me another and another and another.
I block a K-pop channel and YouTube shows me more and more K-Pop.
The “related videos” sidebar next to the video doesn’t seem more willing to experiment with different content, but not so much my homepage recommendations unless I’m endless scrolling.
Also: have an account, and remove garbage from your history if you watched it - and watch out, those auto playing shorts are going into your history. Hide the shelf, in app, or with uBlock origin.
User is "not interested" in this Football video because he "doesn't like this content"? User did the same for 15 Football videos?
Perhaps user just has been exposed to enough Football videos yet.
"not having a youtube account seems to help"
no it doesnt. YT homepage is filled with low IQ content. Blocking his and alike channels is the only cure for now.
you should try 5minute crafts and muskbot channels if you want to loose more brain cells
Cannot agree less on this take. There's dozen of interviews with Jimmy (Mr. Beast himself) where he explains his POV, why he does what he does, and what his goal is: make the best YT videos possible.
Nobody is forced to partecipate in his videos.
Maybe this difference in opinion in based on age? Or some other metric?
Mr. Beast's motives are irrelevant if that's the belief you're operating under.
There’s already a type of degradation in a conventional job: someone having power over you that you can’t question, you have to degrade yourself by being agreeable to nonsense, you have to whore out your time and attention and energy, etc.
Spending 100 days in isolation is less degrading to me than all the things people take for granted at even their cushy software job, they’re just used to it.
How many of you are forced to sit in on absolutely banal Zoom meetings yet grandstanding about what someone else wants to do for $500k?
A person that has no problem with paid labor but does have an issue with 100 days in a circle could have a consistent view if they believe that the former doesn't rise to the level of "torture" or "embarrassment."
It's also a short article. Bringing in other examples would necessarily lengthen the piece and potentially distract from the major points of the piece.
- One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece)
"In this performance, which lasted from 29 September 1978 through 30 September 1979, the artist locked himself in an 11.5-by-9-by-8-foot (3.5 by 2.7 by 2.4 m) wooden cage, furnished only with a wash basin, lights, a pail, and a single bed. During the year, he did not allow himself to talk, to read, to write, or to listen to radio and TV. A lawyer, Robert Projansky, notarized the entire process and made sure the artist never left the cage during that one year. His loftmate came daily to deliver food, remove the artist's waste,[3] and take a single photograph to document the project. In addition, this performance was open to be viewed once or twice a month from 11 am to 5 pm.
- One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For one year, from 11 April 1980 through 11 April 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together yield a 6-minute movie. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time.
- One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)
In his third one-year performance piece, from 26 September 1981 through 26 September 1982, Hsieh spent one year outside, not entering buildings or shelter of any sort, including cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or tents. He moved around New York City with a packbag and a sleeping bag.
- Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece)
In this performance, Hsieh and Linda Montano spent one year between 4 July 1983 and 4 July 1984 tied to each other with an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) rope. They had to stay in the same room when inside, but were not allowed to touch each other until the end of the one-year period. Both shaved their hair in the beginning of the year, and the performance was notarized initially by Paul Grassfield and later by Pauline Oliveros.
Guys, relax. He's an entertainment entrepreneur. He's a circus ringleader. He gives normal people a chance to be trapeze artists for a day. Is it easy? No. It's hard work. But it's a once in a lifetime experience that people sign up for, mostly for that experience, with the money being secondary.
Nobody gets hurt, and he pays his people extremely, extremely generously.
His business model isn't cruelty and torture. It's just a circus that gives away huge sums of money.
OT, but was Joe Rogan during that time (playing) an idiot that never second guesses blatant lies? I find it hard to watch obscure experts, that are either genius' or delusional, and not know what I heared/watched due to no classification by a reliable source, as any journalist should provide with any third party statement.
Therefore, I'd rather watch an interview elsewhere.
I think he now has a "fact checker" who googles questions (nope, not scholar.google.com, regular google queries), but interviews seem to stick to their obscure logic even if a house of cards was just debunked at the very foundation by five minutes of fact checking.
Easy life changing money. Once in a life opportunity.
> During the pandemic, he partnered with local restaurants to sell “Beast Burgers”, a proprietary burger recipe that any kitchen could make and sell with his branding, and in interviews he speaks proudly of restaurants that would have gone out of business without the interest Beast Burgers provided.
No. He inked a deal with a kitchen arbitrage venture.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/dining/ghost-kitchen-mrbe...
The $24 burger was...not good.
I think situations like these will only become increasingly prevalent as time passes thanks to technological development decreasing the raw resource cost of goods and services. Because while we have a good mechanism for reliably increasing productivity and efficiency, no analogous mechanism exists for distribution. Thus profit / wealth inevitably concentrates and you end up with
> the lengths to which humans in the twenty-first century will go to slurp up the drips of unimaginable wealth that the algorithm leaks out through Mr. Beast.
I have no idea how you actually come up with a reasonable solution for this since communism/socialism clearly failed. My hope is that there's enough trickle down from technological growth, that despite increasing wealth inequality, at least the baseline minimum will be high enough that even the poorest people will be able to have a decent standard of living.
You could simply give people more than just some drips that keep them on the edge of desperation. Whether or not you consider that socialism, it has been quite successful in a lot of countries. The failure of a totalitarian dictatorship in no way implies that excessive wealth inequality is the only alternative.
80s shlock like Running Man used to be portrayals of a ridiculous dystopia, but at this point they should be considered a warning. We already increasingly undervalue human life and have culturally accepted avoidable deaths as long as they can be justified with "personal responsibility" or follow from a perceived moral failing.
We're not there yet, but we're inching ever closer.
The first article of the post-WW2 constitution of Germany does not establish freedom of speech but the sanctity of human dignity. Of course in practice only lip service is paid to this, but it feels like "entertaintment" like Mr Beast's videos are the exact antithesis.
I wouldn’t seek out a personal trainer who chooses the name Mr. Hyde personally.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - the $500k isn’t stupid, but the psychological effects are forever. Hope some of that money got earmarked for therapy and counseling! Not kidding, I am an advocate for CBT and I’m pretty sure this situation is pretty similar to stories where lottery winners end up with mo money mo problems.
Get over yourself.
How many people were kept locked in their - possibly smaller - homes during COVID with no option to exit and no end date in sight?
https://bonjourparis.com/history/the-paris-morgue-a-gruesome...
We’re as stuck with the machinations of click-bait as fin de siècle Parisians with their morgue.
It strikes me that he doesnt have competition in youtube currently, because nobody else (?) makes videos with somewhat substantial budgeting that feel like TV. So his videos get all the attention among the various podcast/travel/other kinds of slow-paced, monothematic videos. BUT he might start a trend here of big budget youtube productions. This will depend on his margins, but I m not sure that the relatively small payout of youtube will allow such trend
What’s often misunderstood and unaccounted for is that this algorithm is a feed back loop. We are adapting to it as much as it’s adapting to us.
Perhaps the problem isn't the algorithms of yt and Tik Tok, but rather the people who decide to watch these things instead of moving on?
Seems I haven't been missing a thing.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Personally I'm pretty sure its all fake. The reactions are not quite right for people winning so much money. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of the winners as extras in other videos. He got caught handing out fake money which he claimed was for "security".
If you were Mr Beast would you really give away $500k plus the costs of spending a full 100 days of filming when you could just get some actors to do it in a week?
Especially when you would get the same view count either way.
Kind of like all the NFT wash trades.