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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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You've never heard a positive word about Mr. Beast / Jimmy? I have, quite a lot actually. Maybe you don't watch the people who interact with him more, idk. He seems like a nice guy who uses his videos to generate revenue that he immediately puts back into making more videos. Like, almost all of it if I understand correctly. All while helping tons of people in the process.
Also, Musk is desperate for Jimmy's attention lol. He asked Mr. Beast in a tweet recently why he doesn't upload his videos on X and basically got the answer "It's not worth it" lol
He was on Lex Friedman's podcast a while back. Honestly he seemed like a smart guy but I came away feeling like he was pretty cynical about the whole thing. It really did just feel like a neurotically trained intuition about boosting view metrics.
He did seem like a decent dude I guess. Its hard to tell from those kind of things.
Yeah, fair enough. Who knows, maybe I'll be eating my words sometime in the future.
Meh, I've never watched a video of his, but seems like it's just a modern day game show/home makeover/dystopian feel-good story sort of thing. Neither good or bad. It's good that he helps some people, bad that the people and many, many more need help.
I agree that it sucks that we need people to help pick up the slack in our social nets and whatnot, but I think it's unfair that people attack Mr beast for using that YouTube money to help people to make more YouTube money to help more people. Loads of these youtubers rake in more and do jack with it but never face any individual flak, but he does something different and he becomes the poster boy of evil youtuber to people.
FWIW Beast Philanthropy is a registered 501c3, feeds like over half of NC, and has done alot of disaster relief work in a bunch of states and a handful of countries. I don't think it's evil that they shoot some footage in the process and a quick ad read to feed 100% of the revenue from the philanthropy channel back into the 501c3.
Disclaimer: I don't really watch Mr. Beast all that much.
Mr. Beast's origin story (apparently) is that he went all in on Bitcoin really early, like so early that when it blew up he became a multi-millionaire (we don't actually know exactly how much money he got, it could be a lot, it seems like a fuck ton).
By some grace of God he had a really good influence and decided to use that money for charity, creating a YouTube channel to film that charity and make some money back on his endeavors. He talks a lot now about how he makes so much off of YouTube videos that he can often just break even on the crazy prizes he gives out based on the views he gets.
Now based on this it seems pretty chill. Mr. Beast made a fuckload of money and is working within the system of capitalism to give it back to some of the most needy (I mean he's done stuff like traveled to Africa to help install water wells in tiny remote villages, say whatever you want but that's good charity.)
The problem is, as other people in this thread pointed out Mr. Beast has done a ton of podcasts talking about his work and it's pretty clear that he actually thinks that this is how the system is supposed to work, that the only issue is that more rich people aren't giving away their money like he is and if that happened the system would be working perfectly. That's a stupid take, and as I mentioned before, I think he only became this charitable as a fluke, he's an exception to the rule.
Now I'll defend him: I think that Mr. Beast gets a lot more hate than he deserves. He's one of the very few rich people who is truly giving away most of his money to other people (sure, lots of his videos are him giving away money to middle-american white people but that doesn't even matter that much) he gets hate because he places himself in the spotlight the "controversy around every video" that you point to is a product of this. It's part of the production and only makes him more famous. Mr. Beast is only a symptom of a disease and directing hate towards him is only done because it's easy.
Like I said earlier, he's an exception to the rule, and the rule is that people this rich don't engage in any charity nearly this much. It's bizarre that people focus on the one rich person doing that. Oh wait, it's not, it's just a bunch of lugheads falling for the American celebrity worship/attention culture but in reverse.
Rich people engaging in charity are just washing their own image. Under the current system, there's no way to be rich without exploiting the poor. That's just how the system works. No amount of charity will change that.
He literally just explained a way that MrBeast got extremely rich without exploiting the poor. He got into Bitcoin super early, and cashed out at a peak, becoming a multimillionaire overnight. No poor exploitation at all there.
Except for the faceless idiots that bought in during one of those peaks and left with big debts. Otherwise, no exploitation anywhere!
As the OP, I'd like to mention here that I never said or thought that Bitcoin involves no poor exploitation.
My issue with the hate he gets is he seems to get raked over the coals more than people giving away nothing because he's "exploiting" people to fund it. Im just so sick of people jumping on even slight improvement over the status quo because they expect perfection from anybody trying to do any good. Theres a reason everything is being enshittified. Theres no reason people benefitting from the system have to even slightly improve it because every idealist who probably hasn't done shit to improve the world will be there waggling their finger.
Effective altruism.
Look, I hate youtubers more than anybody I know, but if someone was impersonating this guy to prank some kid he's never met I don't see how we can expect him to apologize for something he didn't know about and wasn't involved in.
Excellent write-up. This paragraph especially speaks volumes. Honestly, it's an angle I hadn't even considered, but when faced with it, yeah, exactly! How the hell does Mr. Beast not get the same "wokeness" critique as other people when it comes to Musk??
Musk is just a suck-up. Also, Mr. Beast doesn't really do anything he could clown on, and he's well connected. It would make Musk's reputation worse than it already is.
But, he's trying to manipulate him by inflating view counts? Also, pretty sure musk wants him because he's a huge creator and it would be good for twitter, not because he can sense he's bad or whatever. I don't really care about Mr Beast, never watched his videos, but I've heard much more good about him than bad.
OMG, thank you! I've been saying for years that something is not right about him but I can't pinpoint why. We will see with time, I guess!
Mr. Beast is never off. I've never seen a candid picture of him. He's probably clean, but something's very fake about him.
The first project I heard of his was "#TeamSeas". Which collects donations to dredge trash out of the ocean. Except realistically, that trash is constantly getting replenished. The efforts should have been to reduce plastic waste, either by promoting less consumption or switching all drink bottles to recyclable aluminum. Neither of those look as good on camera as a specialized ship pulling trash out of the ocean and promoting anti consumption probably wouldn't sit well either his audience or sponsors.
His viewers mainly consist of people who want to feel charitable vicariously or people fantasizing about about being on the reviving end of his charity. It's not much different from the people who watch Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.
I don't think that's the right perspective to have on this, a good action isn't bad just because It wasn't the best action possible.
And the solution you brought upon, would still leave the first problem afloat, "great, we reduced plastic consumption, but who's going to remove the plastic that is already in there?", It's a paradox you see? If he chooses option A, people will burn him at the stake because he didn't choose option B.
I was skeptical at first when I first got aware of him, then I did some research and there's a ton of philanthropy there, lots of people got some help they needed.
EVEN if it's done with ulterior motives, the non changing fact is that people indeed were helped.
Whichever motives he has behind his persona, he has helped more people than most could or would've helped in their entire lifetimes.
I would follow on from you by saying removing plastic is the better of the options anyway. Good old free will means you can't force people to choose to use less plastic and alternatives, but you can force yourself to go and do something about it - we can't even make them use a bloody rubbish bin.
I mean, how would you even go about it? Lobby governments against organizations with much bigger pockets, advertising campaigns to tell us what we already know, start a political party?? Cleaning beaches already showed what we as people are doing and what we can do.
Dredging the ocean can come after we stop putting trash in it. There's a finite amount of resources for these activities and they should be first directed to the most effective solutions first. He apparently thinks he has enough influence on his audience to direct them to clean up his chocolate bar displays.
It must be both simultaneously. You don't ignore a patient with a gunshot wound by telling everyone, "Ignore the dying man until we ban guns!"
I'm sick of metaphors.
By TeamSeas account, they've removed 9,286 metric tons of garbage from the ocean since 2021. We collectively put 11,000,000 metric tons into the ocean every year. The Teamseas method of removing one pound of trash for every dollar would require 250 million USD every year. That's not sustainable for a charity to run on indefinitely.
We should be switching to biodegradable paper or recyclable aluminum. I'll have to look closer the next time I'm in a convenience store, but it looks like MrBeast's chocolate bars are packaged in plastic. We already know how to package chocolate in paper.
I don't watch Mr Beast but he's trying to help unlike everyone else. Yes we should stop dumping plastic in the ocean. But removing what is already there is useful just like cleaning trash on the beach is useful. You don't walk past litter and say, "No point in picking it up, someone else will just throw more."
There are many non profit ocean cleanup organizations.
Except, at least where I am, there's social stigma against littering, so the first problem has been solved. Picking up a bit of litter every now and then is sustainable.
Same here. I always found the fandom and the whole concept suspect AF.
Mr Beast is a fascist