The rise and (maybe) fall of Mr. Beast (with Ben Brock Johnson & Amory Sivertson)

He’s conquered YouTube, but can he conquer traditional media? And also burgers and snack bars, for some reason. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson of Endless Thread join the show to help us figure out how we should feel about Mr. Beast, and how much is simply too much to know about the influencers we love (and love to hate). Our guests Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson are the hosts of Endless Thread — the professional version of this podcast — where they dig into untold histories, unsolved mysteries, and other wild stories from online. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:27Ryan Broderick?

  A question for both of you. Who was the first influencer you were aware of? I think mine were probably like MySpace emo bands. I feel like that was the first time where I was like, this teenager is famous on the internet. I want to be famous on the internet. I want to wear white studded belts.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Let's hear some names. Can we get some names?

• 0:48Ryan Broderick?

  So many. I mean, like, I had the Panic at Disco demo CD before it was properly released. That's sort of the way that I think about a lot of influencer culture now, which is like, they're just the famous teenagers online of this era, and they don't make music. They trap you in a box for a week and torture you for money.

• 1:13Ryan Broderick?

  And that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're talking about Mr. Beast.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber in the world, and he's done that by turning himself into a human algorithm. He creates the most brand-safe, personality-free content you could possibly imagine, and iPad babies all over the world love him. He's also had a recent spat of controversy. Lots of weird and sort of confusing things are coming out of his productions, and we're going to be talking about all of that, and trying to answer the most important question of the modern era, which is, should we be outraged by his existence? My name is Ryan Broderick. This is Panic World, a show about the viral freakouts and moral panics bubbling up out of the weirdest corners of the internet. And today, we are zooming out and zooming in on the career of Mr. Beast. He's conquered YouTube, but will

• 2:14Ryan Broderick?

  he be able to conquer traditional entertainment? Joining me today are the hosts of Endless Thread, a wonderful podcast. I would, I would say a, a much more professional and better version of, of our podcast.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I doubt that because my cat's already here making too much noise. So.

• 2:30Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Should I go kick her out? I feel like I should.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Gently.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, if she's got a good mic technique, she can stay. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, welcome. Hi.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 2:42Ryan Broderick?

  I want to start with your sort of gut reactions about Mr. Beast. How do you guys feel about this little Al Borland that controls the internet right now?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's hard to answer this question like now as opposed to like a year ago, right? Like, he's this weird person where like, depending on your age, people have like literally never heard of him or like know way too much about him.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Well, this is where I confess that I'm one of those people who knows nothing about Mr. Beast, in part because Ben was, he, he had mentioned Mr. Beast and said, ah, maybe I want to, maybe we'll do something where I tell you more about him. And so I intentionally stayed in the dark about Mr. Beast so that, so that I'm, I'm a fresh set of ears and eyes and I'm, I'm here to learn.

• 3:32Ryan Broderick?

  Imagine if you come out this episode and you're like, I love.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Anything could happen, Ryan. Anything could happen.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Endless, Endless Thread broke up this week over a dispute about whether Mr. Beast was legitimate or not.

• 3:47Ryan Broderick?

  So, well, this is perfect then. We can start at the very beginning. So Mr. Beast uploaded his first video to his YouTube channel at 13 years old in February 2012.

• 3:58Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, by the, back then, he was not Mr. Beast. He was Mr. Beast 6000, which is honestly much cooler name, I think. Um, and if you guys go to the chat on the corner of the screen here, you'll see a link to, uh, what we believe is his first video. He, he's someone who does scrub his archive quite often, but, um, can you sort of describe what this video is, what it looks like?

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Alrighty, where am I? What just happened?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, man.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  What's this say?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  He's one of them Minecraft boys.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Before you can advance, you must flip every switch and kill all the monsters that come out. If you try to open the door without killing them, you will explode.

• 4:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it is a Minecraft video. It is extremely boring. It is probably very hard for anyone born in, uh, before the 21st century to imagine watching other children play Minecraft, but it is huge. And this is the world that Mr. Beast comes out of. He, uh, would eventually sort of become the Mr. Beast we know and love, but this is how he started. He started in the gaming world, specifically Minecraft.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:04Ryan Broderick?

  And, um, for a long time, he was just a kid goofing off on the internet. So there's a daily motion link I just sent you, and this is, this is some of the stuff that he's tried to get rid of over the years. So this was a, a series he was doing called Worst Intros on YouTube. So he's a teen when he's filming this, when he's filming these videos, and he's basically, he's making fun of younger kids. That, that's the joke here.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  Welcome to Worst Intros on YouTube, your number one stop for cringe. When a kid and his friend went out in the middle of the night and performed a satanic ritual in my name, I thought that was all, I thought that was as bad as it was gonna get, you know? But no, you guys just continue to surprise me and just make me question what type of influence I'm having on the world.

• 5:50Ryan Broderick?

  Some of the jokes that he would tell where, uh, he would, uh, keep joking about lying down in the street and getting run over by cars to kill himself. He, uh, had a recurring bit where he pretended to be a parent walking in on their child, watching one of his videos and like, you know, being disappointed. Um, he would make jokes about drinking bleach. He had a very problematic thing, uh, called the giant Asian sticker, which was a giant sticker of an Asian character on his wall, that he would sort of animate it with, uh, text to speech bubbles and stuff. It was just like very teen boy.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, this is like classic 13 year old stuff, it feels like to me. Or 13, 14, 15, it's in that zone.

• 6:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, and, and he is a child of YouTube. So like his earliest videos are making other kinds of videos that he's seeing, talking about other YouTubers he likes, and even parodying them. And so that's, that's sort of the, his earliest type of content.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Does he ever identify himself, or is he just Mr. Beast, we don't know who this real person is?

• 6:57Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, his name is Jimmy Donaldson.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Jimmy D.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  I pegged him for a Chad, looking at him, maybe that's not fair, but his name says Chad.

• 7:07Ryan Broderick?

  Strong chin.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  He's got Chad energy.

• 7:11Ryan Broderick?

  By 2017, his channel has 100,000 subscribers, which kind of, that's sort of the number that when you hit that, you become like a real YouTuber. You're not like big, but like you can probably start making some real money, and people kind of think of you as a YouTuber.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:29Ryan Broderick?

  Do you guys have any sort of memories of like what YouTube was like in 2017? I know it's so far, you know, so, so long ago.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  2017, there were fewer ads.

• 7:39Ryan Broderick?

  So this is important, the, the YouTube adpocalypse, as it's called, happened in 2016. This is also when everyone decided that PewDiePie was a Nazi.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:49Ryan Broderick?

  So it's, it's, it's sort of, I think, an important year for YouTube, because it's the year that YouTube transitions from something like Vine, you know, a social media platform, to something like Netflix, a, a more sort of linear programming platform.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Ryan Broderick?

  And this is, I think, very important for thinking about the beginnings of Mr. Beast, because he is learning how to use YouTube and how to optimize YouTube right at a moment when YouTube itself is becoming a much more serious entertainment player.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Is trying to grow up very purposefully and like make money for Google in a way that it probably wasn't before, right?

• 8:23Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And in January 2017, he has his first big video. Can you take a guess what really blew him up? Like what, what, what his first big video was?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Well, if it's January of 2017, is it Trump related?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Ice bucket.

• 8:41Ryan Broderick?

  He stormed the Capitol. That's right. No.

• 8:45Ryan Broderick?

  He was the first insurrectionist.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Before it was cool.

• 8:48Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Uh, man, I'm gonna fail at this, but I, I wanna say like something, something like it was like one of the viral challenges or like a thing that like everybody was doing and he did it too and it blew up. That's my guess.

• 9:02Ryan Broderick?

  You're not wrong, actually. Yeah. He made a video where he counted to 100,000.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Of course he did.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  How long was that?

• 9:11Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, let's see. I've got it right here.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Who has the time?

• 9:14Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, can you guess how long this video is?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  That's a really good question. This is like, this is like the how many marbles are in the jar?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  You're close. You're close. So the actual, the actual time on this video is 23 hours and 48 minutes.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 9:36Ryan Broderick?

  But it opens with a disclaimer saying this year, the original video was 40 hours long, but Adobe caps it at 24 hours. So some parts are sped up to get it under 24 hours.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Wow. Did he take bathroom breaks?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:52Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, at that point, you should just be sitting on a toilet. It's just easier.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  For efficiency sake.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  With a meal.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Wait, you know what's interesting to me about this? Like to me, that fact, Ryan, jumps out because it feels thematic to who he becomes. Or, or, or some of the controversy.

• 10:11Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. And, and for our listeners, by the way, I was scanning through this. I'm not, I'm not gonna watch all 23 hours of this, but he is seemingly in the same chair and in the same clothes for the whole thing.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 10:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, but I think you're exactly right where this is sort of very indicative of what he will be known as is this person who will sort of do anything to go viral, uh, and to be the king of YouTube.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  But also maybe cut some corners in some areas where he's supposed to not be cutting corners, or at least so the accusations go.

• 10:44Ryan Broderick?

  We'll get there. We're gonna get there. Don't worry.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Alright, sorry.

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  So in 2017, he gets his first sponsorships and he, this is, this is the moment when he figures out what I believe is the fundamental core of the Mr. Beast project, which is, how can you take money you make from YouTube, invest it back into YouTube to make more money to invest back into YouTube, a sort of perpetual ad dollar traffic machine? And he gets $10,000 and he gives it to a quote-unquote "random homeless person."

• 11:20Speaker 05

  This is not clickbait. I'm going to give a random homeless guy $10,000 today.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  He gets $10,000?

• 11:28Ryan Broderick?

  Quote-unquote, you say.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  From YouTube revenue from ads? Okay.

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, from his sponsorships and ads. So he collects the $10,000. He then films himself going to like a highway median next to a Sonic and just gives a homeless guy 10 grand. And the video has 11 million views.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Like, I mean, you wanna care to tell me?

• 11:52Speaker 06

  I mean, dude, I moved here from Wilmington, lost a job, I have no family.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  So you don't really have much?

• 11:58Speaker 06

  No.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  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 wanna take it, it's about $10,000. I'm not joking.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  You're right, man.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  It's real, so.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  I got enough shit bad, man. Please don't lie to me.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  I'm serious, man. I promise. Well, that's kinda weird, but pinky promise. Yeah, like I said, I'm a YouTuber and I'm just going around doing some good.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  So that generates a bunch more ad revenue and then he can pull some other stunt.

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And you can start to see him figure this idea out, which is like for every million views I make, I spend X amount of dollars to create.

• 12:46Ryan Broderick?

  Y amount of Z about, you know, like, yeah, this, I'm not very good at math, but you understand what I'm saying.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  He's doing P and L's. He's in the P and L world. He's making budgets. He's like figuring it out. He's like gaming the system in a way that is probably smart.

• 13:00Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly right. Now, do you, do you think the, like, how would you describe Mr. Beast's on-screen personality? Or lack thereof?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  He looks like a college student in a dorm, like a college bro who plays lacrosse. And no, which, you know, no, no hate towards that, but he looks like, like his name is Chad and he has lacrosse practice later in the afternoon. And first he's just gonna make a quick little video.

• 13:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. He looks like an NPC at a, in a video game set at a college. I think that's exactly right.

• 13:39Ryan Broderick?

  And I think this is sort of one of the first big question marks for older people who are discovering him, which is like, how can you be this uninteresting and have this intensive a follow?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  And the name Mr. Beast. I'm expecting so much more from a name like Mr. Beast.

• 13:57Ryan Broderick?

  That's interesting that that's your read on it. Cause like, so I'm in, I'm in my mid 30s and I grew up with like AOL Instant Messenger. So I, I'm of like the first screen name generation.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 14:08Ryan Broderick?

  And so when I saw Mr. Beast, I was like, oh, that's a username that he just like picked when he was 13.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Fair. He chopped off the good part.

• 14:15Ryan Broderick?

  He chopped off the cool part. Yeah. He was over 6,000 before and now he's just the Mr. Beast. But I guess like, I would love to hear your takes on sort of

• 14:26Ryan Broderick?

  the difference between idolizing someone like Mr. Beast or any kind of YouTuber versus idolizing an actor or a musician or, or some sort of, you know, artist or, or entertainer. Like, do you find them to be similar mindsets? Or do you think it's a totally different idea?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's such a good question because like, I think.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  We imagine one of these to be way more curated than the other in terms of how this person is presented to us as consumers, right? Like, I would imagine that like an actor, or a musician, or whatever, like the way that that person is surfaced for me as a potential consumer, that I will spend money on this person's personal brand, like, that is like a very carefully curated presentation of a person, whereas like, we're now in this world where the appearance of curation is gone, it's just like, oh no, this is just, this person's just like who they are, and they're like presenting themselves to me just to like as they are, and so like, that

• 15:27Speaker 02

  is, there's something about that change that feels meaningful to me, that's the key difference, right? Like, Mr. Beast is, he's just himself, he's just being himself, man, or at least that's what I'm led to believe.

• 15:39Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  If I'm thinking about like some sort of character, I don't know, like Tom Cruise, like, that's a person who's like, uh, public persona is very carefully curated for me.

• 15:52Ryan Broderick?

  Why? What's the, what's the tea on Tom Cruise? What's his deal?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  That's another episode, I'm afraid. Yeah, I think, I, I hear that.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  He's tall, that's the secret, is Tom Cruise is tall.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  I thought he was secretly short.

• 16:06Ryan Broderick?

  He is, he's very, he's a little petite man.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  And his teeth don't line up with his lip, right? That's the other thing I know.

• 16:14Ryan Broderick?

  That's also true, yeah. He's got one middle tooth.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Right, he has the middle tooth. Exactly. Yeah, I think when we see actors in a film or a TV show, we are trying to escape, and we are trying to enter a different world, whereas I think the YouTuber for me is more of just like, hey, you're just like me, you're just a regular person, and we don't, um, we don't expect them to be polished and, you know.

• 16:42Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I, I sort of compare them to, do you remember when you could like download like a little cartoon animal that would like hang out on your desktop and like infect your computer with spyware in the 90s?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:53Ryan Broderick?

  There was like a purple monkey you could get that would like dance around your lap, your screen?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:58Ryan Broderick?

  That's sort of what I think of when I think of influencers now, like they're a virtual friend that you spend time with.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:05Ryan Broderick?

  But Mr. Beast doesn't stay in this sort of virtual friend zone, if you will, for very long. In 2018 is when he finally chops off the 6,000 from his username, R.I.P. And he starts to get pulled into more YouTuber elite-level dramas. So how he made this transition from regular guy to algorithmic cartoon character and, you know, amateur torturer, that's all right after the break.

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• 19:13Ryan Broderick?

  He is a self-proclaimed massive student of PewDiePie, the former king of YouTube. And he made a lot of videos early on where he's saying, you know, "I'm studying how PewDiePie does things. I am copying PewDiePie, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:28Ryan Broderick?

  And he then has to sort of turn his back on Mr. PewDiePie, sever that relationship in 2019. Can either of you tell me what happened with PewDiePie in 2019? Because it's very dark.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Oh, man, this is like so much... You're like, I feel like we're really gonna fail at this because you were like, "You guys are internet experts." And like, without Googling this, I am not gonna remember this.

• 19:52Ryan Broderick?

  This is what I do to all of our guests. I say, "You're the most incredible expert. You know everything." And then we just ask you questions you don't know for an hour.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me ask you...

• 19:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's a sick mind game that I play with our guests.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Let me ask you, like, one of the biggest moments in internet history, and you can fail at answering. I want to say, this is 2019?

• 20:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, 2019.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  So like, my recollection is PewDiePie did something...

• 20:15Ryan Broderick?

  I honestly shouldn't have turned this into a game show moment. I'm really sorry. It was the Christchurch shooter.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  No points. Oh, the Christchurch shooter.

• 20:25Ryan Broderick?

  It was the Christchurch shooter who basically wrote, "Subscribe to PewDiePie" on his gun.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 20:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was actually really uncalled for.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  No, that's fine.

• 20:35Ryan Broderick?

  That was a horrible thing. But it was a big deal, I think, in... Please don't forgive Ryan for that. That was fucked up. That was not okay. That... For new listeners, that's our producer, Grant, telling me that I've taken the bit too far. I had to work that day. It was a rough day. No, it is an important moment in Mr. Beast's trajectory because this is when he sort of, I think, finally eliminates this idea from his brand that he is PewDiePie's protege. Like, he is the next PewDiePie. I think this is the moment where he stops defining himself by other sort of huge creators. And he puts a lot of distance between him and PewDiePie after this. Because at this point, no one really understa... Like...

• 21:17Ryan Broderick?

  It would take, I think, many weeks and many months for the media to kind of like pull apart like what the troll of that idea was.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:25Ryan Broderick?

  PewDiePie's lack of connection to the whole thing.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:28Ryan Broderick?

  But it is also, I think, very indicative of how Mr. Beast will go on to deal with a lot of controversy, which is sort of just shutting it down, distancing himself, trying to remain squeaky clean. He is very busy during the pandemic. He starts a burger chain. Have any of you guys ever had Mr. Beast Burger?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  So this is, this was like actually the first time I discovered Mr. Beast. Was I like, I feel like I read, I read an article, it might have been like a New Yorker Talk of the Town or like, which is pretending that I'm smarter than I am because I could never, I've literally never finished a New Yorker.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Talk of the Town is at the beginning, so if you made it that far.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, yeah, get a couple pages in and then I'm like, yeah.

• 22:08Ryan Broderick?

  Is this in the physical copy of the New Yorker?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes. Yes. And it was, it's these little like vignettes that they do at the very beginning. But basically it was about the release of the Mr. Beast Burger. And it was like this like very evocative description of this mall in New Jersey.

• 22:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  That was like filled to the gills with like, again, 11 to like 14 year old boys and their parents. Maybe girls too, who had dragged their parents to this place to get in line for the Mr. Beast Burger. And it basically like shut down the entire mall and like, it was this like huge deal. And I was like, I read it and I was like, what is, I don't get the big deal. Like, it's like a hamburger that this guy launched? Like, I was so confused.

• 22:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that is, that is Mr. Beast Burger. This is when that all starts. He also launches a gaming channel and what will be very important for later in our story, a nonprofit for planting trees.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 23:04Ryan Broderick?

  So this is sort of his, the beginning of his franchise era. He's trying to figure out like the, the limitations of the Mr. Beast brand, which it turns out there are none. He can do whatever he wants with it.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Basically, like, it's not that he was like launching a new chain of restaurant that would serve this burger. He was launching the burger itself and there were these places, there are these places that will make the Mr. Beast Burger that you can order from, but it's not like a Mr. Beast Restaurant. And some of them are like completely unaffiliated. They're restaurant, separate restaurants that will just make the Mr. Beast Burger, correct? Isn't that kinda how it works?

• 23:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so there's, um, there are about a thousand physical Mr. Beast Burger locations across the world.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:46Ryan Broderick?

  But, which is a lot as of right now, but the majority of people who are experiencing Mr. Beast Burger are experiencing it through ghost kitchens. This is so hard to describe.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  It really is. It's super weird.

• 23:56Ryan Broderick?

  So like, it's, um, I don't know if you've ever seen like a ghost kitchen facility, but you know, for our listeners who maybe not, like there's a, a big building and you'll know because it's all the delivery drivers around it. And there's like kiosks that you like open a door and your food's there because there's like one central kitchen making everything. And that's where you can get the Mr. Beast Burger.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Is there anything remarkable about the burger itself? Since this is just, I mean, I don't know if he's, if he's gonna ma, if he's gonna have a burger.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  How inconsistent it is, I think.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  What, what is it? Is it made of magic?

• 24:30Ryan Broderick?

  Let's see, let's see what's on the menu for Mr. Beast Burger. Um, oh, I can get the Mr. Beast Burger app. So I can, I can buy Mr. Beast Burger even faster. Okay. So there's a, there's a Beast Style Burger, which is American cheese, pickles, diced onion, mayo, ketchup, and brown mustard.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:48Ryan Broderick?

  There's a Chandler Style, which I think is like another person that appears in his videos. Uh, two smashed crispy beef patties with hot, so it's a, it's a smash burger again. Then there's the Carl's Deluxe, which is a patty melts of some kind. Uh, there's some very hideous looking fries covered in pickles that don't look very good.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 25:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's like him. It's completely unremarkable. It looks fine, but like whatever.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  It feels, it feels multi-level marketing to me. I don't know why, but there's some aspect of it to me that feels like, it feels, again, like I just, I don't know, it gives me the heebie-jeebies for some reason, where I'm like, the Mr. Beast Burger is just an idea, man. It's just an idea.

• 25:35Ryan Broderick?

  You don't want to franchise out Mr. Beast Burger?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  I don't think so, man, but I don't.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Podcasting doesn't work.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Clearly, I'm not.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Keep your options open.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:43Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, we should all open a Mr. Beast Burger location together.

• 25:47Ryan Broderick?

  So after this sort of franchising moment, there's basically one last piece of the why is Mr. Beast popular question to slot in here. In April 2021, I think that you could argue that the only other person who could have maybe beaten Mr. Beast to the title of biggest person on YouTube, the sort of growing personality on the platform, was probably David Dobrik, who was canceled for alleged unsafe behavior in his productions, and allegedly inappropriate behavior with his cast and crew. And Dobrik was, I mean, really the only other person I could see at this time period who could have overtaken Mr. Beast. And now he's been effectively chased off the internet. So now PewDiePie

• 26:28Ryan Broderick?

  is synonymous with neo-Nazism, David Dobrik is canceled, the world is Mr. Beast oyster. And that's when, in November 2021, he releases Squid Game in real life. Are you familiar with this video?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 26:43Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay, amazing. So, this is great.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  All of this is just, the horrors keep piling on, okay?

• 26:50Ryan Broderick?

  This is great. So he personally funds a YouTube video where he recreates Squid Game in a warehouse, and he, he beats Netflix to it. And in fact, has argued over the years that he has more views on his Squid Game in real life than they did on their actual game show version of Squid Game.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Whoa. And do people, no, people don't die. What hap, what are the stakes?

• 27:16Ryan Broderick?

  He doesn't execute, you know.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  He is Mr. Beast.

• 27:23Ryan Broderick?

  You win money. You win money. You win a lot of money. And it's 456 players and the video has 670 million views.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  I recreated every single set from Squid Game in real life. And whichever one of these 456 people survives the longest wins 456 grand.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  Oh. Oh. And as you can see, every single player has a device strapped to them that when they're eliminated, it pops.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Do you have any idea what that translates to in terms of money? I mean, I'm sure that's very secretive and proprietary, but...

• 28:02Ryan Broderick?

  The thing about Mr. Beast videos is like they are essentially rushing nesting dolls of advertising. I mean, there's one video where he went to Antarctica and he branded a mountain in Antarctica for Shopify by sticking a Shopify flag at the top of the mountain.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:16Ryan Broderick?

  So he really will do anything for money. And because he's kind of created this cult of personality around like, "Help me become the biggest YouTuber ever." I think his fans really like the idea that he is just sort of pure capitalism because that's what they're supporting. They're like, you know, we're gonna help. It's almost like a stockholder in a company. That's how his fans, I think, operate.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Again, like weirdly MLM vibes to me.

• 28:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  I feel like you're getting more, you're going further down the MLM rabbit hole. And again, me as someone who really did not know anything about Mr. Beast coming into this, I'm starting to think like, is he actually a genius? And that the whole point is to shine a light on capitalism and how fake money is and how he can just... Multiply it and...

• 29:09Ryan Broderick?

  I gotta, I gotta cut you off. No, he's, he's like, he, he,

• 29:14Ryan Broderick?

  he's notoriously dumb.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:16Ryan Broderick?

  Like, he, uh, like, he, he does not seem to be a particularly deep thinker. Except, I have watched him do videos about YouTube production. And I will say, like, he is someone who clearly thinks very deeply about YouTube. And this is, this is why it's such an interesting time to be, like, right now, to be talking about Mr. Beast, because he has effectively won YouTube. He, I, I often consider him a, a raw expression of YouTube's algorithm. He will do anything the algorithm wants him to do, and he's very open to that. And he has now sort of reached a point where everyone's copying him. He's not really growing the way he used to, and he's trying to branch out into, like, other forms of entertainment.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:57Ryan Broderick?

  But he's not a performance artist, uh, in, in, in the least. He's, he's kind of-

• 30:01Speaker 02

  No, he's just a vessel, man.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

• 30:06Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I think that'd be super funny if he was just like, like, this was all just a giant, like, very-

• 30:11Speaker 02

  This is my PhD project, and, uh-

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Right, right. Like, you guys will pay me to do anything. Joke's on you.

• 30:18Ryan Broderick?

  By 2023, after the Squid Game video is out, he is now kind of expected to be operating on a much higher level. And this is when you're getting, uh, my personal favorite video of his, which is Train vs. Giant Pit. And it is literally what you think it is. He just drives a train into a giant pit, and it's great.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, to me, that's like the best. Sign me up for that. I'm down for that.

• 30:42Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, okay, first of all, I love making fun of Mr. Beast. There's nothing that gives me more perverse thrill than just, like, writing absolute barn burner takedowns of this guy. But I also think, like, his videos, especially in his later period, are very fun to watch. In fact, like, here, I'll, I'll send you guys a link to the, the Train Giant Pit one, because I think it's the best one.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  I do want to watch that.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  I just bought this train, and it is currently barreling full speed towards that giant pit over there.

• 31:07Ryan Broderick?

  Just talk us through the editing style, because I think this is a really good video to sort of use as, like, an example of his editing style, which is, by the way, referred to as retention editing. That's the term for how he edits his videos.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Okay, this is like a high-velocity video. Everything is coming at you. The train goes down into the hole, and then it hits the bus, and then it supercuts to an explosion, and now there are- Oh my god, it's only been like 20 seconds and now there are people on the ground and there's a house and there's a guy in the tub and I can't tell what the hell is going on. It's chaotic.

• 31:39Ryan Broderick?

  It's awesome. I've often described his videos as a trailer for a TV show that doesn't exist.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's good.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is in the future when our attention spans are actually only a fraction of a second. Because we will have broken our brains so thoroughly with the internet that this is the only way that we can process information.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Like, it's the kind of thing that like if you were tripping acid and you like happened upon this, you would feel like you were like seeing the Matrix, I feel like. Does that make any sense?

• 32:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's like Tim and Eric, it's like Tim and Eric, awesome show, great job.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 32:18Ryan Broderick?

  If you skip further in the video, before they get to the train, they tie two school buses to a tank with the rope going across the pit and then they make them drive in opposite directions to see which one ends up in the pit.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  What is the budget, what, how did he do this?

• 32:39Ryan Broderick?

  Well, he has a lot of money because his videos at this point are, this video has 239 million views. And honestly, it should because it's titled Train vs. Giant Pit. Who wouldn't want to watch that?

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Agreed. This is undeniable that you want to watch this. Like, you don't want to stop watching this.

• 32:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And there's been some, there's been some research into like exactly how good his editing is. He, he has a, an audience retention rate around 76%, which is insane for YouTube. That's 76% of the people who press start, finish it.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 33:14Ryan Broderick?

  He's also a master at thumbnails. So like, he, he has a team that he says are spending hours and hours, like hundreds of hours a week, trying to figure out like exact calibrations of thumbnails for A/B testing to make you want to click on this stuff.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  They're like, no, no, the cyan, like, we, we need to like a different kind of cyan, like a deeper cyan in the, in the text to make sure people click on it, right?

• 33:39Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  That level of detail.

• 33:40Ryan Broderick?

  He famously decided at one point that he was no longer going to smile in thumbnails and now he's going to frown.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 33:46Ryan Broderick?

  And then he like did like months of A/B testing to figure out like which one would do better. And this is, this is most likely his peak around 2022, 2023. In January 2022, he launches his chocolate bar company, which is called Feastables.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:03Ryan Broderick?

  And by the end of that year, he, uh, his company, uh, is looking for $150 million in investments, uh, with a $1.5 billion valuation.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Wow. I did not see all of these directions coming. Burgers, chocolate.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  1.5 billion dollar valuation for this YouTuber who used to just like do Minecraft videos?

• 34:25Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  This gives my son a lot of hope.

• 34:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, that is right. So he's pretty much indestructible, but as this rises happening, there are controversies, starting with his charity organization, which is beginning to cause some issues for him. So in October of 2020, he launches Beast Philanthropy, which I've looked into on and off over the last couple of years. And it's essentially run by like a South African real estate agent who doesn't seem to have any expertise with running a nonprofit.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Seems legit.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Wait, is any actual philanthropy happening?

• 34:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, but, um, it's complicated. There's one video in particular that Beast Philanthropy puts out that upsets basically the whole internet.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  And this video works during a thousand people's blindness.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  One in 1,000 people cured.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  God, I hate this. I hate it. Now he's wearing scrubs. He's wearing scrubs all of a sudden.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  He's claiming to cure people's blindness.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And a baseball hat, yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  He's interviewing a surgeon. Oh, yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  And they're just like.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Isn't this just like what a, what glaucoma is or something, or what, um, cataracts are?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  He's just giving a bunch of people cataract surgery. And he gives her 10,000, he gives a lady $10,000.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  My first question is maybe a boring one, which is just, why this? Who, who, why this problem? Why was this the problem that he wanted to tack you? That he wanted to tackle with his many, many thousands, millions of dollars?

• 36:03Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm gonna send you guys a link to what his nonprofit's page looks like now. It'll give you a good taste of the kinds of stunts that he's putting over on this channel.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  All right, the titles of some of these videos are empowering girls in India. We funded a gym for adaptive athletes. Saving endangered animals from extinction. We rebuilt a village.

• 36:27Ryan Broderick?

  It's a fire hose of charitable quote unquote stunts that are largely based on a before and after. Something that's visually appealing for YouTube audiences. So you're not gonna see him, you know, quietly building water filtration systems. It's, I'm gonna fix everybody's eyes and have a counter on the bottom of the screen. It's like, look how many eyes I fixed.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. Well, I'm instantly, I mean, maybe, I don't know what this says, that this is the first thing that I think about. But, you know, he's not the first influencer, so to speak, to do this. He's doing this on YouTube, but, I mean, think about Ellen DeGeneres and think about Oprah. And why is it? I get that this looks icky because it is performative, but are Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres any less performative about their charitable acts? Or is it just a different medium, different age group, different audience? I don't know.

• 37:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's totally right. Nothing is inherently wrong with the stuff that he's doing, morally. The aesthetics are bad because they're aesthetics that were created for internet content. And I think that's what makes a lot of people over the age of, let's say, 25, feel uncomfortable about this because it's not a TV show like What Would You Do? Right? It's not like Oprah. It's a... Ugly, because the internet is ugly. And I think that's really what bothers people about all this stuff.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 37:58Ryan Broderick?

  Because I love writing takedowns about him, like I get a perverse thrill from it. I'll read one that I put together recently, which I think kind of succinctly puts all this together. There are much, much worse things you can do to go viral. But like every rich guy now, Donaldson wants us to thank him for it and tell him he's a good person. But he's just a guy that spent a really long time figuring out how much traffic costs online. And it just happens to also help people sometimes.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  We shouldn't blame him for everything, but like, he definitely is a symptom of a lot of what's wrong. So like, it's kind of this weird thing where it's like, like I said, I still, I still don't like the cut of his jib at all. And also, you know, it's not all his fault. So it's complicated.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  What tells us that he is like hungry for the?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  It's just the way like, I feel like the, just the way he talks about stuff. He's like, I just solved this. I just helped these people do this. And so like the way that he's talking about the things he is doing, to me, sounds like he expects a pat on the back. Like the way he frames that stuff is very, um, please, you know, please clap.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 39:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And you can see it in the edit, like they always leave in shots of him like pretending to have human feelings while he hugs them and like gets thanked by them. Uh, there's just a, there's a, there's a void inside of him that leaks through the screen and you can feel it.

• 39:34Ryan Broderick?

  And all of this is causing him some hiccups, but they're not like real controversies. These are not, like, people were like, kind of disgusted about the eye surgery video, but it's not like it's a bad video. It's just, it's just gross looking, but there are controversies coming. But before I go to break, I do think it's worth pointing out that while he's doing all these like feel good videos, he's also doing a bunch of weird Fear Factor videos where he's torturing people and their, his videos are getting more extreme. And this tension is going to become a problem.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  To survive 10 minutes with a thousand spiders to move on. I'm going to attempt to spend the next seven days in solitary confinement. I just bought this entire grocery store. And then I decided to trap this random guy inside.

• 40:20Ryan Broderick?

  Um, he made a guy live in a house for like 150 days. And then like destroyed the house where the guy was in it. Like this is where things are getting really out of control because the thing about YouTube is that you have to keep up in the ante.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:34Ryan Broderick?

  So by this point, he has to top himself every time.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I mean, Fear Factor, Fear Factor has given us Joe Rogan and, uh, and now we get Mr. Beast out of the deal.

• 40:44Ryan Broderick?

  Two great personalities. That's right. Two cool guys.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Two cool guys. Yep.

• 40:51Ryan Broderick?

  So there's some complaints, but he's still only gaining steam. But after the break, in the words of every YouTuber ever, after the rise comes the fall.

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• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  What are your general thoughts about the Mr. Beast story so far? How are you feeling?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  I think you were right, Ryan, in describing him as like, kind of like the personification of the YouTube algorithm. Like, I think that makes sense to me. I don't feel great about that, but, but also like you look at this like, like Train versus Pitt, that's undeniable, man. Like that, like that connects to something deep inside me that is like hundreds of thousands of years old. Like, for some reason, that's like, that's like, that's like what I feel when I see fire. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's still like something primordial, but also totally off the rails, as it were. So that's how I feel. Amory, what about you?

• 43:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, what are you thinking?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. I just, I want to ask Mr. Beast, where do you see yourself in five years?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  You want to interview him for a job?

• 43:43Ryan Broderick?

  I think he's quite nervous about where he's going to be five years because he's currently, I think, 26, which is usually the age that YouTubers can't really grow past.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Really?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 43:54Ryan Broderick?

  From what I've seen, if you start on YouTube really young and you build an audience when you're really young and your audience is young with you, 25, 26 seems to be the moment where they're no longer growing with you because now they associate you with their childhood. And a lot of YouTubers, I think, become very frustrated because they discover one day, they wake up one day and discover they're a child performer. Or they wake up one day and discover they're a children's show host. And this was part of, I think, why the Miranda Sings controversy happened, where she realized that, wait a minute, like, I'm Blue's Clues? What do you mean? I thought I was like, cool. And my theory is that a lot of sort of the escalation of the last couple of years of Mr. Beast's brand. In many different directions is because he's terrified of waking up one day and just being like Elmo.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  He's gotta make that Miley Cyrus Christina Aguilera jump, man. He's gotta, he's gotta make dirty.

• 44:45Ryan Broderick?

  He's gotta get nasty.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's gotta get nasty.

• 44:47Ryan Broderick?

  He's gotta be a nasty beast.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Either that, either that or just something is gonna go horribly wrong in one of these videos and he's gonna die young and he'll go up in smoke and it'll be like the end of Thelma and Louise, you know, and he's just...

• 45:00Ryan Broderick?

  You're right. We can all hope that he dies. That's true.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, I think that's a very real possibility and that might be how the Mr. Beast story. We'll just say, if this were a major motion picture, that is how it would end.

• 45:15Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that's a fantastic transition into the darker era of Mr. Beast, which is what we're gonna be talking about now. So, Mr. Beast in July of 2023, um, uh, basically sues the Burger franchise and they sue him back. There's a whole bunch of litigation around Mr. Beast Burger.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  So he didn't own it?

• 45:35Ryan Broderick?

  It was a partnership. A lot of these things are kind of franchisee setups. In 2024, he does a profile with Time Magazine that kind of, I, I think somewhat unfairly makes him kind of like the poster boy for, uh, YouTube rotting people's brains and like children's attention spans. And I only sort of like wanna soften that just because like, Mr. I don't, I don't find Mr. Beast to be

• 46:04Ryan Broderick?

  singular or unique anyway. If Mr. Beast didn't exist, there would be another Mr. Beast because YouTube created Mr. Beast. And he's very open about allowing YouTube to create him. And so I, I think that's an easy way to sort of like pass the blame off of YouTube.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  I totally agree with that. I think like we, we, we love, we love a scapegoat. We all love to like pile on something that we don't understand and think is bad. And find like the person who's like the most popular and like destroy them.

• 46:32Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And this year is when we start to finally get the drumbeat of there's been a lot behind the scenes that we didn't know. So we, we start to find out that members of his staff are having inappropriate relationships with his fans and Discord channels. Uh, there's been allegations of racist content being shared in his official employee Telegram group. There are numerous reports of unsafe filming procedures that are happening at his filming locations and a lot of this finally starts to come out when he announces a new venture with Amazon, which is called Beast Games. They've been filming it pretty much all year. And the stuff that is coming out of these productions is pretty horrifying. The New

• 47:16Ryan Broderick?

  York Times reported that one contestant recalled being asked if she would be able to swim to shore, if she was thrown overboard from a boat, which I guess is like normal reality show stuff kinda, but the major issue with Beast Games has been the logistics. 2,000 contestants were brought to a stadium and they didn't have their phones with them. They didn't have anywhere to sleep. Uh, New York Times story continues. They were given cold oatmeal, one hard boiled egg and a few pieces of raw vegetables.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Same to be honest. That's my childhood right there.

• 47:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, it's great. I wish they'd just give them Mr. Beast burgers. Um, they were also being like forced to eat food that they were allergic to. Like they, they didn't check, you know, people's like food allergy. Uh, this is, this one is very horrifying. So, um, contestants couldn't get access to clean underwear or feminine hygiene products. Um, they were basically just like treated like they were in a refugee camp by the Mr. Beast production team for days on end.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  It's a good way to kill someone inadvertently with sepsis or something like, you know, it's not good.

• 48:25Ryan Broderick?

  And I think the, the major sort of takeaway here is sort of, I understand it, is that Mr. Beast grew in barely five or six years from a kid farting around on the internet to a $1.5 billion valued company, right? And that, I think no matter what, is going to create a structure and an incentive system where you're just flying by the seat of your pants all the time. You're just, you know, there's no moment where an adult steps in and says like, we need to do this right.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:57Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I think that's happened to a lot of creators who grow really fast, but this, we're just talking about the biggest creator of all, the biggest influencer of all time.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  Does it surprise you that after people almost got trampled during the making of the Amazon show and all of the other mundane problems, the fire festival of it all, that one, the show is going forward and two, as far as we can tell, all of the participants who made it to the next round are going, seem to be continuing on to the next round.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Right. So like, I guess like, to me, it's not out till it's out. But I am, but I am surprised that like the controversy so far has not sunk the ship, so to speak. And I also, I, I'm not surprised that the people who have advanced are sticking with it because like, when you create this like craven atmosphere where people are like competing for money, like the people who are advancing are not going to tap out. Like, why would they tap out? That makes, you know, there's no reason for the people who might win big to tap out. You'd have to be like incredibly committed to identifying the thing

• 50:09Speaker 02

  that is wrong with all of this. To say, you know what? I don't want the money, even though I'm still in it.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Well, it just shows how much money was probably poured into the show. That the, the bar has to be pretty high. The, the budget has to be pretty high and thus the bar has to be pretty high to stop that train from trying to reach its destination.

• 50:32Ryan Broderick?

  What the fuck tell you? Like, yeah, they're just gonna do it. Yeah, he'll be fine. Amazon will be fine. The children eating his chocolate bars will be fine until climate change ruins their lives and then he can go fix up their like post-apocalyptic village for YouTube traffic. And none of that is Mr. Beast's fault, really?

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, someone's, I don't know what the bar is, but I'm just picturing Spider-Man, the Broadway musical, and someone had to literally plummet almost to their death to stop that. So what is the, what is the Spider-Man actor plummeting almost to their death of this equation? I don't know.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  And also that was a much smaller budget. Maybe that one didn't even do it.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  I'm curious how many people work for him. Do you know how big the company is?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Shockingly, it's shockingly small, I would say.

• 51:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think it is. I've tried to contact them, but if you email them, they send you an auto-generated response written in Comic Sans.

• 51:36Ryan Broderick?

  I've tried to sort of like dig around their corporate structure. I was particularly interested in their philanthropy group because I was able to, I was able to confirm that they were receiving money from an organization affiliated with the Koch Brothers to make videos basically making private schools look better than public schools.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Very cool, very normal stuff.

• 52:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. So journalists have been trying to figure out what exactly is actually happening with Mr. Beast and how bad it is. But a lot of this stuff is being covered by YouTubers. The major character here that's leading all of this right now is Rosanna Pansino. She became popular in 2014 for making like fun cakes and like being really bubbly. This is a kind of a, a good snapshot of her, her whole deal.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Welcome to another Nerdy Nervies. Wanted to combine two things that I really love, baking and video games. So, thank you and bye-bye.

• 52:46Ryan Broderick?

  And she's a, kind of a funny character in all this, not just because she looks like Polly Pocket, but because she was on one of Mr. Beast's videos. She was in one of his contests and he had edited her in the video to make her look bad and make it look like she actually lost the game. And this apparently was so egregious from Miss Pansino that she has waged a one-woman war against Mr. Beast ever since, which honestly, I love. I love spite. I love pettiness. I'm really, I'm really happy for her. And this has manifested recently in her posting videos where she is essentially just like running a propublica about Beast

• 53:31Ryan Broderick?

  games and like leaking horrifying contestant reports from the production of the show.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Food would run out and people would fight over, steal and hoard food. Water was scarce and kept running out as well. I had to sit with a bloody pad for two Days before I could get undergarments and my reusable pads. We were also sleep deprived, only allowed three to four hours. We all slept on the floor in the stadium in a $10 sleeping bag.

• 54:01Ryan Broderick?

  She's doing real investigative work. She has access to tens of thousands of leaked messages from his internal Discord and Telegram, which she has even reported to the FBI because of some of the inappropriate content that was in there. Wow. She bought Mr. Beast's new food product Lunchly, which is kind of like a Lunchable company that he started with Logan Paul, and opened it on a stream and discovered it was moldy cheese. All the cheese was moldy in there.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  She's the origin of the Lunchly moldy cheese.

• 54:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Wow, great. Good for her. She's the Edward Snowden of Mr. Beast.

• 54:35Ryan Broderick?

  She's very upfront that she has a massive vendetta against him.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  What I think is interesting, from what I have seen about the controversy around Mr. Beast, is a lot of the stuff that, you know, a lot of the stuff exposing him, like the investigative journalism effectively that is like exposing Mr. Beast, is also like made by YouTubers, which I find really interesting. And I also, but some of it seems to focus on like one of his employees or former employees who I believe was maybe trans. And that this person was like engaging in this lolicon. There's like a lolicon layer to this. Does any of that ring true? Or have you seen any of that stuff?

• 55:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so we, thank you very much. This is, this is sort of the last piece.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 55:25Ryan Broderick?

  No, and you are right, though, because this stuff is really confusing because it is largely being done by other YouTubers. Because we're talking about a demographic that just doesn't read. It's like a post-literate society, right? So, you know, anyone under the age of 27 like isn't reading words on the internet anymore. They're watching YouTube. The controversy that you're referring to. Is a childhood best friend of Mr. Beast. She goes by Ava Chris Tyson now. And younger fans came forward earlier this year alleging that she had been inappropriate with them.

• 56:08Ryan Broderick?

  Sharing content of a sexual nature, things like that. Mr. Beast and his team then investigated and decided that the two should part ways. And a lot of the initial questions that were emerging about Mr. Beast's internal structure were because of this. And the reason it's been so confusing to follow is because there are a lot of people who watch YouTube and are hateful bigots that wanted to seize on the idea of a trans woman possibly being sexually inappropriate with minors.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 56:41Ryan Broderick?

  And that made things much, I think, much more confusing for outsiders to follow. Myself included, it took me weeks to kind of be like, okay, like, what's real here and what isn't?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:50Ryan Broderick?

  And what's especially sad about this is that Mr. Beast is not like a very political person. I mean, he's sort of said like, I'll run for president one day, but I sort of put him in the same category as like The Rock. Like, I don't really think of him as like a deep thinker. But up until this stuff with Tyson, he was very vocal about defending her transition.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:12Ryan Broderick?

  And very sort of like, yeah, Chris is my friend. And it's as simple as that. And I always sort of, I always sort of give him more credit. And I think, you know, it's unfortunate that this happened, but he, because, you know, picked the wrong trans woman to support perhaps, but it is unfortunate because Mr. Beast is this massive role model at this very politically, you know, delicate time for the trans community and all of this is happening. And so it made things very, very complicated, I think, especially for like real reporters who wanted to figure out what was going on. Because YouTube citizen journalism is just, it's awful to watch. It's a slog. It doesn't make any sense. It's not done by people who know what they're doing half the time. And it's not really made for audiences over the age of 30 anyways.

• 57:57Ryan Broderick?

  So it's confusing to say the least.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  It feels complicated.

• 58:01Ryan Broderick?

  I assume by this point, you're still trying to figure out if Mr. Beast is just sloppy or predatory. And unfortunately, it's kind of difficult. Because not only is he very tight lipped about how he's doing things. The people that are coming forward are not exactly the most trustworthy because they're going straight to YouTube. So when they do these sort of reports, they have the same incentives to sensationalize or outright lie than Mr. Beast would. One of these cases is a video by a man named Jake Weddle, who claimed that he was offered to do a solitary confinement challenge for Mr. Beast, and basically alleges that there was psychological abuse throughout.

• 58:45Ryan Broderick?

  And here's why you should take this with a bit of a grain of salt, because they have never aired this video. He claims they paid him out. And is it believable? Sort of. But once again, we have, we have not, we don't have a lot to go on here.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Is there an HR department at Beast Incorporated?

• 59:04Ryan Broderick?

  Based on my understanding of the corporate structure of Mr. Beast, Inc., there are people doing jobs, but those people either have never done those particular jobs before, or they are friends of Mr. Beast that sort of got swept up in the machine. I don't get the sense that there is like a massive media company behind this. It is just sort of his friends, his family, and people that he's met along the way.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  What, what does his audience do with all of this? You know, like, where do they go from here? Are they like, oh yeah, forget this guy? Are they gonna discard Mr. Beast as he would any of his other like problematic associations from the past? Or are they defending him? Like, what, what's happening amongst his audience right now, do you think?

• 59:52Ryan Broderick?

  So I track YouTube growth of all the major channels month to month. My researcher, Adam, and I have been doing it for about a year and a half now, two years. And he has stopped growing as fast, but he is still the biggest channel on YouTube. I've not seen any evidence that any of this has really changed that. There's no correlation between like growth and controversies when they emerge. I don't think his audience cares. I think it would take a lot more to move the needle. You know, if he's at like a Diddy party, like maybe. But as of right now, like, I think a lot of this is so...

• 1:00:33Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't really matter because that's not what the people who like him care about.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so disconnected from the, his actual content that it's like,

• 1:00:42Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Why is that relevant?

• 1:00:44Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Like, I don't think Mr. Beast fans want an ethical Mr. Beast. They just want to watch a train go in a pit.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem to matter enough, you know?

• 1:00:53Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly right. I don't think it matters, uh, which is an incredible place to end this.

• 1:01:01Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, the last hour doesn't matter. Oh, no. Hold on. I want to tweak this a little bit. So I think what it is, is that Mr. Beast is trying desperately to get out of the YouTube box. He's very terrified of being trapped in YouTube world. To get out of YouTube world, he needs traditional media partners, whether that's New York Times profiles, Time Magazine profiles, Amazon money, because he knows that he's about to age out. I don't think any of the controversies will affect his audience on YouTube because they're all deranged little iPad babies. But he, I think, is quite concerned about being as above board as possible right now because it's like the last chopper out of Nam. Like, if he doesn't get this right now, he is done.

• 1:01:42Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that's the, that's the, the, um, the missing link there where it's like, it's not changing his YouTube, um, trajectory, but it might eliminate his ability to do bigger things in the future. Yeah, and I, and I find that fascinating when all those traditional things we just listed besides Amazon, I guess, are broken and but. Amazon's very broken. Okay. Great. Yeah. Every. I use Timu instead now. Are they a sponsor? Are they giving us money yet? God, I wish we had Timu money. Why are you?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  That'd be amazing.

• 1:02:14Ryan Broderick?

  Can't be giving that shit away for. I just think all e-commerce apps should also be Chinese gambling apps. I think that's exactly what the future Mr. Beast. Yeah, just one.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  It's a single app future.

• 1:02:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, DraftKings that also can order me groceries. That's what I want. But, but I'm, I'm interested in both of your opinions on the need of establishing outside of YouTube and the, the price.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  Of that when and when it's like his, the New York Times would would lose their minds if they had one tenth of the eyes Mr. Beast has.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think he gets that he might be screwed. But like, what is screwed when you're Mr. Beast? Like, what does screwed actually mean?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  And I, I, I feel like he'll be fine. He must have more money than God at this point. So like, he'll be, he'll be fine. No matter what happens.

• 1:03:12Ryan Broderick?

  He claims he doesn't.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Trying to keep it going.

• 1:03:14Ryan Broderick?

  He claims he doesn't have any money.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  It's because he's buying school buses.

• 1:03:17Ryan Broderick?

  Do you buy that though?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Into pits.

• 1:03:20Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, here's my totally unfiltered take on all this. Mr. Beast is running a tax scam.

• 1:03:26Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:03:26Ryan Broderick?

  I actually, I actually believe that, okay, I, I believe, and, and we can decide if we want to keep this in the episode. I believe that every single thing that is weird about Mr. Beast could be explained by the fact that he is essentially running a massive multimillion dollar tax scheme where he is trying to basically argue that his entire life is based on his work. Thus he can expense all of his expenses. And so he's, he has no money at the end of the day. Like, that's the whole thing. He also essentially bought the town of Greenville, North Carolina. He owns a hotel there.

• 1:04:00Ryan Broderick?

  The like local news stations cover his every move. I think the whole thing, his philanthropy doesn't really, his philanthropy doesn't really make sense. Unless you think of it as him just like shoveling money into something else.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what it all seems to be.

• 1:04:15Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I, I think that is all it is. Yeah, I think that's it.

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  They put in the Times piece, he's like, my mom controls all my bank accounts. I don't even know what's in there. Like, there's, there's, there's deniability on the record.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:04:30Ryan Broderick?

  As someone who, who started a small media business and my dad is very interested in it and constantly calls me to tell me ways that I can pay less money in taxes by doing things that are legally dubious. Mr. Beast, the whole thing screams boomers set this up so that he doesn't.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Well, joining us now is Momma Beast.

• 1:04:52Ryan Broderick?

  The whole thing.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  To reveal all the answers.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you. I put that joke in the out, in the.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  The outline and writing.

• 1:04:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Grant put it in. I was like, I'm not saying Mama Beast. But that's, but I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. I would love to sort of hear your guys' sort of final thoughts on Mr. Beast and sort of what he means. I mean, first, I guess, let's, let's try to answer the, the question we posed at the top, which is, do you think Mr. Beast is worth freaking out about, panicking about? Do you think that this is, is really all that bad, all that new, all that different from anything we've seen before?

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Can it be like a both and?

• 1:05:26Ryan Broderick?

  Please. Yes, and me. Let's do this.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Mr. Beast is not a new crisis. Uh, and also we should panic about Mr. Beast. Like, that's kind of like where I come to this, where it's like, Mr. Beast has come to represent a lot of things that we already know about ourselves. And like the tech platforms that we've created. And it's not the right thing to do to just pin this all on Mr. Beast. And at the same time, like, we should be, we should have fire in the belly about, uh, the things that he is representing about, like the way our society is coming to work and the way that like, people are showing up and interacting with the platforms that we interact with.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  And like, in my mind, uh, Mr. Beast shouldn't necessarily like be the source of all your,

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  like, lack, boomer lack of understanding of the, like, new internet kid stuff. And at the same time, like, um, you know, we should be concerned. We should be concerned about like, how this is playing out and what it means and, and how it's like impacting young people. That's my, that's my get off my lawn take.

• 1:06:42Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's, I think that's a very reasonable take.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Thank you, man.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  I'd say my, my classic Amory old lady take would be that.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  I don't think our heads and hearts can keep up with the pace that Mr. Beast is running at. I don't think he can keep up with the pace that he's currently operating at. So I'm going to optimistically say that he's just going to get tired at a certain point. Or we...

• 1:07:09Ryan Broderick?

  Die.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Give Mr. Beast a blanket. Give Mr. Beast a blanket.

• 1:07:14Ryan Broderick?

  Or die horrifically. That's right.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Or die horrifically.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  We will get tired because we actually do need, uh, we do need to, you know, touch grass, literally, and on the internet. And we do need to slow down a little bit if we're going to survive as a species. So I don't think any of us can keep up with what Mr. Beast is trying to make us,

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  is trying to condition us to keep up with. Maybe that's a totally naive take, but I'm gonna say he's, he's, he's got a fizzle coming in five years or less.

• 1:07:49Ryan Broderick?

  I love how pessimistic that is, actually. That's, that's great. I don't think, I truly don't think anyone is, I haven't read anything good on someone being like, "He's probably cooked." And I think you're, I think you're not incorrect because I think his desperation to continually top himself and also sort of expand beyond YouTube and possibly be unable to do so. I mean, we'll, we'll find out if his YouTube, if his Amazon show is a hit or not. But if he can't make it work, if he can't find a way out of YouTube, I do think he's, I do think it's over. I think, I think already his, his YouTube reign has come to an end to a degree. And, and this is the last, I think, important point to, to, to end on here, which is that

• 1:08:31Ryan Broderick?

  YouTube has a history of treating its most powerful creators like a virus eventually. The type of content they create becomes so uniform and so stolen by other creators that it starts to manifest as spam. And I think Mr. Beast, as a child of YouTube, knows that that algorithmic change is coming.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:08:53Ryan Broderick?

  YouTube will not allow every single account to be making the same kinds of videos. It's bad for YouTube. So now that everyone knows how to be Mr. Beast, no one can be Mr. Beast.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:09:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's right. Do you like that? That was pretty good, right?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  That was good.

• 1:09:08Ryan Broderick?

  That was pretty good.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Is there an anti-Mr. Beast, Ryan? Like, what's the anti-Mr. Beast?

• 1:09:12Ryan Broderick?

  I guess it'd just be like ambient drone footage? Like, an account that just makes just like really, like, slow soundscapes?

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  It's thoughtful.

• 1:09:21Ryan Broderick?

  Podcasts. Yeah. It's this podcast right here. This podcast is the liberal Joe Rogan and it's also the anti Mr. Beast.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Are you ready? Are you ready to go to a 1.5 billion valuation and get money from the Koch Brothers?

• 1:09:36Ryan Broderick?

  I, I want to get so much investment, then make this company gigantic and then lay Grant off. That's the whole plan. I'll be the sad guy in like the Ryan version of the Steve Jobs documentary where like he did, he did the things and he never. That's right. He's not the one with the turtleneck. Damn right.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Just. You're the Waz? Are you?

• 1:09:55Ryan Broderick?

  You're Waz, baby.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Is that what you're saying? You're Waz?

• 1:09:57Ryan Broderick?

  You're Waz.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Be careful, Ryan, because this too shall pass. And so your, your Mr. Beast moment, you're the next one that will fizzle afterwards.

• 1:10:05Ryan Broderick?

  This is a perfect version of Final Thoughts where you're just like, you know, eventually everyone dies.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  You know what?

• 1:10:11Ryan Broderick?

  Everybody dies and nothing matters.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Beast mode always ends.

• 1:10:14Ryan Broderick?

  Always ends. Thank you, Ben and Emery, for coming on.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:10:19Ryan Broderick?

  This was delightful and everyone go check out Endless Thread, the professional version of this podcast.

• 1:10:25Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself, with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude-productions ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

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