True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 411: I Paid a Real Assassin to Try and Kill Me
Aired: 2024-10-10
Duration: 01:33:37


=== Craziest Video Ever? (06:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Behind me is an assassin!
[00:00:01]  And if he stabs me with this rubber knife by the end of the day, he wins 100 grand.
[00:00:05]  Get his rubber knife.
[00:00:06]  Good luck.
[00:00:07]  Get me out of this room.
[00:00:12]  What do you do?
[00:00:13]  Oh!
[00:00:15]  I can't get out!
[00:00:16]  Later, boys!
[00:00:17]  I left your car!
[00:00:18]  I'm the ones!
[00:00:21]  What, are you out?
[00:00:22]  This video is going to be the craziest video you've ever seen!
[00:00:25]  We have a real tank, an entire carnival.
[00:00:28]  I'm blowing up a bank and so much more.
[00:00:30]  All to escape this real assassin.
[00:00:33]  to watch this video what's up youtube Hello, everyone.
[00:01:02]  Hello.
[00:01:03]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:04]  Miyamo Brace.
[00:01:06]  Nope.
[00:01:07]  Miyamo Brace.
[00:01:10]  Miyamo Brace E Yosoy Chomsky Hoven.
[00:01:17]  Chomsky Hoven.
[00:01:19]  And El Pod Casto is Truan.
[00:01:24]  What?
[00:01:25]  True Anyon.
[00:01:26]  Okay, Truanon.
[00:01:27]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:28]  Hello.
[00:01:28]  Ola.
[00:01:29]  How you doing?
[00:01:29]  I'm good.
[00:01:30]  How are you doing?
[00:01:30]  Good.
[00:01:31]  One thing we didn't mention is that Mr. Beast has a company called Unilingo.
[00:01:35]  I know people don't understand.
[00:01:36]  We're talking about that shit later.
[00:01:37]  But he has a company called Unilingo that translates people's YouTube videos into other languages.
[00:01:42]  And I think we should start doing that.
[00:01:44]  Okay.
[00:01:45]  What language?
[00:01:46]  Chinese.
[00:01:47]  Oh, there's the most of them in Hindi.
[00:01:49]  Sure.
[00:01:49]  So my idea is this.
[00:01:52]  Obviously, we're about as big as you can get in America, right?
[00:01:55]  Pretty much one in every American listen to this.
[00:01:59]  But in China and India, you know how many fucking dudes live there?
[00:02:03]  So many more.
[00:02:04]  Literally billions.
[00:02:05]  And you got to add the women to that, too.
[00:02:08]  We have to add the chicks.
[00:02:10]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:12]  Think of the untapped market.
[00:02:14]  If we just got a fraction of the Chinese population to start listening to Truanon, we could be huge.
[00:02:19]  Like, I don't think we've really, like, my plan is ever if I get in real trouble here, I'm moving to China and becoming one of those guys who's like acts in like Chinese commercials as like the white boy.
[00:02:29]  Like, because at that point, that's your plan?
[00:02:31]  Yeah, what the fuck is your plan?
[00:02:33]  What's your plan?
[00:02:34]  It wouldn't be my plan if I told you.
[00:02:36]  Because if fucking Chuji moves in silence.
[00:02:38]  Exactly.
[00:02:39]  But maybe I told you a fake plan.
[00:02:40]  And my real plan is something even crazier.
[00:02:42]  Mongolia.
[00:02:43]  More delicious.
[00:02:44]  Mongolia, you think?
[00:02:45]  You could.
[00:02:46]  Do they need a white man there?
[00:02:48]  Who knows?
[00:02:50]  I think I could change.
[00:02:51]  Rincon just went there and he said he drank a lot of yak stuff.
[00:02:54]  Milk.
[00:02:54]  Really?
[00:02:55]  Yeah.
[00:02:55]  That feels cliche.
[00:02:57]  Yeah.
[00:02:57]  Yeah.
[00:02:58]  Well, I think that they're doing that.
[00:02:59]  Momo?
[00:02:59]  No, that's not Belize.
[00:03:00]  Momos are good.
[00:03:01]  But they're still doing the Yak stuff?
[00:03:03]  I think they're still doing the Yak stuff.
[00:03:05]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:05]  We have a real show for you today.
[00:03:07]  We do.
[00:03:08]  We have old friend of the show.
[00:03:11]  Don't make him sound.
[00:03:13]  He's not old, but what is this?
[00:03:15]  What is this the fourth time he's been on?
[00:03:18]  A venerable guest.
[00:03:19]  Max Reed.
[00:03:20]  Read Max to talk about, you know it, you love it, the internet.
[00:03:26]  Specifically, YouTube.
[00:03:28]  Specifically, Mr. Beast.
[00:03:31]  Mr. Motherfucking Beast.
[00:03:33]  Our favorite YouTuber and one of our favorite guests.
[00:03:37]  So listen to it now.
[00:03:50]  What's up, everybody?
[00:03:52]  My name is Mr. Brace, and I am here with two random fans, Liz and Max.
[00:03:59]  And we are doing 100 circumcisions in 30 minutes.
[00:04:05]  All right.
[00:04:06]  Each of them have a pair of garden shears, and we have 100 certified by Liz somehow Jewish babies out here in a row, October 7th style.
[00:04:16]  And we are and kind of call this, call this motherfucking home and garden channel because we are about to start clipping these hedges.
[00:04:25]  Now, producer Young Chomsky has, of course, his tongs in which we will be holding up the rods.
[00:04:31]  And these will be snip-snip snapping until they get to the center.
[00:04:34]  Boys versus girls.
[00:04:35]  Everybody ready?
[00:04:36]  Welcome to the show, Chief Content Officer and most allegation-free employee at Read Max, a sub stack.
[00:04:43]  The only one I regularly read because it's fairly short and often has bullet points in it.
[00:04:48]  Max Reed.
[00:04:49]  Thank you for having me.
[00:04:51]  I'm sorry she didn't go with mowing the lawn there.
[00:04:53]  Mowing the lawn for the stop.
[00:04:56]  But no one caught my Laud Airport reference in the last episode, which I did make.
[00:05:01]  And you did feel bad about it.
[00:05:02]  And I did feel bad about it and texted you guys on the show.
[00:05:04]  So now they're going to go back in and rewind.
[00:05:06]  If they haven't figured it out by now, they won't figure it out.
[00:05:09]  You're not getting a job after this.
[00:05:11]  No, I'm just thinking about whether or not I need to apologize for this intro to the readers that I send to the podcast from my newsletter.
[00:05:17]  But I think at this point, they know what to expect from you guys and from the end of the day.
[00:05:21]  And that wasn't real anymore with all that.
[00:05:23]  As we know from what we're talking about today, after that first minute, they're dropping off anyway.
[00:05:27]  They're dropping off anyway.
[00:05:28]  I can't imagine dropping off after that first minute, by the way.
[00:05:30]  In fact, at this point, I'd be angry that there aren't babies to get circumcised.
[00:05:34]  I don't believe it.
[00:05:35]  You don't know what's going to happen.
[00:05:36]  I don't believe in it anymore.
[00:05:38]  Babies are circumcised?
[00:05:39]  Circumcision.
[00:05:40]  Yeah.
[00:05:41]  I don't.
[00:05:42]  Have you talked about this on the podcast?
[00:05:43]  We have.
[00:05:44]  We've privately, publicly, and our third space.
[00:05:52]  I don't believe in it, but I still do it.
[00:05:54]  Which is, that's dedication, right?
[00:05:56]  If you said anymore, did you used to?
[00:05:58]  I used to just be like, live and let live, you know?
[00:06:01]  And we're sort of like, you know, different people, different lengths.
[00:06:04]  You didn't want to say struggles.
[00:06:05]  I didn't really want to do that.
[00:06:07]  But no, I, you know, we did have a long discussion about this in a, you know, with a lot of people that had strong opinions.
[00:06:16]  And you were swayed.
[00:06:17]  I was swayed.
[00:06:17]  And also by some testimony, I believe.
[00:06:20]  Oh, we did tell.
[00:06:20]  We did tell it on the podcast because people told me the name of the author who wrote that piece, which I have also forgotten by now.
[00:06:25]  Sure.
[00:06:26]  Max.
[00:06:27]  Yeah.
[00:06:28]  Where do you stand?
[00:06:29]  Just kidding.
[00:06:30]  You don't got to tell us.
[00:06:31]  We can tell.
[00:06:32]  He's naked.
[00:06:33]  Let's talk.
[00:06:34]  So before we get into what everyone knows we're talking about in this episode, because of whatever funny title Brace has come up with, or perhaps I will come up with it.
[00:06:43]  Perhaps.
[00:06:43]  Or maybe Max will.
[00:06:44]  We'll see.
[00:06:45]  No one knows.

=== Dead Internet Theory (05:24) ===

[00:06:48]  You have a new piece out in New York Magazine.
[00:06:50]  I do.
[00:06:51]  Which everyone loves to get angry at, but not your piece.
[00:06:54]  No, no cats were abused in the making of this piece.
[00:06:56]  I missed the entire cat abuse thing.
[00:06:58]  You did?
[00:06:58]  I did.
[00:06:59]  And I didn't want to find out.
[00:07:00]  I think it's fine.
[00:07:01]  Who cares?
[00:07:02]  For people to abuse me.
[00:07:03]  No, no, if you miss the news cycle.
[00:07:05]  Oh, yeah, I'm good on that.
[00:07:06]  But you have a new piece.
[00:07:07]  It's called Drowning in Slop, which is very, you know, it gives you a great image there.
[00:07:12]  It's all about AI.
[00:07:13]  So a restaurant review of Kikis?
[00:07:15]  AI sort of generative content and the slop.
[00:07:20]  Can you define slop?
[00:07:21]  Yeah, I think what AI enthusiasts say is that slop is unwanted AI generated content.
[00:07:29]  But I mean, it's like weird fake AI crap is probably the best way to describe it.
[00:07:34]  Wait, what's wanted AI generated?
[00:07:35]  Well, that's why I don't really like that.
[00:07:37]  Like, I mean, you can imagine, no, I mean, I can't, it's hard for me to imagine it, frankly.
[00:07:40]  But you can, you know, there's a, you can imagine a want, some kind of AI-generated something that you asked for, that you expected or whatever.
[00:07:47]  And slop is like the stuff that you didn't really want, didn't expect.
[00:07:50]  It looks like shit.
[00:07:50]  It's not helping you.
[00:07:52]  More likely than not, it's like preventing you from getting the things you actually want to do.
[00:07:56]  And there's a bunch of different kinds of it.
[00:07:57]  Like people have probably all heard about the Facebook, like the shrimp Jesus, like the crazy Facebook images that are all over the place.
[00:08:05]  If you have a Kindle, there's a decent chance you've been advertised like an insane slop.
[00:08:10]  We talked about this.
[00:08:11]  We did an episode with Professor Simkin, the fellow who wrote the book Big Fiction.
[00:08:18]  And I, because I use a Kindle often for work, and every time I open it, because I got the cheaper version with ads, it's like the craziest fake AI children's book thing ever.
[00:08:28]  And it's almost entirely that.
[00:08:30]  Yeah, that's a really weird one.
[00:08:33]  And that stuff is all over Amazon right now.
[00:08:35]  And it's all by like fake authors whose last names are different by one letter every time.
[00:08:40]  And I had a friend actually for my newsletter, a friend of mine, who had just had a kid and was convinced that Amazon had figured out that she just had a kid.
[00:08:46]  And that's why he was advertising her these insane things.
[00:08:49]  It's always like genre bending too.
[00:08:51]  It's always like a child called Fit.
[00:08:54]  How to get your obese child back in.
[00:08:57]  Exactly.
[00:08:57]  Healthy eating.
[00:08:58]  Right, exactly.
[00:08:59]  Healthy eating for Viking warriors or whatever.
[00:09:01]  Well, a lot of times mine will be like eight children and the magical lamp.
[00:09:05]  Or whatever.
[00:09:05]  And it'll be like an AI-generated cover of like eight children, not even eight children, like two children and like a car.
[00:09:11]  Yeah.
[00:09:11]  And you find out where the rest of them went.
[00:09:13]  Exactly.
[00:09:13]  And I'm like, because people must be, I mean, I think that it's probably one of those things with the scattershot approach, you just make a million of these and like sell them for a dollar or whatever and hope that there's volume.
[00:09:23]  Yeah, what's weird about the Kindle stuff that I haven't figured out is like it costs money to advertise on the Kindle on Kindle covers.
[00:09:30]  And I talked to a couple guys who do this Kindle stuff, like scammy, shady Kindle stuff for a living, and they were a little baffled by this too.
[00:09:37]  They thought it was basically just somebody who didn't really know what they were doing, was spending too much money to advertise this.
[00:09:42]  But they were like, if they are still doing it, then some people must be buying it.
[00:09:46]  It must have like attracted some people.
[00:09:48]  Anyway, that's the Kindle stuff.
[00:09:50]  Spotify, there's like fake country bands, fake electronic bands, all kinds of things.
[00:09:54]  If you're on Twitter, you've seen we were talking about all these like awful blue check replies, like any popular tweet now.
[00:10:00]  There's like hundreds of replies, people sort of restating the premise of the tweet in AI language.
[00:10:05]  All that stuff is slop.
[00:10:06]  All that stuff is different kinds of slop, basically.
[00:10:09]  Yeah, you have a line in the piece that says, in the nearly two years since a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap.
[00:10:25]  And I think the use of seeming is great because there's a kind of a, I don't say hidden, but it's not like the main point of the piece.
[00:10:32]  But I think a really like one I want to highlight before we move on from the conversation, which is like basically that slop requires human intervention or it wouldn't exist, right?
[00:10:41]  That this is like the human hand is creating slop.
[00:10:45]  Like behind all of this stuff is like someone with an intention to create this stuff.
[00:10:49]  Where I think we tend to think of it as just like this sort of technological manifest destiny product.
[00:10:56]  Like it's just, it's just coming out of this technology as opposed to something that we are all actively totally.
[00:11:02]  I mean, not us, but you know.
[00:11:03]  I mean, we are kind of insofar as we're like consuming it.
[00:11:06]  I mean, one way I thought about this piece while I was writing it is, like, you guys know about dead internet theory.
[00:11:12]  Like, dead internet theory has been around for a few years, and it's a cool, spooky theory that I understand to be a, you know, a kind of articulation of like just the weird feeling of being online these days.
[00:11:24]  But I think that it's like really easy to tip too far into this sort of dead internet theory idea that like there actually aren't any humans online.
[00:11:31]  When in fact like there are like every piece of slop you see, there isn't just like one guy behind it.
[00:11:36]  There's like a whole economy of guys like teaching each other how to do it, selling courses and how to do it, plugging in the things like, you know, they're in Discords, they're in Telegrams, they're in WhatsApps.
[00:11:46]  A lot of this is like pretty open.
[00:11:48]  It doesn't require a huge amount to go in and sort of find out where all this is going on.
[00:11:52]  And it's sort of amazing to like, in some sense, like a particular kind of like American in me is like really proud of these guys who have figured out how to like skim a lot of money off of Facebook or whatever, even because they like ruin the internet or whatever.
[00:12:06]  But it's guys all the way down.
[00:12:08]  Like there is no like ancient machine intelligence like forcing this on you.

=== Passive Consumption Boom (03:09) ===

[00:12:12]  Yeah.
[00:12:12]  It's this guy in Kenya or Cambodia or France or wherever making these psycho videos and getting a couple hundred bucks from Facebook every month.
[00:12:20]  Yeah, I've watched tutorials before on like how to make basically like YouTube shorts with like AI generated pictures, AI generated content that steals from other things.
[00:12:29]  And like if you do look at YouTube shorts, which I know I don't want to bust you here, but Liz is on that shit pretty much 24-7.
[00:12:37]  And I've been looking over her shoulder sometimes and I got one of her AirPods in and it's just like, you know, it's like random shit.
[00:12:43]  Yeah.
[00:12:43]  Like that is just nonsense.
[00:12:45]  And it's always in the same cadence, always like the words flashing on the screen.
[00:12:49]  And there's courses on how to sell these because like there's, especially like if you're in like a third world country where like a dollar goes a lot further than it might hear, that dollar that YouTube pays you is like going to like for whatever many millions of views is going to go a lot further.
[00:13:03]  And so I think that's really why you see a lot of prevalence of this stuff in oftentimes really poor countries because like if you get paid like your Twitter payout, you know, for your fucking like funny animal vids account or whatever that you reply to every tweet to with like breaking racist news.
[00:13:19]  Exactly.
[00:13:20]  Well, that's it.
[00:13:20]  That's the other thing.
[00:13:21]  All those like I, there was just two investigations about like two big racist.
[00:13:25]  I think one was a racist Telegram account.
[00:13:27]  Another was a racist Twitter account.
[00:13:29]  And like shocker, one is a black guy in Finland, which actually is kind of a shocker.
[00:13:34]  And the second was two Turkish businessmen like the UAE.
[00:13:38]  Yeah, not shocker on that.
[00:13:40]  I swear to you, quote me on this.
[00:13:43]  All those big racist Twitter accounts are 100% done by BIPOC motherfuckers out somewhere in like Italy or something.
[00:13:52]  Like the big, one of the biggest like racist European accounts is like a Cambodian guy who lives in Italy.
[00:13:58]  Yeah, I mean, that sounds about right.
[00:13:59]  They're all just squirrels trying to get a nut.
[00:14:00]  They all just squirrels trying to get a nut.
[00:14:02]  But I think that that's like actually really important, which is that like underlying all this, this shit that we see on basically every social media platform now, because all of the platforms in the past like, you know, I mean, a handful of years, I'm not going to, I don't, I'm no historian.
[00:14:18]  Have turned from basically being sites of interaction to just passive consumption.
[00:14:24]  Yeah.
[00:14:24]  Right.
[00:14:24]  And that's been a like directive from up top, whether that's like, you know, everyone kind of moving into these monetization models like YouTube has that you see on X.
[00:14:35]  I feel like Facebook is now doing that.
[00:14:37]  Yeah, Facebook, X, and TikTok pay directly based on engagement.
[00:14:42]  Like, Facebook has a creator's fund.
[00:14:44]  They just, I thought they just launched something.
[00:14:46]  For what?
[00:14:47]  I have a new niece.
[00:14:48]  Yeah.
[00:14:48]  No, but that's the whole point.
[00:14:51]  For stuff like that.
[00:14:51]  But is that now you don't do that kind of interactive or sharing on Facebook?
[00:14:56]  You just create content to be passively consumed from a feed.
[00:14:59]  So it's like everything is kind of becoming YouTube in a lot of ways.
[00:15:04]  Yeah.
[00:15:04]  Or trying to compete with YouTube because YouTube is the only one of the only big sites that is still growing exponentially as opposed to almost all the other ones, which are in their decadent era, as a very fashionable Leninist might say.

=== Mr. Beast's YouTube Formula (15:39) ===

[00:15:22]  But I, which I do think is actually a really great way to segue us into Mr. Beast because, in a lot of way, these sloth guys are doing exactly what Mr. Beast has done.
[00:15:34]  Yeah.
[00:15:35]  And in ways that, like, I don't know what the line between any of them are, except that he's, you know, on a different, you know, it's optimized for a different site and for a different audience.
[00:15:47]  Yeah, I mean, I think that's basically it.
[00:15:48]  It's like he's reverse engineering YouTube, whereas, you know, these Indian guys are reverse engineering Facebook and the Cambodian guys are reverse engineering Twitter and whatever else.
[00:15:57]  And he's got, like, at this point, he's got a lot more money and he's sort of doing it in a much sort of more resource-intensive way.
[00:16:02]  But like, if Mr. Beast were 12 right now, I'm sure he would be thinking about this as how can I leverage generative AI to create bullshit for YouTube.
[00:16:12]  Yeah.
[00:16:12]  So wait, let's talk about this real quick because I have looked at the analytics.
[00:16:16]  Most of our listeners are 65 and up and secretive billionaires who live in the Alps.
[00:16:22]  And so for those people, who is Jimmy Donaldson?
[00:16:28]  Crazy name.
[00:16:29]  Crazy name.
[00:16:30]  But a perfect name.
[00:16:32]  Who is Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast, aka Mr. Beast 6000?
[00:16:37]  I believe was his original screen name.
[00:16:39]  He is the most popular and or sorry, he's the most famous YouTuber, I think we can say.
[00:16:45]  I mean, he's the most popular YouTuber who we would call a YouTuber.
[00:16:49]  I think the only channels that are more popular than him are T-Series.
[00:16:53]  Is T-Series more popular than him?
[00:16:54]  T-Series is the Indian, the Bollywood channel.
[00:16:56]  That one?
[00:16:57]  I think he beat T-Series.
[00:16:58]  Okay.
[00:16:58]  I can't.
[00:16:59]  It's always in flux, but Christian Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo, is now a YouTuber.
[00:17:04]  But his big move from Instagram to YouTube has been very successful.
[00:17:08]  And then there's a Brazilian evangelical priest who has a huge channel who has actually kind of used Beast-like strategies in order to, he basically gets people to comment their names and help pray for them.
[00:17:25]  And so he's been really killing it on shorts.
[00:17:28]  Brayson's typing because he's going straight here.
[00:17:30]  No, I'm looking at Social Blade.
[00:17:34]  And I hate to tell you guys, but Mr. Beast is number one.
[00:17:37]  All right.
[00:17:37]  He's back.
[00:17:38]  He's back.
[00:17:39]  And we've got Mr. Beast T-Series, Coco Melon, Nursery Rhymes, my favorite channel.
[00:17:43]  YouTube movies, Set India, Kids Diana Show, and Vlad and Nikki.
[00:17:47]  Yeah, Vladniki or like Russian prankster, like a couple.
[00:17:51]  Oh, that's nice that prank videos are still doing well.
[00:17:54]  So, anyway, he's the most popular, we can say it.
[00:17:55]  He's the most popular YouTuber.
[00:17:57]  You know, so for the handful of like 12-year-olds who are listening, they know who Mr. Beast is already because he's incredibly popular among like middle schoolers, adolescents, even sort of young adults.
[00:18:09]  And he does videos.
[00:18:10]  I mean, these days, he's gone through a lot of phases in his career, let's say.
[00:18:12]  But these days, his videos are these really big and elaborate money, sort of money-centric stunt and game show videos where he'll make people, you know, he'll put 30 people in a house or in a circle, and he'll say the last person who leaves gets to take home money, or he'll walk around a town and give away gold bars.
[00:18:34]  It's all I'm not, that's not a joke, that is actually the kind of thing he does.
[00:18:38]  So, Denda is like, Yeah, there's something.
[00:18:41]  Well, anyway, he's so he's um, he's sort of turned this shtick, along with like an incredibly precise and attentive uh attitude towards the YouTube algorithm into like effectively superstardom.
[00:18:56]  Yeah, um, though it's a funny kind of superstardom because he's like he's incredibly famous among people born after 2000 and a lot less famous among you know, 27-year-olds like me.
[00:19:08]  Yeah, I mean, if you don't have a kid or you're not like like in a discord with a bunch of like 15-year-olds, like some people here I could name, it would be, yeah, I am.
[00:19:18]  I am Liz because I give them advice and I mentor them, okay, on how to groom even younger people.
[00:19:23]  I'm just playing, uh, but it's uh you wouldn't really you wouldn't really interact with him.
[00:19:28]  No, I found out who Mr. Beast was a few years ago, just from I don't know, whatever, ambiently, and I have been obsessed with him ever since because it's so there's something about it, and this is what I this is sort of the core of like really why I wanted to talk about it.
[00:19:42]  There's something about it that I, that is, there's like not a word for it yet, for the way it makes me feel or and for like the image that he presents, and really even down to like the way his face looks.
[00:19:54]  Yeah, but there's something about it that I don't like, and I feel like many have tried to criticize.
[00:19:59]  I'm looking at his videos right now, his channel.
[00:20:01]  I spent seven days buried alive.
[00:20:03]  Video is horrifying to watch, by the way.
[00:20:06]  I watch, I did watch it.
[00:20:07]  Ages one to 100 decides who wins $250,000.
[00:20:11]  $10,000 every day you survive in a grocery store, survive 100 days in a nuclear bunker, win 50,000, and 50 YouTubers fight for $1 million.
[00:20:20]  And you're right, like almost all of it does revolve around, like, there's always like a not always, but mostly money in the title, oftentimes an amount of days or something, and usually like some kind of horrible challenge.
[00:20:35]  Yeah.
[00:20:35]  And I think it's notable that Mr. Beast, his biggest video, I think, to date, is one where he made the squid games real.
[00:20:43]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  And I did not, I can't say in honesty that I finished watching Squid Games.
[00:20:49]  I watched the first two episodes and said, I get the point.
[00:20:52]  Many such television shows that occurs with.
[00:20:56]  But I think it was the whole thing was like the squid games were bad.
[00:21:00]  Yeah, you weren't supposed to have them in real life.
[00:21:02]  Yeah.
[00:21:03]  What if the Hunger Games are real?
[00:21:04]  Which we're actually seeing in England.
[00:21:06]  Yes, yeah.
[00:21:07]  But I think it's notable that he made Squid Games real, but his entire channel is just make is squid games.
[00:21:14]  Yeah, it was real life squid games.
[00:21:16]  Yeah, I talked to, I mean, so I talked to a couple people who like participated in his videos or who otherwise were like recipients of his, I suppose we'd say kindness.
[00:21:27]  And I was, it was remarkable to me how much their sense that this was just the, like what was remarkable to me was their sense that this was just the normal way that you get money or the way that you get help if you need it.
[00:21:39]  And, you know, some of this is sort of fair.
[00:21:41]  Like I talked to a kid.
[00:21:42]  So a video that I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about is this one where he donated cataract surgery to a thousand people.
[00:21:48]  And, you know, so like biblically, what's the title of the video is something like, you know, a thousand blind people see for the first time.
[00:21:56]  It's all very like shocking to me that there isn't more evangelical talk about the fact that Mr. Beast is giving vision back to the blind or whatever.
[00:22:03]  Yeah, well, unfortunately, his name is Mr. Beast.
[00:22:05]  And he's unfortunately documenting it pretty like in a non-religious kind of way.
[00:22:09]  Yeah.
[00:22:09]  It's like, yeah.
[00:22:11]  So I talked to one of the kids who got the cataract surgery.
[00:22:14]  And he's like a bright kid who lived in a trailer with his dad and his sister in Florida.
[00:22:20]  And he had a condition since he was a young kid that didn't allow him to see through one eye.
[00:22:28]  And he spent like most of his life trying to get money to get the surgery.
[00:22:32]  And he had a bunch of people trying to help him work through bureaucracies and Medicaid and donations and all this stuff.
[00:22:38]  And none of that came through.
[00:22:39]  And then he got a DM on Snapchat from one of Mr. Beast's producers.
[00:22:44]  And within like six weeks, he could see again.
[00:22:47]  And Mr. Beast gave him a $50,000 check to help him go to college or whatever.
[00:22:51]  So this is like, you know, it's, on the one hand, it feels so degrading that you have people who are like, the way I'm going to plan for my future is to like win a Mr. Beast contest or whatever.
[00:23:01]  But on the other hand, like a lot of the people you talk to, like they don't, they have no sense of how else to get that help.
[00:23:06]  Or even if they have a sense of how to get that help, There's no the path to get it is too hard to like actually figure out, especially because a lot of people we're talking about are like teenagers, 20-somethings, that kind of thing.
[00:23:16]  I think maybe something we should talk about is how he has the means to do something like that, right?
[00:23:22]  Because that kind of like is that's also like an important part of this.
[00:23:25]  It's like he was able to like reverse engineer his success and understand from and he talks about this in this like 36-page guide to how to succeed at Mr. Beast production that was leaked about a month ago.
[00:23:39]  Um, where he, you know, he talks about like, I spent, I've spent so much time in the mines, like you, you don't know when, what's the stupid meme?
[00:23:47]  It doesn't matter.
[00:23:49]  But he, you know, spent hours and hours, thousands of hours, he says, understanding the YouTube algorithm and understanding how to optimize content to such a degree that he could just reap in as much money as possible for so long that he's built this machine that just fucking generates an obscene amount of like AdSense revenue, basically.
[00:24:12]  Yeah, I mean, he talks about this constantly.
[00:24:14]  One of the really interesting things about YouTube in general is that a huge amount of the content on YouTube is just about how to be successful on YouTube.
[00:24:21]  Yes.
[00:24:22]  So it's like, and this is part of the thing that I think has actually made Mr. Beast so successful is not only do you get the Mr. Beast videos, you always get a bunch of interviews with, you know, hustle culture podcast guys, you know, where Mr. Beast describes his methods.
[00:24:35]  And he'll talk about like when he was in high school, he didn't do homework.
[00:24:38]  He didn't study.
[00:24:38]  He like barely had friends.
[00:24:39]  He just watched YouTube videos and not just watched YouTube videos.
[00:24:43]  He was like looking at how they did the thumbnail and looking at how the first 30 seconds of the video went and like reverse engineering like the, you know, the method to go completely viral.
[00:24:53]  And so since early on, he's just been like kind of relentlessly like experimenting, makes it sound, it's like he's like A-B testing like techniques, thumbnails, you know, like formats, like titles, all this stuff to just get as big as he possibly can.
[00:25:09]  And he reinvests, I mean, by all accounts, like he's reinvesting most of the money he makes back into the Mr. Beast channel.
[00:25:16]  Like he's not even, it seems, motivated by, you know, like amassing wealth, although he is, but like just the growth of the channel is the most important thing.
[00:25:25]  Yeah, I listened to his interview with Rogan last night.
[00:25:28]  And boy, was that a treat.
[00:25:31]  Boy, I got, I just, I love my job.
[00:25:35]  And then Rogan goes, wow.
[00:25:37]  Well, Rogan actually, Mr. Beast is so boring that Rogan eventually has to stop interviewing him and just tell him about the movie Ex Machina, like over and over and over and over again, insisting that he watches it.
[00:25:50]  But Mr. Beast, and he does this in basically every interview.
[00:25:53]  He says essentially the same things.
[00:25:55]  Mr. Beast says that like when he was a kid, he studied YouTube.
[00:25:58]  He doesn't like even describe watching YouTube for fun.
[00:26:01]  He says he was obsessed with it.
[00:26:02]  And he said he had this like hyper fixation on.
[00:26:04]  He sort of describes himself as having no life, no friends, nothing.
[00:26:10]  But not watching it for pleasure, but watching it to study.
[00:26:12]  So he would see the most viral videos and figure out how many camera cuts they did.
[00:26:17]  And see the most viral videos and what they titled it and what the thumbnail was.
[00:26:23]  And that's an interesting thing about YouTube that I don't know is really has like a analogous representation in any other kind of like online medium.
[00:26:33]  Is that like they?
[00:26:33]  They really are?
[00:26:34]  I guess Twitter like people who get paid to do it or whatever, but like they are obsessed with the algorithm yeah, and like the algorithm, like trying to like harness it and see what plays in it, and like there's all these sort of like witch doctory things.
[00:26:46]  And then there's real stuff as well, like you can't swear, I think in the first minute or whatever, or you get demonetized.
[00:26:51]  But he describes himself as like someone who religiously studied this to the, to the detriment of every other thing in his life, and he still talks.
[00:26:59]  He talks about it now is in a sort of bashful way, like wasn't I such a crazy kid?
[00:27:03]  But like it's clear that this is still.
[00:27:04]  He still does this to some extent and you know it's interesting to me because he's right.
[00:27:11]  You know, like what he does works.
[00:27:13]  I don't know he sort of really sells it as being translatable to anybody else.
[00:27:17]  I don't necessarily think that that's true.
[00:27:19]  I think he's sort of selling a line there or even maybe trying to make himself feel more normal.
[00:27:24]  But his videos have this like crazy formula that he does that like.
[00:27:28]  I think this is partially why I find him so unnerving is because, like you can tell and he is actually very open about it that like yes, he has fun doing this, or he says he has fun doing this, but really, like everything is so scientifically or, according to him, scientifically done that like there is actually no real like art whatsoever in this.
[00:27:48]  Yeah, there's no.
[00:27:49]  Like um, I mean, we talked about this like reverse engineering is kind of the right, is like the right framework for thinking about it, because so much of what he does and he's pretty clear about this in the memo is you're.
[00:27:59]  But when you're optimizing for traffic like that, like the actual stuff that's in the video, the content, so to speak, is sort of the last thing you're thinking about.
[00:28:07]  Like you're you're, you're starting with your title, your thumbnail, your like sense of how many cuts have to be in there, your idea of like what needs to be in it, and then at the very end, you can sort of be like, all right, so I guess we'll like bury ourselves in a grave for this one or something like that.
[00:28:19]  Yeah, I mean this is.
[00:28:20]  He says that.
[00:28:20]  He said, this is why you must know the title and the thumbnails of the videos you are making.
[00:28:23]  How can you know how to start your video if you don't even know what expectations the viewers have of you, Which is a completely ass backwards way of any, like, that's not how you think about creating anything at any point before, until we have now reached this era of the YouTube, of optimizing the YouTube algorithm.
[00:28:40]  And I actually think, like, as you were talking, Brace, about like how to put to words what we find so unnerving about him is I do think, like, I think he is the most optimized man.
[00:28:50]  And what he produces is the most optimized product.
[00:28:54]  And there's something very, it's not just Uncanny Valley, but it's like every angle, every note is, is optimized to hit something that we don't realize that we react to ourselves.
[00:29:07]  And it's like an overwhelming, in the same sense that like selfies can be very odd representations of ourselves because of the focal length of the cell phone camera and it's not a right representation.
[00:29:20]  And so there's this disconnect between what we see in the camera and what we see in real life.
[00:29:24]  And that causes a kind of like dysphoria or whatever.
[00:29:27]  And there's something about him optimizing every single thing he does for the absolute most attention possible that has created this optimized monster that I think we can't like, we don't recognize as human because it's not, it like doesn't feel, it's like not real, real or something.
[00:29:49]  I don't know.
[00:29:49]  I'm having a hard time putting it to words, but there's something about it being so tuned, so fine-tuned to the, what the algorithm, you know, knows to like feed into ourselves that we don't even know that we react to or something that is causing this very ick feeling.
[00:30:11]  I think part of the other thing that happens is like he's so he's so like so much of the YouTube audience is like 12 year olds basically.
[00:30:20]  And he's so and so like when he's fitting himself to the algorithm, like he's fitting himself as an adult man, he's 26 or 27 or whatever, into this like very adolescent kind of space and framework.
[00:30:33]  Like I think it's, it's, it's, it's also this sort of weird disconnect between like your expectations as an adult human watching another adult human being and like what they're going to do on what is theoretically a all ages network or whatever.
[00:30:45]  And then the kind of like pure 12 year old id that like emerges out of it, the like, the like big amounts of money and crazy stunts, and then just like the complete and total like high energy from the very first minute that that is like, it's skin crawling to me.

=== Adults in Adolescents' Space (14:50) ===

[00:31:01]  Like it is, it is genuinely.
[00:31:03]  It's funny because like when I, when I think of like an adult with childlike sensibilities, one obviously thinks of the great Michael Jackson or the late Michael Jackson, however you want to describe him, but you know, Michael Jackson.
[00:31:14]  And, you know, somebody who is like, clearly, that is, we are dealing with a, something's going on with that fella.
[00:31:23]  But Mr. Beast has that weird childlike like approach.
[00:31:28]  And then his, his like, but there isn't like anything underneath it.
[00:31:33]  It's weird.
[00:31:33]  It's like he did it to, I don't know how to describe this, but it's like he self-brainwashed himself into being just like this creature that's purely of YouTube.
[00:31:41]  In the Rogan interview, for instance, he talks about like he doesn't watch movies.
[00:31:44]  He saw Spider-Man, a Spider-Man movie, which Rogan also fucking loved, by the way.
[00:31:50]  And Rogan also tells him, you gotta see Into the Spider-Verse.
[00:31:54]  Okay.
[00:31:54]  Which is crazy that I'm like listening.
[00:31:56]  I'm like, I was like walking around fucking Park Slope last night listening to two grown men tell each other how good Into The Spider-Verse two of like the most famous grown men in America be like into the Spider-verse was.
[00:32:07]  It's crazy, you gotta see it.
[00:32:09]  But um, he says that he only watches movies to get in touch with things that are popular in the culture.
[00:32:14]  Like he doesn't have any like.
[00:32:16]  See, he's so optimized, I know, but like it's funny because when we think of optimized you might think of like a Brian Johnson, like my penis is one centimeter longer now.
[00:32:23]  Like I, you know I fucking drink piss or whatever, but like that's not actually optimized.
[00:32:28]  Optimized is like he has cut out every single thing from his life that doesn't help him make a better YouTube channel, and that is actually, I think one of the fascinating things about him is that he puts in all of his money.
[00:32:38]  He puts it back into his YouTube channel, like what you're saying earlier.
[00:32:42]  Like he does have this like little suburban enclave where his team lives, but they don't live in mansions.
[00:32:47]  No, he like owns a Tesla but he never drives it.
[00:32:50]  It seems like he doesn't even really want to drive it.
[00:32:52]  He's like he just because he wants to stay in his house and make youtubes all day.
[00:32:55]  Yeah, I mean he's.
[00:32:56]  He's um.
[00:32:57]  I wrote an article for the Times Magazine last year and like one of the things that I one of the like uh ideas behind it was this sort of like, well, is he for real?
[00:33:06]  Is he actually, because so much of what he does is this vaguely charitable, like I'm giving stuff away, I'm giving cataract surgery away, I'm giving money away.
[00:33:12]  He's got a whole charity channel where every view turns in is like a tree gets planted for it or something like that, and there you know if you're, if you're of a certain age, or like moral sensibility, like the question you're asking is like, is this guy for real?
[00:33:26]  Is this like?
[00:33:26]  Is this a cynical ploy?
[00:33:28]  Is this a?
[00:33:28]  Is this a you know a way to make money or whatever?
[00:33:31]  Um, or does he authentically want to be good?
[00:33:33]  And I think the conclusion I came to is that it's not.
[00:33:35]  It's not quite a cynical ploy in the sense of like he's making money from it.
[00:33:39]  It's just that he's figured out that the way the algorithm works is giving money away is like a really great way to get a bunch of people to watch your videos.
[00:33:45]  If and and for a bunch of different reasons.
[00:33:47]  One because it's like Americans I mean people in general love like big bombastic, like entertainment, charity stuff.
[00:33:54]  Also, because if you subscribe to Mr. Beast, you start to imagine maybe I'll get some of this money from him too.
[00:34:00]  I mean, the funny thing about him like giving sight to people is, and he jokes about this in the video, is like, oh yeah, now I have another thousand people who will watch my videos and like maybe join the Mr. Beast army or whatever.
[00:34:09]  Well, it's notable that you mentioned the giving money thing because, I mean, obviously it's a huge part of his channel, but also one of his first big videos was him giving a thousand bucks to a homeless guy.
[00:34:20]  Which, by the way, as a former drug user, I gave way more than $1,000 all told to people in all sorts of living stations.
[00:34:28]  I think he gave $10,000 to the homeless guy.
[00:34:31]  Okay, that's maybe a little more than I spent.
[00:34:34]  And I was more buying things.
[00:34:37]  You were using commerce.
[00:34:38]  I was engaging in commerce, but I was a job creator.
[00:34:41]  Well, not really.
[00:34:42]  But yeah, like his first thing was giving $10,000 to a homeless guy.
[00:34:46]  And you can tell, like, that's like he realized, like, oh, I've struck something here.
[00:34:50]  And there's a lot of online content that revolves around people holding a phone in front of their face while they give somebody $20.
[00:34:56]  Like, that is a shit ton of stuff.
[00:34:58]  You can get a lot of viewers from that.
[00:35:01]  Yeah, there's like a so this video actually is sort of interesting to watch.
[00:35:05]  Like if you're, if, if any listeners are doing a deep dive on Mr. Beast, like this video is like so much less professionally done than anything that comes after it.
[00:35:13]  And you can tell that he hasn't really like thought through at this point like how the charity video is going to work.
[00:35:18]  So he just sort of like shuffles over to the median.
[00:35:21]  Like there's a there's a guy panhandling on a median.
[00:35:24]  You know, it's it's Greenville, North Carolina, so there's no sidewalks anywhere.
[00:35:27]  And he just kind of hands the guy money and then he realizes the guy doesn't have a mic.
[00:35:30]  And so he has to like take his lab mic off and like hand it to the guy.
[00:35:34]  And they drive around for a little bit.
[00:35:35]  And it's this, it's a really weird, awkward kind of video.
[00:35:38]  Never gets followed up on.
[00:35:39]  No idea what happened to the guy who got the money, but he was very grateful or whatever.
[00:35:42]  But Mr. Beast talks about that video constantly as like the moment he realized, like, because I think up to that point, he had been mostly sort of following other formats on YouTube that he had seen.
[00:35:54]  And here was one that he had like sort of stumbled on himself that he realized had an enormous amount of potential like to build a brand around, basically.
[00:36:01]  Yeah, there's this kind of like marriage between like charity and spectacle that he was basically able to see like, and that has just been his model for growth, basically, and like obscene growth.
[00:36:11]  And then it kind of just feeds itself, much like how the money that he puts back into the channel, but like it feeds itself in that like now the views, and he's very transparent about all of this, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre.
[00:36:26]  But he, you know, it's like the, like you were saying, it's like, oh, each click will plant a tree or each view, this now enables us to give more money.
[00:36:33]  And it becomes this sort of like machine that he's feeding.
[00:36:38]  And it's very weird because it's, it is like, it does feel like a different sort of era of like creator.
[00:36:47]  I don't know exactly how to just, how to put that without sounding so old.
[00:36:54]  But it does feel in the sense that, like, you know, I've noticed this organically, I think, on other platforms where, you know, users will be following influencers or whatever, or people who are trying to become influencers.
[00:37:08]  And the influencer will now be very transparent.
[00:37:11]  Like, oh, now I'm getting sponsored by this person or this, you know, this perfume or whatever, this makeup company.
[00:37:17]  And they'll be like, oh my God, I'm so excited.
[00:37:20]  They'll like cheer on that person because it now means that like this person they've been following has now reached another level of their success.
[00:37:26]  They leveled up.
[00:37:27]  They leveled up.
[00:37:28]  And so everyone, as opposed to trying to hide these sort of things.
[00:37:32]  And Mr. Beast is like very similar where he's basically like inviting the audience into being a part of the marketplace that exists on the platform.
[00:37:42]  And everyone is like very open as much as they can be about the understanding that this is a commodity that's being produced, but also me as an audience member and a viewer is a commodity for the production, like for the machine of this production.
[00:37:59]  Yeah.
[00:37:59]  Yeah.
[00:38:00]  I mean, one of the weird things about talking to like Zoomers and even like college-aged kids for this piece was that when you present them with the kind of dilemma we're talking about, where you're like, well, you know, are you doing this for out of the goodness of your heart?
[00:38:12]  Are you doing this for money or what?
[00:38:13]  It's like the distinction didn't make sense to them in some sense.
[00:38:17]  It was sort of like, well, no, he's like acting crazy because that's what gets you views.
[00:38:20]  And getting views is what you do.
[00:38:22]  And getting views is how you get money and how you do whatever you want to do.
[00:38:25]  And the way I was thinking about it was like, you know, we're all familiar as millennials with the death of the concept of selling out.
[00:38:31]  And it used to be really bad to sell out.
[00:38:33]  And then for a while, it was like, actually, it's quite good to sell out.
[00:38:35]  And now it's like selling out's all there is.
[00:38:37]  There's nothing else you do.
[00:38:38]  All you can possibly do is sell out.
[00:38:39]  There's no authenticity.
[00:38:40]  There's no like.
[00:38:42]  And I think that the sort of naked cynicism of, you know, it's almost like a positive cynicism of telling people and people acknowledging like, yes, we are views.
[00:38:52]  We're eyeballs and we're going to help you.
[00:38:53]  We're going to like join you is appealing because there isn't even the sort of pretense of like what you're talking about of, you know, well, we have to hide the fact that this is like a pretty, you know, like awful relationship that we have and, you know, we're making money or whatever else.
[00:39:08]  It's just like, no, we're all on a journey together.
[00:39:10]  Like you guys are going to help me make money and we're going to give some of that money away.
[00:39:14]  We're going to try to give some of that money away.
[00:39:17]  It's as much a new kind of audience as it is a new kind of creator.
[00:39:20]  Or it's like the new audience and the new creator have been sort of built together over the last 10 years.
[00:39:25]  I mean, you can see that even with like podcasts and stuff.
[00:39:29]  Like, you know, it's, it's people, it's, it's, and no disrespect to any of our listeners who might feel this way, but people oftentimes feel like, you know, you're on like, it's like a, they'll like transpose a podcast into like a political movement or something.
[00:39:41]  Or like think that there's like, it's supposed to be supposed to be like filling this like place in society in a, in your life.
[00:39:47]  But it's like it's just that's just not how it is.
[00:39:50]  But and and and I we can't if we can't encourage that kind of thing.
[00:39:54]  In fact, we actively discourage it.
[00:39:56]  But like if you're something like Mr. Beast, like having your viewers kind of go on this journey with you and like join you in this thing and they're participating and their views are actually like, you know, your views are actually planting trees or like they're, you know, you're helping these, you're helping us make more money so we can give more money away.
[00:40:15]  I know people call these prosumers.
[00:40:19]  Is that what they say?
[00:40:20]  They're consumers.
[00:40:21]  They're prosumers.
[00:40:23]  But it's, it's, you know, it's the with the charity stuff.
[00:40:26]  That was really like the big backlash I saw when Mr. Beast was attacked by adults, which I thought was very unfair because it's a children's show.
[00:40:33]  But that was like specifically the cataracts thing.
[00:40:36]  And then he did some other thing where he built like 100 wells in Africa.
[00:40:39]  Yeah.
[00:40:39]  And I remember seeing on the internet like a bunch of people who were like, fuck this, but they couldn't really say why.
[00:40:46]  Yeah.
[00:40:46]  And I think that's what's so interesting about Mr. Beast in general because it is fuck this, but I can't really say why.
[00:40:53]  And people give all these.
[00:40:54]  It's too optimized.
[00:40:54]  And like you could say, there's no criticism.
[00:40:57]  It's too optimized.
[00:40:58]  But you can say like, oh, it's like capitalism, like in some vague way.
[00:41:02]  Or like, it's, you know, like, this should be like, like, we should have free health care.
[00:41:06]  How come he isn't doing like something like, oh, yeah, so much money wasn't giving free?
[00:41:10]  It's like, but that isn't really like what I find distasteful about it.
[00:41:14]  Like, okay, yeah, Mr. Beast is a capitalist.
[00:41:17]  Yes.
[00:41:18]  So is every single other person who is, you know, in his position.
[00:41:22]  It's, it's something else that I don't know that there's a language for yet.
[00:41:27]  I mean, I think Liz is on the right track.
[00:41:29]  Like, I think it is the two, it's like, it's like those videos are, they just, it's streamlined in this way where like, like it's divorced of any kind of, I'm trying to think of the right way to put this.
[00:41:39]  I mean, it's not just that it's divorced of like context or like, you know, politics or whatever.
[00:41:44]  It's like any kind of friction that would allow you to like place it somewhere.
[00:41:48]  Like it feels a little bit like, I'm going to go way too far here, but it feels a little like porn, right?
[00:41:53]  Where it's like, if you've had sex, and I know not everybody in the room has, you know, that it's not, it's like, it involves like a lot of like weird negotiations and like, I don't want to overstate this, but a lot of weird negotiations and smells and like whatever.
[00:42:04]  $100.
[00:42:06]  But like porn, none of that really happens unless that's what you're looking for out of porn, in which case it's all that happens.
[00:42:11]  And there is a sort of, there's like a pornographic aspect to Mr. Beast videos where you're just sort of like, there's nothing, there's nothing that slows it down.
[00:42:18]  There's nothing that like like like makes it briefly awkward or anything like that.
[00:42:22]  It just is like, it's like a like a perfectly formed piece of shit emerging from an anus or something like that.
[00:42:27]  But there's no, there's no, there's nothing out of place.
[00:42:30]  Yeah.
[00:42:31]  Like humans and reality is not, we're not optimized.
[00:42:34]  We're not smooth.
[00:42:35]  And I don't mean like, I mean, literally, but in the way that you're saying, like, there is nothing in, there's no room for error.
[00:42:42]  And he's very clear about this in that like 36-page guide or manifesto or whatever we want to call it.
[00:42:48]  Like, there can be no room for anything that has not been A-B tested, that has not been like fully optimized or thought of to feed literally the beast of Mr. Beast.
[00:43:01]  And there is nothing real that exists like that.
[00:43:05]  And so I think when we see these, this content, it is like porn in that sense, but it's also like we don't know exactly what we're watching or why it's feeling so weird.
[00:43:15]  And it's because it's scratching every itch we didn't know we had at once.
[00:43:19]  Yeah.
[00:43:20]  Yeah.
[00:43:20]  There's like a fentanyl there.
[00:43:21]  There's a sort of like, it's too much.
[00:43:22]  It like hits you.
[00:43:23]  I mean, the one reason I brought up that original video he did is because that's probably the last video he's done that I can think of that has that like the quality of friction of strangeness of like awkwardness or whatever, like everything since then.
[00:43:35]  And it's, I guess the other thing that I would say is it's, it's not like frictionless in the way that like a movie is or something, that like a razzle, like Ocean's 11, like a razzle dazzle, like everybody is funny and everybody's good looking.
[00:43:46]  It's like frictionless in the way you're saying, like the delivery of it is somehow like there's every cut comes immediately when your attention starts to flag.
[00:43:53]  Every like every face is like arranged in the in the proper, you know, sort of expression.
[00:44:00]  Every everything is like done for you already so that there's no, like you don't really do any work as a viewer on other things.
[00:44:07]  Absolutely.
[00:44:07]  It's also it's long form and I use quotation marks around that.
[00:44:10]  It's long form content in the age of the short form video, right?
[00:44:14]  Like every single cut feels like it's a new 30-second video from Mr. Beast.
[00:44:18]  That's a good way of putting it.
[00:44:18]  And there's certain things that he hits on that like people have really criticized him for from like an earnest way, which I think is ridiculous about how like there's like every video is really like kind of the same.
[00:44:32]  Well, there's different kinds, but like especially like he does these kind of contest squid game type videos and there's always a buzzer beater.
[00:44:38]  All right.
[00:44:39]  Like there's always somebody that gets it in at like the last second.
[00:44:43]  And like people, you know, it's staged.
[00:44:45]  It's fake.
[00:44:46]  Yes, it is.
[00:44:48]  But like the fact that people, and it's interesting to find people who feel betrayed by Mr. Beast as if they expected reality, but like the reality isn't that it's it's it's actually more real that it's staged, if that makes sense, because like this is actually his vision of what he's making.
[00:45:06]  He says in his in his document here, like the one that we've been talking about, he says, what is your goal here?
[00:45:12]  That's the heading.
[00:45:13]  He's talking to his employees.
[00:45:14]  Your goal here is to make the best in all caps, YouTube videos possible.
[00:45:20]  That's the number one goal of this production company.
[00:45:22]  It's not to make the best produced videos, not to make the funniest videos, not to make the best looking videos, not the highest quality videos.
[00:45:29]  It's to make the best YouTube videos possible.
[00:45:32]  Everything we want will come if we strive for that.
[00:45:35]  Sounds obvious, but after six months in the weeds, a lot of people tend to forget what we're actually trying to achieve here.
[00:45:40]  And I think that's true.
[00:45:41]  He makes probably the best YouTube videos that you can make.
[00:45:44]  In fact, I would say that he sets the tenor and tone for the YouTuber as like a genre of entertainment more than anybody else.

=== Why Mr. Beast Matters (06:09) ===

[00:45:52]  Because obviously there's a lot of things for YouTube.
[00:45:54]  He's like the Cervantes.
[00:45:55]  He like invented the YouTube video.
[00:45:57]  Also, it's so important that that platform is like part of his content.
[00:46:04]  There is no separation.
[00:46:05]  Mr. Beast does not make videos for X.
[00:46:07]  He does not make videos to be. shared on any other platform.
[00:46:11]  It is for YouTube and for YouTube only and for YouTube's proprietary algorithm.
[00:46:15]  And everything is for this channel or for this platform.
[00:46:19]  And like I think that that is like, it's important to talk about because YouTube is a particular platform versus these other ones.
[00:46:27]  And when we see these changes that we see at X the Everything app or at Meta, aka Facebook or at TikTok or whatever is they're actually all chasing YouTube.
[00:46:39]  Yeah.
[00:46:40]  Which is really scary.
[00:46:41]  And Mr. Beast says in his manifesto, he's like, in five years, YouTube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined.
[00:46:47]  And I want this channel to be at the top.
[00:46:49]  99% of movies or TV shows would flop on YouTube.
[00:46:52]  And he's right about all of that.
[00:46:54]  And like, I have a fear as, you know, all of these, not just other platforms, but studios are chasing the growth that YouTube has like somehow been able to maintain, which is still a little frightening.
[00:47:10]  That like we're actually, everything is going to be chasing Mr. Beast and start to be optimized like Mr. Beast.
[00:47:18]  And that's going to be what's, I mean, there isn't, everyone's going to be like what you're saying, where they're like, well, of course that's how you make content because that's, that's what you do.
[00:47:26]  This is how you, that's how you have to get it in before people trail off.
[00:47:30]  People's attention drops here.
[00:47:32]  Now we get a new cut.
[00:47:33]  Now, you know, everything gets edited for all in these like same strategic ways.
[00:47:39]  And this is how everything starts to look exactly the same, by the way.
[00:47:42]  Yeah, totally.
[00:47:42]  I mean, this is one of those weird, like, there's like the, one of the things that I still don't have a handle on is the interaction between Mr. Beast and YouTube, like as a, as a company.
[00:47:54]  Because he says that like energy years from YouTube will actually come to him with questions about the algorithm.
[00:47:58]  Like all of these companies, like it does not have a clear picture of how its own software works, of how its own platform works.
[00:48:04]  Like partly it's a really complex system.
[00:48:05]  There's people all over it, but it's also just like they just press buttons and move things around and like see what happens.
[00:48:10]  And Mr. Beast has been adding to it for so long that nobody knows what's in it.
[00:48:13]  And like you never know like what thing you tweak might suddenly like destroy 500 YouTubers careers or whatever.
[00:48:19]  And so they'll go to Mr. Beast and ask things.
[00:48:21]  And I've always had this sort of theory, like part's the theory that like part of what Mr. Beast's success is about is like for most of the 2010s, YouTube had this reputation as being like the radicalization capital of the internet.
[00:48:35]  And even PewDiePie Was like, you know, it started getting a little bit anti-Semitic.
[00:48:42]  Don't bring up Pete Pie because he and Liz used to.
[00:48:45]  Oh, stay.
[00:48:45]  Oh, I'm so sorry.
[00:48:46]  I didn't.
[00:48:46]  I was.
[00:48:47]  Running joke.
[00:48:49]  And they, and, and I think that, so I think YouTube, it was in YouTube's interest.
[00:48:54]  This is like, I don't even think this needs to be a dark conspiracy.
[00:48:56]  It was in YouTube's interest to like make positive, charitable, philanthropic, happy content more accessible, shared more widely, and so on.
[00:49:06]  And I think Mr. Beast was both at the leading edge of that and also has like responded to that change in the YouTube algorithm.
[00:49:13]  And so one of the things I wonder about is what happens if and when YouTube decides that Mr. Beast is no longer like in their best, it's no longer in YouTube's best interest to have Mr. Beast as like the front, as the front runner, right?
[00:49:26]  And like, does he know the algorithm well enough to like be able to sort of end run around whatever changes they would make to it?
[00:49:32]  Do they care enough?
[00:49:33]  Are they happy with Mr. Beast?
[00:49:35]  I don't like this is all just sort of, I have no idea the answer to any of these questions.
[00:49:38]  But like there's a point at which, you know, he's like, he's, he's, like, I guess the question I'm asking is like, is he too big to fail for YouTube?
[00:49:46]  And I, like, I don't really know.
[00:49:48]  Well, the question, I mean, for him, which is like, at what point do you even have to make new content?
[00:49:52]  Yeah.
[00:49:52]  Because it's, it just exists now and it continues to produce returns.
[00:49:57]  I mean, that's the amazing thing about all of this shit that gets created, you know, is that there's just an forever royalty check your way, basically, as this stuff continues to generate views.
[00:50:12]  And, you know, of course, as he wants to keep growing and he's young and he's doing all of these things, I mean, I don't know what's in the heart and mind of the Mr. Beast, but like.
[00:50:21]  I don't think anything.
[00:50:22]  But go on.
[00:50:23]  But like, no, I mean, I agree.
[00:50:26]  But like, theoretically, you don't even have to, you know, broach that conversation because like he could just exist forever with what's already been created.
[00:50:37]  Well, I will say that Mr. Beast, and I shouldn't have said nothing because I think there is one thing in his heart and mind.
[00:50:43]  I genuinely think it is making more YouTube videos.
[00:50:46]  I really do believe.
[00:50:47]  I don't think, like, I think that there is a certain cynicism in what he does because he understands, like, he makes videos that he knows will be viral.
[00:50:54]  He doesn't make videos that, like he says in this, that he thinks will be good or of any use or whatever.
[00:50:59]  He makes videos that he knows will have the specific formula that will get him to virality.
[00:51:03]  And I think, you know, he's talked about in this Rogan interview that I listened to.
[00:51:07]  He says that, like, yeah, the average lifespan for like a hot YouTuber is like two years.
[00:51:11]  And I think that's generally correct, right?
[00:51:13]  Like people like Jake Paul, Logan Paul have had to kind of like switch to being just like personalities rather than YouTubers.
[00:51:19]  And I think that's generally like how it goes.
[00:51:21]  You get a YouTube channel, you grow it for a couple of years, you get big, and then you do like celebrity boxing or whatever.
[00:51:27]  Or you have a meltdown.
[00:51:28]  You have a meltdown.
[00:51:29]  Or you start a game, Facebanks.
[00:51:33]  But I think Jimmy knows that.
[00:51:36]  And I think that he really does.
[00:51:38]  I think that he has one goal in life.
[00:51:40]  Like, I think we are looking at somebody who is completely driven to be a YouTuber, which I think is also partially why I find him so unsettling because it is really like dealing with an alien intelligence.
[00:51:52]  I don't think that I could really actually talk to him about anything.
[00:51:56]  You can understand someone who wants to be a rock star, somebody who wants to be a movie actor, even if they're like really vapid and like annoying.

=== Chandler's Drive: YouTuber Ambition (06:12) ===

[00:52:02]  You're like, I get it.
[00:52:03]  That's a career I recognize.
[00:52:04]  But like, wanting to be a YouTuber is so pathetic.
[00:52:07]  It's like such an awful, an awful thing to say.
[00:52:10]  Even the biggest YouTuber in, like, the history of YouTube.
[00:52:24]  We should talk about, because it's relevant to what we're talking about, we should talk about...
[00:52:26]  We should talk about his other business ventures because he is a burger or was a burger magnate.
[00:52:32]  A chocolatier?
[00:52:33]  A chocolatier, a lunchables competitor.
[00:52:36]  No, you didn't.
[00:52:37]  What do I have here?
[00:52:38]  That is a Mr. Beast Feastives, the D's Nuts bar.
[00:52:42]  By the way, I just want to say a very hastily and cravenly cravenly.
[00:52:48]  Yes.
[00:52:49]  No, I did it with a torn apart.
[00:52:52]  Savagely.
[00:52:53]  Yes, torn apart feastables box.
[00:52:56]  It does.
[00:52:56]  It looks like a dog got into it.
[00:52:58]  The thing on the box got a dog digging into it.
[00:53:02]  I have a friend who was sent a massive, unsolicited, massive Mr. Beast box full of candies and victuals.
[00:53:18]  I have tasted all of them.
[00:53:19]  And they fucking suck.
[00:53:23]  Granted, this is a this is this is too try for yourself.
[00:53:26]  Mr. Beast, D's Nuts, milk chocolate with peanut butter.
[00:53:29]  I don't remember there any peanut butter in this.
[00:53:32]  This was the original bar before they changed the formula.
[00:53:34]  It uh it actually expires in one week.
[00:53:40]  It's, I believe, from two years ago.
[00:53:42]  You can try it if you'd like.
[00:53:44]  Um, yeah, yeah, sure.
[00:53:46]  What the hell?
[00:53:46]  Fucking take a bite of the bar.
[00:53:47]  I'll take a bite.
[00:53:48]  I'll take a bite.
[00:53:48]  Take a bite of the bar.
[00:53:49]  You know what?
[00:53:50]  Liz, she's just not, you're not going to do it.
[00:53:53]  Just open it up.
[00:53:53]  I just have a little, you don't need to have another one.
[00:53:56]  Does it get a golden ticket in there?
[00:53:58]  No.
[00:53:58]  No, but he did say he put a million dollars in one.
[00:54:02]  It says devour.
[00:54:03]  Yeah.
[00:54:05]  I want to hear what you guys think.
[00:54:06]  This is a little bit of a gray.
[00:54:08]  There's like, yeah, if you look at the inside, there's really not that much compared to your Reese's, you know, there's not that much peanut butter in it.
[00:54:15]  How is it?
[00:54:17]  Oh, it's bomb.
[00:54:18]  Yeah, it's really bad, huh?
[00:54:19]  People, it's awful.
[00:54:21]  People went nuts for these.
[00:54:22]  Okay, you guys can't eat anymore because I'm afraid it'll make it a little bit more.
[00:54:24]  Oh, yeah, it's so bad.
[00:54:25]  Yeah.
[00:54:26]  It's like worse than the gold coins that you get.
[00:54:30]  You can put the remainder in here.
[00:54:32]  And that's coming from a lady, and women love chocolate.
[00:54:35]  I don't like milk chocolate.
[00:54:37]  I like milk, but I don't like chocolate.
[00:54:39]  I don't like milk chocolate.
[00:54:40]  I'm a dark chocolate only.
[00:54:42]  It is one of the worst candy bars that I've ever had in my entire life.
[00:54:46]  I was so prepared to love this.
[00:54:52]  $35?
[00:54:53]  Probably for the 10-pack.
[00:54:54]  No, king size, $35.
[00:54:56]  Jesus.
[00:54:57]  When this box, this promo box arrived at my friend's house.
[00:55:00]  Oh, it's got to be a box.
[00:55:02]  I raced over there.
[00:55:04]  Fellow podcaster Jack Bensinger from Droid Tactics and I are big fans of Mr. Beast.
[00:55:10]  We went over there, we took about, we split the thing in half, took it back home.
[00:55:14]  I ate one of these bars and just, it has been sitting in my fucking, like, I've tried to give, you've seen the past two years, I've only been able to give away seven bars.
[00:55:22]  Really six, because I ate one.
[00:55:24]  Yeah.
[00:55:25]  And it is dog shit.
[00:55:27]  I would try to make people eat it when they came to my house.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  He also had little gummies.
[00:55:31]  Maybe if you filmed that, we'd be, you know, you'd be sitting a little bit.
[00:55:35]  I mean, sitting a little bit prettier.
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:37]  But he has, so he has Mr. Feast, Mr. Feast feastivals.
[00:55:41]  The interesting thing that he did with this, and I think this was actually really smart, is that he like got all of his psychotic fans to go to Walmart and to make sure to like arrange the shelves.
[00:55:51]  Yeah, they would go and like clean it up.
[00:55:52]  It was like a bizarre.
[00:55:54]  I mean, this is where it becomes a little less like the culture jamming.
[00:55:57]  This is like, we talk about, oh, well, people want to participate in charity and they want to be part of this thing, but it's also like they're also just idiots who really love Mr. Beast and will do kind of whatever he says, including like cleaning up his chocolate bar displays at the Walmart or whatever it is.
[00:56:13]  Yeah.
[00:56:15]  He's got Mr. Beast Burgers.
[00:56:18]  But he's suing the Mr. Beast, the people who worked with the Mr. Beast Burger stuff on.
[00:56:22]  They don't have a funny name.
[00:56:23]  They're just called Mr. Beast Burgers.
[00:56:24]  This was during, so this is like a really classic Mr. Beast thing where during the pandemic, he just told everybody he wanted to help struggling restaurants.
[00:56:33]  So he announced a Mr. Beast Burger, which is like he licensed, it's like a licensed ghost kitchen kind of like any restaurant could make a Mr. Beast burger and then you could order a Mr. Beast Burger on DoorDash or whatever.
[00:56:45]  And my impression has always been that in the same way that he like conquered the YouTube algorithm, he decided he wanted to try his hand at another.
[00:56:52]  It was like he did tennis and now he's doing a little pickleball on the side.
[00:56:55]  So he conquered the DoorDash algorithm.
[00:56:57]  And but you know, like naturally all the burgers are really bad because they were just made in random places.
[00:57:02]  Like there was a bodega near me that was making Mr. Beast Burgers.
[00:57:05]  But is it like a frozen burger that he sends them?
[00:57:07]  Yes.
[00:57:08]  It is like blue apron where they send out a box of all the ingredients and you can make Mr. Beast Burgers from your own like you can turn any place into a ghost kitchen.
[00:57:16]  Okay.
[00:57:17]  I feel like there's proprietary, not proprietary, but like there's like purpose-built ghost kitchens now.
[00:57:22]  That just do Mr. Beast Burger Kitchen.
[00:57:24]  No, that just do ghost kitchens.
[00:57:25]  Oh, yeah, definitely.
[00:57:26]  But I think that at a certain point, a lot of places are just doing ghost kitchens at their own restaurants.
[00:57:29]  Yeah, totally.
[00:57:30]  Yeah, they got a Chandler style here.
[00:57:32]  You're looking at Mr. Beast Burger?
[00:57:34]  Yeah, I wonder if that's like an RIP thing.
[00:57:36]  The last thing he ate is.
[00:57:38]  Chandler is one of the Mr. Beast boys.
[00:57:40]  You can't name it.
[00:57:41]  You can't take that name.
[00:57:42]  I'm afraid that there's a more famous Chandler now.
[00:57:44]  It's the Mr. Beast Chandler.
[00:57:45]  He's probably talking about generational.
[00:57:47]  He's born in the 90s.
[00:57:48]  He's probably born in the 90s.
[00:57:49]  He's probably named after Chandler Bing.
[00:57:51]  Yeah, obviously.
[00:57:51]  From prime time and because of who else would you, there's no other Chandler.
[00:57:54]  It's hard for me to imagine people being born at a time when friends was on earth.
[00:57:58]  Yeah, in general.
[00:57:59]  Yeah.
[00:58:00]  Beast style.
[00:58:02]  That's in it.
[00:58:03]  That's sick.
[00:58:05]  Smashed crispy beef patties with house seasoning, American cheese, pickles, diced onion, mayo, ketchup, and brown mustard on a toasted bun.

=== Vitamin Claims Controversy (10:47) ===

[00:58:14]  Crispy?
[00:58:15]  There is a location at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.
[00:58:19]  Is that the one that has the fake ski slopes inside?
[00:58:23]  Yes.
[00:58:23]  My side doctor told me about this.
[00:58:25]  Yeah.
[00:58:25]  It's big.
[00:58:27]  It's like our Dubai.
[00:58:29]  That's what he said, too.
[00:58:31]  Gotta go.
[00:58:31]  But his new venture is with Logan Paul, I think, one of the Paul brothers.
[00:58:36]  Yeah.
[00:58:36]  Logan Paul and KSI.
[00:58:38]  So two other big YouTubers.
[00:58:40]  And they have a Lunchly, which is literally a one-to-one copy of Lunchables.
[00:58:46]  But instead of Capri Sun, you get Prime, which is the Paul energy drink.
[00:58:52]  Yes.
[00:58:53]  And all the energy drinks to kids?
[00:58:55]  Yeah.
[00:58:55]  Yeah.
[00:58:55]  Okay.
[00:58:56]  Like I was joking about like, oh, 12 year olds know who Mr. Beast is.
[00:59:00]  If you talk to like any boy between the ages of nine and 13 about like what they would buy at a bodega, it's prime.
[00:59:06]  They're obsessed with prime.
[00:59:07]  Yeah, every single bodega name stocks prime.
[00:59:09]  I actually mean Jack got primes.
[00:59:12]  They're not good.
[00:59:13]  They're illegal in many European countries because of the high caffeine content in them.
[00:59:16]  It's 200 milligrams.
[00:59:17]  Are they in a squeezy pack like Capri Sun?
[00:59:19]  Are they in a can?
[00:59:20]  It's more like a vitamin water bottle.
[00:59:22]  Yeah, but it's all over print.
[00:59:23]  And then I don't know what else is in the Lunch Lee box.
[00:59:26]  It's just, it's genuinely one-to-one lunchable.
[00:59:29]  So there's like a turkey stacker and then there's a pizza thing.
[00:59:32]  They look disgusting.
[00:59:34]  Oddly enough, it's like gotten him a lot of, there's been a lot of backlash against these three for this because they're so unhealthy.
[00:59:42]  And there's like, it's like 150.
[00:59:44]  I like this box.
[00:59:45]  They call it stackums.
[00:59:46]  That's my thing.
[00:59:49]  They were like, oh, this has more electrolytes.
[00:59:51]  The only thing they could say about it, other than lunch, like besides sitting it next to Lunchables, the only thing they could say about it was that it had more electrolytes.
[00:59:57]  That's literally from idiocracy.
[00:59:59]  But Brando's got what plants crave.
[01:00:01]  It's got electrolytes.
[01:00:02]  Because it's got too much salt in it.
[01:00:04]  It's got like a salt.
[01:00:05]  They're using the salt content as an electrolyte.
[01:00:08]  Honestly, that's fucking brilliant.
[01:00:10]  It's fucking brilliant.
[01:00:11]  You know, there's a lot of those like the little like salt packs that market themselves the same way that they try to sell at Whole Foods.
[01:00:19]  That's what they're like.
[01:00:20]  They're like, oh, young NYU student hungover.
[01:00:22]  Here's a pack of salt for your electrolyte needs.
[01:00:26]  You know what these females be drinking now, though?
[01:00:28]  Is fucking goopy vitamin C.
[01:00:32]  Oh.
[01:00:33]  You have it in your fucking bag?
[01:00:34]  No, I have one of B vitamins.
[01:00:36]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  Have you seen this?
[01:00:38]  Have you heard about this?
[01:00:38]  Have you seen this?
[01:00:39]  You're married.
[01:00:40]  Yeah, my wife is not drinking goopy vitamin C. She's not drinking goopy vitamin C. You need to get her this goopy vitamin C. Are you talking about the same goopy vitamin C as like the glutathione?
[01:00:49]  I don't know what funky magic words you want to use to describe it.
[01:00:53]  I'm saying it's a packet and you think it's going to be like a fucking emergency packet, but it's goopy gloop.
[01:00:59]  And they're like, oh, you drink it.
[01:01:00]  It's liposomal.
[01:01:01]  How could I drink it?
[01:01:02]  It's fucking slime.
[01:01:04]  No, you just.
[01:01:05]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[01:01:06]  Wait, where's that?
[01:01:07]  That's wild.
[01:01:08]  Get it for your wife.
[01:01:09]  Get it for your wife.
[01:01:10]  She will stay with you another two years past when she usually would.
[01:01:14]  These husbands, husbands listening now, I think are all going to rush out and get the goopy vitamin C. There's dust all over my desk from these little packs.
[01:01:21]  Wow.
[01:01:21]  See, this is mango B Complex and Ginseng Energy and Metabolism.
[01:01:25]  I do actually really like this.
[01:01:26]  Is it a powder?
[01:01:27]  It's a powder.
[01:01:27]  It's a powder.
[01:01:28]  See, I'm talking about.
[01:01:30]  No, I don't have the liposomal in my because you have that in the morning on an empty stomach.
[01:01:34]  I don't have it ever.
[01:01:34]  Is it like it's like a marathon runners like glucose thing?
[01:01:37]  Okay.
[01:01:38]  Yeah, but it'll be, there's, you can have a vitamin C one or you, there's usually a glutathione one.
[01:01:44]  Well, I don't know what that is, but I just know that these girls are drinking goop.
[01:01:48]  But back to the beast.
[01:01:50]  This is one juice, brand.
[01:01:51]  That was your relationship advice corner.
[01:01:54]  Back to the.
[01:01:54]  You don't want that corner.
[01:01:56]  What corner?
[01:01:57]  Relationship advice.
[01:01:58]  Oh, yeah.
[01:01:58]  Oh, you don't want that corner.
[01:01:59]  But I've been fairly successful, all things considered.
[01:02:02]  The Mr. Beast's business ventures now are fucking huge.
[01:02:08]  I mean, he's not behind Prime.
[01:02:09]  That's the Paul drink.
[01:02:10]  But like, Mr. Beast burger got really big.
[01:02:12]  Why is he suing the guy?
[01:02:14]  Because the burgers were bad, and like the quality was lit.
[01:02:17]  You can sue someone for that.
[01:02:19]  I mean, a lot of restaurants out of business.
[01:02:21]  I mean, it was sort of obvious, like, you know, a million different restaurants are making them.
[01:02:24]  Some of the restaurants are going to not cook the burgers and like send raw meat to people.
[01:02:28]  And it seems likely.
[01:02:31]  But the other business venture is he's working with Amazon on this big show, which is like, which is a very weird attempt to sort of feels again like an experiment to see if he can translate everything he knows and does into a slightly different format.
[01:02:46]  Yeah.
[01:02:47]  Seems to have been pretty unsuccessful so far.
[01:02:50]  So that's the thing about, so we should talk about the difference between like TV and YouTube.
[01:02:55]  Because with TV, there's a shit ton of Liz has just been fucking with her fucking powders here.
[01:03:01]  There's so much powder everywhere.
[01:03:03]  Yeah, okay.
[01:03:04]  Well, clip that.
[01:03:05]  We're sending that one to the fucking DEA.
[01:03:08]  There's so much powder everywhere.
[01:03:11]  But they're like...
[01:03:13]  I don't think it's approved.
[01:03:14]  There's a difference.
[01:03:16]  Girls hate the FDA.
[01:03:18]  But there is a difference between having a game show on TV and the rules that you have to obey.
[01:03:25]  What's the fucking governing body for TV?
[01:03:28]  FTC.
[01:03:29]  CC.
[01:03:30]  FCC.
[01:03:31]  Yes.
[01:03:31]  So the FCC, hold on, I'm drinking Liz's goop.
[01:03:36]  Pause.
[01:03:36]  It's mango.
[01:03:38]  It's Mango.
[01:03:38]  It's certainly Mango.
[01:03:39]  There's like, FCC has all these rules about game shows and about contests and about things where you can win money on TV.
[01:03:47]  And I will say, I know this.
[01:03:49]  They are real.
[01:03:50]  When you see people get hurt on those TV shows, it is real.
[01:03:53]  They have to do that kind of stuff.
[01:03:55]  If they're competing for money, there are crazy rules around it.
[01:03:57]  The Mr. Beast stuff, it's rigged.
[01:03:59]  It's like fake, right?
[01:04:00]  It's real and it's fake at the same time.
[01:04:02]  It's YouTube.
[01:04:02]  It's a YouTube show.
[01:04:04]  But now he is doing something.
[01:04:05]  I don't really know what the FCC laws are around streaming game shows, but it's probably pretty similar.
[01:04:11]  There's been a big backlash because a lot of, they had like 2,000 contestants flown out and things went pretty wrong for a lot of them.
[01:04:18]  Yeah, I mean, it started with saying that there was a thousand contestants and then flying out 2,000 contestants and none of the contestants knew that it was actually going to be 2,000.
[01:04:27]  It was like they were going to whittle this 2,000 down to 1,000.
[01:04:29]  For the show, there's a show he's doing with Amazon called Beast Games or The Beast Games.
[01:04:33]  Beast Games.
[01:04:34]  I feel like I could come up with better names.
[01:04:35]  Yeah, Beast Mode.
[01:04:36]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:04:37]  Beast Games is like a Mark Knopfler album or something like that.
[01:04:42]  But I mean, this is interesting.
[01:04:44]  Like hearing you say this about the rules, because part of the deal with the rules is like people who are participating have to sort of know the rules in advance before they get into it.
[01:04:52]  And a lot of the people were complaining that they were like, well, now my odds are half as good.
[01:04:56]  And to me, I'm like, well, one in a thousand, one in two thousand, like you're not going to win either way.
[01:05:00]  So it doesn't really matter.
[01:05:02]  But as far as the FCC is concerned.
[01:05:03]  Loser mindset, by the way.
[01:05:04]  I just want to say right there.
[01:05:06]  Sorry.
[01:05:08]  I don't mean to bring a loser mindset into this.
[01:05:10]  You got to manifest.
[01:05:13]  So people, like their medicines were taken away from them and not given back to them in time to take them, including insulin shots.
[01:05:22]  They brought, like, bags of underwear, and the underwear was also taken from them and then not given back to them until, like, much later than you would want to change your underwear, including for women who were menstruating.
[01:05:31]  They were generally not fed, and when they were fed, they were fed, like— Isn't this, like, a huge lawsuit for, like, opening up lawsuits to animals?
[01:05:38]  Well, there is in fact a lawsuit.
[01:05:40]  There's a huge class action suit.
[01:05:41]  And I was saying before, I actually sort of think, so I talked to a couple of people who participated in like the smaller scale Mr. Beast like contests.
[01:05:49]  And it definitely wasn't pleasant to participate.
[01:05:53]  Like I talked to a woman who did one of the ones where there was like, they were inside a warehouse and there was like 100 boys on one side and 100 girls on the other side.
[01:06:02]  Whichever one, whichever side left more quickly, like the other side got a lot of money.
[01:06:09]  And like people were complaining that the artificial grass inside the warehouse was giving them allergic reactions and that kind of thing.
[01:06:16]  And I talked to some.
[01:06:18]  I mean, probably.
[01:06:18]  And I talked to a woman who participated.
[01:06:20]  She was like, yeah, it was kind of true.
[01:06:21]  But like, it wasn't as big a deal as the winners were making it say.
[01:06:24]  And it all seemed to me to be sort of of a piece with what I understand reality TV shows to kind of be like already, which is awful.
[01:06:31]  Yeah.
[01:06:32]  But like nonetheless, probably you could have filed a lawsuit against Mr. Beast.
[01:06:37]  And I think the reason this big production has been the place where the class action lawsuit has been filed is that Amazon's involved now.
[01:06:44]  So that like if you're a lawyer who's if you're like a good trial lawyer, you can expect that there's going to be a big payout.
[01:06:51]  But I mean, I say that all just to say, like, I don't think Mr. Beast was like, did a lot worse on this one than he has done in the past.
[01:06:58]  Like, I think he's also always been a little bit not great to his contestants.
[01:07:02]  And this one was maybe just slightly bigger scale and was attached to like a huge company that is, you know, going to be happy to settle out of court with a bunch of people.
[01:07:10]  Yeah.
[01:07:10]  I mean, there's like a sort of interesting history of people on like specifically like prank channels.
[01:07:14]  But like David Dobrik, I think his name is.
[01:07:17]  He's like another big YouTuber.
[01:07:19]  And his, like, I don't exactly know what happened.
[01:07:22]  I'm sure somebody who watches a lot of YouTube will inform me.
[01:07:25]  I want to say this right now.
[01:07:26]  I don't care.
[01:07:28]  But I think he like really severely injured one of his friends during a video.
[01:07:31]  Yeah.
[01:07:32]  And that ended up in like a whole big, I think it was a lawsuit.
[01:07:34]  And he basically like stopped posting on his channel.
[01:07:37]  Also, some allegations that he might have covered up a rape.
[01:07:40]  But, but, like, these things happen.
[01:07:43]  Like, this is almost an entirely unregulated industry.
[01:07:46]  Yeah.
[01:07:46]  Which is, I guess, makes sense, right?
[01:07:48]  Like, it's people making videos from home, but just now with the budget turned to a fucking millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars.
[01:07:56]  Like, I don't really know how you do regulate that.
[01:07:58]  Yeah.
[01:07:58]  I mean, part of what's going on here, like, I feel like I say this too often, but there's a sort of, you know, this is a, like, Hollywood, whatever you think of it, is one of the most union-dense industries in the country.
[01:08:08]  And, like, the, I mean, with the exception of reality television, like anything that you're making, everybody involved in the production is going to be in a union.
[01:08:15]  They're going to have like sharp limits on the number of hours they can work.
[01:08:17]  They're going to have a ton of different like protections, like safety protections, but also just general like job protections.
[01:08:24]  And Mr. Beast is doing none of this.
[01:08:26]  Yeah.
[01:08:26]  And so it's like, it's pretty, like, you'll read this in the memo.
[01:08:30]  Like, he's definitely not protecting the number of hours that he's asking people to work or anything like that.
[01:08:34]  So there's like, he's able to make stuff much more, much more quickly, much more sort of, you know, fly by night, like much less safely.
[01:08:42]  And it's one reason that I was sort of surprised by all this Amazon stuff.
[01:08:45]  I suppose it shouldn't be surprising me that Amazon is not taking care of people who are working for it.
[01:08:49]  But, you know, that no, there were no lawyers or producers attached to the Amazon side who wanted to show up and be like, hey, are we protecting ourselves from like, you know, a more like, what are we opening ourselves up to?

=== Ava's AI-Generated Smile (14:10) ===

[01:09:01]  Yeah.
[01:09:02]  I think the fact that he is able to skirt all of that is, I mean, it's attractive, but also like that's like part of success, right?
[01:09:13]  Like it feels, I mean, I think that's like another thing is it does feel like this sort of like unbridled like content.
[01:09:20]  You know, it's sort of like, what, what Hollywood could make, what, what we all could make if, you know, there were no guardrails.
[01:09:28]  Yeah.
[01:09:28]  It's so horrifying.
[01:09:30]  It's like in a lot of time.
[01:09:30]  David Zaslav's mind is like he's thinking, This is what he would do if we didn't have to have grips or lighters or gaffers or like shoot anything well.
[01:09:39]  And it's just like everything careens towards porn.
[01:09:42]  Yeah.
[01:09:42]  Yeah.
[01:09:44]  I think the porn analogy is really good because it is.
[01:09:48]  I hear that so often.
[01:09:49]  Yeah.
[01:09:50]  You know, it's, and I know you're such a big, you know, the industry so well having been an independent operator of your own OnlyFans masturbation site for quite a while.
[01:09:58]  Actually, I was just a gaffer on that.
[01:10:00]  Gaffer does sound kind of dirty, doesn't it?
[01:10:03]  I gaffed the bloke the other night.
[01:10:06]  I met him on Groningen and me gaffed him.
[01:10:08]  But it sounds like something you do with a butthole.
[01:10:11]  But he like it's, it is, it does, it does feel that way.
[01:10:17]  Like, it feels like, it's like, I don't know how to, and again, like, I keep going back to it.
[01:10:22]  Like, there's something about it that I find so unnerving and so like Uncanny Valley.
[01:10:26]  And I want to talk about his face for a second.
[01:10:29]  Preaching.
[01:10:29]  Can I speak on that?
[01:10:30]  I got to say this.
[01:10:32]  Full disclosure: I look interesting.
[01:10:35]  I have a unique, well, not really.
[01:10:37]  There's a lot of white boys, especially in this part of town that look like me.
[01:10:41]  But I'm not going to say I'm James Cagney over here, but that's my reference for a handsome guy.
[01:10:50]  Do you think he's not handsome?
[01:10:51]  No opinion on James Cagney.
[01:10:53]  Okay.
[01:10:53]  Well, that's, yeah, he doesn't want to.
[01:10:55]  Yeah.
[01:10:55]  Okay.
[01:10:56]  Fine.
[01:10:57]  Very diplomatic.
[01:10:58]  But like, Mr. Beast is fucked up looking.
[01:11:00]  And I think that's part of why people find him, including myself, find him so disturbing.
[01:11:05]  Because you see this guy who has this sort of like, it's like an AI-generated smile.
[01:11:10]  In fact, I think literally on his YouTube thumbnails, it's a fake Photoshop smile that they put on.
[01:11:16]  It feels like it, yeah.
[01:11:17]  No, I think it actually is.
[01:11:20]  But there's something strange about the way that he looks and he speaks and he acts that I think doesn't read as human to me.
[01:11:29]  And I know you're a journalist.
[01:11:32]  You got a sub stack.
[01:11:33]  You don't have to, it's not like he can fire you.
[01:11:36]  Plus, I already did the thing at the beginning, but he, it's like, do you find him fucked up to look at?
[01:11:42]  Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a qualified yes.
[01:11:46]  You know, like, I'd like, you know, he's, um, he's got a weird facial hair.
[01:11:51]  He's got like a terrible haircut.
[01:11:54]  He's like, he's like a super cuts guy.
[01:11:56]  I think he probably looks like a lot of guys in North Carolina.
[01:11:59]  Like, I do think North Carolina probably has a certain super cuts, you know, bad facial hair situation.
[01:12:04]  Like, no offense to North Carolinians.
[01:12:08]  But I think it's the thumbnails because like all of his thumbnails, all the thumbnails to all of his videos feature him making a Mr. Beast YouTube soy face.
[01:12:16]  A soy face.
[01:12:17]  But it's yeah, it's a branded soy face.
[01:12:18]  Yeah, which has like, I think has transformed, like if he, if I saw him in the store, I wouldn't look twice at the guy.
[01:12:24]  He just looks like a guy.
[01:12:25]  Totally normal.
[01:12:26]  But the fact that I now have seen him make Soy Face, like hold Soy Face for hundreds, hundreds of times has transformed his face into a kind of grotesque to me.
[01:12:37]  Like I just can't, like it is, there is something awful.
[01:12:39]  And I think this was like the cataract video.
[01:12:41]  I really think more than anything else, it's the thumbnail to that video that set people off because it's got this, it's got him making psycho, like Joker smile, soy face.
[01:12:52]  And then next to him, photoshopped, is this kid looking shocked.
[01:12:57]  It looks like the come and see kid, basically.
[01:12:59]  Like a younger version of the come and see kid.
[01:13:01]  And beast would change that kid's life, by the way.
[01:13:03]  He would give him $10,000.
[01:13:05]  Yeah.
[01:13:06]  And then in the background is like, I think what's supposed to be a hospital, but looks a little bit like an execution room.
[01:13:11]  Like it's like a sort of bare cement walls.
[01:13:13]  It just looks like it would be creepy enough it was just the kid in the room, but putting thin, like freaky, smiling Mr. Beast on top of it adds this whole, this like deeply unsettling layer.
[01:13:25]  And I think that, yeah, exactly, yes.
[01:13:28]  And the funny thing is the reason he does that smile in all his videos, and even I know this, I don't, I don't use YouTube really, is that like there is a theory, which is probably correct if Mr. Beast is doing it, that like having that particular ricdus featured in your fucking YouTube thumbnail actually does get you in the algorithm, right?
[01:13:49]  Like, and that's the reason like you see all these YouTubers have that like fucked up smile in these in these things.
[01:13:56]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:13:57]  He's the most optimized man and it's like we can't look at it.
[01:14:01]  It's like the sun.
[01:14:01]  We can't stare directly at it.
[01:14:03]  It's like burns our eyes because it's there's something about it that is wrong.
[01:14:08]  Yeah.
[01:14:08]  In the abstract, it's like this is the thing you need to do to get in the algorithm.
[01:14:11]  But like when you actually look at it and like stare at it, it like enters your dreams.
[01:14:15]  It like enters some awful place in your, in your, in your consciousness.
[01:14:20]  We got told all the time when I was working at Gawker that like you had to have people in your images.
[01:14:24]  So like whatever story you were writing about, you would have to go find like a shuttered, like a like a stock image if there was no actual images with a human being in it because that's what people would click on.
[01:14:34]  We didn't like, I don't think we talked about smile.
[01:14:36]  I don't think smiling was a big part of it, but it was like consistently always people, people, people, people, faces, faces, faces.
[01:14:42]  Do we do anything like that?
[01:14:44]  Do we do any optimizing?
[01:14:46]  No.
[01:14:46]  You guys do have faces.
[01:14:47]  We're an Addies.
[01:14:48]  Well, because they're guys usually we're talking about.
[01:14:51]  Well, it's also weird because we use like a filter for our things.
[01:14:54]  I know.
[01:14:54]  This is going to be a good filter over the Mr. Beast thumbnail.
[01:14:58]  Yeah.
[01:14:58]  Well, we have to do it so his AI trackers can't find us and sue us.
[01:15:04]  There has been over the, so we were talking earlier about that, there was like a, maybe it was before we were recording, I don't know, but like every year there's like a, this is the downfall of Mr. Beast video, which is, by the way, its own genre of YouTube videos.
[01:15:16]  Right now, while your phone is still in its like phone holder that you're driving your car in, Eyes off the road, tunnel vision, look at that phone, go to youtube.com and put in the downfall of and then put in whoever, except for my name, because there isn't one.
[01:15:32]  There isn't one.
[01:15:33]  But no, but I'm afraid.
[01:15:37]  But if you put in the downfall of anybody, there will be like 50 YouTube videos now, including some AI-generated ones, of like the downfall of this, this, this.
[01:15:46]  And so like, there's, there's a Mr. Beast one, and because there has been like allegations about his there's like none really about Mr. Beast because I think he is genuinely too boring to like do anything.
[01:15:59]  I don't think he would let anything disrupt.
[01:16:02]  Yeah.
[01:16:02]  Like I think he's pretty careful.
[01:16:04]  He tries to be very careful.
[01:16:06]  I mean a lot of the allegations are like he's a really demanding boss.
[01:16:09]  Yeah.
[01:16:09]  Which is like I'm sure he is and I'm sure he's like an awful boss, but he's really also extremely open about that in all of his videos and his memos and whatever else.
[01:16:16]  Who want to work for Mr. Beast?
[01:16:17]  Yeah, right.
[01:16:18]  Like, you know, you're crazy.
[01:16:20]  Exactly.
[01:16:20]  So that stuff really has never stuck, even though they're, like you said, there's been like one a year, basically.
[01:16:25]  And they've tried to like kind of go after his crew because he has these little, he has his little goon squad around him of like all guys who are presumably in their mid-20s, but who look like they're 15.
[01:16:35]  Yeah.
[01:16:36]  All have their own like version of Mr. Beast face too.
[01:16:39]  Exactly.
[01:16:39]  Yeah, they really do.
[01:16:41]  And one of them was he let go Ava Tyson, I think is the last name.
[01:16:48]  And that was like kind of the most like Mr. Beast drama that you actually really saw because it was like Ava Tyson used to go by Chris Tyson was a transitioned like a couple of years ago.
[01:17:01]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  Was like a major part of the Mr. Beast crew.
[01:17:04]  It's Mr. Beast's best friend.
[01:17:05]  Mr. Beast's literal best friend.
[01:17:06]  Yeah.
[01:17:07]  And like Mr. Beast, like, because Mr. Beast's friends are on the video, Mr. Beast like defended her.
[01:17:11]  It was like, this is my fucking friend, blah, blah.
[01:17:14]  And what was actually one of the most like human interactions that I had.
[01:17:16]  100%.
[01:17:17]  This is like my, whatever generosity I felt towards Mr. Beast has generally been like, well, you know, he's the one guy on YouTube who's like incredibly defends his trans friend.
[01:17:26]  And like, you better believe there are a lot of freaks who are coming out of the woodwork all the time to be like, like you were saying, showing photos of Mr. Beast next to next to Ava where they're like, look how sad Mr. Beast looks when in fact Mr. Beast is.
[01:17:38]  Mr. Beast's face is just like completely slack.
[01:17:42]  Like nothing.
[01:17:43]  I'm thinking like a vague thought of a thumbnail.
[01:17:46]  Put him wherever he is.
[01:17:47]  That's what he looks like.
[01:17:47]  And then, but like, it was like, that was like the controversy around the Mr. Beast.
[01:17:51]  This is for kids.
[01:17:52]  This is for kids.
[01:17:52]  It's for kids or whatever.
[01:17:54]  And then there was like a vague grooming allegation, non-sexual grooming allegation against Ava.
[01:17:59]  And then she was let go.
[01:18:02]  And Mr. Beast called the allegations extremely disturbing.
[01:18:05]  Probably had something more to do with allegations of cheating on her wife with an employee rather than any kind of grooming thing.
[01:18:13]  But like, that was like the most beast drama that we've ever seen.
[01:18:17]  Yeah, that was the closest to like an actual downfall of Mr. Beast.
[01:18:20]  And it doesn't seem to have like done much.
[01:18:22]  I mean, like, people have been going after him for a long time.
[01:18:25]  I think for one, for like ideological reasons, because he has a trans friend, but also because like a good way to make a name for yourself as a YouTuber is to go after the biggest YouTuber and create a drama around the biggest YouTuber.
[01:18:36]  And so people are constantly doing this about Mr. Beast.
[01:18:40]  And he's always kind of skirted that stuff.
[01:18:42]  And I think that it like it ends up here.
[01:18:46]  Just there's like a confluence of different factors, I suppose, that kind of put it together.
[01:18:50]  I do think part of it was like the allegation, to get specific, was that Ava had made like dirty jokes to a 16-year-old in a Discord or whatever, which is like, don't do that.
[01:19:01]  This podcast is not, in my newsletter, not in favor of making dirty jokes with 16-year-olds.
[01:19:05]  But at the same time, specifically in Discord.
[01:19:08]  Right.
[01:19:08]  I mean, in person, at least.
[01:19:10]  Yeah.
[01:19:10]  The human connection is what's most important to all of us.
[01:19:14]  I stay up with the boys.
[01:19:16]  I wake up with the men.
[01:19:17]  Exactly.
[01:19:18]  I don't know what that means, but.
[01:19:20]  Eric Adams said that.
[01:19:21]  Yeah.
[01:19:22]  I go out with the boys.
[01:19:23]  I wake up with the men.
[01:19:24]  That's right.
[01:19:25]  But like Miranda Sings, the YouTuber Miranda Sings, was also recently canceled for doing basically the same thing.
[01:19:31]  Like, unfortunately, if you are a YouTuber, you're going to be hanging out with 16-year-olds in Discords all the time, which is going to lead to all kinds of things.
[01:19:37]  All of which is to say that I think a lot of the sort of Zoomer prudishness came out in this particular instance.
[01:19:44]  So there was like a right-wing, like anti-trans cadre going after Mr. Beast, but also a lot of like Mr. Beast fans who are like, sex isn't real.
[01:19:54]  It shouldn't exist.
[01:19:55]  Don't ever make dirty jokes combined to, and then plus apparently Ava cheating on her wife.
[01:20:01]  And then there was also like the, they, Ava had commissioned a, a drawing from this.
[01:20:05]  There's like some, I can't remember what the name of this guy is, but there's like some horrible guy in this weird internet world.
[01:20:12]  Because like these people inhabit a completely different internet than I think most people listening to this show.
[01:20:17]  I know.
[01:20:18]  I can feel us like driving down the road into really like getting into the drama.
[01:20:22]  It's weird, really, to like steer out of it before.
[01:20:24]  No, There is a there is like an artist that is popular, I guess.
[01:20:29]  I don't know what people are doing this that like will draw basically child porn and like but like beyond child porn like even grocer shit.
[01:20:39]  But like we'll draw real people like having sex with like real YouTubers and stuff having sex with children.
[01:20:44]  And there was like one of his pictures that was in some Mr. Beast house or something.
[01:20:49]  Right.
[01:20:49]  I forgot about that.
[01:20:50]  Yes.
[01:20:50]  And like that was like a part of it.
[01:20:51]  And Keemstar got involved who I know that you're very close with.
[01:20:54]  Oh, yeah.
[01:20:55]  There's so many words that are being spoken now that I have no, I like don't know what they mean.
[01:21:00]  I don't even know how I know what this means because I don't watch YouTube.
[01:21:04]  I don't know what most of this stuff is, but I just know that it happened.
[01:21:08]  I mean, Keemstar has inserted himself into all of our, most of our lives.
[01:21:12]  Keemstar is a 40-year-old man who sort of dresses like Fred Durst, like 90s Fred Durst, and does drama videos where he describes YouTube drama in a sort of inimitable style that I can't quite.
[01:21:26]  And then he was going to convert to Judaism last year.
[01:21:29]  Like Malay.
[01:21:30]  It was a huge post.
[01:21:31]  Waiting for Jews, but I don't think it was pre-October 7th.
[01:21:34]  Pre-October 7th, but I don't know if he followed through, actually.
[01:21:36]  Oh, we lost another one.
[01:21:38]  But he, he, Keemstar is, Liz, he is something that you don't even, you, speaking of, we got to swear off that road because you do not want that smoke, sweetheart.
[01:21:49]  He will destroy you and me and everything that we love.
[01:21:52]  Yeah.
[01:21:53]  He is just like, Keemstar is, I think, one of the symptoms of a sick society that, like, if we need to actually make the world a better place, like, that's like the first guy.
[01:22:01]  Is he American?
[01:22:02]  Yeah.
[01:22:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:22:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:22:04]  He's like, you might argue he is the most American.
[01:22:06]  Yeah, I'm going to look at those first and I'm breaking.
[01:22:09]  I literally.
[01:22:09]  Google Keemstar right now and let's first say it's K-E-E-N Star.
[01:22:15]  Yeah, he's the drama alerts.
[01:22:16]  David and oh, Daniel and Keem.
[01:22:19]  No idea.
[01:22:19]  Oh, I guess it's based on his real name.
[01:22:21]  I had no idea.
[01:22:21]  Keem, quite enough.
[01:22:23]  Well, that's, you know, that's actually pretty tall.
[01:22:27]  But yeah, like, I guess my question, though, is like, why do I want Mr. Beast to, I don't even know if I want him to fail.
[01:22:35]  I don't know what I want.
[01:22:36]  I mean, there's something I find distasteful, obviously, about like this worship of money in this particular way, like everything.
[01:22:44]  But like, that's not that different from like a game show, right?
[01:22:47]  Like, that is just what's on TV, anyways.
[01:22:49]  There is something different about it, though.
[01:22:50]  I'm looking at 100 identical twins fight for $250,000.
[01:22:54]  Like, that is not, that is very different in kind from like, what did we?
[01:23:02]  I mean, like, I was thinking, we were talking about it the other day, and I was saying about the Nickelodeon game shows or whatever that a lot of kids watched.
[01:23:08]  Like, that's very different from like Global Guts.

=== Global Guts Trajectory (04:10) ===

[01:23:11]  It is kind of like, it's like, yeah, it's on the same trajectory.
[01:23:15]  But it does feel, there is something different about it.
[01:23:17]  Yeah, plus the like low rentness.
[01:23:19]  I mean, there's no gak, there's no slime.
[01:23:21]  There's no temperature.
[01:23:22]  There's no hidden temple.
[01:23:24]  Oh my god, yes.
[01:23:25]  There's no, what was the whole big mountain that you had to climb at the end of it?
[01:23:29]  Wasn't it the hidden temple?
[01:23:31]  Or was there no?
[01:23:31]  No.
[01:23:32]  It was just called Guts?
[01:23:34]  Okay, yeah.
[01:23:35]  You have it.
[01:23:37]  Well, I think one thing that I find really distasteful is the torture stuff.
[01:23:42]  Like, like the video where he locks the guy in the supermarket for a month, and then like he's so excited to see his wife and baby.
[01:23:48]  But it's like that, and he's like getting $10,000 a day and he goes crazy and it floods.
[01:23:52]  And they're like fucking with him.
[01:23:54]  The whole thing just like, I guess, I get like, listen, I'm well into adulthood, although I look like 16.
[01:24:01]  I've been told many times.
[01:24:03]  On Discord.
[01:24:04]  On Discord by these older gentlemen.
[01:24:06]  But there is, Yeah, I just think there's something, there's something about it that I just freaked out.
[01:24:13]  Well, I think that like part of it is that he's, it's not just he's like saying the quiet part out loud.
[01:24:18]  He's like putting all of the insides that we really don't want to see that are very ugly for a lot of different reasons on the outside, right?
[01:24:26]  He's like literally like turning the body inside out.
[01:24:29]  That's what it feels like.
[01:24:30]  Because it's like, it's not just that we know we all sort of like compete with each other in these like marketplaces, whether that's like in like increasingly like should be non-market sectors of society or literally in employment scenarios or on platforms or whatever.
[01:24:49]  It's like he's putting all of that out and just like naming it and saying it and being like, we're doing it.
[01:24:54]  Yeah.
[01:24:55]  In addition to optimizing all of his content for all of these like hidden levers that we know are like pushing all of these terrible buttons online in the pipes that are showing us all of this stuff that are, but by the way, are not like evil in themselves, but are reacting and constantly changing based on how we are using the machinery of the internet and these platforms.
[01:25:20]  And so in a lot of ways are mirrors of ourselves.
[01:25:22]  We're like looking at like when we like Mr. Beast is this like horrifying funhouse monster mirror of like everything that we actually put into this thing that is the internet that we don't realize.
[01:25:36]  And so we actually, when we see it at the end, it's fucking horrifying because it's all of these terrible things that we thought we weren't actually doing.
[01:25:45]  Yeah.
[01:25:46]  Like clicking on awful thumbnails of guys smiling and needing a cut every 30 seconds.
[01:25:51]  And I mean, what like gets to me beyond exactly what you're saying is the extent to which like his popularity reflects like an audience that increasingly sort of genuinely likes it, isn't just like compelled and repelled by it at the same time, the way like people like us are, old people are, but like has a whole kind of subjectivity that's like structured by their understanding of themselves as like Mr. Beast viewers,
[01:26:18]  potential Mr. Beast contestants, like people who would spend 30 days inside a grocery store to get $1,000 to pay for their cataract surgery or whatever.
[01:26:25]  It's very, like we were talking about, it's a continuation of stuff that has already existed, but just the fact that that bad stuff has continued feels terrible.
[01:26:33]  And the fact that it has no, that like people have embraced that continuation feels awful.
[01:26:40]  It's unvarnished and I want some varnish on it at least.
[01:26:44]  Well, we got to wrap up.
[01:26:47]  Max, you know, as the father of a son, what age will you begin making your son watch Mr. Beast?
[01:26:53]  Well, I figure he's going to do like fathers and sons fight each other within the next two or three years.
[01:26:57]  So we get Gus to train up a little bit and then we're going to see if we can win those $10,000.
[01:27:02]  Because you said before he just likes Bluey.
[01:27:04]  Yeah, Bluey is his favorite.
[01:27:04]  Bluey is frankly great.
[01:27:06]  You like Bluey?
[01:27:07]  Yeah.
[01:27:08]  I mean, it is the most tolerable to parents.
[01:27:10]  The other shows he likes are a hideous PBS show called Dinosaur Train, which is ostensibly educational, but is one of the ugliest things I've seen in my entire life.
[01:27:18]  I would rather him learn nothing than have to have that on my television anymore.

=== Learning to Ride a Bike (02:53) ===

[01:27:21]  And he loves Alpha Blocks, which I made him watch because there's a kid in his class who can read already.
[01:27:26]  And his parents say it's because he watched this show called Alpha Blocks.
[01:27:29]  Fucking are you up in Reading?
[01:27:30]  You better believe I did.
[01:27:32]  But it's not teaching him to read, frankly.
[01:27:34]  So I don't know how much longer.
[01:27:36]  He tried printing out your articles.
[01:27:38]  He can identify my name and his name.
[01:27:40]  So that's all that's really hard.
[01:27:42]  If your son was like, Dad, I want to go to J school.
[01:27:44]  Would you journal?
[01:27:47]  Yeah.
[01:27:47]  Kick him out.
[01:27:48]  Like, would you be like, you're 14 now on the street?
[01:27:51]  Yeah, I think probably.
[01:27:53]  I really don't want him to be a journalist.
[01:27:55]  What do you want him to be?
[01:27:55]  I would trade him.
[01:27:56]  I would say you can watch Mr. Beast if you don't go to J school.
[01:27:59]  That would be like a fair trade.
[01:28:01]  That's good.
[01:28:02]  I'll say this.
[01:28:02]  We were talking about this in the way in here.
[01:28:05]  My parents gave me like 30 minutes of screen time a day.
[01:28:09]  And I will tell you, I resented the fuck out of them for that.
[01:28:12]  But that was, I think, really helped me out later in life because I learned how to read at like 17.
[01:28:17]  Yeah.
[01:28:17]  And that has changed my whole trajectory.
[01:28:19]  The Bible, Quran.
[01:28:22]  And bike is next.
[01:28:23]  Learning to ride a bike is next.
[01:28:25]  I know how to ride a bike, yeah.
[01:28:26]  But that's not.
[01:28:27]  It's too late, dude.
[01:28:28]  It's too late.
[01:28:29]  I would love to teach you.
[01:28:29]  I have to teach Gus soon.
[01:28:30]  I would love to get you guys both on.
[01:28:32]  You could do it at the same time.
[01:28:33]  Yeah.
[01:28:33]  You don't really ride a bike either?
[01:28:35]  No, you and Gus.
[01:28:36]  Oh.
[01:28:37]  But you probably don't either.
[01:28:39]  Are you?
[01:28:39]  Of course I know how to ride a bike.
[01:28:40]  When was the last time you rode a bike?
[01:28:42]  A couple years ago.
[01:28:43]  Really?
[01:28:44]  Yeah.
[01:28:45]  You don't ride around town?
[01:28:47]  You don't do anything?
[01:28:48]  No.
[01:28:48]  I also, when I was like 12, I got in a really, really, really bad bike accident and broke my collarbone.
[01:28:55]  It was like very traumatizing.
[01:28:57]  And so I don't like to ride bikes.
[01:28:59]  Got it.
[01:28:59]  But you can.
[01:29:00]  But I can.
[01:29:01]  And I will.
[01:29:02]  But usually not in like city environments.
[01:29:04]  Yeah, that happened to me too, actually.
[01:29:06]  That's why I don't ride bikes.
[01:29:08]  I broke my collarbone at 12.
[01:29:10]  I also was driving a car in a really cool and competent way and crashed it.
[01:29:16]  Well, actually, it wasn't my fault, and that's why I don't drive.
[01:29:22]  But yeah, yeah, you gotta, you can't let him see Mr. Beast, dude.
[01:29:26]  Yeah, I'm gonna do everything I can to just avoid YouTube entirely.
[01:29:29]  Don't tell him about phones.
[01:29:31]  He knows about phones because I'm on my phone all the time.
[01:29:33]  What's that documentary about the parents who kept those kids in there?
[01:29:36]  I never saw it, but I know there was like 12 kids or six kids or something, some boys.
[01:29:39]  Oh, the Wolf Pack.
[01:29:40]  The Wolf Pack?
[01:29:41]  Yeah, and they just watched movies.
[01:29:42]  Oh, well, dude.
[01:29:43]  But they turned out really cool because they just watched movies.
[01:29:46]  Okay.
[01:29:46]  That's got a cool name.
[01:29:47]  Yeah.
[01:29:48]  Yeah, it is a pretty good name.
[01:29:49]  I need to have more than one.
[01:29:49]  He guess can't be the Wolf Pack because it's just one of them.
[01:29:51]  Yeah, well, have a wolf loan.
[01:29:53]  Yeah, because if you lock him in somewhere, then it's like a different person on him.
[01:29:58]  I can't do it.
[01:29:58]  You're doing like an Encino man sort of thing.
[01:30:01]  He was frozen.
[01:30:04]  He could do that.
[01:30:05]  He was, he could.
[01:30:07]  Someone locked him in there.
[01:30:08]  Did they lock him in the igloo at the beginning?
[01:30:10]  Igloo?
[01:30:11]  And Ceno man, did they freeze him or something?
[01:30:13]  He fell into a crevasse.

=== Milk Content Problem (02:14) ===

[01:30:15]  That's what it was.
[01:30:16]  A crevase.
[01:30:18]  Okay, but chrome.
[01:30:20]  Wheeze the juice.
[01:30:20]  No, no, no.
[01:30:21]  Wheezing the juice.
[01:30:22]  All right, we got to wrap up here.
[01:30:24]  You can read Max.
[01:30:26]  Fuck.
[01:30:26]  Check this out.
[01:30:28]  You can read Max Read at Read Max.
[01:30:34]  That's right.
[01:30:35]  The sub stack.
[01:30:38]  I did that good?
[01:30:39]  Yeah.
[01:30:40]  Yeah, we'll put a link to it.
[01:30:41]  And the other, the old Mr. Beast piece, the piece about slop.
[01:30:45]  Please, yeah.
[01:30:46]  And people can check it out.
[01:30:47]  Yeah.
[01:30:48]  Thank you guys for having me.
[01:30:49]  Yeah, no problem.
[01:31:03]  You know what?
[01:31:04]  I cannot believe you guys actually took a bite out of this fucking chocolate bar, dude.
[01:31:08]  You said you ate one.
[01:31:10]  I did eat a whole one.
[01:31:11]  That's really bad.
[01:31:12]  It's like shockingly bad.
[01:31:13]  But I also, I'm a big connoisseur of chocolate.
[01:31:16]  You really like chocolate?
[01:31:17]  I do, but not like.
[01:31:18]  Are you like, I love a dark chocolate?
[01:31:21]  No, I know.
[01:31:22]  I eat, yeah.
[01:31:22]  No, but you're like, it's 68%.
[01:31:25]  Oh, whatever.
[01:31:26]  Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I don't say that, but I think I am discerning when I purchase it.
[01:31:32]  You're like, you're in the nice grocery store and you're like, 68%.
[01:31:35]  Your brain thinks 68%.
[01:31:36]  No, it doesn't go, ooh.
[01:31:38]  It just knows what to buy.
[01:31:39]  It's like the Terminator, like 68%, 72%, 80% cacao.
[01:31:44]  80% is too much.
[01:31:45]  What's the rest of it then?
[01:31:47]  If it's 80%, what's the remaining 20?
[01:31:49]  Sugar.
[01:31:51]  Cheese?
[01:31:51]  Yeah, other.
[01:31:53]  I don't really like dark chocolate though.
[01:31:54]  It makes you thirsty.
[01:31:56]  I like a fruit better.
[01:31:58]  Yeah, sure.
[01:31:59]  But those are different.
[01:32:00]  You're scratching different itches.
[01:32:02]  Yeah, and I can never tell if chocolate's going to make my stomach hurt.
[01:32:04]  Well, that would be, if you tried to do dark chocolate, then it wouldn't.
[01:32:08]  It's the milk content that you have a problem with.
[01:32:10]  It is the milk content that I have a problem with.
[01:32:12]  But I don't know.
[01:32:13]  I don't really like dark chocolate that much.
[01:32:15]  I love gummies.
[01:32:16]  I don't really like gummies.
[01:32:17]  I don't really like candy.
[01:32:18]  I like peanut butter cups.
[01:32:20]  That's a classic.
[01:32:21]  That's a classic.
[01:32:22]  Yeah, I could eat way too many of those.
[01:32:23]  Oh, my God.
[01:32:24]  And Skittles, I like too, but I don't eat them ever.
[01:32:28]  I just liked them as a child.

=== Stopping Trick-or-Treaters (01:07) ===

[01:32:29]  Well, Halloween is coming.
[01:32:32]  Yeah, but what do I have to do with that?
[01:32:33]  Because don't you buy candy to give out to kids?
[01:32:36]  I live in the fifth floor of an apartment building.
[01:32:38]  Oh, but people don't trick-or-treat in your building?
[01:32:41]  No.
[01:32:42]  No, I know.
[01:32:43]  In fact, last year, the kid across from me, his parents gave me a bunch of his candy because he got too much candy and they said his stomach was going to.
[01:32:51]  Did he go trick-or-treating in the building?
[01:32:53]  No, he didn't.
[01:32:54]  No.
[01:32:54]  But, you know, I make sure nothing bad happens in the building.
[01:32:58]  Like, I see.
[01:33:00]  Yeah, you stop trick-or-treaters from coming in the building.
[01:33:03]  I'm kind of a doorman.
[01:33:04]  All the kids in the building, you're like, get out, get on the street, go trick-or-treat.
[01:33:08]  Yeah.
[01:33:09]  And while you're at it, pass out this literature.
[01:33:11]  By ID, people come into my building.
[01:33:13]  I stop them, make sure it's 21-plus building.
[01:33:16]  Papers, please.
[01:33:16]  Papers.
[01:33:17]  Give me the motherfucking papers.
[01:33:19]  Excuse me.
[01:33:21]  Yavol.
[01:33:22]  Y'all papers.
[01:33:23]  Y'all papers.
[01:33:24]  All right, I'm Liz.
[01:33:25]  My name is Hair.
[01:33:27]  Oh, you got excited for that one.
[01:33:29]  Nope, it's Mr. Bryce Belden.
[01:33:32]  And we are, of course, joined by producer Young Jomsky.
[01:33:35]  And this has been Dronon.
[01:33:36]  We'll see you next time.