My kids love Mr Beast. I'm uncomfortable with it and can't put my finger on it. It feels like he makes life look like you stand a good chance of having someone walk in and give you $100,000. Maybe there is no harm in thinking that? But it feels like the same thing as buying a lottery ticket. I guess YouTube is free? But is the time spent on that channel worth it over doing other things? I admire the approach he takes with his craft but I don't really enjoy or respect the work.
I'm also uncomfortable with it. There's nothing inherently wrong with philanthropy but what I'm seeing is a very successful business with an enormous and very expensive campus. MrBeast himself is very rich. So what I'm seeing is a corporation claiming to do everything for the benefit of others while actually taking a lot of the money very visibly for themselves.
His channel made $54m from youtube in 2021, and probably a lot more from corporate sponsors. Make no mistake, this is big business - not charity.
And some of his side businesses are downright shady. His burger chain is run out of ghost kitchens which make food for multiple virtual chains like MrBeast's. The burgers are apparently a crapshoot - it depends on which ghost kitchen made your burger as to what you get. Quality control is zero. Yet they charge top dollar for the MrBeast name.
Not attempting to be an apologist, however it sounds to me like there just needs to be some quality control over the licensing of the brand, perhaps?
Not sure how that's shady, sounds like it might be a bit egregious but its not like he isn't honest about this being a business based around his brand of philanthropy either.
Licensing deals aren’t the same as starting a burger business. Clearly the partnering institutions aren’t living up to par but he’s just licensing and marketing which is a pretty common arrangement for these sorts of things.
I believe he is supplying the food. So if the ghost kitchen is a burger chain, they have their own burgers and then separately cook his as well. All of the quality control issues should be from preparation.
How is this any different from Kirkland brand stuff from Costco? They just happen to have a reasonably high bar because they're playing the long game. It's not the practice that you likely have an issue with, it's the individual.
Good example. Kirkland stuff is good. It would be shady if Costco put their name on anything and didn’t care about their product.
So if you see something with the kirkland brand, you have some expectation of quality. And if you have a problem Costco will fix it (or drop the product).
The MrBeast brand doesn’t really stand for anything. And he doesn’t correct quality problems.
Kirkland Brand isn't Ghost Kitchens, it's usually reputable brands who slap a label on their product to build additional sales channels.
The most common example is that Kirkland Vodka is widely reported to be Grey Goose, and it's speculated that Kirkland Mac & Cheese is just repackaged Kraft.
No Brand or Quality Control needed; mostly contract and supply chain control since you're dealing with brands that already do good QC.
It’s actually a quite interesting and experimental business model. The man is a business genius. You’re seeing the early buggy days of an insanely profitable food chain business model
Business genius lmao, he got lucky and made a huge chunk of money on crypto. After that, the money makes itself.
When they say it takes money to make money, that's pretty much it. Reach a certain threshold and the interest on it will pay off any failures you make.
& because the general masses adore and love to watch rich people dance around screen, ofc his YT does well, he's got the money to do some crazy stuff. Everyone watches "who wants to be a millionaire", nobody watches "who wants to win 10 bucks".
He has a fast food restaurant chain that has grown insanely quickly by partnering with local restaurants. He has no kitchens yet dozens of these fast food restaurants operating solely on Uber/DoorDash.
And this Eddy Burback Video https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg on that rabbit hole. Also, seems like his Chocolate Brand is going to be in a ton of places now after seeing him announce the locations in his latest video (the cruise ship one)
Charities like Komen, and the American Cancer Society, and all those charitable Foundations and Societies that fund research on incurable diseases: they are exactly the reason why breast cancer and all the other diseases will never, ever be cured. They must never be cured. Billions of dollars in revenue depend on their incurability. Scientists and researchers have an amazing cash cow, a goose that lays golden eggs, and to identify a cure for breast cancer would strangle that goose where it sits. EDIT: I think I like the cow metaphor much better in this case.
Therefore, mark my words: donate to the "X For A Cure" charities at your own peril, because the perverse incentives mean that they will move Heaven and Earth to avoid finding a cure for anything at all.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with you, but I think people’s conception of curing cancers is just out of touch with reality. Cancer is a group of diseases, and we have come a very long way in successfully treating many members of that - there are many many millions who would have gotten a death sentence just a decade ago, being completely cured nowadays.
I don’t know about these foundations, maybe it is mostly funded by governments/EU funds, whatever instead, but there is good research out there.
Isn't every philanthropic foundation also a "business"? The Gates Foundation had $150 million of income from their investments in 2022. The CEO of the Gates Foundation was paid $1.176 million last year. Their net assets went up by $13 billion in 2022 and up $20 billion since the beginning of 2021.
MrBeast claims he is not rich, that he puts all the money back into his videos. Of course that means he has a huge production. That doesn't mean it makes a lot of profit. Unless there is factual evidence to the contrary I'm inclined to believe MrBeast. He has never been caught lying, which is virtually impossible given his presence and reach.
Just like Holiday Inn, Marriott, or any hotel chain. So weird that you take issue, he makes it exceptionally clear his burger brand is all ghost kitchens.
> There's nothing inherently wrong with philanthropy
Why not? To be able to "give" you first need to accumulate way beyond what you need to attend to your material needs. Accumulating such wealth means taking more resources than you need in the first place.
It's still fully within the scarcity and separation mindset of capitalism.
> you first need to accumulate way beyond what you need
Or... Produce way beyond...
The kleptocapitalism narrative as well as the neocapitalist narrative depend on using a myopic perspective. There is a fair debate about the negotiation over what to do with the excess between all parties involved and that can be a useful conversation. If you didn't mean to agitate in that way I apologize for being too sensitive.
His channel made $54m from youtube in 2021, and probably a lot more from corporate sponsors. Make no mistake, this is big business - not charity.
that is is? that is a rounding error for almost any decent-sized tech company. We're talking a household name, and one of the most popular channels ever, which is on the front page of youtube by default. I would have thought it would be more.
yes, he made $54 million, but surely a lot of expenses too?
$54m was just a forbes estimate and that was 2 years ago in 2021. He reached 50M subscribers sometime in 2021, 100M subscribers in July 2022, in June 2023 he has 163M. Then if you look at video views, he was doing about 500M/month all of 2021-2022 but in only 2023 he is doing 1000M baseline with spikes to 1500M-1800M for some of the big hitters.
See: https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/mrbeast6000
Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2022/11/30/could-m...
That's just his main channel, he has many other large channels (Beast Gaming, Beast Reacts) plus the other social platforms (TikTok, etc).
Then in the last 2 years he launched Beast Burger and Feastables (mostly chocolate bars currently). There are some public numbers about $10m revenue on feastables in the first few months and over $100m of revenue on beast burger orders sometime last year.
He spends a lot, talks about it a lot, $2-4 million per video on each main channel video. He has also talked a lot about re-investing everything back into the channel to grow and grow. Which seems evident by the growth rate if nothing else.
That's just snippets of info and I'm not remotely experienced enough in any of these spaces to make any attempt at a real number but between the increased views, feastables and beast burger I don't see how it's any less than 100s of millions of revenue at this point. My main point, though, is that he has grown a lot from 2021-2023 where that $54m number came from :)
But having said that.. he was still very popular and long on the front page of YouTube back in 2021 perhaps with those much more modest numbers.
Something like this is worth a watch. While I'm sure there is plenty he doesn't talk about, he talks about a lot publicly including money spent, strategies, statistics, etc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo
The thing I love about MrBeast is that he's YouTube "Playing to Win" [0].
Google's YT algorithm is whatever it thinks makes Google the most money. "Doing YT right" is an oxymoronic statement, because YT doesn't care in the least about ethics.
MrBeast found a way to optimize algorithmic ranking, in a fairly altruistic and ethical way.
On the scale of "{Politician} hates {group}, see what to be outraged about" to "See what the drug companies don't want you to know, via this simple trick" YT optimization... MrBeast is comparatively saint-like.
> and over $100m of revenue on beast burger orders sometime last year.
Gross revenue is almost meaningless. Restaurants are known to have very low margins, so how much of that money was paid to the local restaurant, to the delivery service, _in taxes_?
Even once it reaches Mr Beast's company, the company has to pay for a lot of things before it ever reaches him.
I'm sure he's doing well, but he didn't personally pull in $54M in 2021; it's actively counter productive to discuss gross revenue without also discussing expenses, because it conflates "Mr Beast" the business with "Mr Beast" the nom de plume of an individual and likely misleads folks on how much money the individual actually earned.
I saw an interview with a (admittedly much smaller) full time YouTuber and he said that YouTube ads where between a quarter and a third of his total income.
MrBeast is exactly the media phenomenon a broken system would come up with in some 80s cyberpunk movie, as a bandaid to give people the illusion of hope: the 'happy hour' show in a boring dystopia.
That is not MrBeasts fault, it's the environment's. Say you see MrBeast give thousands of people help, and you have the same problem as these people - sure, you're happy for the other people but why didn't you get any help? The show is over, you're left alone, your problem is currently not interesting.
Edit: There is also the power gradient in all of this performance that this video[0] highlights well. Nobody can complain about how they're being treated or portrayed, because they are in need. That is taking away something from the people who receive something, this kind of charity treats them as less - they're extras on stage.
> MrBeast is exactly the media phenomenon a broken system would come up with in some 80s cyberpunk movie, as a bandaid to give people the illusion of hope: the 'happy hour' show in a boring dystopia.
Nicely put. Some people claim that MrBeast's actions are better than nothing, but the money he's using are not growing on trees.
The same money could have been used to fund a fair health system, where people receive treatments based on their needs without their life becoming an exhibit for youtube.
> The same money could have been used to fund a fair health system...
Yes! How dare people choose where to spend their time and money? We should take it from them at the barrel of a gun and spend it for them! Stupid people are always spending their time and money on frivolities when there are smart people willing to spend it on purely benevolent things which never experience abuse or corruption.
Personally, I want someone to threaten me with violence if I don't give them money. It's how I know I'm doing my part.
The same money could have been used to fund a fair health system
no it could not. it would take a lot more than that to fund healthcare.
as it is MrBeast is doing the best he can with the means available to him.
in order to do anything better it would take every member of our community to push for a government will actually implement such changes. the problem is, i don't see many people pushing, and i see a lot of people pushing back. things won't get better until that changes.
I'd expect Mr. Beast to appear in a Robocop movie.
> ... with the Nicaraguan capital expected to recover from the fallout within 200 years. That's it for the news tonight, up next is Mr. Beast with a big charitable payout of 150 000$ tonight, followed by It's Not My Problem!
> With that large a payout from Mr. Beast, you know what they say: I'd buy that for a dollar!
What makes me uncomfortable is the elitism running through many of his videos. Put 100 "poors" in a circle so they can fight it out for $500k [1]? It's just another rich person making poor people do demeaning things for his entertainment and profit. It's disgusting.
They explicitly call this out in the article, but, how is what he’s doing any different than what we always were told reality TV was doing or gameshows do?
This is worlds better than casinos, sports betting, or any other form of gambling, IMO.
People are entertained through watching or participating and some are making big dollars.
My kids watch his videos because the algorithm feeds it to them and from what I’ve seen, I’d rather they be watching MrB than ads for DraftKings where they might believe that some day in the future their free $500 will make them rich. Or worse yet: state lotteries selling a dream for $2 and making millions off the stupidity of those who don’t understand basic stats because the education the lottery is supposedly funding doesn’t do a very good job.
> how is what he’s doing any different than what we always were told reality TV was doing or gameshows do?
It's not. Those things are bad too.
> My kids watch his videos because the algorithm feeds it to them and from what I’ve seen, I’d rather they be watching MrB than ads for DraftKings
I'm curious what your goal is here. It seems like you're disagreeing with me by saying "look, Mr. Beast is equivalent to/better than these other bad things, right?" I don't find your particular applications of whataboutism and false dichotomies terribly convincing or at all relevant to the discussion.
Like, you understand that "these other things are bad too" and "it's this or draftkings ads" are not substantive or relevant arguments, right?
A good point. It's disgraceful how broadcast sports have changed in the last five years to be all about gambling. MrBeast is marginally better than that at least.
I'm not exactly a fan of Mr. Beast, but this comment reeks of more elitism than any Mr. Beast video I've ever watched. Are "poors" too stupid to make decisions for themselves? Everyone in that video received thousands of dollars. I'm nowhere near poor, but if I was given an opportunity, I'd probably participate.
> Are "poors" too stupid to make decisions for themselves? Everyone in that video received thousands of dollars. I'm nowhere near poor, but if I was given an opportunity, I'd probably participate.
No one's saying they're stupid for participating. If I was offered thousands of dollars for peeing in my pants in public for a video, I'd very probably take the offer and no one would think I was stupid for it; it would still be a demeaning and exploitative offer to make.
Why do you get to be the arbiter of what's demeaning? Are "poors" too stupid to determine their own limits? Playing silly games is hardly comparable to peeing your pants in public.
It's about power imbalance. Using your power (in this case, wealth) to encourage other people to do actions they otherwise would not want to.
It's also not a topic that is easy to define as "right" or "wrong". Some game shows will be more empowering or enjoyable than others. Some contestants on the same show might find the experience more emotionally rewarding than other contestants. There's a very subjective, fuzzy, grey area here rather than a clear line in the sand defining what is morally good or bad.
From the odd Mr Beast video I've watched, it's felt like the driving factor was that the contestant didn't want to be there if it wasn't for the money. And that Mr Beast and his friends go out of their way to make the contestant want to leave. Mr Beast has all the power and makes his contestants perform like dancing monkeys to earn their prize. Now as long as the contestants do still find the overall experience more rewarding than demeaning (and that's for them to decide), then I'm fine with it being made as "entertainment". But like many of the others, I personally don't find it entertaining to watch -- I find it uneasy to watch. And that's fine too, people don't have to enjoy the same things. But it's hard not to claim that there is a massive imbalance of power in his videos. In fact that seems to be the point of his videos.
The earlier comparison with 80s cyberpunk seems quite apt. If you take away the fancy post production editing, there is something rather dystopian about the concept of his videos. Sure the stakes are significantly lower than, for example, Running Man, but the power imbalance isn't that dissimilar.
> It's about power imbalance. Using your power (in this case, wealth) to encourage other people to do actions they otherwise would not want to.
Like working at a sprocket factory? I think that somewhat fairly fits here. You could be describing how most of the world looks at their work. My point is that there might be deeper to look for the more "honest" objection.
There are laws (in Europe at least) to protect employees from being exploited due to that power imbalance.
Whereas it's not so clear cut, in my opinion at least, that contestants of Mr Beasts videos aren't being exploited. But as I said, the only people who can honestly answer that are the contestants themselves.
I haven't watched Mr Beast's videos to have an opinion. He popped up on my kid's screen once, we banned him and some associated channels and forgot him. It was clearly garbage content for us in our brief experience and not worth our time to identify why.
Again, no one is claiming that people who participate are stupid for doing so. Why are you insisting on the idea that others see people in financial difficulty as stupid?
Nor did I say I'm the sole arbiter of what's demeaning. We both seem to agree at least that peeing oneself in public is demeaning, but some third person might not see it that way at all.
Sorry. I didn't realize you were a different person. My point is that the only opinion who matters is the contestants. If I were a poor Mr. Beast fan, I would be offended by the original comments denial of my agency.
It's not about being stupid, it's about dependency and power. The offer alone is morally corrupted.
If they'd all get their equal share of money and could compete out of their own volition and quit anytime they'd want then this would be morally ok. But then nobody would watch it. And that there's exactly why this whole thing is morally wrong.
Why do they need to get equal share? This doesn't sound much different than game shows to me. People make money off of other people competing against each other to earn less money than the people organizing it. The difference is we view the contestants on Wheel of Fortune as earning it by playing a few minutes worth of games instead of whatever Mr Beast does. I don't watch his videos, I'm just piecing what it sounds like from the comments. It sounds like it could be a crude version of Survivor, Fear Factor, or Tough as Nails. People do unpleasant things, voluntarily, in the hopes of earning money.
For me, the discomfort is that Mr Beast's content relies on exploiting people's desperation due to the lack of social safety net. It's not his fault that they're in such dire straits to begin with, but he's nonetheless behaving opportunistically and his actions have no chance of changing the system that landed these people in such tough situations
Right, exactly. It takes advantage of systemic problems and relies on the perpetuation of those very problems for its continued feasibility and existence. This is why it feels kinda dirty and wrong to us even though it has a surface presentation of being "morally good".
It's sort of like a recast economic version of colonial white savior ideology—"educate" the primitives—"donate" to the impoverished, all while ensuring the inequalities and social division persist.
He’s making these peoples lives better though. How would him not doing this stuff help anyone? Just because he’s not overthrowing the system the happiness he’s provided is worthless?
Mr beast is not able to upend society and convince enough voters to provide a better support system. You’re advocating for doing nothing, that’s what would happen if he focused on politics instead of fun videos.
i don't see the parent comment as suggesting that pointing out the lack of support in our society is a bad thing. personally i think pointing out how the social net is failing is exactly what we need. if that is really the effect that his videos have then that is good.
is he really? how much good is a one-time payment of a lump of money helping? sure, it may allow someone to afford something they could not before, but unless they are able to invest that money into something that will improve their live for the long term, then such a payment doesn't really do anyhing to actually change their situation.
one time payments need to be used strategically, and we know from lottery winners that many don't know how to do that.
if we want to help people we need to work on changing systems that allow them to raise their income or lower their monthly expenses or carefully guide them to use one time payments to fix a problem in their life that will have a long term benefit.
i have no qualms with MrBeast's business model. using his youtube videos to raise money to help people in whichever way is certainly not a problem. most of the entertainment industry is doing a lot worse (by keeping the profits to themselves).
the question is not, who is doing more, but whether what anyone of us is doing has any lasting effects. so it matters how the money is used. most of what i have seen from MrBeast is giving random amounts of money to individuals, which sometimes can be helpful, but often only provides short term relief. his recent examples of paying for eye surgery or funding an orphanage are an improvement over that, and if that is where MrBeast's philanthropy is heading, then i am all for it.
the eye surgery is obviously an example of a one time payment with a long term benefit. if he is able to generate income to solve more problems like that then he is indeed helping people.
But then he'd have no money to give away. I don't see how it's this difficult to understand. Either you have Mr Beast as we do now - curing blindness and deafness, giving people houses and cars, raising millions for tangible, proven reforestation and sea cleanup efforts - or we don't have Mr Beast at all.
I also find his videos uncomfortable to watch for many of the same reasons stated here, but I don't find them harmful, and I can appreciate how he's helped these people.
But these videos only get watched exactly _because_ they are demeaning. So the problem is the nature of the videos itself and this alone disqualifies any good this guy supposedly does.
I have literally never watched a Mr Beast video but if I go to youtube under a new username or stealth mode then the probability of Mr Beast being on the front page I would put at about 95% and it has been that way for a long time.
We have agency. Anything could be promoted instead but instead we get this nonsense. Over time of course all this gets lost and we just pretend this is all organic.
I agree with you, I have only seen one of his videos in which he paid for people to have cataract surgery I found it strangely absurd.
The issue is if he was to instead start using money to tackle systemic issues then it moves beyond philanthropy and it becomes political. "I paid for 1000 people to have cataract surgery" as a video hits a lot differently to "I lobbied congress to make cataract surgery free"
Systemic change is hard and a lot of people won't want to engage with it. It is easy to look at an altruistic act and say "this is a good thing" a lot harder to question the underlying causes that necessitated the act.
There is a famous quote "When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist."
The basic counter point to that is that dozens of millionaire content creators partake, too.
For many people it's also a novelty to be in a MrBeast video.
For those already rich content creators an additional motivator may be the clout, of course.
Or put simply, he's not lobbying for improvements to minimum wage, or housing, or healthcare, or transportation -- he's schleppin for views. It's poverty-porn.
It's no different than Olympic Athletes and other professional stars telling kids to work hard in school and one day they too can compete in the olympics/be a professional athlete, with no mention to the tens of thousands of hours of training, long hours, strict diet, and frankly unhealthy levels of obsession typically required to propel someone to that level.
As a kid I admired a lot of people/shows that I later wised up about. Probably harmless. In your place I might just every now and then watch it with them, play along with the better moments and shake my head at some of the stupider moments just to plant the mind-worm that what they see isn't "real life", but I'm also not sure how old your kids are or how they watch him.
It’s probably actually beneficial to believe some difficult task is reasonably obtainable. You’d try harder and be more motivated than if you believed it was virtually impossible.
I have believed for a long time that accurately assessing your chances of success on big bets is maladaptive. Ambitious projects (whether they be science, construction or mammoth hunting) could benefit society enough that on a societal level they're good even if a lot of them fail, but the benefit to the individuals taking on the risk could be low enough that it's not worth it for them (due to the diminishing returns of additional wealth on an individual level).
Gambling is just exploiting this mechanism to extract wealth.
I swear YouTube kids is worse for children than 18+ YouTube.
My nephew was obsessed with MrBeast. Every device we had was littered with search histories of Mr Beast, and it was infuriating because of how low-brow the content is. It's teaching kids to turn their brains off. People are talking about charity, but they need to actually watch a few videos before commenting... it's really not something you want your kids imitating.
> My kids love Mr Beast. I'm uncomfortable with it and can't put my finger on it.
Same.
I'm going to sound like an old-man-yelling-at-cloud, but the content is, well, just mindless drivel. There's a near-endless amount of informative content on youtube, but no, instead kids are drawn like a magnet to this kind of stuff. Not saying kids must spend all their screen time on Khan Academy or serious documentaries, but watching this drivel for hours on end can't be healthy for a developing brain either.
From an adult perspective, I'd agree, but on the other hand I've spent hours upon hours of my childhood watching fail compilations and random video game parodies and newgrounds animations on youtube. I'd say it's a "let kids be kids" kind of deal, even if I faint at the amount of money that goes into youtube video production these days.
For me I felt the same way. To clarify I was watching one of the videos where contestants compete for large sum of money. Part of it may be that the contestants don't do anything useful. They are paid to degrade themselves, albeit it in a G rated manner Also that he is an arbitrary judge jury and executioner so to speak. A benevolent dictator.
1) His way of giving away things for free undermines the suffering people go trough to make a living; it makes effort and hardship look like a joke (maybe in the future no effort is required, and we are reminded about this possibility here, and it's sad); 2) It promotes consumerisms: getting stuff (phones, cars) is supposed to liberate us, and doing it in this way reveals how empty it all is; 3) It feels rarely personal and well-thought: he just throws away stuff, so it undermines the gift giving culture also.
It's almost like it's a parody of materialism/consumerism. Let's not pretend like Mr Beast is anywhere close to the genesis of this. Mr Beast is exposing what a lot of us don't like about the broader culture. Change will only start with the individual and the family. Secular values don't have to be the compass direction we drift towards.
This is really well said. And I just imagined trying to tell my kids that and can see that it wouldn't go well. They can only see that he is helping people by giving them money and that's a good thing to them. It just feels like it is creating a set of values for them that is very unrealistic.
>It feels like he makes life look like you stand a good chance of having someone walk in and give you $100,000. Maybe there is no harm in thinking that?
It's the "system is so broken, that some guy can video charity acts to make money off of" that's icky.
Some people will go "Where's the harm in that? Those people do get some money, that's a good thing, isn't it?"
It's the normalizing of dependance on such charity / "acts of god", as opposed to having available decent jobs and health covered plus a government and a community support system.
I second that. I try to teach my family that the only way to success and happiness is working for it. Success and happiness come from satisfaction with who you are and that comes from knowing, on a deep level, you earned it.
So not only your chance of winning a lottery is remote, even if you somehow win a lottery it is unlikely to make you happy. Interviews of people who won a lottery show it.
I also think people have very distorted perception of where success comes from. People think it is a matter of chance and luck that somebody made this or that decision at a particular point in time. But my understanding is that luck only plays small part of it, much bigger part is the preparation to increase your luck and to be able to risk it and to be able to make something with it and to be able to avoid bad luck.
All that comes from usually hard work and a certain mindset of being honest with yourself rather than playing a victim on every possible occasion. I have never heard about a person who would be constantly complaining about their bad luck and then got successful.
Then they'll resent you and watch it on their friends' phones anyway when they can. And they'll suffer socially because they won't be able to talk with other kids at the lunch table about the most recent episode.
I dunno, my parents didn't let me watch The Simpsons when I was a kid. Sure, there was occasionally talk about the latest episode at the lunch table, but it wasn't a big deal, and I turned out ok. One of my closest childhood friends watched it, and we're still friends now, 25+ years later... he's never held my lack of Simpsons knowledge against me.
I think the idea that "parents won't let kids watch X" is somehow damaging to a kid's social health is a bit silly.
My perception about this based on my experience and my kids’ experiences is that these matters are more ubiquitous and socially relevant than ever. Memification of everything permeates their social fabric and if you aren’t in on it, you’re disadvantaged. Kids are simultaneously too young and too immersed to have perspective on this, so being excluded simply hurts.
My approach is to allow exposure but to maintain dialogue around it. They know I accept them watching it, I don’t criticize them for it, but I encourage them to be critical about it themselves and wonder about why it’s popular and so on. At least seeding the idea that they should observe themselves and their peers can hopefully lead to making better decisions later.
Sort of a “let them make their own mistakes” thing, with fairly manageable stakes.
Depends on their friends. I was for all intents and purposes banned from virtually all the pop-culture my friends were into as a kid, it essentially forced me to sit quiet at the lunch table and I was left out of a lot of stuff because I wasn't allowed to participate (what happens on the latest episode of X, movies, concerts, game nights, etc). It sucked.
I fully intend to give my kids the tools and access they need to relate to other kids, with the understanding that I don't always get to decide what that is. I might draw the line at something particularly egregious, like an R rated movie when they're 9 or something, but if my kid and their friends want to watch Power Rangers Mega-Samurai-Viking-Cosmic-Super-Force, I'm not going to ban it because I find it mildly annoying and eye-rolly.
Your children aren't going to resent you because they can't watch a YouTube channel. Nobody has ever resented their parents as an adult because of something like that. My parents didn't let me watch adult-rated movies or play adult-rated games (eg The Godfather, Call of Duty) as a child, while others' parents did. You'd have to be insane to resent them for that. How far do you take this? No rules? "Sorry, no chores in this house: our children will resent us." No boundaries at all?
Your children are more likely to resent you when they grow up incapable of hard work and with no sense of delayed gratification because their parents were terrified of ever imposing any rules or expectations on them for fear of causing "resentment".
No child is going to suffer socially because they don't watch Mr Beast. It's literally one thing. A child might conceivably suffer socially if they're cut off from all leisure activities, but not being able to watch a YouTube channel is so minuscule as to be laughable. I didn't watch Saturday morning cartoons as a child, as my parents didn't like having the TV on in the morning. Did I suffer socially? Not remotely.
not letting your kids watch saturday morning cartoons because you find them to be annoying seems pretty dickish and seems like it has an extremely asymmetric possible negative long run consequence.
you're talking about it to this very day in a way that seems like you can't wait to enforce these rules on your own children.
i can't recall a single thing my parents did along these lines. this is just not how they operated - by just laying down restriction after restriction. seems kind of shitty, honestly.
also my parents didn't teach me how to sit in front of a computer for 20 hours until i got a program to compile without errors. did they MAKE you do stuff like that? lol in fact i remember my parents complaining that i was wasting time on the internet.
joke's on them though, now they spend all their time glued to their devices.
> not letting your kids watch saturday morning cartoons because you find them to be annoying seems pretty dickish and seems like it has an extremely asymmetric possible negative long run consequence.
What negative long run consequence could possibly be created by not being able to watch noisy, annoying, brain-mush kids TV? I'm glad I was discouraged from watching TV on a saturday morning. I didn't miss it at the time either. I did more interesting things, and half the time I had swimming lessons or sports on a Sat morning anyway.
And how is it "dickish"? It's their house. It's their TV. They paid for it, they own it, they control it. That's how the world works, and will always work, and should always work. The idea that they have some sort of obligation to put up with obnoxious screeching American cartoons is just... I don't even know what to say to that. It's just so backwards I can't even put it into words.
>you're talking about it to this very day in a way that seems like you can't wait to enforce these rules on your own children.
I brought it up because it was relevant to the conversation, It's not like I'm sitting here thinking about it all the time. I probably haven't thought about it once in the last.. 15 years?
>i can't recall a single thing my parents did along these lines. this is just not how they operated - by just laying down restriction after restriction. seems kind of shitty, honestly.
Restriction after restriction? I mentioned one thing, mate. Relax a bit please. I really don't understand your mindset though. Should parents not set boundaries? People talk all the time about how it should be parents that set boundaries for their children and not the state. Then people like you turn around and suggest that if they actually do that, they're somehow stifling their children and will breed resentment for their whole life.
>also my parents didn't teach me how to sit in front of a computer for 20 hours until i got a program to compile without errors. did they MAKE you do stuff like that? lol in fact i remember my parents complaining that i was wasting time on the internet.
Of course they didn't "teach" me how to do that, but their parenting influenced by development, because that's what parenting does.
we didn't even have a TV to begin with, so there was no argument about what we can or can't watch. but it didn't feel like a restriction. we had a lot of freedoms and we could spend money on things that we needed or wanted. the wish to have a TV just didn't come up, and internet wasn't available yet.
now in my home, there is no TV either, but there are computers and internet which provide plenty of entertainment. and yes, MrBeast was popular for a while.
i think the problem is not which restrictions are in place but how they are introduced and enforced.
If all their friends are watching said youtube channel and they have to sit quiet at the lunch table, yes they will. I was often the low one on the totem pole as a kid in large part because my parents wouldn't allow me to participate in practically any pop-culture my friends were into. I had to be the relatively quiet one at the lunch table more often than not while everyone else was constantly talking/laughing at references I wasn't allowed to get. It sucked. If I had grown up in the smart-phone age I totally would have used my birthday money/occasional lunch treats to bribe my friends for time on their phones, and not told my parents.
And where do you get "No boundaries at all" from "perhaps you should let your kid watch Mr Beast because it's relatively harmless and allows them to connect with their peers"? You seem to have a very binary mindset.
If letting your kids watch Mr Beast is the deciding factor that makes them incapable of hard work then you're a horrible parent.
Of course not. But building up resentment over an ultimately useless restriction is just a waste of resources and time. Make them resent you for smooth-brain restrictions and they won't listen to you when it actually matters.
Your job as a parent is to train your kid to be a functional adult, not impose counterproductive and arbitrary restrictions because you're frightened by something you don't understand.
Any parent who goes to war with their kid over the mere watching of Mr Beast really needs to consider their priorities in life, and if they're just taking out their insecurities on their kid.
Raise your kids or watch the world raise your kids for you.
If you think that certain media is imparting negative morals on your child, then it's on you to control that. On the other hand if you think it's unusual, but ultimately harmless, then it's also your prerogative as a parent to allow them to watch it.
But the whole stance of "I can't control what my kids are doing because they'll resent me if I do" just sounds like an excuse to deny your own agency over the situation.
Whether Beast is a good person and whether what he’s doing actually helps people are two separate questions from whether he’s good for your kids to watch. My answers would be maybe, no, and no.
Why ‘no’ for the third one? Mostly because it’s just intellectual sawdust. Nobody learns anything from a Mr. Beast video or engages with any new concept. It’s just the same ridiculous kinds of jokes and contests and clickbait churned out over and over again. He has literally no reason to stop making the exact same video 500 times over when people will still watch it. His video titles
Obviously up to you and your wife/husband if you want to continue letting them watch it.
*His video titles and thumbnails have set a new standard for low-quality, eye-catching, bottom-of-the-barrel hogwash and he is dragging the rest of YouTube down with him as people try to emulate his success.
I think the discomfort comes from a deep, pretty much unconscious understanding we all have about how capitalism, taken to it logical extremes, will always perpetuate inequality to the extreme degree, and how gross inequality donned up in the guise of philanthropy is still gross inequality.
His content is a direct display of our economic system at the limit, at which point it becomes absurd. When you recognize that this is quite literally the system under which the majority of the world's economics are organized it becomes deeply serious and deeply uncomfortable.
There's also the plain psychological elements surrounding the fact that the content takes something that used to be valued for its moral goodness (generosity, charity) and transforms it into something valued strictly for its economic fruitfulness (means for generating capital) but this is capitalism's totalizing effect at work: because money is such a pure abstraction it's possible to monetize anything thereby killing off the more humane and traditional values that used to make certain pursuits meaningful to humans.
I fail to see how, given the system we currently have is called capitalism and given that this content is contemporary. The behavior is analogous to behaviors that would have potentially been possible under aristocracy, but it's pretty clearly a phenomenon of late capitalism unless you take a completely ahistorical view of existence. Ideas with historicity have history, they aren't fixed idealist definitions...Mr Beast is functioning in a system we call capitalism because of the general rules it follows and taking actions enabled by the flow of wealth in such a system.
Capitalism isn't just some abstract Platonic definition, we are living it, it evolves in time. Just as the feudalism before it was a lived system that evolved in time, that eventually collapsed, giving way to a new mode (capitalism), the same will happen under this economic system.
This has nothing to do with capitalism, it does have to do with the power dynamic though when one person can easily have a significant impact on another person’s life though.
The same uncomfortablenesses would arise if this were videos of some govt leader going around granting early retirement to people.
And such power dynamics are (at least partially, if not to great extent) enabled by the fact that late-stage capitalism like we have in the US emphasizes individual wealth over social support systems that would otherwise redistribute wealth, make people more equal (read: give them less undue power over each other), and generally remove the conditions of possibility for this sort of content.
I'm sorry but to watch Mr Beast's videos and turn around and say "it has nothing to do with capitalism" stinks to me of the worst kind of kool-aid drinking and willful ignorance. This isn't an either/or game. You can remain a capitalist and still be aware of the inherent flaws of the approach when it lacks proper guardrails, acknowledge the real problems we have, and level critiques to try and make the system more equitable. People get so dogmatic about it, it's practically a religion.
> And such power dynamics are (at least partially, if not to great extent) enabled by the fact that late-stage capitalism like we have in the US emphasizes individual wealth over social support systems that would otherwise redistribute wealth
The social systems you talk about are the biggest they’ve ever been, and the US is going to need to raise tax revenues by 30% just to break even on the current ones.
At no time in history have social nets been so strong in the west, yet it’s never enough.
I don’t know what the solution is, but saying social nets are the solution and we need more of them are about as black and white and unnuanced views as saying we need to abolish them. Neither is true.
the problem with social nets is the holes that some people fall through. most social nets are one size fits all solutions that ignore the individual issues that prevent some people from benefiting from them. so yes, we need to keep working on those social nets until those holes are closed and they will help everyone that is actually in need.
Totalitarianism is much different because ultimately some human is making all the decisions on the allocation of capital. The uncomfortableness that the parent is describing isn’t with the power disparity, it’s with the fact that our world is increasingly controlled by paperclip maximizers.
He is either a tool and does what he does because he has to,
a benevolent, yet idiotic in his ways entrepreneur or
a calculating one.
Neither one is good.
This miracle making is very very very bad for the average person imho. People need to learn that they shape their life by working on it, not waiting for some tooth fairy to give them a thousand dollars. Plus there should be institutions for those who are in need and health related services should be available to everyone.
Mr Beast cannot fulfill these roles, no matter how hard he tries.
Being poor doesn't mean you don't work hard. In fact, poor people often work a whole lot harder than anyone making good money.
Hell, the more I have been paid, the less I have had to work and use my brain. The same applies to each of my friends. I have never come across a person in the opposite scenario in my life.
To what you say should be available: There is a state in the USA that has an overwhelmingly single party government which has overwhelming amounts of money (towering many entire countries). Their homeless population is ranked #2.
MrBeast is substantially better for the poor than each person in this state who votes to keep things as they are. He's better than anyone who has conducted even slight amounts of NIMBYISM.
It's unsurprising that HN has a negative view of the guy doing a better job than they are.
I don't know what would wake up people from their ego dream to see that in order to be a human, to be able to walk with your head held high and not live as a caged animal, you need to have certain basic things in your life. Free health services is one, a small space if you are homeless that is yours until you can get a better job/home/etc., where you can keep your things and the like is another.
It's just mind boggling to see how people do not give a flying fuck about others and only care about their very surroundings and well being.
MrBeast comes into this equation who earns his money by doing these stunts, but seemingly also gives back... I have ambivalent, but lopsided, feelings about creators who do videos about vulnerable people and playing the white knight in armor for who knows why. Anyway, it would be an interesting study how it affects those that are in need and I mean those who watch his videos and daydream away their life in hope for a better life.
His videos are fun and well-edited. It’s usually superior entertainment to a random Netflix show. That’s enough for me. I also really enjoy how his feedback loop has resulted in the videos gradually having reached absurd scales.
Right - I don't think kids understand the philanthropy angle, what they understand is the lottery angle. People randomly getting $10,000 (or $1,000, or $50,000) just for being a bystander in a video.
He doesn’t post a ton of content. Not sure if the time spent is enough to worry about. He also has a channel dedicated to showing his people helping poor and disabled people around the world. Pretty wholesome if you ask me.
he makes success seem so easy even though the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against someone else replicating anything close to his success, except for maybe a few people. when the barriers to entry are low means lots of competition. like muckbang videos. for every video that gets >100k views of someone shoveling food in his or her mouth, there are hundreds of videos that have just a few thousand to 10k views.
