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.
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)
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.
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 $54 million, but surely a lot of expenses too?
MrBeast is exactly the media phenomenon a broken system would come up with in some 80s cyberpunk movie, as a bandaid to give people the illusion of hope: the 'happy hour' show in a boring dystopia.
That is not MrBeasts fault, it's the environment's. Say you see MrBeast give thousands of people help, and you have the same problem as these people - sure, you're happy for the other people but why didn't you get any help? The show is over, you're left alone, your problem is currently not interesting.
Edit: There is also the power gradient in all of this performance that this video[0] highlights well. Nobody can complain about how they're being treated or portrayed, because they are in need. That is taking away something from the people who receive something, this kind of charity treats them as less - they're extras on stage.
> MrBeast is exactly the media phenomenon a broken system would come up with in some 80s cyberpunk movie, as a bandaid to give people the illusion of hope: the 'happy hour' show in a boring dystopia.
Nicely put. Some people claim that MrBeast's actions are better than nothing, but the money he's using are not growing on trees.
The same money could have been used to fund a fair health system, where people receive treatments based on their needs without their life becoming an exhibit for youtube.
I'd expect Mr. Beast to appear in a Robocop movie.
> ... with the Nicaraguan capital expected to recover from the fallout within 200 years. That's it for the news tonight, up next is Mr. Beast with a big charitable payout of 150 000$ 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not altruism if it's your source of income. Sorry but I don't buy this bs. He's doing it to generate income, that's all. Altruism is "unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others" but we have quite the opposite here - a selfish way of milking poor people for emotions in order to generate income. Real altruism is hard and done only by a few. Literally EVERY man/woman/child on this planet will say yes to receiving millions of dollars annually with the sole condition that they have to let go some part of it. The money he spends are just fuel for a marketing engine.
While I see he seems like a nice guy overall, his actions do more good than harm. His impact is very low, his "philanthropy" is localised down to the individual level and his impact is absolutely none on the actual problems that people who he targets face. The more negative side of this is that he inspires the next generations to only go by extreme things on Youtube and other social media platforms and these extreme things are, more often than not, on the negative side (stupid and dangerous pranks, throwing stuff at people from 20th floor etc).
He chose this path because his viewers were probably reacting to it the most. I'm not a hater but I feel like the real altruistic people doing good stuff on a much grander scheme don't get any recognition at all while this money making business man selling snake oil to children is getting everything from the table.
Despite throwing millions and millions, his impact is absolutely ZERO. I find it quite predatory.
I listened to his interview on the Joe Rogan show and was really impressed.
Mr. Beast built his channel by taking all profits from each video and plying it into the next video. Using this approach he was able to produce progressively larger and more expensive videos. He has demonstrated his frugal lifestyle, has publicly given away an incredible amount of money to good causes, and has stated his future goals for his businesses will be for charity. Everything about his actions strikes me as genuinely good, it just seems like the publicity is the best way to get more money to accomplish the charitable goals.
You're right that what he's doing does not conform to the definition of altruism specifically, but that doesn't mean what he's doing is not good.
How can you watch the video where he pays for the blindness surgery for all those people and say that that was anything other than an amazing win for all those nice people?
"Mr. Beast built his channel by taking all profits from each video and plying it into the next video"
To me this seems like a semi-obvious minmaxing solution to making popular videos: make essentially zero profit, regardless of revenue. At some point you get so much revenue that you can't spend it all so the next logical step is to simply give it away as part of the video. And in this case it's a virtuous cycle - apparently giving away money generates more revenue so it just keeps going. But this doesn't strike me as being done out of any noble purpose - all he wants is YT view and charity is just a side-effect of that.
"How can you watch the video where he pays for the blindness surgery for all those people and say that that was anything other than an amazing win for all those nice people?"
My criticism would be that it's local change vs trying for structural change. Why don't those people already have access to surgery? The counter-argument to this would be that structural change is somewhere between very hard and impossible, so just spend the money locally. A more cynical take is that lobbying for restructuring the US health care system doesn't generate YT revenue, so he's incentivized to fund the most clickbaity charity projects.
> He has demonstrated his frugal lifestyle, has publicly given away an incredible amount of money to good causes, and has stated his future goals for his businesses will be for charity.
Pretty much all of this is typical “rich philanthropist” stuff, just dialled down to appeal to a demographic cohort of 20-35 year olds.
It’s incredibly easy to be altruistic when literally every financial and social incentive says you should. I think people are uncomfortable with this because he hasn’t sacrificed anything. His financial incentives just line up with “doing good things”. When they no longer align it still remains to be seen whether he will act the same.
>Mr. Beast built his channel by taking all profits from each video and plying it into the next video. Using this approach he was able to produce progressively larger and more expensive videos.
That's what every sensible businessman does in the early years of a new venture. It's only a stark contrast to the avera social media personality who takes out as much as they can early on to fund car leases, rent for fancy homes and designer brand clothes.
Lemme know if he does it without filming and I'll be the first to call out my BS. Some people just don't see the forest from the trees but it's all good with me, MrBeast needs you for income. True altruism is hard, this is business.
Emotional responses to content are subjective. It’s never been, never will be, that all humans are of a normalized opinion on anything, I’m not sure what the point of your take on OPs take is?
Must we role-play feeling like Shiny Happy People about everything? Why must everything be framed in toxic positivity?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into this concept of "charity" myself[1].
It is wonderful that people can see, but how much money you have should have no bearing on whether you stay blind or not.
These people are victims of a system and charity is just painting over the cracks.
Perhaps he could devote his energy to start the change.
Charity (and alms) is what people did back in the day. Some societies moved on.
[1] Better said: I'm not against charitable acts. I'm against charity as a replacement for an humane and fair society. Sometimes it feels like having a water station next to workers being being whipped to build the pyramids. Perhaps stop the whipping?
> I listened to his interview on the Joe Rogan show and was really impressed.
I wonder many of the critics in this thread have seen him like this. I've also seen a few videos where he's talking about his channel and he certainly has me convinced he's not in it for his own benefit.
It's not cynical, it's fairly neutral. It doesn't mean he's a bad person. There are worse things he could do with his money and at the end of the day, he's doing a lot of good.
But it's not altruism, it's philanthropy. It's more about the performance than the act itself. Some of his videos literally reycle game show ideas ("do X contrived thing successfully and you get $Y money"). His antics help people and that's a good thing. But he's also making them jump through hoops (not literally AFAIK, though I wouldn't be surprised) and perform gratitude for his audience. Things can be good and bad at the same time.
Consider the American trope of "feel good" news reports about, say, an elementary school kid doing a successful fundraiser to pay off his classmate's school lunch debt. Yes, it's amazing that an elementary school student did that but it's also horrifying that this means school lunch debt is just a thing society has come to accept as normal and that society is so dysfunctional a literal child had to take the initiative instead of just getting to be a child.
I think Mr Beast is one of the better people when it comes to using their ridiculous wealth and social capital for good, but it's horrifying that people have to perform misery for an online audience to get relatively cheap medical treatments and frankly it's horrifying that a single person can have access to and control over such an amount of wealth that they can perform this kind of stunts on the regular while at the same time so many people are so desperately poor that their lives can be changed by being gifted mere crumbs in comparison. Mr Beast may be a relatively good person but that he (i.e. his channel/brand) can exist at all should be deeply concerning.
It’s a bit hard not to be cynical when he himself describes how he developed his channel by optimising and a/b testing everything “like a psychopath” including the amount of views per dollar given away - he says himself that 100k seems to be the inflection point, you don’t get so many more views by going from 100k to 500k or 1m. Not once did he ever appear to have thought about the impact on the lives of the people receiving this random lump sum, which plenty of research on lottery winners shows is often very disruptive and negative on their overall long term wellbeing. As for his “donating” for blindness surgery etc, there are plenty of actual charities staffed by volunteers working hard day after day, he could easily donate quietly to any of those and he chooses not to.
I also don't understand the take that altruism/philanthropy has to be zero sum. i.e. true altruism means that I lose something and you gain something.
Maybe it is a hold over from religion and the idea of sacrifice being the ultimate good. The times I have had the most impact (helping people in need, teaching, starting my own NPO) it has been very much positive sum.
If he has zero impact, then everyone else here has negative impact. I certainly haven't cleaned up an entire beach.
Can someone give me some examples of philanthropy that is NOT predatory/extractive?
> Can someone give me some examples of philanthropy that is NOT predatory/extractive?
Richard Stallman and his work on free software?
I think what OP is saying is that at Mr Beast's income level, he can effectively create a lasting change that most of us can't. Instead he focuses on people individually, giving them nice gestures but nothing life-changing, and he continues to do this because his viewers demand these types of low-scale altruism. So effectively he's just an entertainer that earns his salary by doing small acts of kindness, nothing more.
It's like the old proverb in a way: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But teach him to fish, and you feed him for life". Mr Beast is just giving people fish for a day, but it doesn't help anyone after that one chance encounter with him.
By the first definition it requires “unselfish regard”. If MrBeast is pulling 54 million a year (along with lots of fame and clout) he’s not exactly qualifying for the first definition.
Definition 2 is the one I’m most familiar with from the animal kingdom, and it actually requires that the giver either gain nothing or lose something. So that may be where people are coming from who take exception to his behavior being described as “altruistic”. By definition, it is not.
I listened to an interview with him and Lex Friedman a while ago. Interesting discussion. He's very systematic and data driven and that's part of what drives the success of his channel. A lot of what he does is indeed ruthlessly optimized to tap into whatever it is people appreciate across the different social media channel he targets. The guy undeniably has some serious skills and he's built a highly effective revenue engine around the most pointless thing on this planet which is people spending hours looking at whatever big for profit social media companies feed them via their algorithms. It's a big market opportunity to tap into and he's done so effectively.
Instead of getting hung up on what is or isn't altruism, the other point of view here is that he leaves a trail of people that are objectively better off having encountered him. That's advertising money that is spent on worthy causes. Yes, it's self serving. But that money also serves the people he helps. It's an interesting dynamic. Ceasing to do what he does would actually be bad for the people that are on the receiving end of this. So, why should he?
He's found a way to funnel of some of the stupid money slushing around on the social media platforms. There are billions of it. And he's managing to do something more interesting with it than just squirreling it away. Compare that with the average influencer, viral marketing expert, troll farm or other sources of clickbait that are thriving on these platforms. At least this goes somewhere vaguely useful. Good for him and whoever is on the receiving end. And if he pockets some of that, how much worse is that than all the other nonsense on those platforms where most of the publishers just pocket 100% the revenue? I'm not judging that either.
If you are going to watch stuff on Tik Tok, Youtube, or whatever, you might as well watch his. Best case some random people benefit from this, worst case you watch some silly nonsense and are mildly entertained by that. Either way you feel good and nobody is getting hurt. I don't watch this stuff myself but that's just because I have other things to watch that I find more interesting.
I listened to the same interview and can recommend it too. The key to understand him is how he views what he does as hacking: mastering all aspects of YouTube, every detail that attracts views.
Instead of getting hung up on what is or isn't altruism...
It's interesting how people gets stuck in that point. They want him to suffer in order to qualify for saint status. Otherwise, doing good is meaningless. On the contrary, I find very nice his happy, positive, laid back persona.
I wonder what people criticizing him thinks of well-known NGOs.
Despite what you've been taught, every act of charity comes from a selfish need (ego). Whether that is predatory or not from the standpoint of the donor, I'll leave that up to you to decide.
And to be clear, his acts of charity have made an impact in the people who have benefited from it. Whether the public response is positive or negative is besides the point.
> Despite what you've been taught, every act of charity comes from a selfish need (ego).
This may be some kind of projection or just your personal opinion of society and human motivation. You aren't inside the brains of every human and can't possibly know everyone's motivations at all times. It's quite possible that some or many of them experience authentic altruism.
You’re not wrong, but there’s a big difference between donating money to feel good about yourself or even hope others like you more, and building a capital engine with a veneer of philanthropic paint.
This is incorrect. The modern American Gordon Gecko derived brand of capitalism that helps people justify being selfish to themselves.
The OCEAN model demonstrates that we are distributed into camps of "principally considering self first" and "principally considering others first". You take the most high Trait-Agreeable people, and they will all routinely sacrifice their own resources, position, opinion and wellbeing for others. This is fundamentally where maternalism is rooted psychologically too.
But to your point - I agree that if people have benefited from it, then it's still a good thing.
He figured out a sustainable way to keep giving money away. I call that smart philanthropy, not selfish philanthropy. Yes, he makes a lot of money but it mostly goes back into growing his channel and charities.
Here we have some dude who is earning money by helping people - yet for some reason this is one of the biggest sins he can do in eyes of a lot of people. Why? Just because he can't help everyone?
This is so weird take on the matter. What are you doing to help people? Are you taking credit for that work? And if not would you not be able to help more people if you had some notoriety?
There are things that you can criticize MrBeast on - like the MrBest Burger internet kitchens - but him making money off of helping people is not one of them.
No, it's not a sin. Just don't call it altruism or philanthropy because it's an insult to others who are really doing it without selfish reasons or profits.
Btw he is not "earning money by helping people", he is "helping" people to earn money.
Is this the cynical hacker news version of that Friends episode where Joey tells Phoebe that her selfless good deeds aren't actually selfless because they make her feel good too?
I mean I haven't seen his tax returns but from what he says, he spends 100%+ of revenue on the next video. I'm not sure if you are unaware of that claim or just don't believe it.
Sure he is extremely generous to his employees, but that would also fall under altruism...
> a selfish way of milking poor people for emotions in order to generate income.
Monsters, Inc. comes to mind! In that movie they are scaring children, bottling their screams as energy and selling it as a commodity. The happy ending is our protagonists stumbling upon the fact that laughter is a much better source of energy than screams, and so the staff of monsters become slapstick comedians for children everywhere.
YouTube managed to become the boring-dystopia middle-ground where they make money off both.
One caveat: the issue is not that someone does "philanthropy" wrong, as if they could also do it right, the issue is that a society hoping for, needing large-scale/impactful philanthropy is fundamentally unstable. In harsher words: philanthropy is a scam [1].
Instead of having a system able to detect it's pain points and be able to self-heal, our current system "solves" issues by borrowing/stealing from the future: from printing money with the velocity of an unleashed spam bot to using finite resources (wood and steel, but also energy, time, attention, expertise) to build ridiculous boats for a few billionaires.
Also, we have a better word than "large-scale/impactful philanthropy": the state. And yes, there has been and there is no state in the world, beyond all the branding and the flags of the nation-states, mainly because we are unable to solve the tragedy of the commons [2], because perhaps in order to solve it we need to develop a natura naturans [3]: how does one build a god? Because, effectively, that's what a system able to care about everyone and everything becomes.
And people saying "it should be free though", maybe should read Mr. Beast's tweet on the issue... he *agrees* it should be free and is advocating for that.
I'm glad MrBeast is the top YouTuber, it could've been anyone, but philanthropy and a spirit of giving took the #1 spot. Good on Gen Z.
After releasing Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg donated several million dollars to the Shoah Foundation. In an interview, he said that he rarely gives his name when he donates to a cause and made the exception because he wanted to use his name to bring light to what the Shoah Foundation was doing — creating an archive of witness accounts of Holocaust survivors. The reason he said he donates anonymously is that, according to his religion, God does not recognize giving to charity unless it is anonymous. The moment a person does a good deed, and their name is given or known, the act is not recognized by God because it was done in pride and not humility.
I don't have a horse in this fight, but, isn't your criticism only valid if he is gaining wealth at a significantly faster rate than he is giving it away?
I think we can both agree that if he gives away more than he makes in ad revenue, he won't be able to keep doing that for long. And hopefully we both agree that if he's able to make back roughly equal to what he gives away, there's no problem there either? At that point he's basically a non-profit. It's only really an issue if he's giving away 1 million and pocketing 10 million, right?
Or is that not quite it either? Because what if he's able to invest that 10m such that the next video gives away 5m and pockets 50m?
My question is, where is the line between being a force for good vs bad, given that his philanthropic potential can grow along with his profits, and he seems to have a track record of doing so? Is it when he starts making 100m but is still only giving away 5m? I have no idea what the actual numbers are, maybe he's already well beyond that point, and now he's just investing his profits into PR to make himself look like a good guy .
But I don't see how his impact is absolutely ZERO when he's at least given 1000 people his vision back.
There's pranking people for money online, then there is giving people life altering treatments for free.
Imagine having a life where you make money helping people and bringing joy to other people's lives. The only caveat is that those people are featured on a video... that they agree to.
So imagine going to someone who's blind, and say "we'll pay for your treatment, but you've got to let us film you... oh what's that ? you don't want to ?... ha.. i'm sorry, next !"
Is that really altruism ? It sounds more like a business deal to me.
This is a lot of unsourced, completely gut feeling statements about someone’s philanthropic impact to essentially just have an excuse to shit on them. I wonder how much your own life has impacted the world out there.
Look I don’t know mrbeast, beyond the team trees stuff from a while back. But YAWN at claiming someone’s actions do more harm than good just because your gut says it’s inspired pranksters.
Terrible fucking take that could only come from HN. How many cataract surgeries have you funded? How many pounds of trash have you cleaned up from the ocean? Let's hear what a big impact you're having if Mr. Beast's impact is 0.
If you give me millions of dollars for it? I could clean tons of trash yes, or fund a lot of cataract surgeries. I can found hundreds of thousands if by the end of the year I'm left with more money than I started. Awesome idea.
Yikes! What a cynical take and I wonder if you bring this degree of skepticism to the world.
From the article:
> The end product was an eight-minute video called “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.”
This is a huge quality of life improvement for 1000 people directly, and imagine the secondary effects - they qualify for jobs which they didn't, they can contribute money to their families, their families are able to use the money to fund education / savings for future generations, etc.
Leaving aside the altruism, he is a master of his craft. He understands the Youtube algorithm, his viewership, and how to grow his brand.
He managed to build a self sustaining form of altruism that doesn't depend on taxes or a field of call centers harassing people for donations, that has to be worth something, regardless of the ultimate motive.
My worry for instance is that what he's doing in not scalable on the level of a society, yet it's polluting our public thoughts so much that better solutions are stifled.
It might be of interest to know that there is a form of altruism originating out of South Asia where you distribute to others before partaking in their earnings themselves.
There is another that says to earn a honest living through hard work.
Dictionary definitions are rarely complete and independent of the model Christian lens (and sometimes bias) that writes them. It can make things harder.
might technically still be considered "altruism" - after all there is no official definition. but your reasoning holds. i would also question whether his business deserves to be called altruistic given that he gets rich by it. he wouldn't be flying first class without his altruistic deeds.
I find it interesting that people are upset that this, for lack of a better term, philanthropy achieved by MrBeast, while yes, its for the likes, the YouTube popularity, its a cottage industry of "feel good" that he's producing, is somehow bad?
I wonder how sustainable this will be ultimately, but it seems like he's able to just give all this stuff away and help people, and yes, they have to agree to be being filmed participating in some manner, but seriously, he's helping folks who need it. Every day people.
He also makes other content, but this seems to be the "bread and butter" of what makes MrBeast famous. I'm not seeing an obvious downside to what he's doing, seems like a net win for many people
This is philanthropy porn. He is not the philanthropist because he doesnt haev the money in the first place, he is using other people's money to perform charity on camera.
I 'm not very religious but it is a tale as old as humans. The christian gospels called out this hypocricy for a reason:
> Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory before me. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their rewards. But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.” – Matthew 6:2-4
The other thing is that philanthropy is about helping people according to their need, not randomly or according to their willingness to get on cam
But if we never celebrate altruism or philanthropy, are we not, perhaps, discouraging it? Don't we want to instill these cultural values of giving?
It seems to me that keeping quiet is a kind of purity ritual that perhaps does more harm than good as well.
Personally I don't care about MrBeast one way or the other, he doesn't affect my life in any appreciable way, if he makes money giving other people money, cool, I can think of a thousand worse ways to make money.
He's certainly not using anyone else's money. It is money that he's received from making videos.
The difference, I think, is the same difference that there is between donating money anonymously and donating money under the condition that something is named after you. The former is transparently good because it can only be done for a good purpose. The latter may be done for a good purpose. You might want everyone to know you donated so that you can set an example for others: "I am a popular actor and if I do this it will bring attention to this cause". But we often get the feeling, I think, that the donation would not have been given if not for the quid pro quo, and then it feels a bit dirty: more like buying indulgences.
Here he's not giving the money away just so that he can say "look what a good philanthropist I am" but also so that he can record and publish videos of it to make money. That makes it twice as dirty: doing something that ought to be done for its own sake and using it as a means of achieving an end that is, let's face it, his own benefit.
If he were doing it differently, then it might be different. If it felt like he had structured the operation so that he was only making all this money to funnel it into a charity, that would be different. But he's not: he's not making money in order to do charity, but doing charity in order to make money. He's reversed the means and the end. That is deeply uncomfortable.
> I find it interesting that people are upset that this, for lack of a better term, philanthropy achieved by MrBeast, while yes, its for the likes, the YouTube popularity, its a cottage industry of "feel good" that he's producing, is somehow bad?
It depends on how it's done.
It's one thing to be broadcasting what is essentially, poverty porn, where you, the hero of the world, come in to paradrop money on the problem.
It's another thing to, well, be doing meaningful charity, and promoting it.
And just like art versus pornography, the distinction is one of 'I'll know it when I see it'. Unsurprisingly, people have legitimate disagreements on where that line is.
Unfortunately, the US is just completely broken in respect to treating people with dignity if they fall on hard times. I'm willing to say that as long as things are (and they seemingly are, so far anyway) transparent, and agreed to, up front, by all parties involved, I can't say I'm against this.
I understand the "poverty porn" aspect might be a sour taste, but this is the state we exist in, unfortunately, where these random acts of charity are really meaningful to so many people.
To Jimmy’s credit, a lot of his charity work is done without a camera. He runs a legit food pantry year-round. He doesn’t farm it for views. I think it’s only in one or two videos.
I wonder how sustainable this will be ultimately, but it seems like he's able to just give all this stuff away and help people, and yes, they have to agree to be being filmed participating in some manner, but seriously, he's helping folks who need it. Every day people.
the federal govt. spends trillions on aid without having to film people. The whole reason Mr Beast is able to give anything away at all is because of the spectacle. otherwise, no one would watch and he'd have no money to give.
Mr beasts viewers give him money because they enjoy the spectacle. Without the spectacle all the good he’s able to do would not be done. Sure his viewers could just give the money to the government instead, but without the spectacle they don’t want to. Isn’t convincing people to be more charitable good? How is that not what Mr beast is doing
Sure they do, but he’s doing it without any bureaucracy. No real strings for the recover. Government aid is both more political and often has strings attached or requirements. Very different things entirely, nor is it sufficient
The MrBeast video where he pays for people's eye surgery felt icky to me and it took me a while to really figure out why. On one hand, I think it's great that people in need were able to receive assistance. On the other hand, why is it that it took some rich YouTuber to pay for their surgeries in the first place? As I understand it a lot of these eye surgeries have been fairly standard for decades, so why isn't there already a government program that pays for this? No paperwork or other bullshit, you just go to an eye doctor and they give you the surgery. It seems like such obvious low-hanging fruit, and it would be a massive political win. Maybe manufacture one fewer jet to pay for thousands of surgeries?
Maybe Medicare For All and these big medical reform programs are too ambitious and unlikely to go through. But maybe we could at least help raise the floor for what medical conditions Americans are treating by default.
If you're reading this, consider calling up your representative and telling them: "Hey, I think it's kinda crazy that we have a safe and proven surgery that lets people see, and I think it should be available for anyone that needs it, figure out how to make it work."
How many people even need these eye surgeries? I bet that raising enough money to pay for this surgery for every single American wouldn't even cost that much (in relative terms). So going the charity path would probably also be viable. However if it's something that enough people agree is worth doing, why not just use your tax dollars to pay for it? Who's going to seriously oppose a bill for giving people the ability to see?
You know what would be a win? Tuning in to the State of the Union next year and hearing: we eliminated this form of blindness from the USA.
The article says the kid tried looking into Social Security for the Blind, but "couldn't figure it out". And I guarantee you that plenty of entitlements and government grants of all sorts, especially welfare type ones, go unclaimed, because the would-be beneficiary doesn't even know about it, can't figure it out, or attempted and failed on some paperwork technicality.
I've been on federal entitlements of various types for over 20 years, and let me tell you, the paperwork and reporting requirements are onerous, and they advertise extremely punitive penalties if you don't comply. It's basically a part time job to gather up all the necessary proof of income, assets, employment, medical records, etc. and fill out the necessary forms, and then get it all filed in the right place at the right time before the deadline. And the agencies will do their best to lose all that and mess it up on their end, so you need to constantly be second-guessing them.
I'll tell you, it's far easier to go beg what you need from a charity like the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Technically, they also have income limits and other qualifications, but they're not going to put you through a scene from Brazil just to get your rent paid in an emergency.
> "Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used."
You're 100% right. It's nice that MrBeast paid for those simple and cheap surgeries to restore people's vision, and it's abhorrent that it required someone with money to decide to take that step for the problem to be solved.
> However if it's something that enough people agree is worth doing, why not just use your tax dollars to pay for it? Who's going to seriously oppose a bill for giving people the ability to see?
Unfortunately, I think the same people who oppose universal healthcare would also oppose this.
It’s also hard to draw the line on which things should be covered by the government, short of just covering all essential medical care. Curing blindness is definitely important, but people in the US literally die from not being able to afford other types of healthcare.
Two reasons I find this distasteful. It might be a net good still, I’m not sure. It’s not obvious however.
One downside is that it competes for the same “feel-good” feeling which much more effective charities compete for. Someone engages with Mr.Beast, feels like they did good. Later they walk by a food shelter in need of volunteers and thinks “I already did my part.” As we have parasocial relationships, we have paraphilanthropy. I suspect it ultimately makes people less compassionate and caring. This is hinted at here:
> For Miller, what makes Donaldson remarkable is that he essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity, and to therefore see their views and likes and shares as a force for good: “MrBeast is actually telling people that they’re entering a marketplace, by saying, ‘If you watch this, this is worth so much money, I can raise this much money and I can spend it on good causes.’” As Donaldson says in one video for his philanthropic sub-channel: “Beast Philanthropy is literally funded by your eyeballs. Not even joking.”
Truth is, watching hours of YouTube isn't doing good. At best it’s entertainment, at worst it’s hours of human potential wasted.
The other downside is that it normalizes the extrinsic reward to doing good. Kindness done for the “thank you” breeds resentment. The vulnerable can be thankful, but they can also be angry, frustrated, confused, hurt, mentally ill, etc. Sustainable kindness is done for oneself.
> One downside is that it competes for the same “feel-good” feeling which much more effective charities compete for. [...] Later they walk by a food shelter in need of volunteers and thinks “I already did my part.”
The exact same argument is made against government programs. And there's a long history of research showing just how much government grants crowd out charitable giving because tax payers feel like "I already did my part".
But I don't see how you can consistently argue against Mr. Beast without also arguing against government funding, if crowding out is the issue you're concerned about.
There's other arguments in favour of government programs though. For one, a lot of the wealth that's generated in a country is due to the collective historical effort of the people which is summed up in the state (for americans, the "government").
So taxation is simply the United States of America, or Norway, or Sweden, taking back some of the resources of the "now" that have been generated thanks to the collective effort of the "past".
Also, there is actual research on the effectiveness of government programs (such as food stamps for example) in increasing quality of life of children who grow up on these; compared to those who grow up without those. In reality, children don't choose where they are born, and as much as it is the parent's job to raise them it is not the child's fault to not have gotten responsible parents.
So, in reality, tax payers shouldn't be doing charity. Why would they? If charity is needed then the government is obviously not collecting enough or allocating resources efficiently. I would very much say that charity is a systemic failure, and philanthropy is usually spear headed by the very same people who argue against universalist measures such as higher taxation. Why would a billionaire know where resources are needed better than the government, who has much more data on people to properly know where money should go.
So, in my opinion, it's really easy to argue against philanthropy and in favour of government programs. I mean, there's a lot of data out there.
> The exact same argument is made against government programs. And there's a long history of research showing just how much government grants crowd out charitable giving because tax payers feel like "I already did my part".
How much?
> But I don't see how you can consistently argue against Mr. Beast without also arguing against government funding, if crowding out is the issue you're concerned about.
They could believe public programs and some charitable giving is more effective than no public programs and more charitable giving. Or someone who feels like a friend telling you you gave to charity affects charitable giving more.
He isn’t genuine. In his origin story you’ll notice he talks about trying lots of different strategies to maximize his views and engagement. That’s his only real goal. He stumbled upon his current formula by accident after significant iteration.
It strikes me that he could have just as easily be producing any kind of harmful content if the rules of what’s acceptable to society and YouTube were different. It just so happens that in his case the content is self-reinforcing and easily defensible.
He is the same as the people who film themselves giving flowers to lonely elderly people. Such people do not feel good about doing good acts because of the actual act, they crave the attention and praise that doing good often brings, and they need it in great quantity.
The act itself is just a vehicle for vulnerable narcissism and wouldn’t exist or have been done in the first place without these outlier personality traits enormous investment.
But if he’s honest in telling his origin story about figuring out how to optimally drive engagement, doesn’t that actually make him genuine? There’s no lie here. He’s upfront about how he’s optimizing content for views and using profits to drive further content, grow the business, and donate to charity.
I don’t really find his content very interesting, but he seems like a decent guy and you can definitely make an argument he’s doing some good in the world.
It may make him honest but he doesn’t deserve the type of praise people give to him. He never set out to help people, that isn’t the root of his motivation, and never has been. He is motivated to create content that gets a lot of views and “wins YouTube”.
The content isn’t the point in his mind, it’s getting as many views as possible. So that’s what I mean when I say he isn’t genuine, because the content is only there to get the views, and he’s only doing it because it’s what works.
The way I see it, if those lonely elderly people's days are brightened by being given a flower, who cares what the intentions of the flower-giver were?
This is a very utilitarian way of viewing the world.
Under other philosophical frameworks, intentions do matter, not just consequences. For a deontologist, for example, thinking of Kant's categorical imperative.
My point here is that "who cares what the intentions are" is not really, at all, such an obvious thing. And there's a wealth of philosophy that's non-consequentialist. I honestly invite you to read a bit more on these kinds of ideas because they might genuinely give you a new perspective on morality.
Also, what if the viewers of the video also had their day brightened by seeing someone being nice? No wonder negativity bias is such a thing in media, not only do negative doom-and-gloom articles get more views, but positivity is actively scorned.
I think MrBeast is fantastic, this is what he wanted to do, he made it happen, he's worked out how to run his organization, he's scaled it out. His content is really well done and fun. He gets to help people, he's very explicit about how he makes money, he's not making out he's a charity, he's directly promoting things and starting his own spinoff businesses. Good stuff.
Readit News
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 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.
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)
Deleted Comment
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.
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 $54 million, but surely a lot of expenses too?
That is not MrBeasts fault, it's the environment's. Say you see MrBeast give thousands of people help, and you have the same problem as these people - sure, you're happy for the other people but why didn't you get any help? The show is over, you're left alone, your problem is currently not interesting.
Edit: There is also the power gradient in all of this performance that this video[0] highlights well. Nobody can complain about how they're being treated or portrayed, because they are in need. That is taking away something from the people who receive something, this kind of charity treats them as less - they're extras on stage.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LfJ-VxuqIQ
Nicely put. Some people claim that MrBeast's actions are better than nothing, but the money he's using are not growing on trees.
The same money could have been used to fund a fair health system, where people receive treatments based on their needs without their life becoming an exhibit for youtube.
> ... with the Nicaraguan capital expected to recover from the fallout within 200 years. That's it for the news tonight, up next is Mr. Beast with a big charitable payout of 150 000$ 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!
> Ha ha ha.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxYjTTXc-J8
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.
YMMV.
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.
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.
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."
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.
https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1309325764739858432?...
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.
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.
orphan crushing machine
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
The same uncomfortablenesses would arise if this were videos of some govt leader going around granting early retirement to people.
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.
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.
Your downvotes don't matter to me.
Your are supposed to educate them and give them values, not be a victime of some random youtuber hit videos.
Not to juge but as a parent you can have so much positive influence...
Is that the standard by which you judge all leisure activities?
It's all about repugnant materialism and self-promotion
Now apply same standard to literally any other Youtube channel
Dead Comment
While I see he seems like a nice guy overall, his actions do more good than harm. His impact is very low, his "philanthropy" is localised down to the individual level and his impact is absolutely none on the actual problems that people who he targets face. The more negative side of this is that he inspires the next generations to only go by extreme things on Youtube and other social media platforms and these extreme things are, more often than not, on the negative side (stupid and dangerous pranks, throwing stuff at people from 20th floor etc).
He chose this path because his viewers were probably reacting to it the most. I'm not a hater but I feel like the real altruistic people doing good stuff on a much grander scheme don't get any recognition at all while this money making business man selling snake oil to children is getting everything from the table.
Despite throwing millions and millions, his impact is absolutely ZERO. I find it quite predatory.
I listened to his interview on the Joe Rogan show and was really impressed.
Mr. Beast built his channel by taking all profits from each video and plying it into the next video. Using this approach he was able to produce progressively larger and more expensive videos. He has demonstrated his frugal lifestyle, has publicly given away an incredible amount of money to good causes, and has stated his future goals for his businesses will be for charity. Everything about his actions strikes me as genuinely good, it just seems like the publicity is the best way to get more money to accomplish the charitable goals.
You're right that what he's doing does not conform to the definition of altruism specifically, but that doesn't mean what he's doing is not good.
How can you watch the video where he pays for the blindness surgery for all those people and say that that was anything other than an amazing win for all those nice people?
To me this seems like a semi-obvious minmaxing solution to making popular videos: make essentially zero profit, regardless of revenue. At some point you get so much revenue that you can't spend it all so the next logical step is to simply give it away as part of the video. And in this case it's a virtuous cycle - apparently giving away money generates more revenue so it just keeps going. But this doesn't strike me as being done out of any noble purpose - all he wants is YT view and charity is just a side-effect of that.
"How can you watch the video where he pays for the blindness surgery for all those people and say that that was anything other than an amazing win for all those nice people?"
My criticism would be that it's local change vs trying for structural change. Why don't those people already have access to surgery? The counter-argument to this would be that structural change is somewhere between very hard and impossible, so just spend the money locally. A more cynical take is that lobbying for restructuring the US health care system doesn't generate YT revenue, so he's incentivized to fund the most clickbaity charity projects.
Pretty much all of this is typical “rich philanthropist” stuff, just dialled down to appeal to a demographic cohort of 20-35 year olds.
It’s incredibly easy to be altruistic when literally every financial and social incentive says you should. I think people are uncomfortable with this because he hasn’t sacrificed anything. His financial incentives just line up with “doing good things”. When they no longer align it still remains to be seen whether he will act the same.
That's what every sensible businessman does in the early years of a new venture. It's only a stark contrast to the avera social media personality who takes out as much as they can early on to fund car leases, rent for fancy homes and designer brand clothes.
It’s not a competition; OPs view is not yours.
Emotional responses to content are subjective. It’s never been, never will be, that all humans are of a normalized opinion on anything, I’m not sure what the point of your take on OPs take is?
Must we role-play feeling like Shiny Happy People about everything? Why must everything be framed in toxic positivity?
It is wonderful that people can see, but how much money you have should have no bearing on whether you stay blind or not.
These people are victims of a system and charity is just painting over the cracks.
Perhaps he could devote his energy to start the change.
Charity (and alms) is what people did back in the day. Some societies moved on.
[1] Better said: I'm not against charitable acts. I'm against charity as a replacement for an humane and fair society. Sometimes it feels like having a water station next to workers being being whipped to build the pyramids. Perhaps stop the whipping?
I wonder many of the critics in this thread have seen him like this. I've also seen a few videos where he's talking about his channel and he certainly has me convinced he's not in it for his own benefit.
But it's not altruism, it's philanthropy. It's more about the performance than the act itself. Some of his videos literally reycle game show ideas ("do X contrived thing successfully and you get $Y money"). His antics help people and that's a good thing. But he's also making them jump through hoops (not literally AFAIK, though I wouldn't be surprised) and perform gratitude for his audience. Things can be good and bad at the same time.
Consider the American trope of "feel good" news reports about, say, an elementary school kid doing a successful fundraiser to pay off his classmate's school lunch debt. Yes, it's amazing that an elementary school student did that but it's also horrifying that this means school lunch debt is just a thing society has come to accept as normal and that society is so dysfunctional a literal child had to take the initiative instead of just getting to be a child.
I think Mr Beast is one of the better people when it comes to using their ridiculous wealth and social capital for good, but it's horrifying that people have to perform misery for an online audience to get relatively cheap medical treatments and frankly it's horrifying that a single person can have access to and control over such an amount of wealth that they can perform this kind of stunts on the regular while at the same time so many people are so desperately poor that their lives can be changed by being gifted mere crumbs in comparison. Mr Beast may be a relatively good person but that he (i.e. his channel/brand) can exist at all should be deeply concerning.
I also don't understand the take that altruism/philanthropy has to be zero sum. i.e. true altruism means that I lose something and you gain something.
Maybe it is a hold over from religion and the idea of sacrifice being the ultimate good. The times I have had the most impact (helping people in need, teaching, starting my own NPO) it has been very much positive sum.
If he has zero impact, then everyone else here has negative impact. I certainly haven't cleaned up an entire beach.
Can someone give me some examples of philanthropy that is NOT predatory/extractive?
Richard Stallman and his work on free software?
I think what OP is saying is that at Mr Beast's income level, he can effectively create a lasting change that most of us can't. Instead he focuses on people individually, giving them nice gestures but nothing life-changing, and he continues to do this because his viewers demand these types of low-scale altruism. So effectively he's just an entertainer that earns his salary by doing small acts of kindness, nothing more.
It's like the old proverb in a way: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But teach him to fish, and you feed him for life". Mr Beast is just giving people fish for a day, but it doesn't help anyone after that one chance encounter with him.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altruism
By the first definition it requires “unselfish regard”. If MrBeast is pulling 54 million a year (along with lots of fame and clout) he’s not exactly qualifying for the first definition.
Definition 2 is the one I’m most familiar with from the animal kingdom, and it actually requires that the giver either gain nothing or lose something. So that may be where people are coming from who take exception to his behavior being described as “altruistic”. By definition, it is not.
Shocking question, but here's an answer: millions of non-billionaires who donate some money to [good] charities.
You never hear from them because they don't go around bragging about their donations.
Dead Comment
Instead of getting hung up on what is or isn't altruism, the other point of view here is that he leaves a trail of people that are objectively better off having encountered him. That's advertising money that is spent on worthy causes. Yes, it's self serving. But that money also serves the people he helps. It's an interesting dynamic. Ceasing to do what he does would actually be bad for the people that are on the receiving end of this. So, why should he?
He's found a way to funnel of some of the stupid money slushing around on the social media platforms. There are billions of it. And he's managing to do something more interesting with it than just squirreling it away. Compare that with the average influencer, viral marketing expert, troll farm or other sources of clickbait that are thriving on these platforms. At least this goes somewhere vaguely useful. Good for him and whoever is on the receiving end. And if he pockets some of that, how much worse is that than all the other nonsense on those platforms where most of the publishers just pocket 100% the revenue? I'm not judging that either.
If you are going to watch stuff on Tik Tok, Youtube, or whatever, you might as well watch his. Best case some random people benefit from this, worst case you watch some silly nonsense and are mildly entertained by that. Either way you feel good and nobody is getting hurt. I don't watch this stuff myself but that's just because I have other things to watch that I find more interesting.
Instead of getting hung up on what is or isn't altruism...
It's interesting how people gets stuck in that point. They want him to suffer in order to qualify for saint status. Otherwise, doing good is meaningless. On the contrary, I find very nice his happy, positive, laid back persona.
I wonder what people criticizing him thinks of well-known NGOs.
And to be clear, his acts of charity have made an impact in the people who have benefited from it. Whether the public response is positive or negative is besides the point.
This may be some kind of projection or just your personal opinion of society and human motivation. You aren't inside the brains of every human and can't possibly know everyone's motivations at all times. It's quite possible that some or many of them experience authentic altruism.
True. Which is why a lot of people recognize this and perform acts of charity anonymously.
I don't mean to say there is anything wrong with non-anonymous donations by the way.
Two different concepts that should be looked at separately.
The OCEAN model demonstrates that we are distributed into camps of "principally considering self first" and "principally considering others first". You take the most high Trait-Agreeable people, and they will all routinely sacrifice their own resources, position, opinion and wellbeing for others. This is fundamentally where maternalism is rooted psychologically too.
But to your point - I agree that if people have benefited from it, then it's still a good thing.
Here we have some dude who is earning money by helping people - yet for some reason this is one of the biggest sins he can do in eyes of a lot of people. Why? Just because he can't help everyone?
This is so weird take on the matter. What are you doing to help people? Are you taking credit for that work? And if not would you not be able to help more people if you had some notoriety?
There are things that you can criticize MrBeast on - like the MrBest Burger internet kitchens - but him making money off of helping people is not one of them.
Btw he is not "earning money by helping people", he is "helping" people to earn money.
Don't overthink it too much, yo.
Sure he is extremely generous to his employees, but that would also fall under altruism...
Monsters, Inc. comes to mind! In that movie they are scaring children, bottling their screams as energy and selling it as a commodity. The happy ending is our protagonists stumbling upon the fact that laughter is a much better source of energy than screams, and so the staff of monsters become slapstick comedians for children everywhere.
YouTube managed to become the boring-dystopia middle-ground where they make money off both.
Instead of having a system able to detect it's pain points and be able to self-heal, our current system "solves" issues by borrowing/stealing from the future: from printing money with the velocity of an unleashed spam bot to using finite resources (wood and steel, but also energy, time, attention, expertise) to build ridiculous boats for a few billionaires.
Also, we have a better word than "large-scale/impactful philanthropy": the state. And yes, there has been and there is no state in the world, beyond all the branding and the flags of the nation-states, mainly because we are unable to solve the tragedy of the commons [2], because perhaps in order to solve it we need to develop a natura naturans [3]: how does one build a god? Because, effectively, that's what a system able to care about everyone and everything becomes.
[1] https://jacobin.com/2021/10/philanthropy-is-a-scam
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[3] <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#:~:text=This%20i...>
I agree there is something icky (discussed in the article) but it’s weird to say zero impact.
I'm glad MrBeast is the top YouTuber, it could've been anyone, but philanthropy and a spirit of giving took the #1 spot. Good on Gen Z.
So he donates mainly to please God, not to help others.
I think we can both agree that if he gives away more than he makes in ad revenue, he won't be able to keep doing that for long. And hopefully we both agree that if he's able to make back roughly equal to what he gives away, there's no problem there either? At that point he's basically a non-profit. It's only really an issue if he's giving away 1 million and pocketing 10 million, right?
Or is that not quite it either? Because what if he's able to invest that 10m such that the next video gives away 5m and pockets 50m?
My question is, where is the line between being a force for good vs bad, given that his philanthropic potential can grow along with his profits, and he seems to have a track record of doing so? Is it when he starts making 100m but is still only giving away 5m? I have no idea what the actual numbers are, maybe he's already well beyond that point, and now he's just investing his profits into PR to make himself look like a good guy .
I agree with what you typed there, even though based on the rest of the context, it's probably not what you meant to type.
But I don't see how his impact is absolutely ZERO when he's at least given 1000 people his vision back.
There's pranking people for money online, then there is giving people life altering treatments for free.
Imagine having a life where you make money helping people and bringing joy to other people's lives. The only caveat is that those people are featured on a video... that they agree to.
Is that really altruism ? It sounds more like a business deal to me.
Look I don’t know mrbeast, beyond the team trees stuff from a while back. But YAWN at claiming someone’s actions do more harm than good just because your gut says it’s inspired pranksters.
Put your comment in context.
I feel like you meant the opposite. . .
From the article: > The end product was an eight-minute video called “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.”
This is a huge quality of life improvement for 1000 people directly, and imagine the secondary effects - they qualify for jobs which they didn't, they can contribute money to their families, their families are able to use the money to fund education / savings for future generations, etc.
Leaving aside the altruism, he is a master of his craft. He understands the Youtube algorithm, his viewership, and how to grow his brand.
I hope you find some optimism in your life.
There is another that says to earn a honest living through hard work.
Dictionary definitions are rarely complete and independent of the model Christian lens (and sometimes bias) that writes them. It can make things harder.
Dead Comment
I wonder how sustainable this will be ultimately, but it seems like he's able to just give all this stuff away and help people, and yes, they have to agree to be being filmed participating in some manner, but seriously, he's helping folks who need it. Every day people.
He also makes other content, but this seems to be the "bread and butter" of what makes MrBeast famous. I'm not seeing an obvious downside to what he's doing, seems like a net win for many people
I 'm not very religious but it is a tale as old as humans. The christian gospels called out this hypocricy for a reason:
> Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory before me. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their rewards. But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.” – Matthew 6:2-4
The other thing is that philanthropy is about helping people according to their need, not randomly or according to their willingness to get on cam
It seems to me that keeping quiet is a kind of purity ritual that perhaps does more harm than good as well.
Personally I don't care about MrBeast one way or the other, he doesn't affect my life in any appreciable way, if he makes money giving other people money, cool, I can think of a thousand worse ways to make money.
The difference, I think, is the same difference that there is between donating money anonymously and donating money under the condition that something is named after you. The former is transparently good because it can only be done for a good purpose. The latter may be done for a good purpose. You might want everyone to know you donated so that you can set an example for others: "I am a popular actor and if I do this it will bring attention to this cause". But we often get the feeling, I think, that the donation would not have been given if not for the quid pro quo, and then it feels a bit dirty: more like buying indulgences.
Here he's not giving the money away just so that he can say "look what a good philanthropist I am" but also so that he can record and publish videos of it to make money. That makes it twice as dirty: doing something that ought to be done for its own sake and using it as a means of achieving an end that is, let's face it, his own benefit.
If he were doing it differently, then it might be different. If it felt like he had structured the operation so that he was only making all this money to funnel it into a charity, that would be different. But he's not: he's not making money in order to do charity, but doing charity in order to make money. He's reversed the means and the end. That is deeply uncomfortable.
How does one can acquire money in the first place without recieving money from other people?
Does your money should appear from nowhere, so you will become "true" philanthropist?
It depends on how it's done.
It's one thing to be broadcasting what is essentially, poverty porn, where you, the hero of the world, come in to paradrop money on the problem.
It's another thing to, well, be doing meaningful charity, and promoting it.
And just like art versus pornography, the distinction is one of 'I'll know it when I see it'. Unsurprisingly, people have legitimate disagreements on where that line is.
I understand the "poverty porn" aspect might be a sour taste, but this is the state we exist in, unfortunately, where these random acts of charity are really meaningful to so many people.
He’s effectively transferring dollars from large advertisers to poor Americans. Very unlikely he would be doing this at all if not for YouTube.
the federal govt. spends trillions on aid without having to film people. The whole reason Mr Beast is able to give anything away at all is because of the spectacle. otherwise, no one would watch and he'd have no money to give.
Dead Comment
Maybe Medicare For All and these big medical reform programs are too ambitious and unlikely to go through. But maybe we could at least help raise the floor for what medical conditions Americans are treating by default.
If you're reading this, consider calling up your representative and telling them: "Hey, I think it's kinda crazy that we have a safe and proven surgery that lets people see, and I think it should be available for anyone that needs it, figure out how to make it work."
How many people even need these eye surgeries? I bet that raising enough money to pay for this surgery for every single American wouldn't even cost that much (in relative terms). So going the charity path would probably also be viable. However if it's something that enough people agree is worth doing, why not just use your tax dollars to pay for it? Who's going to seriously oppose a bill for giving people the ability to see?
You know what would be a win? Tuning in to the State of the Union next year and hearing: we eliminated this form of blindness from the USA.
I've been on federal entitlements of various types for over 20 years, and let me tell you, the paperwork and reporting requirements are onerous, and they advertise extremely punitive penalties if you don't comply. It's basically a part time job to gather up all the necessary proof of income, assets, employment, medical records, etc. and fill out the necessary forms, and then get it all filed in the right place at the right time before the deadline. And the agencies will do their best to lose all that and mess it up on their end, so you need to constantly be second-guessing them.
I'll tell you, it's far easier to go beg what you need from a charity like the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Technically, they also have income limits and other qualifications, but they're not going to put you through a scene from Brazil just to get your rent paid in an emergency.
> "Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used."
You're 100% right. It's nice that MrBeast paid for those simple and cheap surgeries to restore people's vision, and it's abhorrent that it required someone with money to decide to take that step for the problem to be solved.
Unfortunately, I think the same people who oppose universal healthcare would also oppose this.
It’s also hard to draw the line on which things should be covered by the government, short of just covering all essential medical care. Curing blindness is definitely important, but people in the US literally die from not being able to afford other types of healthcare.
One downside is that it competes for the same “feel-good” feeling which much more effective charities compete for. Someone engages with Mr.Beast, feels like they did good. Later they walk by a food shelter in need of volunteers and thinks “I already did my part.” As we have parasocial relationships, we have paraphilanthropy. I suspect it ultimately makes people less compassionate and caring. This is hinted at here:
> For Miller, what makes Donaldson remarkable is that he essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity, and to therefore see their views and likes and shares as a force for good: “MrBeast is actually telling people that they’re entering a marketplace, by saying, ‘If you watch this, this is worth so much money, I can raise this much money and I can spend it on good causes.’” As Donaldson says in one video for his philanthropic sub-channel: “Beast Philanthropy is literally funded by your eyeballs. Not even joking.”
Truth is, watching hours of YouTube isn't doing good. At best it’s entertainment, at worst it’s hours of human potential wasted.
The other downside is that it normalizes the extrinsic reward to doing good. Kindness done for the “thank you” breeds resentment. The vulnerable can be thankful, but they can also be angry, frustrated, confused, hurt, mentally ill, etc. Sustainable kindness is done for oneself.
The exact same argument is made against government programs. And there's a long history of research showing just how much government grants crowd out charitable giving because tax payers feel like "I already did my part".
But I don't see how you can consistently argue against Mr. Beast without also arguing against government funding, if crowding out is the issue you're concerned about.
So taxation is simply the United States of America, or Norway, or Sweden, taking back some of the resources of the "now" that have been generated thanks to the collective effort of the "past".
Also, there is actual research on the effectiveness of government programs (such as food stamps for example) in increasing quality of life of children who grow up on these; compared to those who grow up without those. In reality, children don't choose where they are born, and as much as it is the parent's job to raise them it is not the child's fault to not have gotten responsible parents.
So, in reality, tax payers shouldn't be doing charity. Why would they? If charity is needed then the government is obviously not collecting enough or allocating resources efficiently. I would very much say that charity is a systemic failure, and philanthropy is usually spear headed by the very same people who argue against universalist measures such as higher taxation. Why would a billionaire know where resources are needed better than the government, who has much more data on people to properly know where money should go.
So, in my opinion, it's really easy to argue against philanthropy and in favour of government programs. I mean, there's a lot of data out there.
How much?
> But I don't see how you can consistently argue against Mr. Beast without also arguing against government funding, if crowding out is the issue you're concerned about.
They could believe public programs and some charitable giving is more effective than no public programs and more charitable giving. Or someone who feels like a friend telling you you gave to charity affects charitable giving more.
Talk about grasping at straws. Seriously?
It strikes me that he could have just as easily be producing any kind of harmful content if the rules of what’s acceptable to society and YouTube were different. It just so happens that in his case the content is self-reinforcing and easily defensible.
He is the same as the people who film themselves giving flowers to lonely elderly people. Such people do not feel good about doing good acts because of the actual act, they crave the attention and praise that doing good often brings, and they need it in great quantity.
The act itself is just a vehicle for vulnerable narcissism and wouldn’t exist or have been done in the first place without these outlier personality traits enormous investment.
Wouldn't many people call this "learning"?
I don’t really find his content very interesting, but he seems like a decent guy and you can definitely make an argument he’s doing some good in the world.
The content isn’t the point in his mind, it’s getting as many views as possible. So that’s what I mean when I say he isn’t genuine, because the content is only there to get the views, and he’s only doing it because it’s what works.
Under other philosophical frameworks, intentions do matter, not just consequences. For a deontologist, for example, thinking of Kant's categorical imperative.
My point here is that "who cares what the intentions are" is not really, at all, such an obvious thing. And there's a wealth of philosophy that's non-consequentialist. I honestly invite you to read a bit more on these kinds of ideas because they might genuinely give you a new perspective on morality.
There's a comparison to be made to choosing to stay in the matrix or unplug yourself from the illusion.
The difference between the flower TikTok’s is that the contestants in his video signed up for it.