MrBeast lays bare how the internet really works

27:03When you watch this, be aware that the vast majority of other people watching this are at most 15 years old. And the vocabulary and tone and content here is designed to be maximally appealing to that demographic. And because you don't have that kind of warning, you don't have all the sort of the signs and structures around the filter. It's like coming across, you know, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon in like the adult section of the video store or something. Like you can know that it's for kids, but it's much harder to kind of engage with it because you're like, well, maybe it's for adults.

27:38Like, I don't know. I don't quite know how I'm supposed to understand who this is for and what it's about. You know, it's a context collapse thing, but on the demand side instead of the supply side or something like that. And it raises this question for me of like, okay, so does content destined for adults on the internet have to then kind of, does it lead to like a natural sort of simplification or I don't know, is it like subtly influencing us? I think so. I mean, I do think so. I think the other like thing that I think this is relevant to is like the Andrew Tate manosphere world where it's really hard to know how to take some of that stuff.

28:12And I think it's more understandable if you recognize how young the audience is. Certainly, it probably makes it seem much scarier in some ways. But that stuff that I don't, I think is made with adults in mind. I mean, I don't know. I have no idea how sophisticated Andrew Tate is about his own audience. But that's like a, that's probably even a better example of something where you have these kinds of adult ideas manufactured for like 12 year old boys who feel really bad about themselves and are looking for a place to sort of like articulate that anger or rage or whatever. I mean, not to not that that's the only people watching it, not to defend Andrew Tate, which I'm absolutely not doing.

28:51I don't know. There's something strange about it on a much on a much more sort of lighthearted level. The thing I think I always think about is like it reminds me of like chip flavors, like the like like Dorito, you know, Cooler Ranch. It's like adults have to eat Cooler Ranch because if you want a Dorito, like that's what it's called. But Cooler Ranch is so like designed to appeal to 12 year olds. So I have to be out here eating my Cooler Ranch Doritos and I have no choice. and they taste good but you know i i wish that i had a more sophisticated dorito flavor profile for myself or like the talk of the summer or one of them is the barbie movie where it's like this movie that is you i guess it's for adult is it i think it's like somewhere between for kids and adults or it could be for both and both get something different out of it totally i mean i just sort of make the argument that this this process of like age collapse has been happening since like PG-13 was invented for Indiana Jones movies, basically.

29:46And, you know, you see the other side of this. I think I wrote in that post about YA fiction, which now appears to only be for adults. Like I do, I don't even know if young adults read young adult fiction. Certainly online, the discourse is all like grownups talking about young adult fiction. Yeah, and why do you think that he is so enormously successful? all like is it that he's just really good at doing what everyone who is successful on youtube does but on a bigger scale or like more precisely or is it that he's doing something that is different from what other people are doing which makes him sort of stand out like you know in the piece that he sort of bucks the trend of, you know, the most demonic or salacious or dark, disturbing content traveling the farthest on the Internet?

30:41Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit both. Certainly, I think he is a better craftsperson, so to speak, than a lot of other YouTubers that he is more thoughtful about his videos. He spends more time making them good. He has very good instincts for what makes a good video. So, you know, I think in another timeline, if Mr. Beast had been born 30 years old or whatever, he would have made a great, I don't know what, Ryan Seacrest or Mark Burnett or something. He has television instincts and he could have been a producer of reality shows. So in part, it's just purely he's doing it better. He's doing it bigger.

31:18He's just better at it than other people. But he also is doing something a little different. And I think it's easy to overstate it. But there's a way that I think he interacts with and treats his audience that other YouTubers haven't yet cottoned on to that I think makes him particularly appealing, especially to the kind of adolescent audiences that we're talking about. On the sort of surface and most obvious level, a lot of it is just simply that he tends to reward his subscribers. You know, with the video I was talking about where he invited a bunch of people to the island, he just invited subscribers to the island.

31:52So there's this there's a little bit of this premise that if you subscribe to Mr. Beast, you have a decent chance of being the recipient of his generosity, which is like not a bad way to get subscribers. It's a pretty standard marketing tactic. You know, it's a sort of like if you subscribe to me, you're entering a raffle that maybe someday I will pick you out of the list and send you to an island to compete against other subscribers. So I think there's that's lurking in the back of a bunch of people's minds. But then I think also, and this is something that an idea I'm sort of borrowing from an academic in the UK named Vincent Miller, he has this particular directness with which he treats the audience in terms of acknowledging to them that each one of the views that they have is worth a certain amount of money.

32:37so when he is doing philanthropic work he's telling viewers quite explicitly every time you press play on this video uh a dime is going into somebody else like you're giving a dime away to somebody else because that's how much each one of these views is worth it's like a very cynical way to describe it because he's you know it's it's a it's a way that i think uh a lot of youtubers would have trouble doing because it sounds it sounds almost too cynical to sort of be like you your eyeballs are just worth money, like money going into my pocket. So I think the fact that it's charity helps, but it's also, you know, he's able to do it in this very empowering way where the suggestion is that, um, by watching the video, you're not just sort of like learning or being informative.

33:18You're like actively raising money for something important. You are actively joining the, the, the sort of Mr. Beast movement, so to speak. And I think that's, I think that's a real, that's a pitch. It's a sort of a subtle one, but I think it resonates with people who watch, especially, you know, as we talk about his audience being young, people who don't otherwise have a huge amount of control over their day-to-day activities, who aren't able to politically organize, who aren't able to donate money in one way or the other. The idea that simply by watching YouTube videos, which is something they were going to be doing anyway, they are now sort of like active participants in charity, in some very vague sense of politics.

33:59is I think really appealing. Just to go back to the sort of generational divide we were talking about before, this is appealing to them also partly just because they, as longtime YouTube watchers, you know, as people who grew up on YouTube, he's telling them something they already know. You know, what I was saying before about how much content on YouTube is geared towards teaching people how to be YouTubers, so many viewers on YouTube are like quite familiar with YouTube as a business. So Jimmy leveling with them in his videos and saying, hey, you know, like, look, you guys are worth 10 cents of you or whatever it is.

34:32It's that kind of cynicism that is sort of empowering instead of pessimistic or nihilistic. It's like, oh, yeah, but we're going to we're going to turn this on its head and we're going to donate all that money somewhere. So, you know, it's like these sort of confluence of factors, I think, really help push him over the top. He's better at creating stuff than other people. he is making a really good value proposition to viewers who follow him and he is engaging them in a way that other youtubers aren't um and then just to finish this really long thought the other part of this and this is the part that i think is really important to underline because we don't know the answer to this question um the other part of it is that youtube is obviously pulling levers behind the scenes on the other side of the screen to adjust the way videos get sorted and recommended you know, what we call the algorithm.

35:23And there is a high likelihood that not maybe not in a specific, there was no memo that was like, let's make Mr. Beast the biggest guy on YouTube. But YouTube is obviously incentivized, much rather have somebody like Mr. Beast be the biggest YouTuber. And so if it's incentivizing videos that are slightly more positive, where generosity and charity are the focus, if it's incentivizing videos of a certain length, where there's more activity instead of just a guy talking to a camera, then you could see how Mr. Beast would be sort of rising to the top. And other more recently popular YouTubers like PewDiePie would be falling down a little bit.

36:01But the thing is, because it's a black box, we don't know. Like, we can sit out here and say, well, here are the things Mr. Beast is doing. That might be the reason. But we don't know whose thumb is on which scales and where and how much that's pushing him to. Right. Can you talk a little bit more about like the process by which all this makes money, You know, in your piece, you describe it nicely as this kind of a, quote, unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle and growth. Can you talk a little more about how that flywheel works and the role that fans play within it and how that leads to money?

36:33Yeah, well, so YouTube is relatively unique among platforms in how straightforward it is to earn money as a creator, which is to say once you reach a certain level of subscribers and a certain number of hours of videos produced, You can just flip a switch. And from then on, around 50 % of all advertising revenue from your videos goes directly to you. So the obvious answer is just sort of the more people watch his videos, the more money he makes. And that's great. But what Mr. Beast has to do is put the money back into his next video so that every video, and he's very explicit about this, so that, you know, you subscribe and you know that you are contributing more money to the Mr.

37:15Beast pot, which you will then put toward an even bigger, crazier, more generous, more charitable video the next time, which will then bring in more subscribers whose money will then go to the next even bigger one. You know, and again, like maybe you're joining because you think you might be the beneficiary of some of that. You might be joining because you feel like you're you are participating in a charity or a philanthropy, like a movement that feels good to you. But either way, like the stopping point just becomes the number of people, you know, who watch YouTube, basically.

38:08Um, going back to that academic, you mentioned Vincent Miller, you said that he wrote a paper that examines Mr. Beast through the lens of this concept called the audience commodity, um, which you sort of touched on before, but I was wondering like, what is the audience commodity and like, what is different about Mr. Beast's relationship to his audience? Yeah. So I'm not, um, I'm going to almost certainly flub this cause like I'm not a Marxist media studies academic. But the basic idea is that we tend to imagine, and I think a traditional sort of traditional Marxist analysis of media regarded consuming media as like a basically passive activity that mostly had to do with sort of like false consciousness and like ideology.

38:55It wasn't necessarily like a productive activity. But in the 70s, and I don't remember the name of the guy who first argued this, the idea that actually sort of say watching TV is in fact a kind of labor because you're sitting there and you're spending time creating a commodity that can be sold. And the commodity is an audience, basically, is an audience in the viewing time that the audience is happening. And this is not like a universally accepted concept among Marxists or among media studies scholars, you know, people argue, say, for example, that you're not really doing labor because it's not like a job where you sort of entered into a marketplace where you're selling your time for wages.

39:38It's not like agreement with the TV channel that you're going to sit there and help create an audience for them and they're going to deliver something for you. And, you know, also just the fact that most of us don't think of what we're doing when watch TV as work. We think of it as watching TV. We certainly don't think of it as though we're producing a commodity. Yeah, though your eyeballs are effectively being sold to advertisers. Yeah, exactly. And what Professor Miller thought was interesting about Mr. Beast and what I think is like a really interesting way to sort of think about what he's doing with his audience is that he's actually he's out there saying to them, hey, you guys are a commodity.

40:16It's something that a television network, I think, would never do because it's very important to them that viewers of TV only think of themselves as having a great time watching sitcoms. You don't want to tell the viewer necessarily that they're a valuable component of this whole experience. Mr. Beast is sitting there being like, you guys are a commodity. You guys are not just a commodity, but you are actively a force for good. You're a commodity that I'm selling and I'm using all the money that you're making me to give away to charity. I believe there's a video where he says that philanthropy is literally funded by your eyeballs.

40:49So whether or not you want to think about that as the audience commodity, it certainly is a different kind of relationship than traditional television. And, you know, I think that's a real component of its success for the reasons I was talking about before, that the sort of directness of that pitch is appealing to people who are otherwise kind of jerked around by YouTubers or by TV channels or by whomever, that sort of transparency. The flip side of it, though, is that I think it only really works in the context of charity and philanthropy. Once you make very clear to your viewers that they are making money, that they have that level of power in their relationship with you, the YouTuber, like, I think the only option you have is to sort of give that money away in a generically good way or to say, I'm putting it all into the next video.

41:34Because if you're like, you guys are commodity, I'm making a dime off of every single one of you who watches this, and I'm going to buy a couple mansions and a lambo or whatever that's not a good growth strategy i suppose i would say so in some sense like i wouldn't necessarily say he's backed himself into a corner but like this is the strategy that works and i don't know that there's a way to adjust it that wouldn't sort of break one component of the flywheel yeah like within the context of the specific operation he's built um the thing that i that i wonder about is whether like this is possible potentially because audiences are already sort of primed to conceive of themselves in this way like maybe not entirely consciously obviously he has his own really specific thing that he does but i often think about sort of other examples of this in culture maybe where the fans they're not necessarily helping for charity but they can sort of like think of themselves as performing labor to get something themselves like it's a little bit different um yeah like i edited this piece last year that was about these like manifestation videos on youtube where it's like it's not exactly the same thing but the whole premise of the video will be like a self-proclaimed which is like hey if you comment on my video your wish for your manifestation of beauty and happiness will come true or whatever or if you share it it will come you know yeah um and then i also think of things like crypto where it can sometimes even take on like a pseudo charitable element um and you see this probably less but during the like height of the bull run you saw more where it's like, OK, if we all share this project on social media and hype it up, it is going to come true.

43:26And the NFT or the coin is going to go to the moon and we'll all get rich. Or even if we do this, we'll get this pot of money that can be put towards some good use. Yeah. Like the people reclaiming the Constitution, the copy of the Constitution of America, you know? Yeah. Right. I mean, in crypto, it's also just like crypto's self-conception and Bitcoin from the original days of Bitcoin, self-conception as a world-changing force is so important to the long-term story and the long-term hold. Anyway, to answer your question, I think, yes, absolutely, that a huge part of this is made more easy by how primed we are for this.

44:06And I think to some extent, YouTube is a particularly good place for this because the kind of economics of it are so open and well known that many people who watch YouTube are also themselves YouTubers. One of the kids who was in the video, the blindness video that I interviewed, this guy, Jeremiah Howard, had a nice long conversation with him. He was a smart kid. And I was asking, you know, sort of how I should refer to him in the video, in the article rather. And he was very anxious that I mentioned that he himself had a YouTube and he wanted to make sure to get it up there. And I think that the way these platforms tend to democratize, you know, creative activity in that way, also means that they democratize knowledge about the sort of back end knowledge about how money is made off of creative stuff.

44:52And because of that, you know, people are less necessarily interested in clinging to their illusions about the purity of creative endeavor. And this is, you know, it doesn't have to be YouTube, even you talk about basically any, any platform, people have a pretty good sense of what's going on there. And so when you get a guy like Mr. Beast sort of acknowledging like, yeah, you guys are a commodity, come join with me and we're going to make the world a different place. Yeah, I mean, the crypto is not the worst comparison. I think a lot of the emotions and the ideas are not that far. Or something else I thought about a lot while I was reporting this was Stop Kony, which I don't know if you guys remember in 2012, this mega viral video movement about stopping the warlord Joseph Kony.

45:37That was just kind of, again, a thing that a lot of kids shared. It was very appealing that you could be part of this big positive movement online. There's something that's just very appealing about the idea that simply by kind of reproducing a claim and putting it out there in the world, you are doing work and activating some kind of movement. that I think that that's a core part of Mr. Bustadil. It can really like gas people up to be a part of something like that, too. Like it provides belonging and this sense of, you know, we're unstoppable and we can change the world. And I can see kind of why it's appealing.

46:12Yeah, especially again to like young kids who don't get that feeling in a lot of other ways. I was also thinking about this sort of in context earlier when we were talking about sort of like the durational performance appeal, part of like what makes him successful. I feel like it hits like maybe the same kind of like dopamine or satisfaction centers in the brain as like factors like social media activism and just that kind of superficial sense of agency or maybe not so superficial that social media has really like come to provide. Yeah. I mean, I actually think you saying that has just made me think, you know, we were talking about authenticity before.

46:48And I think maybe one way of articulating it would be that, you know, for at least the kids I was talking to, like authenticity or purity of motivation was just not really very important. But I think like authenticity of deed, like actually doing the thing that you say you're going to do, like, you know, counting to 10 ,000 and showing that you did it or actually giving away a thousand cataract surgeries or whatever. I think that is really important. And that, like we're saying, it activates that, that kind of response. It feels, makes people feel feel good i suppose right because in a sense especially in our like digital panopticon even not not publicizing your good deed is like can be viewed as its own kind of performative or like or like in conversation with that whether you want it to be or not right totally yeah so just to kind of bring this conversation full circle you know at the beginning we mentioned PewDiePie and how Mr.

47:46Beast has surpassed him as like the most successful streamer on YouTube. If PewDiePie's popularity felt very emblematic of the Trump era, what is it that makes Mr. Beast kind of a folk hero of our time? Like, is his success mostly the result of, you know, changing YouTube algorithms, like polarizing political content being sort of de-emphasized? or would you say it's something deeper than that? Like, you know, what we were just talking about a little bit, like a misplaced yearning for an actual social safety net. I do think, I think that part of it is, and I will, I have to admit, I kept trying to goad the kids I was talking to into saying this and I couldn't quite get the quote I wanted, but I do think there's something where it's like the world of drama YouTube.

48:34I think people are just kind of sick of it, like up to, you know, three or four years ago, So the sort of the Paul brothers and even PewDiePie, the kind of endless YouTube as a closed loop. Everybody is just a character in each other's channels. And you get really mad at anybody who peers in from the outside. And you're just sort of endlessly consuming updates from one or another hypebeast living in a hype mansion. I think that kind of ran its course. Like there's only so much of that that an audience can really engage with. And writing this, I found myself, I don't really like Mr. Beast, but like compared with what was really popular on YouTube five years ago or 10 years ago, he's he is, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, just much better, like both aesthetically, but also like, you know, as if somebody I would want to have a beer with or whatever.

49:20and so I think part of that is there's like a kind of just a changing of the guard like a stylistic shift that um that people are ready for something new and I also think it's reflective of like setting aside the algorithm it's reflective of YouTube's audience getting bigger and broader and so you get you're going to see stuff like Mr. Beast which is really straightforwardly and extremely broadly popular is just going to come out you know one thing I write in the piece is that I sort of joked in the beginning it's like I don't understand what is appealing about Mr. Beast. But the trick is, it's also kind of obvious.

49:51Like he's doing really classic television. He's doing Double Dare plus American Gladiator plus, you know, Million Dollar Makeover plus Candid Camera. You know, this is sort of like very old, very obvious, very broad reality, feel good reality TV shows. And, you know, if YouTube is in fact sort of our TV or that is TV now, which is not the wrong way to think about it, I suppose. It kind of makes sense to me that it would stop being this weird, formless internet thing and turn into something that resembles TV in a much more decisive way. But I think the last thing I'll say is I think in addition to people being sick of YouTube drama and wanting something more popular, I also think there's a way in which culture in general, audiences, people of all ages and all persuasions are like sick and hung over of the Trump administration, basically.

50:49I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here, just sick of the endless extreme politics and like sort of queasy debates and this, that and the other. And Mr. Beast just completely sidesteps any of that. I mean, he's just not engaged with it at all. And it's comforting in that way, right? Both for an audience who doesn't have to like think about the politics of what they're watching but also like for parents for example like you know i don't meet a lot of parents who are like i love mr beast i think they all feel weird about him but i think he feels safe in a way that youtube didn't used to if you've got a 10 year old or even a six year old you can sort of be like well god i need to distract him for a little while just let him watch mr beast because he's not going to end up you know a misogynist watching mr beast or whatever so i think that's that's part of what's what's behind the mr beast popularity is wanting him to talk about like the fact that people can't get that eye surgery for free or that people don't have universal health care too much to ask do you think in this context i don't i don't think it is personally i also i'm not sure i personally given my apologies to be thrilled that mr beast became a more political figure i don't think that he's like a he's not a reactionary he's not extreme or anything but his the only political statement i saw him make on Twitter after the blindness video was something like, it's amazing to me that the government doesn't pay for more of these surgeries.

52:13Great. Agree with that. And then he said something like the ROI on getting more workers out there would be, would be worth it alone. I was like, oh, that's not really how I would think about it. I'm sorry. Um, so, you know, it's also a funny sort of revealing way. Like, of course the guy who had mastered the YouTube algorithm is thinking about like the video itself ends with a winking joke where he's like, we just gave the gift of site to a thousand people maybe they'll all become mr beast subscribers so for now i'm happy to just let him pay for the surgeries and maybe other people can write the articles about about what should be done differently yeah it kind of like makes me just all think about like sort of just the basic like rhetorical rule like we're all writers here right like it's always more effective to say what something is rather than what something isn't yeah or like express like what you want rather than what you don't want and i think so much of you know inflammatory youtube success and like also politics of recent years has been about voicing what you don't want yeah and his tactic feels like it has a lot of longevity because it's very aspirational it's very much about like what you do want totally what people do want yeah yeah people and people love you know they're one of the most beloved and oldest criticisms i mean on the internet but anywhere is to sort of like you're just you know you're just complaining what are you doing mr beast is out there doing something and he is like that's this is the core of what his his shtick is oh at the end of the day It's almost like an American Hollywood story where, you know, for the duration of the video, people live happily ever after.

53:40Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. I mean, just to put a button in it. So the kid I was talking about before, this kid, Jeremiah, who has a who has his YouTube video, which is FL Boy Rhino for anybody listening. You could focus on him and you could do a whole story about what's wrong with American health care. So he's a kid. His mother had drug problems and mental health problems and left when he was young. He lives with his sister and their dad. in a double-wide trailer in Panhandle, Florida. Really smart, interesting, articulate kid who has been blind in one eye since he was about five and who spent years trying to figure out sort of whatever the government bureaucracy, the assistance.

54:19He tried to raise money on GoFundMe and couldn't get enough. His dad installs alarm systems for a living. His dad has his own health problems, doesn't get great insurance, wasn't getting hours. I mean, this is sort of like the complications of this just in like that you can see just in this one example. And you don't get any of that from the video. Like you don't get, you just get the sort of, well, he wanted to see and then they did a surgery and now he can't see. And he get the check for$50 ,000. And I mean, I don't know how else to put this, but it's sort of on the one hand, you're like, well, you should write more about Jeremiah.

54:52On the other hand, look, I had a lot of this stuff in my article originally. And me and my editor decided not to include like all of the complicated things about why Jeremiah couldn't get the surgery because it just doesn't make for smooth, audience-accessible content. It's not even if so. Mr. Beast is making hugely different decisions from the New York Times, so to speak. I don't want to pretend that I was not party to all these cuts either. It was sort of like, I understood. This is part of the, this isn't what the article is about. It's not what it's for. It's not what it's supposed to be doing.

55:23So this is not just on Mr. Beast. It's a media environment question, I suppose, that nobody has ever had a good answer to. forces that we're all dealing with whenever we put something out into the world. Exactly. Well, Max Reed, thanks so much for coming on. This has been an awesome conversation and we appreciate you and your work. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me on.

56:03This episode of The Culture Journalist was written and produced by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominik, with editing by Ben Newman. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To read Max's piece and check out more of his work, head to our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.

56:32... You