The Daily - How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has become a sensation on YouTube for ostentatious and sometimes absurd acts of altruism.Today, Max Read, a journalist and contributor to The Times, discusses what the rise of one of YouTube’s most popular star tells us about the platform and its users.Max Read is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and writes about technology and internet culture in his newsletter “Read Max.”Background reading: Why do so many people think Mr. Donaldson is evil?MrBeast is out to become the Elon Musk of online creators.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold, and this is The Daily. Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, has become a sensation on YouTube, with ostentatious and sometimes absurd acts of altruism that go viral. Today, journalist Max Reed on the rise of YouTube's most popular star and what it tells us about the platform and its users. It's Wednesday, July 5th. Max, hello. Hi.

So I had a strange experience earlier this year. I have three kids and they're very into watching videos on YouTube. And full disclosure, my husband works at YouTube, so I'm probably the only one in my family who doesn't obsessively watch YouTube videos. But one day a few months ago, my teenage daughter showed me this video. And this video, we're curing a thousand people's blindness. It's going to be crazy. It was called 1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.

Oh my God. I'll see everybody. And in this video, this goofy-looking young guy with a scraggly beard explains how he pays for eye surgery for 1,000 people. And we're just getting started. We still have 980 lives left to change. And I was like, what's going on here? Who's this guy? Thank you, Mr. Beast. Thank you.

And my daughter said, you haven't heard about Mr. Beast? Yeah, that's kind of the perfect video to get an introduction to Mr. Beast, isn't it? It gets all of the hallmarks of a Mr. Beast production. There's a lot of money being thrown around. There's very high production values. There's this goofy, enthusiastic sort of adolescent tone. And there's this altruism at the core of it, that the focus of the video is giving the money away in this extremely extravagant and colorful way. And a combination of those qualities has turned this guy into the most popular single YouTuber on the platform. He has the most subscribed channel on YouTube besides the Bollywood music label T-Series. He recently passed Cocomelon, which

if you have a toddler, you know very well because it's like a toddler narcotic, basically. And the fact that he's passed Cocomelon to somebody like me, who has a two and a half year old, is maybe the most impressive thing any entertainer has ever done. I mean, it's fascinating because on the face of it, it seems kind of surprising that the most popular guy on YouTube is essentially doing like good stuff. And that's just not what I've thought was popular on the internet these days. I feel like in recent years, we've been talking so much about far right rabbit holes and darkness. So this is different. Yeah, and he's done it, as you say, by sort of being very different from what I think

people imagine YouTubers to be like. If we imagine a kind of Jake or Logan Paul, these sort of extremely good-looking drama queens who live in McMansions in Los Angeles and start fights with each other, or PewDiePie, the Swedish gamer who is probably most famous for making what he claimed were ironic anti-Semitic pranks. Mr. Beast, he hasn't done any of that

stuff. He's mostly spent his time putting on these enormous stunts and giving away a lot of money and prizes and sometimes just to random people on the street. So, Max, for those of us who are, you know, older than 14, what's this deal? Well, Mr. Beast's real name is Jimmy Donaldson, and he's a 25-year-old from Greenville, North Carolina. You know, I've been covering YouTube for 10 years. I'm a tech journalist by trade, and I've been watching him rise over the last four or five years into being this behemoth figure on the platform. But he started in a much more humble place. How's it going, guys?

But he started in a much more humble place. How's it going, guys? It's been a while since I've done a commentary or even made a video for that matter. He began making videos in about 2012. And at the beginning, he was just making what are called Let's Play videos. This is going to be a video about the top 10 worst guns in Call of Duty history. And real quick, the gameplay you're watching is nothing special uh it actually sucks but you know where he would play a video game usually call of duty and commentate on his own performance and upload videos like that so my number 10 worst gun in

call of duty history is the pm9 from modern warfare 3 and i think a lot of people can agree with that the clip This is a really common YouTube genre. And at the same time, he was studying the masters, so to speak. He talks about having spent all of his time in high school, just watching popular YouTube videos and looking at how they titled their videos, looking at what kinds of thumbnail images they used, and trying to kind of reverse engineer a science of YouTube success. Wow. He decided not to go to college over his mom's wishes in order to really devote himself to this. And he put in the hours. He garnered a small subscriber base early on, but he didn't really take off for four or five years. And in all that time, he was waking

up, obsessing, watching, tweaking his own videos, thinking about what his next videos were, and trying to outdo himself. I'm about to count to 100,000. The first video that went truly viral was one where he counted to 100,000. You don't believe me? Just watch this video. And recorded it, edited it, and uploaded it to YouTube. Hang on, he counted to a hundred thousand? Yeah, just sitting in front of his computer in his room, he counted from one to a hundred thousand. And people watched it. People loved it. It went viral.

99,999. 100,000. What am I doing with my life? And I think for him, it was an object lesson in the value of putting in an effort and letting viewers see how much effort you put in. And it's really interesting to me, you know, as somebody who's been a journalist online for a long time, the conventional wisdom is that volume is the most important thing if you're producing content. If you're making YouTube videos, just make as many YouTube videos as you can, and surely one of them will go viral and you'll gain a lot of subscribers. But what Mr. Beast seems to have learned is that if you spend a lot of time and focus a lot of energy on doing one video that makes it very clear how much time you spent, how much effort you put into it, sometimes how much physical pain and exhaustion you had to endure, that that's something that YouTube viewers connect with.

So what are some examples of the videos he makes after figuring this out? That's something that YouTube viewers connect with. So what are some examples of the videos he makes after figuring this out? What's up, guys? I'm going to be attempting to set the world record for the longest Uber ride ever. So he rides in an Uber from North Carolina to California, which is 2,256 miles. So he just agreed to do it. This is going to be the man taking us from North Carolina to California. Thank you. You're going to give me a viral video.

Keeping in the theme of cars. Why did I purchase every fan in my city to try to push a car? He buys a thousand fans and tries to push a car using all those fans. It's everyday bro, it's everyday bro, It's Everyday Bro, It's Everyday Bro He watches the YouTube video It's Everyday Bro, which is a legendarily atrocious rap video by his fellow YouTube star Jake Paul for 10 hours straight, which is frankly a daring stunt for anybody who wants to save their brain cells. I have a headache. I'm tired of hearing it.

Oh, gosh. That was miserable. I've got a piece. I mean, he more or less invents and certainly perfects a style of video that has come to be known as the junk lord videos, so-called because they involve a lot of really extravagant waste

that creates a lot of junk, like, say, 100 fans that did not successfully push a car anywhere. And the idea behind the Junk Lord video is exactly what we've been talking about, that if you spend a lot of money on a huge stunt, the more ridiculous, the better, the sillier, the funnier, the more extravagant, the better. You can bring in a lot of viewers. the more extravagant, the better. You can bring in a lot of viewers. And this becomes a really dominant style of YouTube up there with the Let's Play videos that we were talking about before. This is a pit of slime.

You guys will get in it. I don't care which one of you it is. Last one of you guys to leave this slime gets 20 grand. Chris, start us off. Hop in. And a lot of his Junklord videos involve giving money away. Hmm. Whether that means a really extravagant contest where there's a prize winner at the end who gets $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000. Or sometimes it means just arbitrarily handing money to people in the street. So you don't really have much?

No. Well, I'm a YouTuber. I mean, you can see the camera. So I'm just, it's a series where I just, you know, be nice and just give people some help. So if you want to take it, it's about $10,000. For example, he wraps $10,000 in cash in a bundle, and he hands it to a homeless man who's panhandling in a median. Anything you want to say real quick? These guys are the best, man. These guys are unbelievable.

Unbelievable. This is crazy. And he does a short, awkward little interview with this guy, and they give him a ride somewhere. And he finds that this is a really successful video. You know, if you have $10,000, what he's realizing is you don't need to necessarily spend the $10,000 on slime to put in a barrel that you then have to bathe in in order to make the views. You can just take the literal $10,000 and give it to somebody who needs it. And viewers will respond very similarly. So he starts doing more videos where he's just giving away money like that.

Do you accept tips in cash? Yes. Here you go, man. Thanks for driving us. Are you serious? Yeah. Yes, sir. He tips $10,000 to Uber drivers. He gives away $10,000 in tips to waitresses. He hands the deed of a house to a Domino's delivery guy

who's delivering a pizza to that house. Here is the key. It is yours. Seriously. No strings, no catch, no nothing. But like, these amounts you're talking about, these are not insignificant amount of money. Where does that money come from? Yeah. So at the beginning, he's mostly getting direct sponsorships, you know,

software companies who have some money to burn and want to get their products in front of people who watch YouTube will just give him, say, $10,000 and he can use it to fund a video of some kind. But the other important thing to understand about YouTube is that it's a platform where it's really easy to monetize your followers. you have a certain number of subscribers, you can flip a button in your settings that allows you to earn about 50% of all the advertising revenue that YouTube is getting from the videos you make. So if your videos are routinely getting hundreds of millions of views, you are earning a lot of money with every video you put up. And something that Mr. Beast is very explicit about and something that I think is very attractive about him to his fans is that he puts the money that he earns with every video into the next video. He sort of makes an implicit promise that the money that he makes when you watch his videos are going to go to an even bigger, more extravagant giveaway

or contest or a stunt in the next video. We just hit 100 million subscribers and from the bottom of my heart, thank you everyone that subscribed. So when he hit 100 million subscribers, which was last year, he bought a private island in the Bahamas. So I brought 100 of my subscribers

to compete in four extreme challenges. Last one standing wins this island. And then invited a bunch of subscribers to do survivor-style competition in order to win the island from him. You see the smoke on that? How is that not lighting? This isn't easy, guys. He's not giving it away.

The production values are very high. It's very fun. Do none of you want an island? I do want an island. Then start a fire faster! And it's hard not to think, as you watch it, that there's a suggestion that maybe if you subscribe to Mr. Beast, you might someday be a recipient of his generosity.

Congratulations! I can totally see how my daughter would want to be called up like that. Yeah, I call him the Willy Wonka of YouTube, because a huge portion of his appeal is that he's both entertaining and also potentially able to transform your life as a viewer, that he could reach down and throw you $10,000 to, you know, offer you a check to quit your job on the spot. And so to some extent, the popularity, it's almost like entering a lottery or something. You join in with Mr. Beast and maybe you too will become the object of his charity. So the money comes because it's compelling to millions of viewers to give away money, which then lets him give away more money. It's kind of like this cycle

that feeds itself, it seems. Yeah, it's a flywheel. He makes money from each video that then goes into another video, both the production, but also the value of the cash prize or gift, which then brings in more viewers. So he grows at the same time that the charity grows. And for a lot of viewers, this is like a beautiful, wonderful thing to watch. So by the end of last year, just a few months after that island video, he's passing PewDiePie, until that point, the biggest YouTuber. So now he's riding high at 163 million subscribers. It's incredible. 163 million. I mean, that's like twice as many people as live in Germany, which is where I'm from.

Right. And that's the context in many people as live in Germany, which is where I'm from. Right. And that's the context in which the video that your daughter showed you of Mr. Beast paying for all these cataract surgeries was released in February. And this video vaulted him even outside the containment of YouTube. This video enters Twitter, enters mainstream media, enters Facebook, all these other platforms, and all these people who hadn't really even encountered Mr. Beast encounter him for the first time. And all of a sudden, this kind of flywheel of growth and charity that made a lot of sense in the context of YouTube was being questioned by people for whom it felt somewhat different. We'll be right back. Okay, Max.

So what happens when this Mr. Beast video breaks out of YouTube and starts to get some more mainstream attention? Yeah, when the Blind People See for the First Time video came out in February, I think there was a huge sense of bafflement that this strange, wonka-esque, goofy, maybe a bit shallow video had gone so viral. You know, it's hard to do this on a podcast, but I feel like I have to describe in just a few words the thumbnail to this video. And it's this very obviously photoshopped image of a grinning Mr. Beast with his hand on the shoulder of a presumably post-surgical child whose eyes are brimming with tears with a kind of shocked expression on his face that to me reads almost like shocked with

horror. There's some unseen horror in the distance that he's looking at. The whole thing, it reads as cheap. It reads as cheesy. It reads as manipulative. And the video is not as bad as the thumbnail, but there is something a little bit icky about it. And I say icky, I'm quoting another YouTuber who acknowledged that there is something icky about the idea of putting a chyron at the bottom of the video that counts the number of blind people who are being saved as though they're like objectives in a video game. And I think that for a lot of people, that kind of filmmaking feels antithetical to the generosity or charity. So the criticism in a way is that this is all a little cynical and exploitative. That basically he's in it for the views. He doesn't really care about these people he's helping. Yeah. And I think if you watch the video, the criticism is not exactly baseless. It's notable that in a video where he is paying for a relatively cheap but totally transformative

surgery, he never really questions why these thousand people who he's giving it to weren't able to access it in the first place. What the structural or political reasons are that they couldn't get cataract surgery. In the course of my reporting, I talked to one of the subjects in the video, a kid named Jeremiah Howard, who's been blind in one eye since he was about five or six. And Jeremiah told me what I found to be an incredibly compelling story about essentially being unable to find the help that he needed, that between applying to the Social Security Administration for help, trying to raise money from his classmates, he just couldn't come up

with the money. So what people are objecting to is that even though Mr. Beast might be helping Jeremiah, he isn't really doing anything to change the system that made it impossible for Jeremiah to get this simple surgery in the first place. Yeah. Though I should also say, when I put this to Jeremiah and asked him about the kinds of criticism that Mr. Beast was facing, Jeremiah essentially said to me, well, have any of those people paid for my eye surgery? The bottom line is he paid for the surgery. And to the extent that Mr. Beast has a very explicit model in which he has very successful videos that make a lot of money,

and that money then goes to charity or goes to prizes. If he started making 45-minute videos about the history of healthcare in the United States, it seems very unlikely that those are going to get the same kind of viewers that a punchy 10-minute feel-good video will. And so for his flywheel to keep moving, he really does need to make it as direct to viewers as possible. So, Max, what can we say about his motivation? Well, I don't know what's in Mr. Beast's heart, and he didn't agree to an interview,

so I haven't spoken with him. But I have to say that I started reporting this piece with a skeptical frame of mind, you know, as somebody who did find the blind people video somewhat alienating. And in the end, I think I was mostly won over, at least to the position that of all the things that anybody could be watching on YouTube, and of all the people who could be making YouTube videos, this was really not so bad at the

end. And one thing that helped me get past my hang ups, to the extent that I've gotten past them, because I don't want to give Mr. Beast a blank check or anything, was speaking with teenagers and 20-somethings who had watched Mr. Beast for years and finding them, if not annoyed, at least sort of baffled at the question, isn't he just doing this for views? Isn't this just a cynical exercise? A lot of these people, again, people for whom YouTube was the main source of entertainment for most of their youth, the kinds of tactics that Mr. Beast is undertaking in videos like 1,000 Blind People See for the first time are the cost of doing business. That there was no point in making videos that weren't sentimental, manipulative, eye-catching, icky, so to speak. And that if he stopped doing that, if he stopped using those strategies,

then he might as well just give up entirely. But I think there's something else going on too where MrBeast is really good at speaking sort of directly to his audience about their own role in his channel. And I think the fact that MrBeast says to them, From now until the end of the year, every single time someone subscribes,

I will give away 10 cents. Every time you watch this channel, you are putting 10 cents in the pocket of someone else, which he says on some of his specifically philanthropic videos. 100% of all the ad revenue, brand deals, and merch sales from this channel, Beast Philanthropy, will go into this food pantry.

Allows them to feel empowered, allows them to feel like they're doing good, and sort of gives them a sense that by doing this thing that they already love, which is to say watching YouTube, they're also participating in a kind of movement themselves, that they're able to act on the world. Every view on this channel is literally putting food in people's mouths, like this.

Which, especially if you're, you know, 12 or 13 and you don't have a ton of money or a ton of agency, is probably a pretty attractive proposition to you. It's kind of funny because it's such a vague sense of doing good, right? A lot of charities are actually aligned with some sort of political point of view or ideology, but it doesn't seem like Mr. Beast is. And so I'm curious, Max, has he aligned himself with any political faction given this huge platform that he clearly has and the amount of money that he's given away? No, and I think this is one of the more interesting things about him. You know, I think we all have heard plenty of stories about YouTube as a site for right-wing radicalization, but I certainly wouldn't place Mr. Beast on the right wing by any means. While I was reporting this story, one of his close friends,

who appears in a bunch of videos, announced that they were undergoing hormone replacement therapy, and Mr. Beast has been nothing but quite vocally, openly supportive and protective of his friend, which is, sad to say, not something you would necessarily expect from a popular YouTuber. At the same time, he's not standing up against or presenting himself as an alternative to more controversial YouTubers like PewDiePie. You know, he still appears on the channels of YouTubers who, if they themselves are not explicitly right-wing, are, let's say, right-wing coded in a culture war

that is perhaps too complicated to go into in detail here. Do you think it's actually a selling point for Mr. Beast that he can't be categorized politically in the same way? He's kind of all over the place, so in a way he's nowhere. And I don't know, maybe that helps his appeal. I think so. I think it's important to keep in mind that the bulk of Mr. Beast's viewers are adolescents, young teenagers, people who are not necessarily extremely politically sophisticated need it are much more appealing than more explicitly political causes.

So, Max, you were won over. And clearly, so are many of the young people that are, you know, subscribed to this channel. But do you think there's any danger in making people feel like they are actually doing good by simply watching Mr. Beast videos? feel like they are actually doing good by simply watching Mr. Beast videos. It kind of reminds me of, you know, a lot of kids liking a cause on Facebook, but not actually going to the march. Yeah, I think one difference we can say in Mr. Beast's defense, I suppose, is that there actually is money being generated by them watching videos and that money is going to charity. So it's, I suppose, on the grand spectrum of do-gooding, slightly better than merely liking the cause on Facebook.

But this style of charity or altruism is pretty new. We don't really know where it goes from here. And we don't really know what happens to people for whom Mr. Beast is their first engagement with charitable giving or with activism in general. What we do know is that what Mr. Beast is doing is clearly working. So in a way, I wonder, doesn't that seem kind of countercultural that this is what young people are going crazy over when everything we thought about the internet was sort of pointing in the opposite direction?

Yeah. I mean, what I find actually quite funny about it is that it feels a little bit retro to me. That all kinds of stuff on YouTube that I would see in the 2010s just didn't make any sense to me. This is like admitting that I'm... That you were born before 1990. Yeah, but to say I've never really loved watching other people play video games. But clearly some people really love that. But when I watch Mr. V's videos, I don't necessarily find myself confused. They remind me in a really direct way of TV I watched when I was a kid of American Gladiator, Double Dare, Extreme Home Makeover.

You can go even further than that and say they're like queen for a day. It's like very classic, straightforward, basic cable, local news, feel good programming. And I think that part of what's happening is that as YouTube gets bigger and bigger, as the platform keeps expanding, its audience is becoming more, the only word I can think to say is normal. The audience is becoming more like the audience for broadcast television was in 1995. And I think that means content becomes a little bit broader. It becomes a little bit more feel-good. It becomes a little bit more sentimental in a way that YouTubers just weren't in the earlier days of the platform.

When, even though it was very, very big, it still didn't have a kind of mass American audience. I mean, I feel like he's cracked the formula, right? And that it seems like the formula is universal themes, universal games, universal humor, kind of a common denominator people go for. Do you think this portends good things for the internet broadly? Like, I think so many people are worried about the internet. So many parents like myself are worried about the internet. You know, so many parents like myself are worried about the internet

and what it's doing to our children. But is this a harbinger of good things to come? I suppose I felt, the only way I can gauge this question is telling you how depressed I feel after I finish any given story that I write about the internet. And I felt, I would say, less depressed

at the end of this story than I have about many different stories that I've written over the years. That there's a lot to criticize about Mr. Beast and a lot to criticize about the sort of model of charity and viewership that he's promoting. But I feel like the bottom line is, could be worse. The thing that I do keep in mind, though, is that, you know, Mr. Beast's rise from a 12-year-old video gaming North Carolinian kid to the biggest YouTuber of all time happened over the course of 10 years. And that is a blink in the eye, so to speak. Right now, it seems like maybe we can be optimistic about the future of the internet. But we also know how quickly these companies and platforms shift, how quickly they rise and they fall.

So all we can really do is wait and see, I suppose. So I guess if my daughter asks me how to become a successful YouTuber, I should just tell her, go for generosity and decency. Morality sells. This is what I should tell her. It turns out that being a successful YouTuber is also the same as being a pretty good human being, I guess.

Thank you very much, Max. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, eight people were wounded in a car-ramming attack in Tel Aviv that Israeli authorities described as an act of terrorism. It came as Israel mounted one of its largest military operations in the occupied West Bank in years.

At least 11 Palestinians were killed and 120 injured in a series of Israeli drone strikes and ground raids in Jenin, a densely populated refugee camp. The events raised fears of tit-for-tat violence in the region six months after the most right-wing government in Israeli history took power, vowing to root out Palestinian militants and expand Jewish settlements on occupied territory. and expand Jewish settlements on occupied territory. And Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is heading to China today for four days of difficult talks aimed at easing tensions

between the world's two biggest economies. Her visit comes at a time when relations between the United States and China have been strained over a wide range of economic and security issues. One of the most contentious issues is expected to be the renminbi, China's currency, which has been falling considerably against the dollar and is threatening to hurt U.S. exports. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Will Reed, with help from Carlos Prieto and Rochelle Bonja. This is a production produced by Nina Feldman and Will Reed, with help from Carlos Prieto and Rochelle Bonja.

It was edited by Marc Georges, with help from Paige Cowett and Lisa Chao. Contains original music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brandberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benholt. See you tomorrow.